the string between the cans

communication. technology. culture.

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left brain, meet right

A funny thing happened on a panel sponsored by The Economist and held at Cannes recently. The CMO of Airbnb, Jonathan Mildenhall, is quoted saying: 

“Creativity without strategic rigour is a waste of marketers’ budget”

Clearly, there’s a growing recognition that creativity and data analysis are not diametrically opposed or entirely separate activities. One informs the other. A great strategic insight is simply a “non-obvious truth” - something everyone knows once you hit on it, but never thought of before. Getting to that point involves creativity, sure, but it also involves a walk among the data. Mildenhall advises:

“Work with talented people who understand how to tell a story out of data and use that story to inspire creative people, so the foundation on which the creatives are asked to work is actually robust.”

Couldn’t agree more.

Read more about it here.

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Branding, for better or for worse, is now a conversation. Gone are the days of the monolithic, immutable brand, set in stone for the ages. Today, a brand is whatever its customers say it is, the result of a complex matrix of interpersonal recommendations and connections on social media.

Fast Company, The Lessons of Two Epic Logo Debacles

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who’s going to pay for all that “free” content?

What is the growing popularity of online ad blockers going to do to the internet? 

With all the changes in communication technologies, channels and media, one thing hasn’t changed much - the underlying business model for content. Research shows that most millenials believe content is free, but graybeards like me know better - “free” content is free because someone is attracting your attention, then selling it (or a portion of it) to someone else (someone who wants to sell you something). 

Of course, you can pay for it yourself (pay subscription fees) and have fewer people trying to sell you stuff, but that gets expensive. We hate ads, but we hate having to pay for content even more.

This way of monetizing content is old as Ivory Soap, and has been the fuel for hundreds (if not thousands) of IPO promises, as well as being the foundation for the entire publishing industry.

So what now? Publishers like CBS Interactive and Forbes are fighting back, but it’s an interesting battle to watch since in the end it may wind up being a case of “careful what you wish for”.....

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First everyone wanted to know about it. Then they made certain assumptions about me.

VANESSA FRIEDMAN on why she broke up with her Apple Watch, reported in the New York Times

What does your choice of technologies say about you? And is it saying what you want it to say? 

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your content doesn’t suck - your load-time does

There’s more to content marketing than creating compelling stuff people love & want to share. Here’s the thing - there’s little content that’s really worth waiting for. Consumers bounce on mobile at a rate 20% higher than on desktop - mostly for reasons related to the slowness of the pages they want to read. So when thinking about your content strategy - speed counts.

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the contagious billboard

What happens when you see someone else yawn? According to research, about 70% of us yawn too - a somewhat trite observation, but powerful insight when you’re thinking about getting people to react to something. Coffee company Café Pele worked with its ad agency to cause a contagion of yawning in Brazilian metro stops….then set about remedying it with glamour girls armed with steaming shots of the world’s most socially accepted pick-me-up.

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how to stop speaking stupid

Last week, a colleague and I were interviewing the CEO of a large multinational company in his office in Stamford, Connecticut, and he told us something simple but profound: “Words matter.” 

 Ok, sure. 

 Words have mattered since humans began using them to replace charcoal scribbles on cave walls – why should they matter more today? More importantly, why should they matter more for today’s businesses?  Because today everyone’s a publisher. 

Every company – whether it sells socks, super-sonic jets or (gulp) solutions – has to publish extensively online and across social media channels and formats. 

Today, 70% of B2B enterprise marketers say they’re creating more content than they did a year ago. ChartBeat estimates that there are 92,000 articles posted to the web every day – many of them coming from companies like yours. Because as today’s marketers know, most of the sale (nearly 60% of it, according to Google and CEB) is done long before anyone talks to someone at your company or a retail outlet that carries your stuff (if you’re selling B2C). 

 Not long ago words mattered for a company’s ad campaigns and product packaging and that was about it. If anyone wanted to know more about them or their products and services, companies figured, they’d call or ask someone. No longer. 

 Regardless of whether your company is introducing, ramping up, or is just figuring out what the heck a “content marketing program” is all about, people are learning about your company through the words you use online, across channels and media. 

 And that means you must be diligent to avoid that killer of clarity – jargon. 

One of the most interesting insights to come out of a recent Forrester Research Customer Experience event I attended in New York was this: 

Speak to me in language I understand” is among only three universal drivers of customer experience. (The other two are, not surprisingly, “make me feel valued” and “resolve my issues quickly.”) 

It’s obvious but important to remember: People don’t buy things they don’t understand. And they don’t buy things from people or web sites or sell sheets they don’t understand either. 

So here are a few suggestions on how to get to clear, simple words that matter:  

Explain it to a child. Whether real or imaginary (real is better) explaining what you do or sell to a child is humbling at the same time it’s instructive and great verbal exercise. 

Go “extra-environmental”. We can’t see the things we’re totally immersed in. So to be clear, we have to step outside ourselves and our comfortable worlds (which are filled with way too many verbal tics, jargon and insider-isms). 

 Tweet it. If you need more than 140 characters, maybe it’s too complicated. Try again please. (“Honey, get me re-write.”). A great Harvard Business Review article “Can You say What Your Strategy Is?” suggested it be 35 words or less. Simple advice, really, but difficult to follow. 

And I’m as guilty as anyone of going all “buzzword Bingo” and sounding like I spent a little too much time in detention at the Derek Zoolander School for Kids Who Don’t Read Good. 

 But in an attempt to keep myself honest (and speaking and writing clearly) I keep in mind what I learned from 2 slim books: On Bullshit; and Why Do Business People Speak Like Idiots? 

 That way, when I find myself leaning in to write a genuinely customer-focused value-added deliverable solution, they remind me what I should be reminding myself – K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid). 

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there’s no such thing as digital strategy

i know what I’m about to say is going to cause a shit-storm, but it’s true: there’s no such thing as digital strategy. I’m saying this in the starkest, most unambiguous and direct terms possible.

Too many people are taking the TinkerBell approach to digital strategy - if they only believe hard enough, it’ll appear. 

Someone has to stop them.

In my experience, a deep and abiding belief that digital strategy actually exists separate from business strategy inevitably leads organizations to ask the wrong questions (and ask them in a screechy panic):

What are we going to do on Facebook?

How are we going to use Twitter and Pinterest?

Why don’t we have an app? (We need an app! Where’s our app!?)

How are we going to “go” digital?

Ok, maybe these aren’t the totally wrong questions to be asking yourself as a business today - but they’re most often asked at the wrong time. They aren’t the questions you start with. The questions you start with are around your customers and prospective customers, their world, your product or service, and how you can connect the two.

And sure, now is a good time to ask them because of all the things the digital revolution (small “d” small “r”) is upsetting with regard to each. But that doesn’t mean we’re doing anything different from what we’ve aways done as strategists - define a way forward, given a clear-eyed view of the world as it is and will soon be.

A better set of starter strategy questions might be something like:

How is the world our customers and prospects inhabit different today than it was just a little while ago - especially when it comes to information gathering and sharing?

What new opportunities are these changes creating (and what do they portend for existing ones)?

How can we create value for our clients, given this new world, and their new journeys within it?

How can we capture value for ourselves after delivering value for our clients?

These last two questions really get to the heart of all business strategy (which is very much real and non-make-believe) - value creation and value capture. Digital technologies have changed both dramatically - but our strategy has to focus on the changes, implications, and opportunities part....not the digital part. 

If we take our eye off our customers and prospects and what they’re experiencing, we risk completely losing track of them and our relationship with them.

Digital is infused throughout everything - it’s a fundamental, enabling technology that makes lots of things possible. Think of it as electricity - an underlying technology that can help us create monsters or monuments, depending on how we harness it.

It’s what digital technology makes possible that is really of concern to us as strategists - how it creates what IBM calls a Smarter Planet through instrumentation, interconnectedness and intelligence; how it enables exact replication, at infinite scale, at near zero incremental cost.

Our job, as strategists, is to derive insight and create strategies, given those realities and possibilities.

Exciting, for sure. And real. No need for make-believe.

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social in the enterprise - internal NOTworks

Listen up organizational leaders - when it comes to your internal social networks, if you don’t use it, they won’t come. 

A recent study in Harvard Business Review showed that the key to driving internal social usage is leadership participation. 

We meet with company after company that wants to build “the social workplace” but few ever manage to get past integrating Chatter and hoping people will use it. 

Check out just how lonely it is out there on workplace networks:

The authors give 3 great reasons why leaders should lead the way onto their organizations’ social networks:

To listen at scale. Where else can you hear so much, from so many, so fast?

“Share to shape.” If you share recognition, direction, and stories via social media, you have a good shot at shaping how your employees use the channel, and what your culture is.

“Engage to transform.” Use the network to solve real problems - engage employees to gather deep insights into intractable challenges. 

In the end it’s about building trust by demonstrating a willingness to do things differently yourself - then inviting others to join in with you.

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hashing out the tags on Ferguson

What does the dramatically different use of #Ferguson on Twiter & Instagram tell us? The Pew Research Center just released results of a study on the use of hashtags about Ferguson on the social media networks and the findings are pretty stark. Most conversations on Twitter with #Ferguson were about incidents in the town and the news surrounding them; on Instagram, #Ferguson posts were about broader issues of racism and inequality. 

So what should we take away from this? Off the top of my head, there are 2 possible explanations - neither of which is particularly clear given the data we have:

Instagram & Twitter users are dramatically different. This could be. Twitter is much more well-established than Instagram - especially among mainstream media outlets, almost all of which have several handles and use the network to amplify and comment on the day’s hottest news.

Instagram & Twitter users see the networks as having dramatically different purposes. This could be as well. We segment our communication communities (online and off), so it wouldn’t be surprising if the same people use the different networks to communicate different messages to different audiences about the same things.

In all likelihood it’s a combination of both - a difference in user base and perception of purpose that is skewing the usage of the hashtag so dramatically. What’s clear, though, is that while we might identify and see a difference, it takes a bit more thinking and analysis to understand what that difference actually means.

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“i never paid for it in my life”

If you ask Millenials, keeping up with the news is important. But ask them to pay for it? Forget about it.

A recent report released by the Media Insight Project showed only 40 percent of Millenials report paying for at least one subscription themselves. More disturbing, though, is the comments they collected that show an extreme naivete about why all that information is free.

I really don’t pay for any type of news because as a citizen it’s my right to know the news.Clueless Millenial

Um, yeah. It may be your right, but collecting, editing, assembling and distributing the news costs money and someone has to pay for it. If it’s not you, it’s someone else (yes, that’s the way the media works). So who is it then? Brands. Increasingly. And, increasingly, it’s brands creating content directly.

In an unrelated report last week, the New York Times reported that some of its paid posts are outperforming its editorial content.

We’ve noted for quite some time that great stories can come from anywhere, and certainly from brands. Michael Zimbalist, SVP @NYT

I’m not one to look at sponsored content and sound the alarm about the end of journalism and democracy as we know it - it’s simply part of the unfolding (r)evolution in how we communicate. It’s also a part of how brands are creating more direct and broader relationships with the people who love them. But I do think it’s important that Millenials (and everyone else) know who’s paying for their attention and why - because you may not pay for it, but it ain’t free.

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research shows: your brand has the personality of a rock

Everything has a personality. Even rocks. Recent research shows we all tend to ascribe personality traits to inanimate objects. Experimenters showed people a range of rocks (real rocks) and asked which were “confident” “glamorous” “aggressive” – traits we tend to associate with people, pictures and action heroes instead of gray globs of quartz, feldspar and mica.

What that means for brands is that everything you do – not just your brand voice and visuals – is part of your brand’s personality.

Your branded environments, channels you choose, materials and layouts of your sales materials….everything communicates your brand personality – whether you orchestrate it or not. And “not” for today’s brands, should not be an option. Building out a brand experience platform - one that lives alongside your brand visual and voice standards - is a must in today’s multi-channel world. 

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the (super)power of nice

Since it only took me about 3 seconds to decide what to wear on the first day in my new gig as strategy director at Genuine (jeans & a wrinkled linen shirt, duh), I had some time to think about what books I’d take with me. 

That choice didn’t take much longer – I decided to bring only one: The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness by Kaplan & Koval. Sure, the Niceness Principles in Chapter 1 are great, but what’s most intriguing about the book – especially for a strategist – is Chapter 8: Shut Up and Listen. As strategists (and colleagues, and partners, and friends, and family members) we often are so eager to share what we think are dazzling insights that we cut things short and miss what’s important about a given interaction or relationship. 

The most successful strategists are intensely curious – tabloid reporters without the mean streak – and the 5 goals listed in the chapter are guides worth keeping in mind as my new team and I “do” strategy together here at Genuine:

Let the other guy be smarter. The person who desperately tries to be the smartest person in the room inevitably comes off as the least.

Keep it simple. Life is complicated enough. Clients – and colleagues – expect us to be expert enough to keep things simple and easy to follow.

Ask don’t tell. Even if you think you know the answer already, it’s worthwhile to ask someone to articulate it for you – you may be pleasantly surprised.

Don’t argue so much. Really. Don’t.

Everyone is worth a listen. Don’t confuse this with the idea that everyone deserves a medal – some ideas are better than others (enough said) - but pretty much all are worth a bit of a listen before moving on.

The last bit of advice I’m choosing to take away from The Power of Nice comes from the last chapter that asks us to “Put Your Head on their Shoulders”. Empathy is trait #2 on the strategist – and colleague – checklist, if you ask me. And it’s hugely critical to remember. So, the foundation is set, and I’m ready for my first day “inventing together” armed with the 3 most important traits I can think of: curiosity, empathy, and nice.

[experiencebrands]

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experiencebrands:

What is your brand doing to stop your customers from leaving before they actually do?

"66% of consumers switched brands or business due to poor customer service last year. Some 82% of those who switched said the brand could have done something to stop them."

(Accenture, November 2013)

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The value of cu$tomer experience. Helping to build the case that creating an experience your customers value feeds the bottom line, a recent study by Medallia reports some impressive numbers. They ran their model against both subscription- and transaction-based businesses to show that higher customer experience scores correlated highly with greater spend and loyalty. And while the results focus on top line growth, they also found significant evidence supporting the idea that delivering better customer experiences actually result in LOWER costs due to savings on customer service, returns, churn, and other things associated with less-than-stellar experiences.

[experiencebrands]

Hello, it’s nice to meat you. We often get compliments on our business cards because they have pics of us posing with different whimsical things that in some way define us (or not). But business cards made from beef jerky and lasered with your personal info - Brilliant! Perfect, memorable memento for your next, ahem, meat and greet.

[experiencebrands]

This just in… ok, not really. I’d absolutely love to say my experience at the Forrester Customer Experience Forum (East) was remarkable and unmistakeable (along with being trusted and essential - the 4 parts of Forrester’s TRUE brand framework). But, alas, I can’t. I really don’t mean it to be snarky - we’ve been talking about this a lot and are all guilty somewhere along the line - saying not showing. So I guess it was a little disappointing to not see even one innovative experiential activity or touch. Missed opportunity, I think. Or maybe it’s more of a b2b bias - where we focus so heavily on the consumer experience (consumer as end user) that we forget about all those other brand experiences with other businesses. It was nice to see a focus on culture and employees - Steve Cannon of Mercedes Benz did a great job emphasizing its importance and backing it up with the program dollars to prove it. But despite several questions from the audience on the role of brand experience in b2b and the requests of previous attendees to include more of it, the lone b2b session was the very last presentation on the very last day and felt like more of a token than a recognition of its importance. Too bad. Two opportunities missed.