It was just a matter of time: "With brands turning into curators of conversations about them and brand value increasingly determined by the value of aggregated content, third parties might be inspired to hijack these very brands by offering curated conversations on their behalf," I wrote in early July.
And now Seth Godin and BzzAgent have done exactly this. The marketing guru and the marketing agency have launched a portal that aggregates conversations about brands and presents them in a unified public-facing dashboard that gives brands the chance to lead the discussion. Brands in Public translates the Get Satisfaction business model (a portal for public-facing aggregated customer support) into the broader realm of brand management. It aggregates the aggregation, if you will, and centralizes what Modernista, Skittles, and Crispin Porter Bogusky did on their own sites.
The cost of participation for a brand is US$400 per month, and the incentives are threefold: First, brands can publicly demonstrate their commitment to transparency. Secondly, because the portal presents branded conversations just one click away from each other, brands might benefit from an attention spill-over (while of course also having to fear a cannibalization of their feed). Finally, the aggregated conversation tracking comes with some metrics, kind of like FriendFeed and Google Analytics combined. The dashboard view puts brands in control of the conversation, or at least suggests as much.
However, I have a feeling that Brands in Public will fall flat. As with the new Google Sidewiki, one could argue that community dies in the very moment someone tries to "own" it. If it's true that 'your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room,' how interesting then is what these people say when you're not only in the same room (any social network feed, i.e. Twitter, Facebook) but actually on the same stage with them (Brands in Public)? The outcome of Godin's and BuzzAgent's experiment remains to be seen: It may mark the next stage of the 'conversation economy.' Or the end of the conversation.
(Hat tip to Kristina Loring)
The Socialnomics-Social Media Blog has compiled a comprehensive list of stats from all kinds of sources to prove that "Social Media Is Bigger Than You Think."
"Welcome to the Social Media Revolution."
This week's collection of remarkable marketing links, curated by the frog marketing team.
Super-Powerful: An energy-generating bike rental system.
Personal: Jeff Jarvis announces on his blog that he has prostate cancer. How public do we want our health to be?
Creepy: Meet your Facebook contacts in a movie trailer cum gaming environment.
Obama I: The message is the message: New York Magazine thinks that “Obama’s ubiquitous appearances as professor-in-chief, preacher-in-chief, father-in-chief, may turn out to be the most salient feature of his presidency.”
Obama II: Funny How?: Matt Bai believes that Obama’s “improvisational asides are like bubbles of air reaching the surface of placid water, reminders that while he remains immersed in the process of Washington, his lifeline to the world outside remains intact.”
The Truth about Amsterdam: Creative video response to a Fox smear campaign against Amsterdam.
The JK Wedding Entrance Video: Again and again, celebrate the mundane!
TruthyPR nails it: “The lesson for you to take from this is that your cause or your brand no matter how boring probably has an angle that you haven't found yet that would be entertaining to interact with. You don't need a new content management system. You don't need a new widget. You don't need to redesign your website.You have to be able to laugh at yourself a bit, and find someone unshackled by your organization's tradition to think about new ways of engaging the public. You need to be publishing more.Writing more. Recording more. You need more content and you need to find people who can do that for you over and over, since many of their attempts will fall flat. In short, you need editorial staff. And then you need to let them run.”
That's exactly what we're going to do until next week.
Frog Design's promised series on “Meaning-Driven Business” is taking shape. After introducing the concept of “Chief Meaning Officer” in the “Power” issue of design mind, we are going to formally launch this new forum in our upcoming special TEDGlobal issue (to be released on Sept. 21, 2009) as well as on a special microsite to be launched in a couple of weeks.
For the first round of essays, we are delighted to have received contributions from three industry and thought leaders: Beth Comstock, chief marketing officer of GE and one of the world's most influential Fortune 50 marketing executives, will take the economic crisis as an opportunity to make the case for marketing-driven innovation. Werner Bauer, Nestle's chief technology officer and head of innovation, will describe his company’s concept of “Shared Value” and how it enables a more socially responsible business. And Dev Patnaik, founder and chief executive of innovation consultancy Jump Associates and author of the book Wired to Care, will illustrate how “high-empathy organizations” of all kinds prosper when they tap into a power each of us already has: the ability to reach outside of ourselves and connect with other people. Stay tuned!
The conversation is continuing in other outlets, too, and some pundits want “meaning” to not only be an abstract concept, but a movement. Economist Umair Haque is one of them. His "Generation M (as in “meaning”) Manifesto" stirred some controversial reactions (just read the comments on his blog)--from unconditional endorsement to accusations of arrogance and naiveté. It is one out of many manifestos that have recently been published on the new “new economy”--this, too, is a sign of the times. Manifestos indicate an increased need for ideological alternatives – and meaning. ... Read more
(Credit:
DRCCC)
After participating in a Digital Brand Think Tank in Munich a couple of weeks ago (a lively discussion with 20 marketing executives from Audi, BMW, Google, Continental, and other top-tier brands), I must admit that I’m a bit tired of having to evangelize (or even justify) the value of brands using social media. It is astonishing to me that companies still ask for evidence when the tweet is on the wall. The event showed that there is a new Digital Divide that cuts straight through the ranks of the marketing industry--some executives get the Social Web, some don’t. No one has figured it out yet. Most would admit that they need to catch up and keep learning.
Marc Mielau, head of digital media at the BMW Group, certainly belongs to the former cohort, and at the event in Munich he shared some interesting insights into his company’s much acclaimed online strategy. BMW has long been on the leading edge of marketing innovation and has embraced social media formats early on (remember the hugely successful branded entertainment “The Hire” film series, featuring renowned directors like Wong-Kar Wai?). To me, more than the actual programs, the most remarkable thing about BMW is how the company has managed to establish a culture of marketing innovation. It is much easier to pull off a sporadic viral hit than to build and sustain a proactive and trendsetting digital marketing engine.
Management guru Peter Drucker once wrote, “The business enterprise has two--and only two--basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results: All the rest are ‘costs.’” BMW took this axiom literally and created a “Marketing Innovation” group. Mielau described how the Bavarian carmaker concluded that an innovative brand needed truly innovative marketing and consequently put its money where its mouth is. With the Marketing Innovation department, it installed a function that was freed of any P&L pressure, given a considerable budget, and the mandate and support to experiment with various types of emerging marketing technologies and techniques--occasional failures included. Serving as a sort of marketing R&D, sounding board, incubator, and innovation catalyst, the Marketing Innovation group explores new user behavior trends on the Web and on mobile devices, while at the same time rapidly prototyping tools and campaigns to address them. While not every program has been an immediate or massive success--BMW’s engagement in Second Life, for example, was terminated, albeit in an elegant way--all activities undertaken by the group helped BMW learn by doing and enabled it to be the first mover when new formats eventually became mainstream. This has led to the high ‘social media readiness’ needed to instigate, enhance, or rebut conversations occurring in the echo chamber of BMW’s expansive and influential social graph. The key is that BMW’s short-term social media agility is based on a strong commitment to a long-term vision for its brand.
This very vision would help Vodafone these days, whose “Generation Upload” campaign in Germany has been the subject of much ridicule and scorn from the very Digital Natives it so eagerly (and maybe a little too eagerly) aimed to embrace. The company had obviously studied the social web playbook and thought it was doing all the right things: It created cross-platform social media channels for live-feedback to the campaign’s launch press conference; it put user-generated content at the center of the campaign; and it featured a prominent German blogger as the campaign’s ‘hero.’ However, it made one big mistake: It launched the campaign without backing it up with an actual product offer for the targeted “Generation Upload.” The “medium is the message” approach was simply not enough in this case. Sure, the Gen Y’ers love to converse--but they also appreciate products and rates that meet their needs. Besides that, “Generation Upload” is an unfortunate term that describes user behavior as purely mechanistic when in fact it is not so much characterized by the function of uploading but the desire to share.
And yet: “If you can’t get fired for your marketing campaign, it is not innovative,” marketing author Seth Godin once pointedly said. I’m not sure if any heads were rolling at Vodafone, hopefully not. The company deserves credit for taking a risk and jumping right into the social Web without a safety net. Ultimately, I believe, this strategy will be rewarded by the marketplace. Already, the campaign--notwithstanding all the negative comments--created a lot of buzz. And as they say, there is only one thing worse than negative PR--and that is not being talked about at all. This truism is magnified on the social web. With a long-term commitment and flawless follow-through similar to BMW’s, Vodafone might indeed have made a first step towards transforming its brand.
Marketers, beware! The New Digital Divide is very real--but you may not always know exactly which side you are on.
(Credit:
Werkmann)
The demarcation line here runs between pioneer and early adopter: CPG is the latter, no doubt, and while there’s nothing really innovative about the new site, it is nonetheless still radical relative to the vast majority of corporate web sites out there. Bringing CPB’s client portfolio to life by marrying the Kantian “You are what you do” with the Twitterian “You are what they say about you,” it certainly sets a new standard for the online presentation of creative industry brands. And – the proof is in the pudding – it accomplishes the ultimate goal of any conversational site: it is the talk of the town (or at least that of Madison Avenue).
However, as I was browsing through the plethora of content on the new (beta) CPB.com, an unsettling feeling came over me. It occurred to me that the trend of conversational corporate web sites going mainstream might trigger an unexpected, inadvertent effect. With brands turning into curators of conversations about them and brand value increasingly determined by the value of aggregated content, third parties might be inspired to hijack these very brands by offering curated conversations on their behalf.
Similar to Google’s profiting from original content on the backs of original publishers, brand-specific aggregators could benefit from being parasites of original brands’ social universe. In other words, what if Skittles faced unexpected competition from a third-party site that provided a much more comprehensive and easier-to-access curation of Skittles conversations than Skittles.com itself? Or if McDonalds suddenly saw itself confronted with a site aggregating blogs, videos, news, and tweets, all about but not by McDonalds? Think of this as the logical extension of the company profiles that already exist on LinkedIn and XING, which aggregate individual member data into a fairly transparent view of companies, including employee information and recent news. Indeed, third-party brand curators might realize that brands live in the ‘social commons,’ and that whoever builds the right aggregation mechanism and establishes the most popular channels to reach a mass audience will “own” the branded conversation on the web.
This scenario will hardly be a conflict that brands can legally solve, and it may therefore present a troubling blind spot in the social media ecosystem. Sure, brands can claim their corporate URLs and even their Facebook profiles (not always their Twitter feeds, as you can see exemplified by http:/twitter.com/ted – “I got it first, I win.”). Aggregators, however, operate in social web’s no man’s land, in indisputable territory.
Brand value, extremely volatile anyway, would then become completely unmanageable for the original brand owner. The very transcendence that is emblematic of powerful brands, may become their curse: brand loyalty is not so much loyalty towards a certain company; rather it is – as the name implies – loyalty towards a brand, wherever it lives and however it appears, both of which not limited to the confines of the official representation on the brand owner’s properties. It is the conundrum of successful brand builders that the bigger their brand becomes, the more likely their risk that they lose it to the social commons. Skittles and CPB have recognized that the main threat for their brands is not coming from competitors at the center of their industry but from outliers at the fringes –and they have preempted it, at least so far. My advice for all the others, the late adopters: Take action quickly and launch your own branded aggregation portals before third parties beat you to the punch!
While third-parties might try to benefit from curating branded conversations, Twitter produces the reverse trend as well: brands acting as parasites of existing third-party conversations. UK furniture retailer Habitat had to apologize for referencing the popular hashtag #iranelection in its Twitter feeds. (Over)-eager to drive eyeballs to its feed, it had committed the ultimate sin of social brands: it had stolen a collective currency that no one brand could possibly own.
Another scenario is brands initiating Twitter conversations that are essentially solipsistic. Web-site building company Moonfruit conducted a campiagn offering10 free MacBook Pros as prizes randomly awarded to Twitterers who would use the hashtag #moonfruit. The result: #moonfruit became a trending topic, attracting 400 tweets a minute, more than 10,000 times per hour, and 200,000 per day. Moonfruit’s Twitter followers rose to 23,000, and according to a Moonfruit spokesperson, visits to its site were up 600% on day two of the campaign. Some bemoan it as a "tragedy of the commons" or caution that "unless the Twitterverse wises up, we'll end up getting deluged with hashtag spam." I'm not so worried. The different responses to Habitat's and Moonfruit's campaign show that the Twitterverse can self-regulate attention-hijacking attempts and tell the cool from the not-so-cool. Let Twitter do what Twitter can do. All is fair in the conversation wars.
Several blog posts this week, combined, pinpoint what are arguably the two most influential trajectories for the impact of communication technologies on business these days: from real-time web to real-time business, and from social media to social business design.
Let’s start with the former. Referring to Salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff and his presentation at the Structure 09 conference in San Francisco last week, DigitalBeat claims that the real-time web is not only shaping the future of all computing but also that of business overall: “In business it’s real-time or it’s no time.” It goes on by quoting Benioff: “Customers (…) expect everything to happen right away— if they update their data, they expect those changes to appear immediately, not an hour or two in the future. (…) Any concept of batch or delay in development or execution, I think, will not be tolerated by customers anymore. (…) Even in development, customers are demanding now that they want to be able to build in that sandbox and deploy immediately, instantly, no delay.”
Sure, you may say, customers always want it faster and cheaper, that’s not news. But the implications Benioff talks about are more profound and affect the way organizations operate and adapt their business models to the new and ever-changing demands of immediacy. Some examples: Zara, the Spanish clothing chain, uses customer feedback to develop new clothes, in near real-time. TCHO, the San Francisco-based chocolatier, relies on continuous flavor development and customer feedback to drive constantly evolving versions of its dark chocolate, with variations emerging as often as every 36 hours. Status updates, embedded news feeds, and Twitter apps have injected some “real-time-ism” into professional online social networks such as LinkedIn and XING, converting them from address books to conversational circles, from networking forums to collaboration platforms. Zappos, the online retailer, successfully combines real-time customer service on Twitter with near-real-time delivery – having established a powerful, dynamic brand before letting its customers decide what business it was actually in. And Skittles, the candy brand, ingeniously replaced its corporate homepage with the 'Interweb,' a collage of real-time social web conversations not by but about Skittles – essentially recreating itself as the first ever real-time brand. All these models show that the news industry’s big conundrum applies to every other business, too: It used to be that there’s nothing more boring that yesterday’s newspaper. Now there’s nothing more boring than today’s. When you relaunch your business model, product, brand identity, web site – it’s already too late. Real-time beats planning to the punch.
Real-time businesses therefore must get rid of long-term strategy plans, product road maps, goals and objectives, and all the other superfluous documents that distract organizations from focusing on their true mission – the here and now. Most of these documents are inward anyway and can be easily replaced with one strong and permanent mission statement (which, if your company culture is intact, does not even need to be verbalized).
Real-time business is inherently social – there is no real-time without social. The more businesses open up their organizations and invite external voices into their inner sanctum, the more real-time they will become. Getting social will help companies gather customer intelligence in real-time and use it to move faster. In the future, real-time businesses may deliver before their customers even articulate their needs. And they will provide immediate value without immediate return, in other words they will over-deliver – free for now but with a material or immaterial return later. What is the inadvertent business model for media might be a fulcrum for companies that manage to achieve a brand premium through customer participation as a part of real-time product development: “building a plane in the air,” together with their customers.
"The process is the product,” as Trendwatching writes in its latest report, in which it also claims that the real-time the web is breeding a new quest for longevity or “Foreverism”: “the new popularity of technology that allows consumers to find, follow, interact and collaborate forever with anyone & anything.” It’s not as paradoxical as it may sound. Living real-time means living in the ongoing – forever. If everything happens in real-time, nothing is ever final and always in permanent beta. Conversely, if everything lasts forever on the Google web (your emails, networks, conversations) and your digital presence is only as good as your latest search results and Twitter updates, you better utter some digital impressions NOW.
And yet, what’s required is a shift in thinking and ultimately a new organizational model that goes beyond feeding the social media beast on the real-time web: “If the big picture is business transformation, it's going to take more than a few tweets to get there,” David Armano writes in his post on ‘social business design,’ and argues that ““Social Businesses are those which are designed from top to bottom as a reflection of the world we all live in online today. A business where everyone is connected and able to contribute but also where the right tools are available to them to do all of this with business intent from the beginning.”
For centuries, organizations have considered it their task to conquer chaos and manage people, now they have to embrace the sudden chaos instigated by unmanageable throngs of instantly and elegantly self-organized individuals. Whether that will lead to the end of organizations remains to be seen; it will definitely lead to the end of organizations as we know them.
(Credit:
Unicef)
The $10 billion market for baby and young children’s furnishings (cribs, other case goods, layette, nursery decor, and the like) and accessories (car seats, strollers, baby monitors, diaper bags, etc.) is a lucrative market, and the baby stroller is one of its most competitive sectors. Hundreds of models vie for the attention of parents-to-be, and the level of detailed research, due diligence, and individual preferences may come close to the decision making process by an airline for the purchase of a Boeing 787. There are only few things – at least that’s what the industry makes you believe – that are as personal and intimately important to consumers as a baby stroller. The stroller embodies the commitment, care, and love that a couple chooses to devote to their newborn. It is the most visible representation of good parenthood. And in the US, the baby stroller market combines three quintessential American traits into a mind-boggling mix of over-commercialism: an abundance of choices, an obsession about mobility, driving, and vehicles, and a profoundly whacked out paranoia about deficient baby care. All that turns the stroller into a status symbol, especially after the chic Bugaboo arrived on the scene (thanks to Sex and the City) and became the must-have stroller for every DINK (double income-no kids), oops, with kids now – from Los Angeles to New York.
All the more rewarding then is to see a baby and kids super store that defies this irrational exuberance by taking it even a step further, turning a farce into a comedy. Lullaby Lane in San Bruno, CA is a paradise for stroller shoppers precisely because it doesn’t try to be one. It runs three stores and a warehouse in the suburban town south of San Francisco, and surprisingly, the town isn’t named after the brand yet - as perhaps one of the biggest non-big-box baby gear suppliers in the world. The town of San Bruno is adjacent to the San Francisco International Airport (the noise of planes taking off may disrupt your shopping experience at Lullaby Lane every other minute, but my wife used it as an extra lever to lure me into the shop – “if you get bored, you can watch planes.” I love watching planes almost as much as I hate shopping).
But bored I was not. Lullaby Lane is a one-of-a-kind store, independent, grassroots, not slick and shiny – but having been in business for 57 years and family-run, it is the anti-Babies R Us. Almost like a garage sale with sales reps that are a charming mix of car mechanic, Formula One engineer, and precocious kindergartener. Adhering to an old-fashioned model of super-personal customer service, they master folding and unfolding hundreds of different strollers, and go to great lengths to thoroughly analyze each and every feature of the many brands of strollers that they carry – including a live comparison of the performance of the inflatable wheels of the Bugaboo Frog versus the non-inflatable wheels of the Uppa Baby Vista (the Bugaboo is the clear winner). The best thing about Lullaby Lane, however, is its product reviews on YouTube, enhanced by a delightfully ill-placed soundtrack (AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells”) and astonishing, unexpected outbreaks of stroller stunts. You have to see them yourself; here's one example:
The videos are smart. They’re rough, low-budget, authentic, fun, and laden with just enough irony so they don’t turn off hardcore parents-to-be but also cater to the more enlightened shoppers who (wrongly) think that they aren’t succumbing to the baby industrial complex. The videos feature men and are designed to appeal to men, highlighting the strollers’ features and the competitive nature of their performance. You feel like they’re selling you a sports car. Once you’re in the store, however, the sales reps pay closer attention to the mothers-to-be, knowing they will ultimately make the purchasing decision. Even though I was the one asking more questions, our sales rep would always face my wife when answering them. When we left the store, we had bought two strollers (I learned that you need one for home and a lighter one for travel), and we swore we’d come back. There’s always more you need for your baby. Yes, we care. And then we watched planes.
By the way, you may think the Lullaby Lane videos are edgy, but they pale in comparison to the guerrilla marketing campaign conducted by UNICEF in Finland. Wanting to raise awareness for children rights, the “Be a Mom for a Moment” campaign placed fake blue strollers with a crying baby audio track in crowded places in 14 cities. If people looked in the strollers, they would find a note with the message: “Thank you for caring, we hope there are more people like you. UNICEF – Be a mom for a moment.” Apparently, the media and public reaction was overwhelming, with coverage in all the major TV, radio and web news. The estimated media reach was more than 80% of Finnish population after two days.
Lullaby Lane and UNICEF’s campaign share a commitment to meaningful marketing. They successfully connect with their audiences by applying what I call the "five principles of meaningful marketing (pdf):” be social, be personal, be dramatic, be disruptive, and be responsible. Lullaby Lane embraces the idea of generosity (“give more than you take”) and originality (the videos) to create long-term customer loyalty, and UNICEF’s campaign was a perfectly choreographed moment of “disruptive realism.” Both create meaning – events and experiences that you can relate to other events and experiences and that are at the same time so scarce and unexpected that they’re worth sharing.
Happy Father's Day!
(photo credit: UNICEF)
Credit: next09
I just came back from the next09 conference in Hamburg, one of Europe's leading digital/creative/marketing forums that stands out in the conference circuit because of its unique German-international focus (bilingual program, 80 percent international attendees, many international speakers). This year's theme was "Share Economy," and the 1,300 attendees comprised of European VCs and angel investors, Web 2.0 entrepreneurs, media, creative agencies, and executives from German corporations (from BMW to Deutsche Bank to Deutsche Telekom).
In talking to many German attendees, my impression was that the German creative community shows no signs of a downturn. The German start-up scene in particular, if that is any indicator, is alive and kicking. There are many new promising Web 2.0 firms run by smart entrepreneurs (many of them are funded by entrepreneurs who made a fortune during the dot-com heyday), and there is a lot of money to go around. Notwithstanding this newly found confidence, however, Germans still look to the U.S., and in particular to Silicon Valley, for technology trends and innovative business models--this is nothing new but next09 was a stark reminder of how powerful the Valley myth still is. Consequently, there was a large contingent of social media folks from the Bay Area.
I met several great people including Lane Becker, the founder of Adaptive Path and co-founder and president of Get Satisfaction (the "people-powered customer service" that seems to be everybody's darling these days), Natasha Friis Saxberg, the founder of Mentory, a Web-based mentoring network, Maria Sipla from social network marketplace Linqia, Daniel Reckling from Neckermann.de, Germany's largest online retailer, Stephan Loyen from Simyo (a German discount telco), Darius Miranda from Wells Fargo (which appears to have a pretty sophisticated social media B2B strategy), and many others.
In conversations with Jackson Bond and Johannes Haus from Xing, the European equivalent to LinkedIn, it became evident that for social networks and other Web players "conversations" are the next big frontier. The business world is ready to embrace an enterprise Twitter, and many business communities (social networks and intra-company networks alike) are working on proprietary internal micro-blogging services--micro micro-blogging, if you will, that can be better customized and controlled. Yammer for everyone. In one of the main stage sessions at next09, Stowe Boyd ("Unmarketing") presented the Open Enterprise 2009 study, which predicts that in a few years 80 percent of knowledge-based tasks in corporations will be happening outside of formal organizational boundaries and will be open-sourced, crowd-sourced, social, and conversational.
In this vein, I was invited to speak about "The Shrinking Brand--Marketing in a Small World," a talk I had given before at the eMarketing conference in San Francisco. But after listening to Jeff Jarvis' terrific key note on "The Great Restructuring," Umair Haque's pledge for "Constructive Capitalism," and Andrew Keen's passionate rebuttal of both, I felt the need to change the focus of my talk and approach it from a broader view. It was also more fun to present something new. And so I came up with the "Seven Rules of the Chief Meaning Officer" (I know, I know, 10 would have been better, but sometimes there are only seven...), based on a concept I've been blogging about over the past few months. This was the first time I ever shared it at a public forum.
My key points, in a nutshell: As brands face an unprecedented level of competition, transparency, and consumer empowerment on the social Web, "meaning" is becoming the new powerful currency that connects brands with their brandholders in the "share economy." The new marketing leader, the chief meaning officer, is a strategic activist, social media entrepreneur, constant innovator, and integrator. The chief meaning officer has the potential to transform business through meaningful marketing--marketing that consistently creates added social value, not as an afterthought but a sine qua non. While marketing has always been the art of turning friends into customers and customers into friends, it is now the art of finding, befriending, and activating the like-minded for a common cause, for the common good--and for profit. Brands that have a reason to exist, an argument to win, will be more appealing than ever.
The Seven Rules:
1. Listen and converse (and converge)
2. Atomize your brand
3. Activate your customers
4. Think and act like a media company
5. Give more than you take
6. Be the change
7. Be yourself
Here are the slides:
More about the other next09 talks--and the emerging 'Share Economy' (that you may also call a "Twitter Economy")--in the next couple of days…
(Credit:
Zimbio)
Trendwatching gets it right (again): "Giving is the new taking, and sharing is the new giving." That's the key assertion in this month's trend briefing, which describes the characteristics of Generation G (for generosity) and offers eight ways for brands to join: from Tryvertising to Brand Butlers to Random Acts of Kindness (RAK).... Read more
