Curation: The Magic Word for Marketers

I recently attended CES in Las Vegas to do some research for a client.  CES was huge and hyperactive and I hated it. My resistance was not due to the size or number or quality of exhibits, but rather the show’s inability to navigate me through any of it.

We live in a consumer-centric world, powered by immediacy and universality of choice (otherwise known as the Internet.) Today, we can shop for anything online, customize the features, and dictate how it’s delivered. Everything from clothing to cars to medicines to media.

And that’s pretty peachy. We all love choice. We all love control. But the surprising truth in many of our brand interactions is that we’re not all very good at it. Especially when the choices are overwhelming.

At CES, I longed for a GUIDE of some sort. I wished there was a handbook that outlined what I wanted to see if, for instance, I only had 2 hours to spend there. Or if I was only interested in “small, cool audio stuff.” Or if I just wanted to knock around and see celebrities. (There were many in attendance. I passed on Snooki and 50 Cent and took a front row seat at Earth, Wind & Fire. Call me old school.)

Such a guide would have still afforded me choice, but those choices would have been curated for me. And curation is the magic word for the new consumer world.

Curation is the antidote for a world of infinite choices. It relates to both content and the methods of its consumption. Those marketers who can provide guides or maps or recommendations for their consumers will have a much more fruitful relationship with them as a result. This is true in both the consumer and business-to-business galaxies. Some examples:

Museums curate exhibits. Of all the Duchamp cubist paintings, a certain museum might choose 30 of them. They would then arrange them in a distinct order, put them on certain walls, make you stand in directed spots to view them. Remember, content and the mode of consumption. The subtext here is “the museum strongly suggests you view Duchamp this way.” It’s a very specific experience. If I want some other experience, I can gladly seek it elsewhere.

Restaurants curate food experiences. The menu, by definition, is a curated presentation of food. The chef took all the ingredients available that day and culled them to eight appetizers, eight entrees and five desserts to choose from. Would going to a restaurant and just seeing a big buffet of basic ingredients (vegetables, fish, lettuces, meats, sweets) be the same? Not a chance. Here’s exactly where I DON’T want to have too much choice. (Sidebar: this was how the original “Craft” restaurant in New York started. Chef Tom Colicchio just presented the menu items, and left the pairing decisions to guests. In the June 2001 review of Craft,  New York Times Restaurant Reviewer William Grimes stated “…(the culinary arts,) function more efficiently as dictatorships.”)

Brands in virtually all categories curate personal experiences. Whether it’s how your clothes smell, or what your ringtone is, or what color the dashboard lights are in your vehicle or the editors of your favorite business magazine – we, as consumers or business customers, are seeking features and experiences that enrich our lives in some way. But for goodness sake, we want someone ELSE to tell us what those are.

We want Amazon to tell us it has “recommendations” for us. We want Google to auto-fill our search terms. We want the Gap to recommend a sweet belt to go with that sweater we just purchased. Sure, we ultimately want to make the buying choice, but what we need brands to do is present the pathways to making them.

Marketers, take note. Curate an experience for us. Stand for something. Deliver something specific, that no one else can deliver. Or deliver something that lots of other people can deliver, but do it in a way that’s unique, or cool, or fun, or hip or technologically cool or convenient. Because we all want choices…we’re just not all very good at making them.

This article first appeared on Technorati.

Five Rules of Engagement

For years, marketers, editors and bloggers have been volleying the marketing term “engagement” around like a taped up shuttlecock.  The term has also been denigrated by continuous contextual evolution.  “Engagement” means one thing when referring to customer loyalty programs, another in the context of your web analytics package, and something further afield in the complex mesh of social media.

So, to give engagement a better—or at least more consistent—name, I’ve attempted to identify some key principles of what customer engagement means in the context of marketing, and in the process, hope to help marketers use these principles to focus their efforts on engaging more customers.  This will be expanded into an intelligence paper with more detail, which I will post here later.

Just to be clear, three qualifiers and definitions:  first, I’m not talking about making sales, or generating leads, or providing entertainment.  We’re talking about moving a consumer (of just about anything:  soda, music, jet engines, etc.) beyond the initial sale, into an area of prolonged interaction and even ongoing communication.

Second, engagement does NOT necessarily have to follow a sale.  But it does follow the initial conversion from “I’m not interested” or “I’m not aware” to “I’m interested and want to hear/learn/see/do more with this brand.” For instance, I don’t buy anything from Mashable, but I’m deeply engaged with their content, and couldn’t imagine starting a day without visiting that site and consuming that information.  The same is true for almost a billion people and Facebook: nothing has been purchased, but the engagement level with that brand is incredibly high.

Finally, customer engagement tends to be transactional.  That is to say that it seems reserved for those brands that involve multiple interactions.  You might buy a coffee brand or read a certain blog every day, so the opportunity for repeated experiences—as you’ll see, one principle for engagement—exists.  On the contrary, you may only buy a funeral plot once in your adult life, if it all – there’s not much of an opportunity for that marketer to drive engagement with that customer.  (Not to say it doesn’t happen  - the singular experience may leave a lasting impression.)

The Five Principles of Engagement – in relative chronological order.

Principle 1:  It Starts with Triangulation. Although many marketers believe that they can engage customers in a linear, point a to point b fashion, this is actually quite difficult to sustain.  At some point, the customer needs more attention, and thus triangulation becomes a pivotal element of customer engagement.  When you and your customer can triangulate on outside interests—features like design or performance, affiliations like music, or sports, or a cause like the environment, or travel rewards like Broadway musicals—then the opportunities to engage multiply exponentially. Now you can offer your customer more of what they like/want/need, (while simultaneously creating a deeper bond, since you and the customer now have a common interest or two or six,) and tie the resulting benefits back to your brand.

Principle 2: It’s Fueled by Passion. Passion is the fuel for true customer engagement.  When you triangulate on something together, it’s based on both of your passions for it.  (That’s why you choose your triangulation points carefully. If you don’t have passion for that “other thing,” your customers will see right through your shoddy aims.) If your brand can demonstrate real passion for the industry, for the craft, for the process, or it continues to demonstrate passion in the form of your new products and services, that passion tends to be matched by your engaged customer. It’s in the nature of relationships to want to reciprocate what the other party is doing.  This in turn, leads to a process of ongoing exchange between the two parties that continues to amp up the interchange.

Principle 3:  It’s an Ongoing Relationship.  Many sales professionals (and I say this with the utmost respect for what they do) have an understandably myopic view of what marketing is about…they think lead>conversion>end.  Today, marketers know that the sale or conversion is just the beginning of a long and hopefully fruitful relationship where the initial conversion is an indication of some assent to continue communicating.  Brands that form relationships with their customers tend to provide a more enjoyable, and more sustainable experience for the customer, where each has their own voice, and after some trust is built up, can even begin to ask things of each other.

Principle 4.  It’s Based on the Experience.  Even if a marketer can provide every one of the above principles, engagement typically only occurs when the marketer can provide a certain (unique) experience to the customer.  It could be a benign feature, or something very personal, (but as we know from our brand training, the more emotional the benefit, and the higher up the ladder of self-actualization, the better.)

Great brands with deeply engaged customers provide a single certain, can’t-get-it-anywhere-else kind of feeling for those customers.  In many cases, those brands provide repeated experiences (even simple ones) that add up to something similarly special.  That leads to an unmistakable takeaway and a glowing perception of the interaction between the consumer and the producer.  Apple does that.  Wired magazine does that. The Ritz-Carlton does that.  And just to prove it doesn’t have to be some hoity-toity-Fortune-40 brand, the guy on the corner who sells you your bagels and coffee can do that.  And so can your private voice teacher.  And, likely, so did your best sports coach.

Principle 5.  It’s Gotta Be Consistent. Okay, so you’ve triangulated on something cool to create some commonality.  You’ve demonstrated passion with turning out great products that set or buck the industry trends.  You’ve forged a relationship with your customer that’s based on a unique and singular experience.  Now the challenge is sustaining this good will.  The easiest way to do that is to exploit the principle of consistency.  Be consistent with how often you’re communicating with customers.  Be consistent with how often you’re upgrading your products or services. Be consistent with your brand voice.  Because of all the things, this is most important.  Your customers fell for you because of something you did, or the way you did it, or the way you packaged it.  They remembered that experience and the feelings it created.  They came back for more, and continue to patronize—maybe even evangelize for—you and your brand.  Make a left turn on them, and you’ll likely lose all that good will.

Brand Guidelines: Sometimes Ya Gotta Cross ‘Em

We’ve all heard a lot about brand guidelines, and how vital they are to the marketing success of your company.  And in most cases, this is quite true.  A strong brand structure can provide an incredible level of connective tissue between your company’s product or service and the consumers you have and, most importantly, those you hope to reach.

And while a lot of care and thought goes into brand development and brand representation, in some cases, we can overdo it.

Before we get into that, let’s make sure we’re clear on what brand guidelines are.  Many companies entrust their brands to experts to develop guidelines as to how the brand behaves, what it says, what it does, (in some cases what the company produces,) and very importantly, how that brand is represented visually and verbally across the landscape of media in which it may appear.

These guidelines, especially the visual and verbal ones, can get very specific and very detailed regarding how the brand (and the logo, or taglines or images) is reproduced and presented for public consumption.  If you’ve never seen a brand guideline handbook, it’s a cross between a diary of a madman and the exactitude of an aerospace engineer’s drawing book.  In some cases, they can be hundreds of pages long, and stipulate everything from specific color swatches to negative space to how NOT to reproduce the various design elements.

Ultimately, it’s a usage document, in that it instructs anyone responsible for pushing the brand out into the world exactly how the brand should be represented.  (This is true even if the brand is a person!)  All in the name of the venerable core objective:  consistency of perception.

However, this control issue can sometimes become, well, a control issue.  In many instances in my work with brands that my firm hasn’t created, we’ve been saddled with guidelines that have actually gotten in the way of – even obstructed – clear and consistent communications.

In one instance, we were working with a company who (inexplicably) had an extremely long, multi-word URL.  When creating a Facebook application for this brand (targeted to suburban soccer moms, by the way,) we suggested using capital letters to help guide the reader along.  Imagine this url:  thecompanyyoushouldvisitinyourtown.com.  We suggested TheCompanyYouShouldVisitInYourTown.com for clarity.  Our client came back and said “our brand guidelines instruct us to NOT use capital letters in the URL.”  When we reminded them that it was simply easier to read with the caps, (especially online in about 10pt type,) they pushed back.  Hard.  The brand guidelines were scripture, and were not to be messed with.

In another instance, we were working with an important media company whose brand is very well recognized in the consumer marketplace.  In designing a microsite that demanded a rich color background, (ironically, for consistency with the print campaign,) we opted to knock out (make white) their logo, just as we had done in print.  Knocking out was acceptable according to their brand guidelines, but not in digital applications.  So it was okay to trust printers to knock out the logo using ink, but not okay to use never-bleed pixels for the same brand representation.  Strange.

The reason I highlight these examples is because they were actually attempts to arrive at either clear(er) or more consistent communications between the brands and their intended audiences.  We were (we always are) striving to make it easier for the consumer to interact with the company, not the other way around.  But the brand guidelines were so stringent, these simplified communications were overlooked for standards that could not possibly have recognized these interactive objectives.

Don’t get me wrong – there ARE guidelines that are un-crossable. Stretching or tilting the logo is a no-no. Swapping out colors is a no-no-no.  Going off script is a no-no-no-no.  Inserting a new tagline is a triple-dog-quadruple-no-no. We’re clear that some lines shouldn’t be crossed.

Because it is important to have a voice.  It is important to have the brand represented consistently across all touch points.  But when adhering to your brand guidelines, we also have to consider: would it HURT the brand if you drop-capped a URL?  Would it HURT the brand if you didn’t honor the standards to the letter?  If crossing the line a little means engaging the consumer a little more, then maybe it’s time to consider a little tiny brand rebellion.

Give the Gift of Anything: Three Keys to Overachieving with Customers

So, it’s the holiday season, and naturally, our thoughts turn to spending time with loved ones, eating (or over-eating in my case,) and the best part: sharing gifts. Whatever holiday you share, exchanging gifts is typically a part of it, and it adds an absolute level of joy, intrigue and excitement as we count down to the big day (or days, or geological phenomena, or whatever you celebrate.)

But what is it about gift-giving and gift-receiving that’s so special? Why do we bother with the fancy wrapping and the bows and the bags and the pomp and the circumstance?  As it turns out, there’s a marketing lesson in this process that’s worth evaluating.  I’ve found three keys that help keep my clients focused on delivering – and in some cases, overdelivering – on value.

The first key:  Surprise
Unless you’re one of those kids who makes a list and then GETS what you asked for, (and ewww if you do,) gifts, as we know them, are something typically UNEXPECTED.  At the very least, there’s a surprise element in the DNA of gifts that make them so enjoyable to receive.  (And as we get older, to give, too.)  In some cases, outside of the holiday construct, giving a gift can be an unexpected circumstance altogether.  Like when flowers arrive, or someone sends you a heartfelt greeting card or surprises you with something like a special dinner.

The second key:  Value
Another important ingredient that makes gifts so juicy is that they’re usually VALUABLE.  It’s not to say that they must be expensive, as much as having real value to the recipient.  That value could be monetary, could be sentimental, could be utilitarian, could be intellectual, could be sexy.

The third key:  Context
Finally, and this is the key, the cornerstone of a great gift experience is correlated to the level of CONTEXT on the part of the recipient.  When you give a gift that someone genuinely wants or really likes, there’s no limit to the value that can be put on it whatsoever.  Sure, unexpected and valuable gifts are nice, but give me something I really want, or have been searching for, or mentioned months ago, or is in a category I have enthusiasm for – that’s a gift I’ll always remember.

Now, let’s think like marketers.  When was the last time you created a structure where you could give a GIFT to your customer?  No, I’m not talking about a little box with a bow, but rather, when was the last time you gave something unexpected to your customer?  When was the last time you added real value to a transaction beyond what was agreed or expected?  When was the last time you took the time to find out what your customers really like, and then over-delivered it, or created a conversation around it that they could participate in or created an event based on that thing for them to attend?

This is what smart marketers do, on every level.  They first agree what the structure of the relationship is going to be:  I’m going to sell you gourmet food and wine in a fine dining atmosphere; I’m going to provide insightful television programming; I’m going to design clothes that you’ll want to wear; whatever.  But once that structure is set up, the smart marketer looks to add these three key ingredients:  surprise, value, context.  So the attentive marketer needs to watch his or her customers carefully, learn what they like, learn what they value, and then surprise them with something perfectly timed and perfectly tuned.

How can you add these three elements into your future marketing?  Whether you’re a small, local business or a multi-national corporation with thousands of employees, give your customers a gift every now and then, and you’ll find they give them right back in the form of deeper relationships, more referrals, maybe even brand loyalty.

Writing Advertising? Shorter is Always Sweeter.

Illustration:  Bruce Crilly

In the history of advertising, some of the most lauded taglines have also been the shortest.  Why is this?  (And while we’re at it, why does the leggy blonde always seem to go out with that short guy?)

Why do we not seem to gravitate to long, multi-syllabic complex thoughtforms?  At first glance, it would seem to be useful if we could pack more bullet points into our advertising signoff, so people would remember lots of stuff about our product or service.  But for American consumers, it just doesn’t work.  Maybe it’s because we’re American.  We like it punchy.  We like it now.  We like Ricky Bobby and light beer, dammit.

Okay, that’s cynical, and not so helpful.  Let’s get serious.  For the most part, shorter taglines work for a number of reasons. Primarily, its because they’re easy to remember.  And if you’re in the business of stimulating demand (that’s what advertising is supposed to do, bee-tee-dubs,) then a short, pithy line is simply more memorable, more recall-able than, say, an advertising haiku. So there’s a form-follows-function overtone there.

Second, there’s an actual meter to consider, a rhythm, a tempo, a little bounce that shorter lines provide over their more verbose counterparts.  With a short line, the consumer can file a meme away into a corner of her mind that only your brand (in the best cases,) can occupy.

Finally, it’s about time.  The modern consumer is busier than ever, and is literally overwhelmed with messages, media, and now devices that carry and deliver information, including advertising messages.  Whether it’s social media applications, or websites, or traditional media, or a sporting event, or the floor at the local grocery store, there simply isn’t time in the consumer’s day to focus on all that content – especially your bloody marketing message.  Now, more than ever, being short and to the point is not just a welcome deviation from the discord in the din, but also a way to stand apart from it.  Brevity is indeed the essence of wit.

Although this might seem confining, remember that you can say an awful lot with a few small words.  Case in point:  ‘Be all you can be.’ for the US Army.  This line lasted more than 20 years and defined perhaps the most successful articulation of any military marketing message. Five words, of two or three letters each.  And yet, the meaning is monumental.  Partly because it’s personalized to the individual reading it via “you,” and “all” is just broad enough to cover virtually every aspect of that individual’s life.  Brilliant.

Some of the most notable short advertising taglines:

Just do it.
Think Small. (This was actually a headline but it rocked so hard, it has to be included.)
We try harder.
Got Milk?
Be all you can be.
A diamond is forever.
Think different.
It’s not TV.  It’s HBO.
Intel Inside.
Priceless.
Because You’re Worth It.
Great taste. Less filling.
I want my MTV!

Putting it into practice:

Let’s not forget, there have been immortal taglines that are not short.  (The Ultimate Driving Machine/When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight/Melts in your mouth, not in your hands, etc.) So when you set out to craft advertising for your business, keep your audience front and center, and let that dictate what you write.  What are they doing?  What do they need?  How can you help them?

Keep it simple.  Better yet, keep it short.  Pack as much into the idea that you can, without leaving too much to the imagination, (although leaving to interpretation is okay.)  Generally, basic language works best – small words, single syllables if you can help it, and a clear, declarative tone.  And NEVER make your slogan – strapline, tagline, whatever you want to call it – a question, okay?   (A really good one only happened, like, once.)

Now,  get your eraser out and start writing.

The Butterfly Effect of Marketing

Illustration:  Bruce Crilly

Have you heard of the Butterfly Effect?  It’s a chaos theory-based rubric attributed to Edward Lorenz for explaining the sensitivity of the dependence on initial conditions relative to widely dispersed outcomes.  The theory is expressed in the saying “the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Thailand can set off a tornado in Texas.”

Okay, so what does that have to do with marketing, especially for small to midsized companies? If you drill down into the Butterfly Effect statement, you learn that small, seemingly insignificant actions can, in time and to a great degree, affect or evolve into great, often extraordinary results not easily conceived in context of the original event.  And conversely, you see that the auspices of great outcomes can be found to have relatively benign provenance.

In marketing, we’re often overcome trying to “think big” and “make it rain” and “blow it out,” and a zillion other clichés of bigness.  The truth, however, is that we can sometimes reach these astonishing aims by applying the Butterfly Effect and initiating small actions and – this is the key – setting them on the right course.

Here’s a simple viral marketing example:  you put a status up on Facebook, for instance, and tell 10 of your friends to pass it to ten of their friends, and so on.  Perhaps you’re promoting a secret concert of a popular band.  How many times does this have to be passed on for your initial (small) action to have a great effect?  In just four repeats of your original action (tell ten friends,) you have 100,000 screaming fans show up at the concert.  Uh oh – only 20,000 seats! So, sure, there’s very little chaos there.  But you can see how quickly simple actions can scale outward to a great degree.

Social media is really the Butterfly Effect in action in today’s marketing world.  Brands are seeding conversations, and then setting them off into the ether.  And in an extremely democratic (and sometimes terrifying) manner, the brand is weaved into conversations by people, and expanded, and turned into recipes or planking videos or mashups or hashtags.  Who knows? It’s chaos, but it’s usually good for the brand.  Sometimes (see AdFreak’s recent post on ChapStick’s social debacle,) it’s not so much.

One last point.  It doesn’t have to be social media.  You can start generating big marketing effects through small actions in lots of ways.  It could be a new merchandising program, a refresh of your menu, seeking new talent, or adopting a cause, or a new partnership, or a next blog post.  It could be anything.  But it has to be something and it has to be started.

A few keys to applying the Butterfly Effect:

Chaos. An important aspect of all of this is that it’s painfully hard for mere mortals to calculate chaos.  [An easy task for a math-head.  Not for me.] So it’s easy to imagine outcomes that are too likely.  The Butterfly Effect is constantly evolving, ever shifting and morphing into outcomes that, while predicated on the action before it, often do not travel a predictive pathway.  Get with that.

Direction. Don’t think about the outcome, because you often have little or no control over it.  Just ensure that the initiating action is set off in the right direction, is well-intentioned and is aligned with your brand values.  The rest is the market’s work, with all its environmental and evolutionary vagaries. Indeed, the chaos is part of the fun of watching this theory in action.

Distance (whether it’s measured in time or space) is a necessary factor.  You can’t expect these great things to happen in sixteen minutes.  Be patient, and integrate the Butterfly Effect along with your other, more urgent, plans.  If you launch a rocket in the air, and then measure its effectiveness in six seconds, you’ve failed to reach the stars.  Measure again in four hours, and you’re dancing among them.

How does this apply to your brand?  What can you START today?  What ten things can you start today?  Even if it’s a small but pertinent action that can evolve, it’s probably worth it. So start flapping.

The Law of Failure

Illustration:  Bruce Crilly

It’s been noted in many places that Thomas Edison [caricatured above] may have failed as many as 1,000 times at inventing an electric-powered light bulb, and when asked about his string of failures, he turned the tables by saying (and I’m paraphrasing,) “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. I succeeded at inventing a light bulb, and it took 1,000 steps to arrive at it.”

A recent New York Times article asked the question “What if the Secret to Success is Failure?” when discussing education and character among school-age children. Do a search on “failure,” and you’ll find inspiring stories of heroes of history who have failed mightily on the way to great successes: Churchill, Einstein, Darwin, Pasteur, Ford and on and on.

And at the recent DMA International Conference in Boston, Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, turned failure on its head relative to social media, stating “if someone posts a negative comment about your product, it demonstrates a level of investment and passion about your brand.”

Okay, that’s a lot of fluffy and warm and puppies. But in business – and particularly in marketing – we’re trained otherwise. For most of us, “failure is not an option” for our next product rollout, or our next advertising plan, or our next event. However, if we embrace The Law of Failure, we might find that failing helps to reveal what success really looks like.

In almost every business, professionals fail their way into success, typically in a process of elimination continuum: try › fail › tweak › repeat until try ultimately leads to success. At which point, you test the snot out of that success to ensure repeatability and reliability. This is true in engineering; in medicine; in sports; in fashion; in entertainment; in technology; in a zillion other categories.

In marketing and advertising, (direct, media, creative,) we call it “testing.” But testing is simply an accepted euphemism for “financing failure to yield better strategies.” Why else would almost every big campaign be run through focus groups first?  Why test your spots on samples of your target demographic? It’s not so much that you can see what WORKS, but rather that you can reveal what DOESN’T.

My theory on why it is so vehemently avoided in the marketing/advertising arena is simply because of the money flow. When doing medical testing, for instance, the medical company has an R&D budget to cobble away in a lab for sometimes years at a time. In engineering or technology, all the sunk costs are stacked upfront – sometimes financed by venture capitalists – and millions or tens or hundreds of millions of dollars might be spent to arrive at a new design/product/solution that then gets recouped upon selling/distributing/launching.

But in advertising, the money flow is different. The typical relationship is an outsourcing model (company x hires agency y to develop the marketing program) that puts the pressure on the marketer to justify that spend and that agency choice. It’s our money, so you better spend it wisely. No marketer I’ve ever met wants to hear in the pitch “yeah, we’re gonna spend a percentage of the budget on failing.”

But that’s essentially what’s happening. Sure we do research, we do cluster analyses, we create predictive models. My colleague David Adelman at OCD Media is a media planner who creates predictive models in order to yield what he calls the most “testable propositions.”

The only problem (in advertising and marketing) is that those propositions are tested out in the marketplace, and failure is seen as a scarlet letter on the breast of the marketer (and in many high-profile cases, the agency, too.)

But I propose that failure is not a sad end to high hopes, but rather an intelligent investment in future successes.

When you fail at strategy X, you now have saved an innumerable amount of money because you KNOW that strategy X won’t work (under the current conditions.) You can instead pursue strategies Y and Z. And if they fail, you save proportional amounts, and so on. KNOWING is powerful.  Failure leads to knowing, whereas success is sometimes an intoxicating mix of planned well, guessed right, timed it right, chose a good director, etc.

This might not fly at your company if you’re a slave to the quarterly conference call with the board and have to explain that you’re failing. But if you’re a small to midsize marketer – you’ll never spend money any more wisely than by failing and KNOWING what to avoid in the future.

Death and Social Media – version 2.0

Illustration:  Bruce Crilly

The below is a follow-up to a post I wrote back in July 2010. First, the original post, then the follow-up:

Death and Social Media
This is a morbid way to discuss an idea, but let’s talk about death. And while we’re at it, let’s talk about social media. I was (briefly, fleetingly) thinking about what would happen after I die, and the kinds of things people would remember about me. (And more exactly, the kinds of things I hope people will remember about me.)

In my life, (and I’m not quite done yet,) I have created volumes of content in the social media world: blog posts, and blog comments, Facebook statuses and comments and likes and picture uploads and all those Tweets, reTweets and direct messages on Twitter! I’ve yelled about firing the head coach of my beloved Buffalo Bills on the fan forums on buffalobills.com, and helped people solve technical problems on support forums for Apple computers and some software platforms. I’ve written record and book reviews on iTunes and Amazon. I’ve uploaded and even commented on videos posted on YouTube! (Eeek. What a geek.)

So I wondered, will this become part of what people remember about me? Will there be people at my funeral saying, “yeah, nice guy…oh! And did you see his Tweets from the IAB mobile conference back in 2010? So insightful.” Instead of a collage of photos, will there be a screen somewhere with a streaming feed of my life’s digital output?

On one hand, I seriously doubt that these bits and bytes of my recommendations, forwards, hashtag snips and extemporanea will have any bearing on what people think about me. But on the other, there’s no getting around the fact that social media content is now a contributing editor to my legacy. I also submit that I think it would be an interesting, revealing and even fairly intimate way to chronologically peek into the ebbs and flows of my (mostly) professional life. Which makes me think: are we (am I?) Tweeting accordingly? Is the overall tone of my social commentary admirable/useful/honorable? Will my children be proud of what they read? Does it really matter how many check-ins I have, or if I’m the bloody mayor of some local bar? Jeez…maybe we better start looking at all of this in context.

In older days, we might have discovered a diary under a bed, or a journal tucked away in a closet somewhere, long after the departure of a loved one. But now, we have a digitized database of someone’s every thought and comment for years and years. And since most people in the world will never author a book, or write a professional article in a real journal, or be interviewed for television or radio, is the chronicling of social media verbiage a new means to endure? [Uh oh, I think I smell a new business model being hatched.]

Follow-up [September 2011]
So it turns out I was on to something about new business models being hatched, and people starting to talk about this morbid stuff with a more, um, opportunistic tone. A year after my blog post, a journalist named Adam Ostrow gave a TED talk that covered this topic – and outlined some new business models that are indeed being hatched at the intersection of death and social media as “opportunities for technologists.”

The first (and perhaps weirdest) is ifidie.net, a service that lets you create a message or video to be posted to Facebook after you die. Check out their website…kind of a wacky approach to a fairly serious topic.

“My Next Tweet” is a service that uses an algorithm to predict what your next (and perhaps last) bit of social output would be on Twitter by analyzing all your previous tweets and retweets.

Finally, Ostrow points out 1000 Memories, a service that allows you to organize, share and ultimately post a collection of photos, memories, writings and more to Facebook or an area of their site. Not just for the dead, apparently.

On the flipside of all that nonsense, there is a beautiful side-effect to digitizing one’s last days. I recently read a gorgeous narrative by Rebecca Armendariz chronicling a series of Gchats with her lover that is both heartwarming and gut-wrenching, and exquisitely written. Read it and (be prepared to) weep.

I suppose all of this does lend gravitas to the idea of self-monitoring your digital expressionism. Once you’re gone to the great mashup in the sky, you don’t want one of these dopey services misrepresenting your life’s social work. So if today is indeed the beginning of the end of your life, social-ize accordingly.

Ten Apple Traits Every Small Company Should Emulate

Illustration:  Bruce Crilly

With the recent resignation of Steve Jobs, I began contemplating the company he built more than 30 years ago with a Woz and a dream. Apple Computer, which recently (briefly) overtook Exxon/Mobil as the world’s most valuable company, has had its share of ups and downs. Just a little over a decade ago, they were teetering on the edge of irrelevance, losing ground to new manufacturing and software entrants. Today, however, the company has a total value close to $350 Billion, legions of loyal evangelists and, despite Jobs’ recent announcement, a very bright future under new CEO Tim Cook as the sitting-architect-in-residence of modern computing and electronics.

They didn’t get there by accident. At Apple, Inc., there is a culture of progress, and businesses at the micro level can learn a lot by examining Apple’s behavior. Sure, most of us may never get to their size or influence, but that doesn’t mean small and midsize businesses – in virtually any category – can’t wield the same traits and characteristics and, hopefully realize similar successes.

Here, the top 10 fundamental traits of Apple that any small and midsize company can emulate:

1. Embrace Innovation. Apple has embraced innovation in virtually every aspect of their business. Not just in the products they develop, but in how they manufacture them, ship them, sell them, update them, service them and finally obviate them with new and improved models. Embrace technology, look for avenues to optimize performance from your team, and adopt a culture of “what can we do next, what can we do better?” at your company to emulate this enviable trait.

2. Anticipate (and even create) Consumer Needs. One thing Apple does very well is think ahead, and think deep into the hearts and minds of their consumers. No one ever thought that they needed a telephone, AND an Internet browser, AND an email client AND an iPod AND an app player, all in one simple device. But when Apple created iPhone, everyone suddenly NEEDED one. Why just give your customer base what it wants, when you can give them more than that, or better yet, something they don’t know they want yet? It’s a great way to bond to consumers and, in strategic terms, to immediately dominate the category in which you operate.

3. Form Smart/Strong partnerships. Apple has done this in many different ways. From manufacturing partners to content partners to the legendary App Store developer partners. Sure, they may dictate the terms of how things will go, but they leverage the talents and abilities of innovative companies that operate well outside of Cupertino. Look around in and outside your category – who can your business partner with to emulate this trait that helps you to grow or helps you improve in some way?

4. Never Forget Your Entrepreneurial Spirit. It’s a classic story: Jobs and Woz in a Silicon Valley garage, building machines from scratch, selling on credit, scrounging for parts and never wavering on their dream to build something new, something special. And that spirit is still evident in every new product launch with Jobs smiling, bragging and still trying to out-geek every geek out there. Sometimes, in our businesses, we tend to forget why we started, how much we love what we do, how good we have it and more. Maybe it’s time to re-kindle that passionate spark?

5. Push Into New Categories. At one point, Apple only offered two core products: a slick operating system and the machines it ran on. Then, about a decade ago, they had an idea to use their skills and optimize their DNA to create a different kind of device that played music. The iPod pushed Apple into a new category (music/entertainment,) that then exploded into the iTunes revolution, that gave way to even more categories (movies, telephones, tablets, etc.) The key here is that even with iPhone and iPad, they have never strayed too terribly far from their core capabilities: intuitive operating systems, running on elegantly designed devices. Think about it. What’s driving your business? And how can you use your skills/your team/your assembly line/your supply chain to push into a new category…or two…or four?

6. Embrace New Channels for Your Business. It’s hard to believe, but for a while, you could only get Apple products (and they were basically only computers) from “authorized resellers” who were few and far between. But Apple realized that retail was a viable channel, especially since their product offering was now appealing to a more mass audience. By embracing retail, they also created new opportunities to expose more people to Apple’s core line of devices and software. Think about your business: can you sell through an intermediary? Can you create a direct dialogue with your core audience? Can you segment or discover a new audience altogether? It might be a viable opportunity to create new revenues without much more overhead.

7. Have a “Cool Factor.” One of the most defining characteristics of Apple is that their products are simply cool. The devices are cool-looking, they play or display cool content (like music and movies and apps and games,) and through a combination of factors (like smart partners – see #3 above – and elegant design; see #8 below,) the company has managed to basically de-position all or most competitors as stodgy, or clunky, or un-hip, or simply, (despite a strategic partnership) as “Windows.”

8. Commitment to Design. One of the key players at Apple is Jonathan Ive, Senior VP of Industrial Design. His influence on clean, elegant, sometimes teeny-weeny product design at Apple has given the entire company a new complexion. While other computing companies are still trying to figure out the “liquid” look for their laptops, Apple presses forward on countless innovations, including the all-in-one desktop computer, the “flywheel” on iPods, the “anti-flip” telephone device, the “it feels so easy in my hand” iPad, the famous “earbuds,” and on and on. A recent article in The New York Times outlined several of the 313 patents Apple has filed for, and one of them is for the iPhone packaging. (Seriously, the packaging is patented.) Even if your company isn’t in the devices business, have a designer look at your business from top to bottom and see if you can’t match your company DNA to an aesthetic and interactive sensibility that elevates the experience of doing business with you.

9. Simple, Effective, and Consistent Advertising. Throughout Apple’s history, advertising has played a central role to how the company promotes its products and disseminates product feature information. And with its (almost unheard of) longstanding relationship with TBWA/Chiat Day, there has been a driving force of simple, features-based, single-concept advertising. From the moment Apple introduced itself to the world with the Ridley Scott-directed
“1984,” through the “Think Different” campaign of the mid 1990’s to the “Hello, I’m a Mac” spots of recent years, Apple and their agency have always kept it simple and pithy. Any company can learn a lot about how to promote just on the basis of Apple’s advertising track record. Not just what they do, but that they do so much in so many channels (print, radio, tv, outdoor, direct, institutional, one-to-one, etc.) with such consistency.

10. Make Brand Matter. Of all the items listed above, or perhaps as the sum of all items listed above, the most important of all is that Apple has had a very strong commitment to their brand. The products stand for something that is tied to the ethos of the company and its founders. The collective perception of most people around the world is that Apple IS cool, and that’s not by accident. “Designed by Apple in California” is more than just a copyright line, it’s nearly a profession of faith. NONE of this is happenstance or coincidence. It’s been a carefully scripted, scrupulously architected vision of what the company wants to MEAN to its consumers, its competitors and its out-of-category passersby. Of all things, use this as a compass for your company, and work to create a relationship with your consumers that transcends what you do and what you sell. It will carry your business across virtually any obstacle, any economic condition, any CEO resignation. Think Different.

Article first published on Technorati.

Seven Guidelines to Setting Marketing Objectives

Illustration:  Bruce Crilly

As you set out to accomplish any long-term marketing initiative in virtually any business, you’ll be faced almost immediately with the task of setting objectives.  Unfortunately, many companies large and small don’t spend adequate time setting – no less understanding the importance of – objectives. If you don’t know where the finish line is, how can you pass your competitors in the home stretch?  Below, seven simple guidelines to understanding and setting marketing objectives.

1. Embrace Multiple Objectives and Objective Types
Depending on the size of your organization, there may be many objectives, and they should be categorized according to who will be accountable and how they will be measured. Loosely, you can have hard and soft objectives, where hard objectives are directly quantifiable (sell 20 million widgets through the direct channel in the next three quarters,) and where soft objectives are crafted to serve larger goals, like growing the company, or opening new offices, or improving the brand awareness levels. Types of hard and soft objectives include marketing objectives, corporate objectives, operational objectives, distribution objectives, promotional objectives, pricing objectives and more.

2. Be Specific
We’ve all heard about the “SMART” objective acronym, where S stands for “specific.” Since objectives provide a baseline so that performance can be measured, specificity is the most important aspect – what you want, when you want it, what you’re willing to do to get there, etc. “Improve accessibility for our customers” is too vague to align your organization. “Create and deploy a customer support system in the next 18 months that allows our customers to connect directly with technicians and with each other in a format that’s conducive to their trade” is more specific and more useful.

3.  More Importantly, Be Decisive
Sure, you want to accomplish a hundred things, but in the next few months, you should be focused. It doesn’t mean that all your issues are not important, but some will have to wait as you set objectives in a clear order. Even if you are embracing multiple objectives or objective types (see guideline #1 above,) this is not the time to waffle. So decide what you want to accomplish, set an order if you have a lot to tackle, then focus on the first item and get your team(s) (internal and external) moving in a unified direction.

4. Set Up an Accountability Structure
Whether it’s an individual or a team, there must be accountability, and that structure must also have contingencies. If you hire a CMO to turn the reputation of a company around, then that person is accountable to align the teams, manage the processes and meet the objectives. However, if the board of directors holds back the budget, or something unforeseen pops up on the radar, the structure of accountability must be refashioned in accord.

5. Tie Strategy to Objectives
The fulcrum of every marketing initiative is the strategy with which it will be executed. But the center of every strategy should be tied to objectives. It’s pointless to set a strategy without this critical connection. A strategy can be conceived of as a road map, and its efficacy should be judged in terms of the extent to which it meets the destination outlined by the objective set.

6. Don’t Confuse Tactics with Objectives.
I’ve been in many meetings where someone says they have an “objective” of creating a Facebook page. While that may be a desire, it’s not an objective. It’s one tactic (of many possible tactics) that’s really only a means to an end. The objective, (if it included details like timing and other specifics,) in this case, is to create a structure and a location to enable a social conversation around the brand. A Facebook page, as an example, provides a fine tactical solution to meet that objective.

7. Be Flexible/Embrace Creativity
As you can see, there are many reasons to stay focused and stay on course, but there is also an important caveat. With so many factors outside of your sphere of influence (competitors, geopolitical developments, economic fluctuations, emerging technologies, etc.) you must also develop the skill to be flexible, adaptive and even quick to embrace new models as opportunities and threats alike may be poised at the gate. This is also a time to let creativity run its course and let ideas evolve and embrace the magic of improvisation and performance. Once the cameras are rolling, or the mic is live, or the program has rolled out, anything can happen, and often what happens is simply a different “version” of what you expected… that doesn’t make it better or worse. But as long as it’s still on objective, the entire enterprise is elevated by and in the moment. It’s craft at its highest level. Enjoy it when you get there.

Article first published on Technorati