“We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings and our reach exceeds our grasp. Deal with it.”

The cluetrain manifesto

A quote from Peter Drucker and to that I think that we can also add that

“Service eats brand for lunch”

To prove my point look at the now famous 1 Billion USD purchase of a the two year old company with 13 employees that leveraged the Polaroid brand.

“Back in 2008, it was very much about paid media,” said Mark Renshaw, chief innovation officer at Leo Burnett, a unit of No. 3 advertising agency Publicis, referring to the last summer Olympics. “Now the reason they want to have a relationship (with consumers) is to generate shared media.”

Reuters

Riding on this wave the International Olympic Committee has created their own social platform, the Olympic Athletes Hub, for competitors and fans to connect by integrating the fragmented Twitter and Facebook conversations into one stream.

But hold on here come the Branding Police.

As Esther Addley of The Guardian outlines, the sponsorship and branding contracts tied to the Olympics this year are so closely guarded and monitored, that ticket holders, athletes and businesses will have to tread carefully in order to avoid incurring the wrath of the branding ‘police’. They also run the risk of putting a stick in the wheel of the IOC being effective with shared and earned media.

An example of this is the video embedded below. The video is taken from the IOC’s YouTube channel to promote the Olympic Athletes Hub. However try to embed the video onto another site as I am here and well, just try to play the video and you will see what I mean.

For me what is so impressive is how they created simple tools via an online marketing kit, that encouraged small business owners to get active in social media channels in a simple and effective manner. The campaign dropped the usual barriers that stops business getting active in these channels, educating owners as to why and how they can use the social media channels to drive awareness, and sales. In a practical and simple manner they were able to set up Facebook pages, YouTube videos, twitter, foursquare accounts and create special deals in these channels to attract customers.

500,000 small business owners signed up to use the tools and attracted more than 103 million shoppers who turned out to support the event. The results were measurable not only via the usual proxy ROI measurements of ‘likes’, ‘shares’ and ‘retweets’ but with a 23% raise in sales compared to the previous year. It also resulted in the US senate passing a bill to official support small business Saturday. Of course American Express benefitted with a 100% increase in sales with their cards during the event. This is a great example of why and how digital can help companies and brands in the long term, rather than delivering the usual short term PR. Read more about the awards here http://facebook-studio.com/awards/winners#/gallery/submission/small-business-saturday-1 here is the campaigns website http://smallbusinesssaturday.com/  some of the reported effects here http://www.businessinsider.com/small-business-saturday-2011-12

We seem to be talking the talk as they are walking the walk. This is worrying.

In the mobile context, you need to explain what you do in 30 seconds or less because people move on to the next shiny object.

Kevin Systrom, CEO and Founder, Instagram

1. That it makes physical the characters from the app gaming world. One thing that angry birds has had a huge success with thanks to my colleague Claus at Grow.
2. That it provides game developers to possibility to bring another level of interactivity to their already existing platforms.
3. That mattel can provide an attractive digital experience for their physical toys as you can see they have done for their Hotwheels toys  in the video below.

1. Goals and objectives

First we need to start with digital goals and objectives. I strongly believe that a companies digital presence should support it’s brand platform and be a facilitator of it’s business strategy. This might sound like common sense, but so often the main brief from many clients is a need for a graphical facelift or the modernisation of the technical platform. These of course are valid starting points, but any project to redesign a companies web presence should look at the wider opportunities that web can provide as being a central tool for it’s brands communication.

2. Brand culture

After setting the goals and objectives, you next have to look at the relevance for the digital channels not only externally but also, more importantly, internally. Externally you must build an understanding of where your audience is and what they are doing online. Similarly mapping the internal usage of the digital channels can reveal the if the site is relevant internally and if not why not. Also to map out what resources are needed / available to run effective communication.

3. Brand communication

At this stage we need to define where and how a brand should be active online. This needs to be balanced against the findings that came from mapping out the brand culture and more specifically,

• Where the audience is online
• What kind of content will being produced
• The resources available

At this point I think the model needs some explanation.
It is important to note the scale at the bottom right. I have laid out the different channels by level of customer engagement rather than level of importance. This is not to say that a brand needs to be active in all of these channels, rather you need to create a total vision over the total digital footprint.Defining the roles between paid, earned and owned media and how they can feed into each other.

• The main site acts as the digital hub to be a central point where a brand can create deep engagement.
• Mobile apps, are mobile specific applications and not mobile ready sites. The general finding so far is infrequent connection with a brand in the mobile is best done through the main site which goes without saying should be mobile ready. Where as a specific mobile app should provide a deeper engagement to more devoted and frequent customers.
• Blogs and content feeds contains sites that can act as content host providers such as YouTube, Vimeo, tumblr e.t.c. as well as the brands on blog or similar news feed.
• Social networks here include sites such as Facebook, G+, Twitter etc. even though these sites provide great awareness, they rely on micro content and micro interactions, making it hard to drive a deeper engagement.
• Microsites are loosing ground to social media channels but still exist.
• Digital ads are everything from traditional banners to mobile through to padverts.
• Developing a strong SEO and SEM strategy is of course hugely important but in the terms of customer engagement it is quite low, which is why on this model it is out on the edge.

If you look to the left hand side of the model you will see the introduction of Innovation into the goals and objectives. The digital channels are fast moving, and a brand needs to be able to judge if the new platform is right to jump into. You also need a reason to revisit the strategy at regular intervals and innovation, both external and internal, provides the catalysis for the revisit.

4. Digital Brand innovation

Finally through the digital channels a brand has the possibility to move into service design. Here you can explore the possibility of your brand delivering high level of engagement by providing digital services for their customers that are either driven from the core of the brand or taking opportunities from the peripheral edges.

So that is a quick overview of my framework with which to develop a digital strategy. I use this model to describe Grow’s digital offer as well as to provide clients with an understanding of developing a digital strategy.

The problem in this business is not to keep people from stealing your ideas, but to make them steal them

Howard Aiken

From the first days of my career as an entrepreneur, I have always used my own and my team’s lack of experience to our advantage. In fact, at our first venture, Student magazine, we used our newcomer status to secure great interviews and generate publicity — people were excited about our new project and wanted to get involved. Our inexperience fed our restless enthusiasm for trying new things, which became part of our core mission.

Richard Branson

London 2012 / Brand Launch from Universal Everything on Vimeo.

This is the first summary of the two full days at cirkus on Djurgården at the SIME conference. Surprisingly this was my first SIME and I was unsure what to expect. The intro speech by Ola Ahlvarsson (founder of SIME) left me feeling a little underwhelmed. Ola tried to set the tone of where we are now and how digital has made and impact on culture over the last year, but he left me wondering if SIME was going to be full of people showing and telling me things I have already seen online, that was not the case and it did get better.

Ola did throw a few things out there that was interesting and new to me; Bing are pushing their maps to be more and more intelligent, the future vision is that Bing maps will liken a ‘Second Life’ experience called Read / Write World where you will be able to walk down a street, browse shop windows and if you like what you see go in and even be purchase items directly in the map experience. Whats even more interesting is that they are building this from a base of user created content.

Passion

The theme of the conference was Passion Wins and to illustrate this we were treated to the Unboxing of Skyrim Collectors Edition.

Mobile

The first speaker Rikard Steiber, Global Marketing Director Social & Mobile Google, set the tone for the whole day – Mobile. Some of the stats that Rikard kicked out were:

• Search in mobile has increased almost 500% over the last year.
• 40-50% of mobile searches have a local intent.
• 70% use their mobile during their in-store shopping experience.
• Everyday 200 million YouTube playbacks are on a mobile deceive and mobile is fast becoming the main screen preference for YouTube.

To prove his point he rounded off with this video

After Rikard’s talk there was a panel discussion around mobile, with Rikard, Carl-Henrik Borg – CEO Hemnet, Malin Eliasson – Head of Mobile SEB, and Johan Åsén – Head of Mobile Business Aftonbladet. The key take aways that came from that session were:

• Paying with mobile is going to explode (more about that in day two’s summary)
• The common mistake with mobile advertising is that it drives traffic to a desktop site, to be viewed in a mobile, loosing conversion.
• App or Site? Create a mobile site for causal and first time customers and a mobile app for loyal customers that want deeper engagement.

Malin was quite and Johan was uninspiring, however Carl-Henrik Borg came with the interesting insight that due to the Swedish love of just looking at others houses he has 4 times the amount of customers on his mobile site than are interested in actually buying.

The need for coffee and constant buzz of work emails meant I had to jump out of the fireside chat with Niklas Zennström, but after seeing him at the Wrapp launch party the night before it did not take much to drag me away.

The Start ups

After the break the event went into advertising mode with a good looking but uneventful speech by Andreas Bernström, CEO Rebtel and the showcasing of Wrapp and Izeetle. Hjalmar Winbladh Founder of Wrapp said that Wrapp is disrupting the gift card industry, where as I think they are in fact enabling it something that co-founder of Wrapp I glad to say agrees with. It was clear that Izeetle – the European answer to square – has a bright future and was very popular with everyone at SIME one of teh main things I took away from Jacob de Geer’s, founder Izettle, speech was that he does not see the actual payment being in focus, simple as it is, but rather the data around the collective payments that can empower the merchants. I look forward to seeing this turn up in stores soon.

The final start up was pruta.se (Swedish for haggling) presented by founder Nicklas Jönsson. The site is a bargin driven community where customers haggle with the site in to purchase selected items. The whole flow of haggling that they had developed was a little too complex and introduced an unnecessary game play element that does not enhance the bargin hunting experience. As one twitter comment said “Swedes love a bargin but hate to haggle”. The sites design is very reminiscent of tretti.se which, I am not sure is intentional, but does little to help the whole concept stand on its own. Unfortunately Nicklas also failed to be convincing in his presentation, it might have been nerves but there was a definite lack of passion.

And the Investors

The investor’s panel debate was around the art of value creation, with Måns Hultman, founder Qliktech,  Gary Moon – Headwaters MB, José Marín – IG Expansion and Lea Bajc – Northzone. The discussion was less inspiring than the blurb in the brochure but there were a god few points especially when José Marín held a piano recital of his own composition, that’s so 415! The sound bite that gained the most attention came from Lea;

“Own your failure! Don’t blame it on someone else, it is valuable!”

Next up was an entertaining speech by Jan Helin Aftonbladet’s Editor in Chief on privacy, freedom of the press and what is entertainment or news. Reading from an A4 page he took us us through the recent reactions to Ryan Gigs twittergate, Tiger Woods’s affair and Jonas Bergstrom infidelity to Princess Madeleine. Two quotes that stick in my mind were;

“You can’t build your brand on your private and public vales and then claim the private is private”

“Who sleeps with who is at the very essence of how Sweden is run”

Design

Next up was a well choreographed presentation by Creuna on the difference between a cool site and a good site. With live tweeting coming from the stage @FM & @martindeinoff came across, as @Reklamaren tweeted, today’s Jay-Z och Kanye West (or at least white geeky versions of them). In the brochure they promised ‘a brand new way of looking at the web’, but nice as their Blue-note design inspired slides were, they failed to deliver any real insight.

Whats on the telly?

After the Creuna boys it was time for a panel to discuss the future of TV. This panel failed to impress me, a whole load of buzz words and worried statements where thrown out but they lacked vision and again insight. Two take aways were:

• Microsoft are doing interesting stuff with their kinectally controlled Tv (but basically it is just a way of getting rid of your remote)
• “Checking into a programme” programmes are becoming more an more social with the second screen (The laptop / table in your lap whilst watching tv)

Glam

The final talk was with Ernie Cicogna, President, Co-founder and General Manager of Glam International. Glam.com is more than one website it is also a hidden element in a global network of sites reaching over 200 million monthly users making them a top 5 site in the US and the largest media targeting women in the world. there is no doubt that it is a powerful network, but for me Ernie and Glam has more in common with Rupert Murdoch and news corp than they would like to think, a media mogul holding onto the wrong model.

Social Business

A move away from the big room into the workshops came at the right time. The first workshop was on Social Business and the best section was a talk from buddymedia who gave us what we wanted stats and insight…finally! Here were the best takeaways for effective content creation/publication in social channels;

• Posts with 80 characters or less, have a 66% higher engagement. (supporting my theory of micro content and micro interactions).
• Better copy in questions to use is based around “where” “when” “would” “should” and try not to use “why”.
• The morning and day traffic has been over saturated so the most effective times to post are between 8pm and 7am and Wednesdays are marginally better.
• Try to make your followers look good.

Passionate brands

The last workshop of the day was for me the best.

First up was a great talk by Carl Klinberg on the launch and rise of Macmyra the Swedish Whiskey. Due to the 10 -15 years investment time they needed to create and engage a community of like minded people who were willing to invest in their own barrels. Through yearly sampling and crowd sourcing the expansion of the Macmyra whiskey cellers. This community has grown and help develop Macmyra into the brand and company it is today.

After Carl came Patrik Blixt, now with Rebtel who taked about his experience with Absolut. He showed a film that he created together with Zach Galifianakis for Absolut. They paid Zach a small sum and gave him complete artistic freedom to make a film Absolut as long as they mentioned the product. Made back in 2008 the films are still the first item in a google search for Absolut on a faction of the budget. The first minute is best.

The final speaker of the day was Kim Cramer from br-nd ’The appeal company’ who are engaged in scientific studies to gain understanding of the emotional appeal of brands in Amsterdam. Kim took us through her  23 plus one method which is a tool to find a brands emotive core.

She told us how she conducted a series of studies involving over 8000 consumers, 23 markets and 195 brands to identify the basis of brand appeal. From that study she then identified 24 fundamental human drives and created the methodology of mixing and matching combinations of these to create appealing tensions within brands. In the workshop we tried to identify, with the aid of cards contain the 24 drivers, the emotional core of Macmyra and Absolut comparing the similarities and differences.

Cramer has taken this metod online at http://www.23plusone.info/ so that anyone can use this method to discover their own brands emotive core.

So that was my experience and notes of day one. I left, with mixed feelings, the day could have been better but it at least went out on a high, I was tired and hungry but ready for day two. I will leave you with final video from the day, you can’t keep a good mouse down!

Not all good ideas change the world but they all make the world a better place.

Just as John Lennon was a hero for the flower power generation of the 60’s,  Steve Jobs is the “patron saint” of the “creative class”

Alan Deutschman

To illustrate the fact here is a infographic made by Brafton with a link through to their supporting arguments.

We have more than 33 million fans on the Coca-Cola Facebook page – and it was not even created by us.

Muhtar Kent CEO Coca-Cola.

Freitag and Nest’s product pages.

The first is the redesign of Freitag.ch - redesigned by information architects – What I like about it is deep layer of the product presentation page [The right hand image above]. It has clear navigation, well placed cross sale, alternative products, well presented colour variations and my favorite is the usage videos for the how to use the bags using video to fill the gap where text and images fail.

The second is Nest, I am sure you have already seen this as it’s hype has been worthy of any Apple product release (probably due to nest’s creators being the original creators of the ipod) But I was particularly impressed with the product page “Living with nest” [The left hand image above]. I not only love the clean design but also how the pages manages to communicate the users experience of the object over time as well as the long term benefits using it can provide.