The BrandForward Blog

It’s a sunny day outside. And I’m the kind of girl who loves to be outdoors doing something active on pretty July days when I’m serendipitously not in the office. I’m pretty much a gear-head and I think the only adventure sport I’m not fully equipped to engage in is probably ice climbing. (Never say never.) But somehow as I look out the window at a gorgeous day, I’m sitting behind the computer. I could be biking or hiking or kayaking. But here I am. Reading about brands. Tweeting about brands. And wondering why I can’t tear myself away for just an hour to play.

At this moment I have déjà vu, remembering life as a 9 year-old girl buried inside a magazine, indoors on a Texas summer day while the neighborhood kids jumped through sprinklers and chased each other around the block.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

This isn’t the first time I ever found myself trading off a pretty day in favor of something mentally blingy.

I’ve had a love of brands for as long as I can remember. As a child I was mesmerized by every nuance and every detail. From the shiny faux metal bezels that wrapped imprinted car logos on dashboards, to the TV commercials where carefully-placed crescendos played at the precise moment the product flashed on screen. Anything that told a story in short, bite-sized morsels that could keep my ADD brain satiated and free from boredom had my undivided attention.

Due to a genetic glitch which allowed me to effortlessly memorize at a single pass, I had most of the popular slogans and jingles in TV commercials swirling in head, probably to the chagrin of friends who had to listen to me randomly weave them into conversation. I distinctly remember losing a would-be boyfriend in second grade when he whispered to me from across the aisle to “give him” flashcards and I sauntered over, slapped them on his desk, and quipped “You WAAAANT it? You got a Toy-o-ta.”

That was a short-lived relationship. These days he’s a friend on Facebook so I guess the damage wasn’t all that substantial.

Looking back, my preoccupation with brands was probably more symptomatic of OCD than a conscious understanding of brand association. But the result was the same nonetheless. Decades later I write a blog about brands.

I remember consuming my family’s magazine subscriptions like they were candy. Hours upon hours of my childhood were spent with my nose between sheets of paper. There was only one thing that could keep me from galavanting around the neighborhood on my bike or bullying the neighborhood boys on a sunny day. And that was those glossy magazines, and the sexy, faraway world they captured on every page.

Visiting the dentist was made almost bearable due to the monster selection of reading material. And I had caveman teeth so I spent a lot of time at the dentist. A lot of waiting room magazine time. It’s a miracle I didn’t become an interior decorator. Or a National Geographic photographer. Or a marine commando. (It was Texas. Didn’t everyone read Soldier of Fortune?)

When I was a kid, my parents drove a Buick. Or at least my mom did. My dad drove a Blazer. We were apparently Chevy people. (GM in a pinch). The blazer was so cool and trucky and masculine. But I barely remember riding in it except for the occasional Saturday when my dad would attach his boat to it and haul us to the shore (where it would just break down in about twenty minutes anyway). I still remember the brand.

But yeah. The Buick was the car I spent the most time in. And that’s where I recall most of my first brand experiences.

I remember hours of watching the world go by from the cushiony red velvet seats of that old Buick. First as a child in small-town South Texas where most of the brands I saw were John Deere tractors rolling across fields of cotton, or the big red Texas stop signs of Dairy Queen.

At nine years old, my family moved to Dallas and that back seat became witness to a whole other galaxy of brands. I remember hours of commuting into and out of downtown with my parents. Them to work, me and my brother and sister to school. Time well spent in that Buick, exposed to countless billboards for Gilby’s gin and Marlboro cigarettes.

Those moustached Marlboro men reminded me of Tom Selleck. That was a good thing.

And this was Dallas. So of course there were boards for Neiman Marcus, Lord & Taylor, and Cadillacs. And 24-hour bail bonds.

Advertising was everywhere. Advertising for whatever might stoke the material fires of Generation Jones. Big-haired Dallas women were the original “real housewives.” In the fourth grade I remember a classmate’s mother picking her up from the playground in a full-length mink coat. In a Cadillac. My guess is she saw the billboards, too.

My more down-to-earth mom worked at a radio station and I had to spend about an hour at her office before school every day. The selection of magazines at a radio station totally trumped the dentist’s office. D Magazine, Texas Monthly, and The Dallas Morning News were the windows to the outside of my 10 year-old world. I’m half sure it was more about the slick advertising than the articles about Lakewood socialites or where the governor dined when he visited Dallas.

More likely, I was transfixed by the beauty, sophistication, and perfection of Benson & Hedges menthol smokers and that hip crowd over at Benetton.

My brother and sister sat around bickering, but I was transfixed by the smorgasboard of what years later would come to be known as “content.” Yes. Advertising is content. It always has been. It’s just that now brands are finally getting it.

As much as brands in the past have been focused on selling product, what they didn’t realize was the importance of telling the story. Sure, brands have always been storytellers and the best have embraced it since the dawn of time. But now, it’s more critical than ever that the focus is off the “bling” and onto the content, onto the brand stories.

And I’m betting there are plenty of wide-eyed girls ready to be mesmerized by them. Although they should really find a little more time to go outside and show those neighborhood boys how to throw a football.

Join the Conversation…

What were your first brand experiences?

What were your favorite brands as a child?

How did your early exposure to brands affect you?

How do you think today’s children will be affected by brands?

October has been a busy month and November already seems to be putting it to shame. After a whirlwind of marketing and social media events over the last 30 days (where I got to meet Gary Vaynerchuk and Robert Scoble, just to name-drop a few), it’s time for the next conference: ad:tech NY. Read more…

One of the things that’s so inspiring about the Information Age is that the possibilities for an individual are limitless. A college drop-out created one of the world’s most powerful companies. A college kid came up with a billion dollar operation out of his dorm room, (and at 26 years old he’s running it). A child from a broken home who didn’t know his father grew up to be president of the United States.

Is there anything that can’t be done? When ideas are what create success, can we afford to judge anyone based on their pedigree, education, or age?

As was predicted, in the new millennium ideas became currency.

In an environment that has evolved to value ideas, every day is a new opportunity to change the world, to be a catalyst for growth, to build something amazing. The ease and speed at which we’re now able to connect is what makes most of these dreams possible.

What’s small is big, and what’s big is flat. Ideas spread like a blaze in the wind, and the strength of our connections allows us to leverage those ideas into something greater, faster.

That was until the chilling effect of “influence.”

It’s ironic that Fast Company, a brand known for highlighting the speed of great ideas, would create and promote an idea like the Influence Project. Because it’s ushering in a new craze over superficial influence that’s unhealthy to the ecosystem that supports the growth of ideas, and it threatens the intricate and delicate networks that allow ideas to move so quickly.

The new fascination with who’s influential, who’s not, who’s got clout, and who doesn’t, and the ability to filter people out of your life based on a number is unhealthy for a community. The long-term result of the Influence Project, as well as Hootsuite’s Klout scoring and filtering, is going to be a social media ecosystem that gets even more strongly segregated into cliques.

Am I the only one who hates cliques? Or having your value as a thinker, idea person, and sharer crunched into a cold, inhuman number?

With Hootsuite’s Klout tool, it’s too easy to filter out followers, and limit conversations to only people who are in the highest quartile of “influencers.” Does this honestly benefit anyone? Or does it encourage us to all become focused on influence?

With a rise in artificial influence-seeking behaviors like spamming contests and ignoring followers who have low Klout scores, the sharing and mixing of many disparate people and ideas (something we just recently gained) and the quest for social media trust will both be lost, and the new currency will no longer be ideas, but numbers and the perception of influence.

Sure, filtering by Klout can be useful to brand community managers who want to identify influencers within the community for strategic seeding. But when everyone in the entire community is using the technology to shut out “the noise” of everyone below the Klout number they “respect,” we’ll have a community that’s no longer driven by sharing and connecting, but by popularity.

The loss will be great.

In this TED video by Matt Ridley, “When Ideas Have Sex,” he talks about how important it is that ideas are shared and combined. I especially loved his concept of the genetic inheritance of an idea. By allowing them to co-mingle, the best parts of ideas come together to form a new, better idea.

Just like in a biological ecosystem, if an environmental factor is manipulated, the resulting evolution changes course. The Influence Project and Klout scores aren’t the end of the world, and they’re not going to end the sharing of ideas. But they do add a factor that reduces the energy many will spend on ideas, reduces the potential for some people’s ideas to be heard, and increases the energy that many will expended on manipulating personal influence, faux influence.

A lot of ideas that could have and would have connected, won’t. A lot of people who could have benefited each other (in ways that have nothing to do with influence) will never come together because at least one of them couldn’t be bothered.

It’s actually disheartening. I’ve seen remarks about annoyance with “followers seeking validation” by trying to connect or be heard. (Connect? Be heard? How dare they?!) Or the other blogger who tweeted how the people trying hardest to connect “probably deserve it the least.” I’m guessing those are the types Klout was designed for. It shouldn’t be a surprise they both have high follower counts. But what they’re gaining in “influence” they’re losing in trust, relationships, and access to ideas outside the echo chamber.

Join the Conversation…

Has Klout scoring affected who you interact with and how you interact with them?

Is there an innovative way to counteract an unhealthy focus on scored influence?

Does crowdsourcing represent the physical embodiment of the democratic sharing and mixing of ideas?

Will there come a time when Klout scores are automatically attached to our name on interactions across the internet?

Sometimes when I click into my RSS reader, I feel like I’ve walked onto the bridge of the starship Enterprise. Racing through space with the warp drive cooking at ten. Little bits of light rushing past from all sides, each star system passing so quickly there’s no way to tell if there’s intelligent life worth stopping for. Or if it’s a barren wasteland I’d want to circumvent like a sector full of Borg.

This is life inside my RSS reader.

A vast unknown. Many wonderful things to discover. Many irrelevant time suckers. And more than a few cling-ons.

So while on a recent exploratory mission to uncover the mysteries that might be revealed under a pile of roughly 4,027 unread news stories, blog posts, and myriad YouTube memes it struck me that what I really needed was some sort of aggregator that can go down onto the planet while I sit up in the transporter room.

Something that can beam down to the surface and rifle and poke around all that content, while I wait for a specimen of intelligent life to magically materialize.

I mean really, they’ve got to have that, right?

Even Mashable’s wonderful “Latest News Updates” in my mailbox every day wasn’t exactly doing the trick. I didn’t necessarily need to know the top 10 Droid apps for drunken World Cup revelers, or how Google Pacman confused somebody’s grandmother in Dubuque.

What I needed was someone who’s committed to staying on top of the things that are driving the world fast forward, but with more of a marketing and advertising perspective. And I needed that someone to become my personal aggregator. I needed that someone to care about the point where technology and culture and brands and social media converge.

I needed this imaginary person to assemble the stuff that’s making an impact. The news that’s signaling change. The stories that are so thought-provoking it makes your head hurt. The stuff that if I overlooked, might cause me to miss a pivotal development, and initiate a planetary descent into irrelevance.

And while I was dreaming. On my fairy tale wish list I wanted this person to combine all these most important stories into a podcast I could listen to while I mill around in the kitchen on Monday mornings, or listen to on my iPhone while reading in bed at night.

I needed it and I needed it now!

Which of course led to my realization that it’s not fair to always expect someone else to do it. It’s not right to benefit from freebies like open-source platforms and creative commons photography and iPhone apps and spare pennies at the gas station if I’m not putting something valuable back into the jar.

That’s when I decided to keep digging through my RSS feeds and email newsletters and keep reading my admittedly old school print editions of Wired, Inc., Ad Age, and Fast Company, and I’ll keep pulling out the stories that are making a difference. And this time, I’ll try to make a difference, too.

The BrandForward Top 10 Podcast is the result. It’s the top ten stories every week from across the net, plus some added bonuses such as recommended TED talks, TV spots, video memes, hot apps, and must-read books and blog posts. An aggregation of my galaxy-class RSS feed with all the interplanetary static tuned out.

So as I continue to explore the outer reaches in a quest to write about the future of marketing, advertising, brands, technology, and social media, I’ll now start sharing the official captain’s log of my on-going adventure into the darkest recesses of that RSS black hole.

Find the latest podcast episode by clicking on the icon below or search “brandforward” on iTunes and subscribe!

You may not like today’s post.

I’m not laying into ghost tweeters. I’m not telling Domino’s where it’s at. I’m not even going to say a single word about big media. Really.

Today I’m turning over a new leaf. I’m going to whip up an informative post. (gasp!) Something you can actually use. Today I’m going to talk about social media. And what the heck you’re supposed to do with it.

So let’s get to the thing. A lot of people out there are trying to figure out what to make of social media. How to use it. How to master it. How to turn it into something that doesn’t scare small children. Companies are trepidatiously calling their agencies. Talking to their buddies on the golf course. Acting all cloak and dagger in the break room as if they’re talking about tampons or hemorrhoids. Asking the same question. All in hushed tones.

“What exactly is this whole social media thing anyway?”

“What is Twitter?”

“How do you get your kids to friend you on Facebook?”

Well you could ask a social media expert. Or you could just pull out that Swiss Army knife you’ve got stuffed in your shirt/pocket/purse/glove box.

Because social media is essentially a Swiss Army knife. And a Roman legion of social media experts can’t tell you more about social media than a simple Swiss Army knife can.

Social media is a tool.

A tool to get something done. Just like you’d pull out the multi-appendaged knife’s shiny corkscrew to pop open a bottle of wine three minutes after the boss leaves on a Friday. Or flip out the nail file to dig leaky printer ink from your fingernails before meeting with the CEO. Or open up that handy 2″ mini-blade to fend off a savage bear attack.

This is social media. Nothing fancy about it. You can sprinkle fairy dust all over Facebook and MySpace. You can pretend Second Life is going to go mainstream. You can daydream about the 19,530 Twitter followers Gary McCaffrey promises to get you in 30 days. Right. And all the wealth and riches that supposedly goes along with that.

But at the end of the day, social media isn’t magic. It’s just a tool, a multi-functional, albeit bright red and shiny tool. Waiting for a purpose. And without clear objectives and ultra-sharp strategy, using social media is like trying to cut a rope with those cute little Swiss Army tweezers. Not the right tool. Might make a dent but ultimately it’s not going to work. And certainly isn’t going to be efficient.

Yeah, I could have walked away right now and left this a neat, tidy little sub-1500 word post that might not eat up a whole lunch break. But why have a Swiss Army knife if you can’t take it out and play with it. It has so many nifty little pieces.

So here’s my collection of social media Swiss Army tools. Each for a specific use, each with its own capability. Just like the Swiss Army knife, social media packs a whallop. But it’s only effective when each tool is understood and used for its proper purpose and executed within the confines of a comprehensive marketing strategy.

1. Social Media as an Account Planning Research Tool
When used as an account planning tool, social media helps a company connect to the pulse of the consumer market and gain insight into how to speak with consumers and how to influence them more relevantly. Social media account planning complements traditional primary research methods and gets closer to raw opinions and of-the-moment brand conversation.

2. Social Media as an SEO Research Tool
Social media can also complement SEO research. Granted, there are a lot of great SEO tools out there that can tell you which search terms are trending for your specific market, as well as what’s being overused or underused, and a whole slew of other fun toys. But adding social media research to the mix allows you to do some of the digging yourself so you can see first-hand the keywords in the context of real-time conversation, get a feel for trends by reading blogs, and experimenting with the results of long tail search terms. It’s kind of like the difference between getting a creative brief in your IN BOX vs. hearing all the nuances from listening to the client speak about the project. I always prefer the latter. A lot of SEO practitioners will probably say that analyzing link juice, page rank, search terms, and evaluating reach and exposure is naturally social media. I’m just saying it can be used in a truly social way, where a warm body is doing the research as opposed to a search engine algorithm.

3. Social Media as a Public Relations Tool
Social media is a way for traditional public relations counselors to execute their strategies in a more proactive way, building even stronger relationships with bloggers, news brands, and online journalists. It also opens the window on getting brand exposure in more venues than they’ve ever had access to. Purposing social media for PR uses strategies similar to traditional PR, but using this new set of tools allows for more proactive innovation in the execution. A social media twist can be spun on press releases, corporate communiqué, reputation management, or awareness programs. And on and on.

4. Social Media as a Point-of-Sale Tool
As a virtual point-of-purchase tool, social media can serve as the catalyst for a buying decision. This can be anything from having a sales agent manning the Twitter feed to being proactive about forum interaction on your website. Or creating a virtual sales agent on your website ready to interact in real-time. Or a strategically-placed banner ad. The key is having a proactive presence at the virtual points where customers are likely to be making final purchasing decisions.

5. Social Media as a Customer Service Tool
Social media can be used to field customer complaints and questions, or to direct customers to the appropriate point of contact for specific needs and requests. Or to educate. Or just to have a (gasp!) real conversation. Using social media as a customer service and customer relationship management tool (thanks @AlexnNYC!) lets brands get closer to the customer when the customer needs them most, which in turn influences brand trust and provides brand assurance.

6. Social Media as Direct Sales Tool
Yeah, it’s pretty obvious. There are those wonderfully high-minded folks who’ve discovered that social media can be used as the least appreciated form of marketing: door-to-door sales. Load up an auto DM with a “free e-book” link or the URL to your product website and you’re treading a really thin line. When you don’t have the time, budget, or marketing know-how to launch something subtle, strategic, and targeted, or you’re pretty sure the only way to make a sale is to overwhelm the consumer with big promises and TMI, there’s always social media as a direct sales tool. You’ve seen it around. You know who’s doing it. You’re probably ignoring it.

7. Social Media as a Direct Marketing Tool
This is a tool that allows marketers to quickly identify and qualify leads and blanket large numbers of potential customers with highly-targeted or loosely targeted direct messaging. Consider it a kinder, gentler form of spamming. Which means when it’s used in social media it probably has a tiny bit more relevance than those Viagra and Mexican pharmacy emails that just won’t go away. But not much.

8. Social Media as an Advertising Tool
In place of television, radio, outdoor, and print are YouTube, podcasting, banner ads, an
d blogs. Social media as an advertising tool is so massive I can’t even begin to lay out the land without upgrading my hosting package. (okay I’m still on blogspot, just go with me here). The key is that social media as an advertising tool seeks to achieve similar objectives as traditional media, but the tactics and path to sale are different. Requiring a whole new set of strategies. And a very different looking media department.

9. Social Media as a Brand Positioning Engagement Tool
I love brand positioning. There’s just something about getting to the core of a product, service, and company that makes my day. Truly brilliant advertising/marketing is founded on solid brand positioning. Getting to the core of what matters to the client and what’s true about the company and product. Social media is a phenomenal tool in this respect. It’s two-pronged. First, it allows a brand team to delve into the blogosphere, twittersphere, socialsphere, and googlesphere to uncover hidden consumer realities and motivations that ultimately drive brand positioning. On the other side, it gives a brand the chance to be authentic in its connections. When consumers interact with a brand in social media they walk away with a more saturated, lasting brand aftertaste. Social media as a brand positioning tool makes a connection that can ultimately be even more powerful than the connection made through traditional media. And man. Is that hard for me to say. Because one of my greatest passions is harnessing the power of a core value to make a tangible brand connection using something as flimsy as TV/radio/print. But social media ramps that ability right up to 11.

10. Social Media as a Community Tool
I started to lump this with Brand Positioning. But I needed a 10th. And because growing a social media community hinges on crafting a brand experience from the “promise” perspective. And that’s branding, baby. But because of this new and interesting animal we call “co-ownership” it creates a need to manage the brand community. Let’s just say community picks up where brand positioning strategy ends. Oh and you can expect your customers to now have the title of Brand Manager. You no longer own the brand nor do you control it with an iron fist. This gives you the chance to build customer loyalty in a fresh, new way. Or fail in a fresh, new way. So you better do a good job. With customers. Not just at the awards show and on the blogging circuit. Because people will talk. And that’s why today, protecting your social media community is just as essential as protecting your trademark. Only not as easy.

The Difference Between Marketing and Social Media
Okay, just because you can head out into the hinterlands with nothing but a Clif Bar and a Swiss Army knife and still come out alive, a brand cannot survive with a social media Swiss Army knife alone.

Pack the whole bag.

Integrate. Realize that “marketing” is that 5000 cubic inch Kelty backcountry pack you’ve had strapped on for many an adventure. It holds a lot of gear. You need that gear. A social media Swiss Army knife is just a part of it.

Are there more social media Swiss Army tools? You betcha. We haven’t even gotten into the Strategic Alliance tool, Referral Marketing tool, and I’m sure there’s someone out there working on a Timeshare Marketing tool. Lord help us. But the point is social media is a tool that has a lot of different purposes. And none of them should be used just because they look pretty. Yeah, a Swiss Army knife is a beauty to behold. It’s even got a place in MOMA. But unless you’re MacGyver you really shouldn’t expect it to launch rocket ships.

Okay, so as much as I’d like to go on and on and map out which social media networks work best with which tools, and go into the mix and match uses of blogging, video blogging, podcasting, webinars, Yelp, and Yahoo Answers, this isn’t a white paper and that little man with the stick is jumping up and down. Apparently I’ve exceeded the time limit. They want me backstage. Now.

Your turn. What are the social media Swiss Army tools you’re using? How are you using them? And why. Let’s pack this bag.

*****
The term “Swiss Army” is a registered trademark owned by Wenger S.A. and Victorinox A.G.