(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:
Mooneythinks)
CNN is now printing one-off American Apparel headline T-shirts. The new feature (in beta) allows you to order them from the CNN web site -- with the headline, time-stamp, and CNN logo on it.
Pretty cool. CNN gets it. Their T-shirt campaign exhibits all the key ingredients of contemporary marketing genius.
Instant: Merchandising in real-time, tangibly tied with world news.
Artificially scarce: The headlines are only available to be printed while the headline is in the current news section.
Customizable/hackable: The T-shirts are customizable. You can put your own headline on them simply by changing the text in the URL.
Personal: The message is clear -- you are the news.
Convergent: Digital and physical domain converge. You can wear online news on your body.
Social: The T-shirts are perfect conversation starters ("Why this headline?;" "Where were you when that happened"?) or outlets for political statements ("Clinton endorses Obama").
Viral: Because it's social, it's viral.
Timothy Schigel is the founder and CEO of ShareThis, which "lets people easily share the things they find online, in the most convenient way possible." ShareThis consolidates address books and friend lists, so that anything can be shared immediately, without even leaving a Web page. Since its launch, the ShareThis button has been installed by thousands of publishers, generating 100 million plus views from more than 26 million unique users every month.
Timothy has led technology investing for the past 10 years at Blue Chip Venture Company, an early stage venture firm with $600 million under management, investing in leading companies such as Advertising.com, Nielsen Buzzmetrics, and Third Screen Media. Prior to Blue Chip, he was a technology entrepreneur and international consultant leading innovative projects for Apple Computer, Hitachi, Hallmark Cards, Motorola, and Procter & Gamble. Tim received his bachelor of science in electrical engineering from Case Western Reserve University.
How do you define "innovation?"
There are degrees of innovation, but at its core I would submit that innovation is the result of applying a non-obvious modification to a system resulting in improvements to quality, performance or cost that exceed current expectations. Breakthrough innovations seem to change our definition of a system or product itself.
What are the most important areas of innovation in your organization (product, process, IP, marketing, etc.)?
In our case I would say that "perspective" is the most important area for innovation. Once you have redefined the problem, opportunities for innovation seem to be everywhere. In addition, applying state-of-the-art science to new problems creates real proprietary advantage.
What would you consider your most successful innovation? How did you "find" it?
Disconnecting the process of sharing from specific content and communities, which was found through conversations and observations with stakeholders which exposed limitations and challenges of current systems.
Which innovation "failure" did you learn the most from, and why?
Pushing a technically elegant solution into a market that was not prepared to embrace it. This experience demonstrated the need for several factors to be true for market success, most importantly timing. Good ideas should be tested as early as possible and pursued if the demand is compelling and urgent.
What lessons can you pass on to others from how your organization has changed to make itself more innovation driven?
It's still early for us, but I would suggest that continuously asking the question "what problem does this solve?" keeps the organization focused on what's important. In turn, focus drives opportunities for innovation.
In your opinion, what are the biggest barriers and challenges that stand in the way of organizations becoming more innovative?
Losing focus. It's easy to be distracted by things that really don't matter at the end of the day.
Beyond your organization, who do you admire for risk-taking innovation, and what do you think makes them successful?
Steve Jobs. He's willing to take big risks. I admire someone who knows his customers, but is also willing to lead and follow his or her intuition. It's very similar to the creative process in art or music. Most of the best-known music was created because the author liked it and thought it was good. Polls and opinions can only take you so far.
What innovation are you still waiting for?
Teleportation.
[T]astemakers, Gladwell concluded, are the spark behind any successful trend. "What we are really saying," he writes, "is that in a given process or system, some people matter more than others." In modern marketing, this idea--that a tiny cadre of connected people triggers trends--is enormously seductive. It is the very premise of viral and word-of-mouth campaigns: Reach those rare, all-powerful folks, and you'll reach everyone else through them, basically for free.
Yet, if you believe Watts, all that money and effort is being wasted. Because according to him, Influentials have no such effect. Indeed, they have no special role in trends at all.Read the article at Fast Company
Here's a link to a presentation I gave last week. Forgive me for the "conversation 2.0" moniker but it's a catchy way to pinpoint what's happening right now in the world of marketing. Marketers and brands have always had conversations, but at a much slower pace and mediated by professional parties. That's no longer the case. Conversation 2.0, that is, the Web 2.0-enabled conversation, shifts places and times; it is ubiquitous and doesn't pause--it is, in all senses of the meaning, a "never ending conversation."
Thus, "social marketing," derived from the more common "social media marketing," is all marketing that utilizes the social graph of both marketer and audience (in fact, the interesting thing is that they can be one and the same) to facilitate and cultivate a conversation. Social marketing is whenever more than two individuals collaborate online or offline for content generation and distribution. Social marketers harness the viral power of social networks in order to grow both the frequency and the reach of conversations exponentially. They know how to feed the social orbit with content that catalyzes conversations. And they understand that an "architecture of participation," that lets employees be marketers, has become paramount for turning brands into live brands.
The media of the new era of social marketing are characterized by the following attributes:
-- Hybrid: The boundaries between institutions and players are blurring. This results in the mash-up of producer and consumer (prosumer), fan and consumer (fansumer), professional and amateur (proteur), and the convergence of media, platforms, and communication modes.
-- Adaptive: Change happens in real time and is organically built into the social media mechanisms. The never-ending conversation is in fact a never-ending loop; feedback is creation, creation is feedback.
-- Transparent: Everything is visible to everyone. Self expression and revelation go hand in hand. Privacy has become a public asset, and the more you share, the more (information) you will receive in return.
-- Open: Open is the new closed. Everybody can join. Systems are becoming inter-operable. The best way to build loyalty and retain visitors is to let them go whenever and wherever they want to go. The best way to lock customers into your business model is if you open it up for everyone. Seth Goldstein just had a great post about this, in which he argued that open systems need to be closed, to a certain extent, in order to function.
-- Micro: The online social universe is fragmented into an increasing number of micro-universes that develop their own micro-crowds and micro-formats. Micro is the new macro: Not only is "small the new big," and "selling less of more" may be "the future of business" (The Long Tail) -- communicating more of less is the future of media and communications. More and more businesses identify and carve out untapped niches for their business models with ever more targeted, personalized, and localized offerings.
-- Social graph: It's not just who you know; it's what you know about what who you know knows. We are "a crowd of one" (Clippinger), an interdependent cohort of individual personas. We experience a widgetization of content, of social behavior, of value(s).
-- Instant: "Now is gone" (Geoff Livingston). Everything that happens is happening immediately or not at all. Live-Chat, live-streaming or 24/7 life-casting (Justin.tv)--we want it all and we want it now. The time between action and reflection has shrunk to zero. Beta is eclipsing meta.
- prev
- 1
- next
