Kill Them With Kindness

It’s election season and in the U.S. we’re getting ready for a good solid year of negative advertising. It’s sad that it works so well. The negativity so easily spreads to the social channels. There we end up with a cacophony of anger and insults rather than any interesting interaction. As a result, one ends up disliking all of the candidates (which may be a good description of what’s happening with the GOP voters this year).

But what about brand and product advertising? Does negative advertising work there as well? Most of the negative advertising we see today is clearly aimed at young males. We usually see competing products or behavior painted as weak and mostly feminine (think car and beer commercials). 

One notable exception was the oft-discussed “I’m a Mac” campaign where Apple instead killed Microsoft with kindness. This unexpected, slightly patronizing but always empathetic spin probably did more to damage Microsoft’s reputation that all of it’s software bloat combined.

If you look at many of the smart brands that have integrated social media into their operations, you see the same thing. Rage, frustration and displeasure are met with patience, understanding and kindness. Most of the time, it works. There’s something about the social channel that brings out the complainer in all of us. Why that is would be great topic for a doctoral thesis.

So try this for a strategy: whether you’re arguing with someone about politics, sports or brands, or attempting to convince customers to use your products over your competitors, try killing them with kindness rather than with clubs and arrows. My guess is you’ll be both more successful and less frustrated.

Sweden’s Social Experiment

For the last several weeks, the tourism and marketing arm of the Scandinavian country of Sweden has allowed various Swedish citizens to take over its Twitter account. Called “Curators of Sweden” The idea is:

“...that the curators, through their tweets, create interest and arouse curiosity for Sweden and the wide range the country has to offer. The expectation is that the curators will paint a picture of Sweden, different to that usually obtained through traditional media.”

The end goal, though unstated, is to attract more tourists to visit the country.

I’ve been following this experiment in social curation for a number of reasons. I’m always on the lookout for smart social marketing ideas. I also lived for many years in Sweden (and live with my half-Swedish family in Vermont). So I was very curious in how the curators would paint the picture of Sweden for the rest of us.

The first few weeks were disappointing. It seemed like @sweden started with a lot of check-ins at local bars and nightclubs, discussions about older American movies, and pictures of Sweden from the summer. There’s nothing wrong with those topics. What was missing, for me, was any sort of context.

I didn’t mind the bar hopping in Sweden (although I didn’t recognize any of the clubs from 15-20 years ago) but what I missed was any sort of description of the nightlife or the people in those places. There was no feel or texture. I liked the farmer tweeting from somewhere in the country but where was the story of what it was like to actually do that for a living in Sweden (did he get 5 weeks vacation, for example?). The discussion about watching American DVDs put me over the edge, though. How about talking about Swedish movies (yes, I’m biased, I used to work on them)?

More to the point, I wondered how any of those very topical tweets “painted a picture” or “aroused interest” for Sweden. They sounded just like very normal people from anywhere in the Western, industrialized world.

When a female Swedish priest took over, things started changing. She did a great job of describing different aspects and places in Sweden. Despite Twitter’s 140-character limitation, she allowed me to start recognizing places I’ve been, and imagine places I hadn’t been to. Leave it to a female Swedish priest. Everything about her set the bar high.

A Swedish female truck driver swiftly followed her. Another amazing opportunity, right? Again what followed lacked a story. I imagine that the truck driver gets to see more of the country of Sweden than 99% of Swedes. There’s very little of that here, yet. 

The big question for me is: Who curates the curators? We live in an era of citizen journalism and customer created content. The problem is that although we may be citizens, most of us are not journalists. Even though we are all customers, most of us have not developed our talents for content creation. 

Experiments and collaboration are great. But they need context. Social marketing will always trend to the banal and irrelevant without a story, structure or perspective to hold it together, and to hold our interest.

It’s as though social media has given rise to a corollary to Camus:

“I am, therefore I’m interesting.” Social has given us all a channel to prove it. But it still doesn’t make it true.

The biggest question is whether this campaign will increase tourism to Sweden or not. Based on the content to date, I would guess not. The uniqueness of the campaign, and even the publicity it generates, will probably not be enough to convince people, like Americans, to spend the big bucks to visit that beautiful country.

Marketing, social or not, needs to tell good stories. Perhaps the medium of Twitter is the culprit, limited as it is (sorry McLuhan). Perhaps Instagram was the way to go, since pictures always provide more context than words (although they’re not always better). I don’t really agree with either of those though.

Don’t get me wrong; I love the idea of Curators of Sweden. I just wished the execution lived up to the idea.  Johannes Karlsson, head of PR and Social Media at Visit Sweden tells me to give this experiment time. I will. 

I hope that @sweden can develop into a great social story telling platform that gives people the flavor of one of my favorite countries in the world.

Use Social Media to Connect Friends and Family

Brands want people to connect with them through social channels. Social media usage among U.S. Internet users has more than doubled in the last three years (28% to 65% between 2008 and 2011). So brands are increasing the time and money they spend in these channels with the hope of attracting people through deals, content and, in some cases, customer support. 

That’s what brands want. What do most people using social media want? They want to connect with family. They want to connect with their current friends. They want to find old friends. Only a small group of people wants to use social media to connect with other like-minded people around a common interest. 

If you only looked at the marketing efforts online, you might assume that most brands and marketers believe that last group to be bigger than it is. But you would be wrong.

I think a key question for brands in the next few years is this: What value or utility can they provide that makes it easier or better for people to connect with their friends or family?

A challenge for most is to refocus the gaze from internal needs to external, customer needs. And many times those external needs don’t necessarily have a direct connection to internal “goals” or “plans.” It means moving out of your internal business meetings into a state of empathy.

Here’s an example, imperfectly executed but with a clear value proposition behind it: ShopyCat scans your Facebook friends to recommend gift ideas. Right now the gift ideas aren’t very good, in my opinion. But they have started sending emails to remind me of upcoming birthdays, with those poor gift ideas. While ShopyCat is in the business of selling stuff, they’re doing it by tapping into something that’s very important to me: Remembering my family’s and my friend’s birthdays. They’re attempting to add a layer of utility to keep me connected (and make me look good).

There aren’t a lot of other good examples, to be honest, although I believe that the ones that support community and charity help will resonate with peoples’ close networks (think Patagonia’s Common Threads initiative). I think there’s a much bigger opportunity for any brand that deals with any kind of food, since that’s a stronger connective tissue between people than we understand.

So when your brand is evaluating your next social initiative, try asking yourself: How can your brand help friends and family connect?

Social Gift Shopping

Every year, we are continually challenged to find good gifts for our spouses/kids/parents/friends for the December holidays. I had one friend who kept a running list of things she wanted throughout the year. Every time she went shopping she made sure to add one or two things to her list. Whenever someone asked her what she wanted for Christmas/birthday/anniversary, she had a good answer! Most of us, unfortunately, aren’t like that. 

So I was interested to check out some of the new social gift finders this year, in the hope that they would make my life easier over the next few weeks. The two that caught my attention were Etsy's and Amazon’s Facebook integrated gift finders.

Both tap into your Facebook profile with the (as yet unmet) promise that they will scan your friends’ profiles and come up with unique gifts for them. Of the two, Etsy does a better job, since it looks like it’s more focused on keywords than actual products.

Etsy though looks at what you’ve said you’re interested in, rather than what you’re actually talking about on Facebook. So if you’ve loaded up your profile with lots of things you identify with, Etsy will search its catalogue for those keywords. Sometimes it gets a little funny. 

My wife Bella, for example, has only chose Sweden as a topic of interest. So when the Etsy gift finder cranks out its suggestion, guess what I get? Lots of Swedish, not much else.

Another friend, for some reason, has indicated she’s a fan of Red Bull (maybe because her two little boys are wearing her out). So the only thing she gets are Etsy products tagged with Red Bull!

I have to admit that while neither of the recommendations are perfect nor even close to being personal, the gift selection is certainly odd and entertaining, which is not always a bad thing when giving gifts. 

Amazon, on the other hand, looks to see what type of media you’ve liked in your profile, such as records, movies or books. It also searches its own site to see if you have a wish list. 

Unfortunately, it only works if you’re talking about specific titles. Which most of my family is not. It’s why the results can be somewhat absurd, since the last thing my wife would want for Christmas is the Steve Jobs book. 

One thing Amazon does have going for it is that it focuses primarily on birthdays! I’ve never understood why Facebook hasn’t trie to monetize this feature more. I think it’s the single most valuable tool Facebook (or any other social network, for that matter) offers. Remembering birthdays is something that Facebook has moved from my memory to its Web pages, a vast improvement. All they need to implement now is a one-click purchasing option.

While these are pretty good, they’re not perfect. I’ve created interactive gift finders for clients as well and all of these seem to make the mistake of looking for gifts based on expected or canned criteria. I’d like to see a more intelligent social tool that analyzes what you talk about with the most passion, in order to recommend GREAT presents. Maybe we’ll get there.

Or maybe that’s my next project. Happy Holidays.

UPDATE 12:30 PM:
Apparently I missed Shopycat, a gift finder created by Walmart Labs. It's actually be worse than the other two for personalized gifts. As for non-personalized, it suggested the George Foreman Grill to everyone (who wouldn't like that, right?).  While the app says it scans your updates, it's apparent from the list that it doesn't. And as for the suggestions for Bella? I think I'll stick with Etsy.

What we really need from Google, Facebook and Apple

As a parent indoctrinating his kids with all the things I liked when I was young, I was struck by a simple fact. While watching (re-watching) many of my favorite shows and movies with my children, like original Star Trek and Mission Impossible, Sean Connery James Bond movies, and Get Smart, I realized that what most of these shows talk or fight about is Science and Scientists. That idea was reinforced after this summer’s visit to the Spy Museum in Washington. The Cold War, and our future success as a nation, boiled down to one thing:

Those with the most, and best, geeks win.

Back then we competed in rockets, space travel and military technology. Men in white coats were prizes. The real power was locked in the brains of the smartest people.

We kids were weaned on that. Q was cool. Spock was, well just amazing. Scientists were heroes.

No wonder we produced a lot of them back then. NASA launchings caused everything to stop, all at once. Being a geek was chic. Our popular culture trained us and our schools supported us.

Fast forward to the 21^st century, where we need more engineers, technicians and scientists than ever before. We may have thought things were cool before, but they’re just mind-boggling today.

Right now, though, we’re not fighting over rocket designs, we’re fighting over code. The spy game of the 60’s has shifted from dead drops to hacking. Nano-technology, artificial and bio intelligence are just as sexy, more actually, than rockets. But they are much harder to visualize.

What we really need today is a way to visualize and popularize technology in the same way we did during the Cold War and space race. We need to pump up the techno-cool so kids will want to emulate it and follow it into practice. We need a Spock for the Social Age.

This is where we need Google, Facebook and Apple’s help. Unlike in the past, the government propaganda apparatus won’t help. Movies like Social Network end up glorifying the parties, not the coding. Google, Facebook, Apple (and others) are already the coolest companies in the world. We need them to help create a PR push or branded content that Hollywood (and others) will emulate.

We need them to help elevate the idea that technologists are still the diamonds in our society, worth fighting over and protecting. With their collective creativity, we need TV shows, movies and graphic novels promoting the amazing stuff only they can do.

In the end, this will help technology companies like Google, Facebook and Apple by providing a greater pool of technology talent. But it will help all of our country much more.

We need a new geek chic to go mainstream. 

Social Metrics

This was the presentation I gave at the Vermont Web Summit on November 3, 2011 on Social Metrics. As expected, I talked more about having something important to measure, like things that impact your business than the nuts and bolts of social analytics and tools.

A number of people have requested that I post this, so here it is:

Social Metrics

View more presentations from Digalicious.

The Rise of the Socially Empowered Consumer

There’s been a lot of talk about empowering consumers over the past few years. But the events of the past few months show that we’ve passed an inflection point. The actions and reactions around Bank of America and Netflix show that the power has shifted from an unbalanced company/consumer relationship to a much more balanced one.

Bank of America announced yesterday it was dropping plans to raise its debit card fees by $5. When it revealed its plans in September, BOA caused an outcry of protest on Twitter and Facebook. “Debit card fees” was a trending topic on Google.

Social media enabled consumers to not only show their discontent with the new plan, it allowed them to spur and encourage people to do something about it: switch banks. Apparently that threat of customer loss and negative publicity helped BOA change course.

This summer Netflix bumbled through an organizational and operational change that increased customer costs while decreasing what they received for it. Despite numerous attempts to explain what it was doing, Netflix only succeeded in enraging millions of people. Those people then used social media to tell each other how mad they were.

Not only that. They acted and encouraged others to act. The result: Netflix lost almost 1 million customers in a very short time. 

Both of these results would have been unthinkable back in the day when companies had a near monopoly on communications. In the broadcast or propaganda age, companies controlled the message and the means to distribute them. Consumers, who lacked any organizing principle or mechanisms, let alone the combined resources to act as a counterweight to those messages, had little power to counteract company actions.

Social media has disrupted that. Our digital revolution has delivered the means of production and distribution into the hands of consumers. Social media has created a channel to match and overwhelm the broadcast channel. With that, we’re seeing a very significant power shift. 

And it’s not only in consumer markets. The same thing happened in Tunisia and Egypt.

Companies best take note. It’s one thing if people make you change back your logo, like Gap. It’s another when they stop doing business with you.

Imagine instead if all of these same companies had used social media to help test and form the business decisions. Perhaps they wouldn’t have always produced the most popular results, but the companies would have been more prepared, and created more consumer friendly decisions than otherwise.

For those companies who don’t really like paying attention to what’s happening on social media, I can only say one thing: You deserve everything you get.

Today’s consumer is empowered thanks to social media and that empowerment is going to grow stronger. People will no longer simply accept decisions and messages that affect them. What a great time to be a consumer!

What If You Don’t Have What Customers Want?

Graphic From Marketing Profs

A recent Exact Target study on Facebook Likes revealed that most people who like brands on Facebook want something tangible in return. For the majority, they want payback in terms of product discounts or sales. That makes sense. Just like brands, people are looking out for Number One.

But what about all of the companies that don’t sell products? What do all of the service brands do where discounting is, well, odd. Ever see a sale or a coupon for a lawyer, doctor or accountant? If so, post them here.

How about banks, electric utilities or even, ahem, ad agencies? Nope, nope, nope. No sales or discounts there. If most people want deals, and service organizations don’t offer deals, should they even be on Facebook or social media?

When I look at that top line (and I’m not even bothering with the data below those two top lines) the word “exclusive” jumps out at me. People don’t say they want sales; they want exclusive sales. They want to feel special. They want companies to treat them specially.

Now that sounds pretty smart and very doable. Most companies should treat their customers as special people. The challenge is creating something exclusive for them. Although when I think of exclusive, it means that you can give someone access first, before anyone else.

The service industry can do that. They can offer special reports or insights to their customers, first, to help them get smarter. They can invite them to special customer only events to meet with industry experts. They can simply throw parties or give away branded shwag.

The problem with that: It’s extra work. Creating a sale or a coupon isn’t that much work compared with creating content or events. So most companies balk at doing so. I ran across this statistic a few months back that puts this extra work into perspective, though:

Increasing your customer satisfaction by 5% can increase profits by as much as 95%. 

So the question for the service industry becomes: Is it worth the effort to increase your profits by up to 95%?

If you answer no, maybe it’s time to shut down your Facebook page. For the rest of you, it may not seem like you can offer customers what they really want, but you can. You just need to treat them a little better than everyone else.

The State of Marketing

Digital. Social. The Age of the Consumer.

We keep reading about how marketing is fundamentally shifting. Every day there are articles and blog posts about the changing relationship between customers and brands. We experience how new technology has changed the game.

And then there’s the reality of marketing. Brought to you with stark contrast in IBM’s Institute for Business Value latest study.  

Here’s what the study says:

• Most CMOs are not using social media to track current customer sentiment
• Most use traditional marketing research
• Most CMOs believe that by 2015 they will have to show ROI on their marketing investment
• Most feel they aren’t currently prepared to provide hard numbers

Maybe it’s not so surprising that they don’t use digital sources to inform their decisions. But most are not prepared at all to respond to the shifting market and to change the way they run the marketing department.

Perhaps even more depressing is the fact that even if CMOs did all of the right things, they have little or no influence on key business decisions, such as new product development, pricing or channel focus. In short, they’re not included on the main things companies do.

One question that comes to mind is: What will it take to remove the CMOs that don’t get it with ones that do?

Or maybe that’s the wrong question, since the other C-levels don’t seem to let the CMO in the room where decisions get made.

It’s further proof why mediocre advertising is still the rage. And why agencies that cater to and empower laggards makes so much money.

I guess we’re going to have to wait for #occupymadisonavenue.

Cusp Conference 2011 – Part 1

Last week I attended the Cusp Conference in Chicago. The title of the event was “The Design of Everything.” For two days I watched, listened and met some of the most interesting and inspiring people I’ve met in years. For a few days, all of us attendees felt our energy and engagement go through the roof.

Now it’s Monday of the following week. I feel like Dr. McCoy in the Star Trek episode “Spock’s Brain” where he learns how to put Spock’s brain back into Spock’s body, but as time goes by, McCoy feels the knowledge and remembrance slipping away. I’m trying to do everything I can to make sure that the energy from Cusp doesn’t slip away amidst my “normal” work. Because, after Cusp, normal can take a hike.

Day One started off with the blindfolded former priest Mike Ivers talking about “Fear.” If there’s one thing we all know all too well, it’s fear. As Mike stumbled around the stage, he made an amazing point: That almost all of us are afraid of stepping into our own power.

The Fear of Stepping Into Your Own Power. You could almost hear the audience gasp. All of the reasons and excuses we have for not doing things start here. It’s the difference between people with potential and the people who make a difference. If there was a sub-theme to this conference, this was it.

And then things went from the sublime to the surreal. Dr. Richard Satava, U.S. Army senior science advisor, stepped up to talk about technological advances in medicine and robotics. He talked about operating rooms with no people and how we’re moving from instruments to energy. With micro-robots to operate, we’re creating miniaturized surgical cockpits that go far beyond human capacity. Although, Hollywood got there first on this one, back in the 60s with “Fantastic Voyage.” 

Ultimately he posited that medicine was going to move from “fixing” to “replacing.”  Here’s his money quote: “We’ve replaced every part of the body except the brain.” Guess what’s next? The implications for us are profound.

For the first time in history, we’ll have the ability to choose the species that follows Homo sapiens. We will enter the era of Chimeras and Cybrids.

Guess how we’re going to figure some of this out? Gaming. Jerome Waldispuhl of McGill University works in the field of comparative genomics. He’s comparing animal DNA to understand where key differences show up. It turns out that computers are not very good at doing this. People are. His solution? He’s crowdsourcing this by turning it into a puzzle to solve the problems. The game Phylo is available online or through mobile apps. We’ve heard a lot about gamification this year, but Waldispuhl is gamifying science to do something that matters (in a way that Scvngr can’t). Get ready for the age of citizen scientists.

Okay, I’ve got to admit, my head was spinning after just three speakers. It’s not like I’ve lived in and intellectual desert for the last few months. But this was the first non-digital marketing or social media conference I’ve been to in years. More on that later.

The first session ended with some students from Design for America. This college program [started by Burlington native Liz Gerber (Go Vermont!)] at Northwestern University, enables design and engineering students to do something simple: Use design to change the world. 

Mert Iseri and his colleagues solve problems, trying to have social impact through local projects. He told us how they spent time with homeless people and learned that the homeless walk, on average, 36 miles per day! Their feet are their weak link and they suffer from a variety of pedal infirmities that makes their lives more hellish than they already are. So Design for America developed a sustainable shower mat for homeless shelters that reduced foot problems by 50%.

They spent time with a local hospital with the goal of reducing hospital sickness that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year. They developed a tool called Swipe Sense that fit right on doctors’ and nurses’ pants and that allowed people to disinfect their hands with a motion they were already doing. Smart, smart, smart.

Boy, those kids were not only incredibly smart, they were some of the most passionate and self-confident speakers I’ve ever seen! I left that first talk with imperatives:

1. I HAVE to get my kids involved in something like this. I can’t imagine a more exciting, stimulating and worthwhile education.
2. I have to get this to Vermont. Some of these students had already received seed money for their ideas. This whole educational program struck me as one of the best incubators and business development tools around. We need it here.

You know, I could have left after that first session and the conference would have been worth it. But there was oh so much more left.

To be continued…