Yesterday I ran into old colleague, now an art director at another agency.  Here’s how he greeted me.  “Hey, I heard you’re no longer creative.  You’ve gone 100 percent digital and social.”

Now, I am under the impression that if you lose 30 pounds you may no longer be fat. Or that if you convert to Judaism you may no longer be Catholic. Or that if you have a sex change you may no longer be the same gender you used to be.

But I had no idea that if you went all digital and social that it meant giving up your creativity.  Heck, for a moment I had actually believed that digital and social was the new creative.

Sure it’s possible, maybe even likely, that my encounterist employed the word as a noun rather than an adjective.  But it was, nevertheless, a reminder that in our business we continue to apply restrictive labels far too liberally. Labels that affect how we think of each other.

Want a creative idea?  You go to the “creatives.”  Need a digital creative idea?  Seek out the “digital creatives.”  If it’s a social media idea you’re after, well then, find yourself a social media person.

We do the same with companies. If you’re an ad agency, you can’t be a digital agency.  If you’re a digital agency, you can’t be very good at branding. If you’re a digital production company you can’t do digital strategy.

Certainly there are times when specialization, either as a company or an individual, positions us more strongly or enables us to differentiate ourselves in competitive pitches.

But in general labels holds us back. Worse yet, they become self-fulfilling. It’s hard to grow if you’re nothing but a boutique. Tough to get invited into the creative brainstorming if you’re merely the strategist. Challenging to win a digital client if you’re a traditional agency.

If I were to be labeled anything my preference would be someone who defies labels.  Is that possible?

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Klout's a cool tool, but is it the best determinate of a candidate?

Earlier this week my friend  Michelle Tripp, blogger/CD/social media consultant asked how Mullen assesses talent when we hire people to develop strategy, content and online presence for our social media clients.

Specifically, Michelle wondered if we’d starting using tools like Klout to evaluate someone’s online presence, influence, and community engagement, and if not, did we have a formal approach to determining someone’s social media skills?  Apparently, Michelle has clients who are starting to check candidates’ Klout scores before hiring them.

Anyway, the answer is we don’t.

While Klout is a pretty cool tool, and will no doubt evolve,  it appears to emphasize the impact of one’s “push” content on Twitter and Facebook – reach, influence, re-tweeting. But it can’t identify the rest of the qualities – conversation strategy, flexibility, timeliness, and authenticity – that a smart agency or brand should look for in a social strategist.

Obviously there is no magic app or metric to determine whether someone will be good at all the skills you need to them possess: add strategic thinking, creativity, familiarity with tools, writing, blogger relations, and a knack for collaboration to those mentioned above.

Being on Twitter, having a large following, writing a blog, and generating content for one’s self may be a good sign that someone gets how social media, content and distribution work. However, I have met plenty of candidates who were brilliant at promoting themselves and creating a personal brand but would have no clue how to generate ideas for a client.  I’ve also encountered people who were great at knowing how all the platforms worked, but had little or no talent for determining the best way to use them strategically or creatively when challenged with a specific assignment.

Today, everyone in our business should be social. They should have an online presence, a community, and a basic familiarity with the popular platforms. They should know the protocols and acceptable practices for each, embrace virtues such as transparency, and understand how a brand has to behave when it’s earning attention versus buying it. But even that’s not enough.

What we inevitably look for in our social influence group are smart, talented people who have all of those qualities but are then experts at something –strategy, analytics, SEO, blogging, story telling, video content. More importantly we try to make sure they possess a clear sense of how their particular skill contributes to a larger platform or campaign.

Yes we’ve hired social media strategists or practitioners who were early adopters of Twitter and had amassed thousands of followers — people who had Klout, if you will.  But we’ve also recruited people who were masters of technology, tools and SEO techniques. We’ve brought in journalists for their writing and story development skill. We’ve even grabbed participants out of the Ford Fiesta Movement, knowing they could create content across all media. In every case we opted for talent first, then focused on whether they could be essential members of a larger social team.

I guess in the end we don’t care what someone’s Klout score is.  We’re more interested in whether they can have an impact on everyone else they work with and the clients who depend on them.

What about you?  Have any tactics for determining social media prowess and skill?

image by thekenyeung

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I give Kevin Roddy a lot of credit for coming out and declaring that creative directors might actually be clueless when it comes to creating ideas for the post digital age.

In a guest column in Ad Age, Roddy suggests that traditional CD’s may still know a great idea when they see it, but he questions whether they can inspire or conceive complex digital ideas if their real comfort zone is in the media of TV, print and radio.

BBH New York’s CCO goes on to suggest that advertising creative directors whose experience comes from old media story telling should “admit that they don’t know enough about technology and start asking for help.

“Take down the walls and ask other people for suggestions about how to make the work better,” he smartly suggests.

I’m in total agreement with everything Kevin says. But I might go one step further.  Knowing how most traditional CDs, writers and art directors work, I can confirm that there’s still a tendency among many to generate ad “ad idea” first and then go seek out their digital counterparts who might “make the work better,” to use Kevin’s words.  In fact plenty of creative technologists will tell you that the question they usually get is, “Can you build this?”  When the question they want to be asked is “What should we build?”

Kevin’s right that those of us who grew up on the traditional side of the business need help with the new complexities of technology.  But we should make sure we get that help before we have an idea.

In fact we should be aggressively and proactively learning as much as we can about what’s possible with mobile, geo, APIs, social media and the very latest technology before we or anyone on our team closes the door to go and concept.  Better yet, the people we concept with should be the techies themselves – creative technologists, UX professionals, social media enthusiasts.

I once had a CD tell me that he didn’t really need to know technology because, “No matter what I think up there’ll be someone who’ll know how to build it.”  True, but my question back to him was, “But if you knew what was actually possible, wouldn’t you think up even more interesting ideas?”

Thanks again to Kevin for admitting and reinforcing what we all need to do.  Let’s just make sure we get the help he recommends first. Then we can brief teams, look at ideas, and know we’ve picked the best one.

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Marriott gave me a great opening to a speech on social media and a lesson in how anyone can create content, distribute that content and influence a brand conversation. Above the first four slides of a talk I gave at Sears.

If you’ve been here this week you know the story of my dripping hotel room ceiling and my frustration with Marriott’s initial response.  But I’m pleased to report the story has a happy ending for all involved.

For starters, the ordeal gave me a brilliant opening to a speech I was making to Sears HC the next day. Perfect timing for a talk titled “The End of Us and Them,” and the thesis that media is now in the hands of two billion amateurs rather than a select group of privileged professionals.

I opened with a photo of the ceiling, thanked Sears for putting me up there, and then proceeded to reveal the early morning Tweet stream along with a video I’d shot and edited on my iPhone that morning calling out Marriott.  (Truth be told I didn’t actually post the video on Youtube, but faked it in my presentation to make the point.)

Needless to say it got a great reaction and emphasized that in an age of social media, when consumers control both content and distribution, all brands need to learn a different set of rules and behaviors.

Anyway, the rest of the story worked out well on a number of accounts, too. When offered free nights and points by the Marriott (nice of them) I told them, “no thanks,”  and instead requested a public apology on Twitter and a comment on this blog. The point wasn’t to embarrass anyone but simply to get the hotel to admit its mistake, acknowledge my frustration, and turn the entire mishap into a conversation from which people could learn.

It appears to have worked. The comment stream on the last post is a rich one. It questions whether one’s social footprint influences the response that they get from a brand.  It reveals disappointments with service in general. It earns Marriott credit for engaging. And, perhaps most importantly, it shows that a blog post that exercises a little restraint, replacing the venom-filled rant with some productive advice, gets a slightly better reaction that one that simply vents.

Furthermore, the hotel actually suggests that there’s room for improvement in both customer service and employee responsiveness. We may even see a guest bill of rights.

Lance Misner, the manager of the Marriott Hoffman Estates, has become a reader of this blog, a Twitter user, and maybe even a convert to social media’s potential for learning, engaging and marketing.

Here, in fact, is what he’s had to say in response to my last post and his own exposure to the story playing out in the social space.

“Let me say first of all that I do not know anything about Twitter so if I sound ignorant I am. I signed up myself in order to publicly apologize.  I hope that worked.”

“There are some incredible things going on in the business world as it relates to social media.  This has been a real wake up call, I need to embrace these concepts and find opportunities to further market our property. In fact I am looking forward to showing your blog at my staff meeting on Tuesday.”

“I would love to pick your brain as this old dog needs to learn a few new tricks.  I hope your presentation went well at Sears and if you are home, or wherever you are tonight, I hope you are able to get some rest.”

I supposed I should add that Lance also threw in a bunch of points and an upgrade to the big suite next time I’m in town.

Lessons?

We should make our issues public.

It’s smarter to offer suggestions than criticism.

We should welcome any brand or individual who tries to learn and engage.

If we want brands to deliver better service, it’s partly our responsibility to guide them there and hold them to it.

This just in:  Just as I was about to post this, I got an email and phone call from Marriott headquarters letting me know they plan to use this as a learning and training experience.  Not sure if it would have generated that kind of response if it weren’t posted, blogged and tweeted about, but that turns out to be just one more reason that consumers should wield their new power and brands should heed it.

Finally I made it clear to Marriott that I hoped no one employee would be called out, but that it the entire incident be turned into something positive.

Your thoughts?

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The ceiling above my hotel bed leaked all night long, onto the mattress, the end table and the rug below. Had to sleep on the floor as a result.

OK, so maybe it’s not your fault that my hotel room ceiling leaked all night long. Though the fact that there was already a stain in the same corner of the room suggests you should have known about it.  But what doesn’t really work for me is the response that I got when I called in the middle of the night. It went something like this:

“We’re sorry, the hotel is totally booked there’s nothing we can do.”

Really? Nothing you can do?  How about a real apology?  How about an offer of five free nights at any Marriott in the system? How about setting up a bed in a conference room? They’re not full in the middle of the night. Or perhaps it doesn’t really matter to you.  After all, you’re full.  Business is good. What do you care if you lose one customer or have an occasionally unhappy guest?

Well I think you should care. Because not caring is the beginning of the end.  And whether you believe it or not, no business these days is indispensable.

My suggestion is this.  Develop a customer bill of rights if you don’t have one already.  Post it at the front desk. Place it in the rooms. Train your employees in what says and what it means.

Start with:

1. We guarantee your satisfaction.

2. We guarantee your room will be clean and that everything works: the clock, TV, lamps, bathroom.

3. If for any reason your stay with us was unsatisfactory we will make it up with comparable accommodations on us.

4. We will take any complaint and suggestion seriously and respond as quickly as humanly possible.

5. We encourage you to Tweet, blog, and post images and video of anything you find below standards or unresolved.

The last point is to me the most important. It acknowledges that Marriott recognizes it lives in an age of social media and expects to be held to even higher standards as a result.

What do you think?  Do brands have to be even more responsive when all of its customers can create, share and disseminate opinions and reactions?

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Today I am once again flattered to be speaking at Boulder Digital Works with the likes of Gareth Kay, Matt Howell and all the other incredibly smart folks who have welcomed me into the digital fold.

I think of myself as an advertising refugee and a digital immigrant. Not sure if I qualify yet for full citizenship (can’t really code) but I’m working on it. What’s amazing to me is the openness of the digital community. I have been embraced on Twitter, at SxSWi, at SoDa meetings, by IAB (where I’m hoping to make a contribution to the future of online advertising) and here at Boulder Digital Works.

Had the advertising community learned earlier to be as open and collaborative as their digital counterparts it would be in a lot better shape than it is now and all those people still spending their energy defending traditional messages could instead be focused on inventing and creating new experiences and ways to tell stories. “Hello Ladies.”

Anyway, back to Boulder. The session this week is called Making Digital Work. It’s a two-day workshop compromised of  small lectures, group discussions, and projects all designed to give attendees a better understanding of their role in the digital age. Of course the real purpose of any learning isn’t what happens in the classroom, but rather what you do with the experience after the fact.

With that in mind, I offer you my list of lists – books, blogs, creative – something to take with you as you depart Boulder and continue your digital evolution.

Forgive me if it’s content, people and ideas with which you’re already familiar.  Last time I was at Boulder there were people who’d never been on Ted.com and who had never even heard of Slideshare.  Of course, this list of lists will be better still if you share yours, whether it’s decks, docs, or apps.

Five books you should read

Pick and choose from the list below. Some are already a few years old, but they lay out the background and cover a lot of the disruption we’ve been living through. Change by Design and Cognitive Surplus might be my favorites.

Groundswell, Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff

The Shallows, Nicholas Carr

You are not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier

Change by Design, Tim Brown

Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky

Five more books if you’re really determined

If you really want to download some ideas, keep going.  Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead is fast and fun with a few useful tips. Free is controversial but worth the read.  Anything by Jonah Lehrer will make you think. The Checklist Manifesto has nothing to do with digital, but it’s filled with rich ideas you can extend into your own business and behavior.

Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, David Meerman Scott, Brian Halligan

Crowdsourcing, Jeff Howe

Free, Chris Anderson

How we Decide, Jonah Lehrer

The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande

Five big blogs you should have on your RSS

If your RSS is anything like mine it constantly grows until its out of hand and there’s more there than you can ever consume. My colleague Stuart Foster often reminds me to pare things down and focus on the content that matters. I admit to an inconsistent and erratic consumption of content, which is why I sometimes just visit the New York Times. They filter stuff for me.

PSFK

Mashable

Read Write Web

Digital Buzz Blog

NY Times Technology

Five small blogs you may want to include

There are many more I could have added here, but it strikes me that these may be more relevant to the audience attending the BDW digital workshop. Faris and BBHLabs will keep you up on digital and marketing trends and innovation. David Armano is a good source for social media. Joshua Porter offers insights on UX and design.  And Rob Schwartz is great filter for cool creative, some of it digital, some not.

Talent Imitates, Genius Steals, Faris Yakob, Chief Innovation Officer, MDC

BBH Labs, Ben Malbon and Mel Exon, co-founders BBHLabs

Logic + Emotion, David Armano, SVP/Digital, Edelman

Bokardo, Joshua Porter, experience designer

Metal Potential, Rob Schwartz, TBWA/Chiat Day CCO

Five platforms worth knowing about

There are now 70,000-plus Twitter apps and new platforms being introduced daily. Some will burn out before they ever catch fire and the next big thing is hard to predict, but these all seem to have potential, or at least make you think about what’s possible.

Kickstarter:  crowdfunding

Philo: Foursquare for TV

Placecast: opt in to receive mobile marketing

Plancast: announce and share your plans

Springpad: save the plethora stuff you find online via photo, geo, notes, url

Five creative ideas you should dissect

I suggest everyone master the skill of dissecting creative ideas. What makes them great? Technology? Story? Juxtapositions? Consumer participation? Viral technique? You don’t want to copy, but tear them apart and use some of the components.

The Colony: transmedia story telling

Art of the Trench: simple crowdsourced content creation

Chrome: interactive video

Olympus Augmented Reality: useful camera demo

Wheat Thins: social, TV, viral

Five small ideas that might inspire

What individuals and small teams are doing is way more interesting than what most big brands are doing. These are a few of my favorites at the moment. And yes, one of them is mine.

@BPglobalPR: reminder that consumers want to create, control, take over

The Uniform Project: new business model blending cause and fashion

The 3six5 blog: simple crowdsourcing project to generate year’s worth of content

Brandbowl: turn an analog event to a digital event

Bud Caddell on Kickstarter: new way to fund creative projects

Five Ted videos that will inspire you

Find your own, but these are five that I’ve watched more than once and find both motivating and thought-provoking.

Malcolm Gladwell on Spaghetti Sauce

Sir Ken Robinson on Finding Your Passion

Tim Brown on Creativity and Play

Benjamin Zander on Music and Passion

Steve Jobs on How to Live Before You Die

Five people to follow on Twitter

Everyone starts out following the people on the Twitter lists who have the most followers. But that’s an easy system to game.  These are people who get it, who live it, who are digital natives. Most are young, interesting, opinionated and share some pretty good stuff. Hoping you don’t already know all of them.

@StuartFoster: social strategist, digital cool hunter

@thaz7: connected planner often the first to know

@lenkendall: smart, forward thinking digital guy

@mikearauz: he’s from the Internet

@conradlisco: mobile and emerging platforms

Five things you should do yourself

Be on Twitter

Have a Posterous or Tumblr

Make movies on an iPhone

Crowdsource something

Connect with five influential people you’ve never met in person

Hope these are useful.  What about you?  Got a list you want to share?

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For years the doomsayers have predicted – and in some cases even rooted for – the demise of the New York Times.  Print advertising revenues plummeted.  Ownership of and overpayment for papers like the Boston Globe drained resources. Endless digital real estate diminished the value of every online property’s available ad space.

But the Times isn’t doing all that badly at the moment. For the first time in a long time total ad revenues stayed flat rather than falling. In fact in its most recent quarter, digital ad revenue jumped 21 percent. Operating profit doubled and an improved cash situation gives the paper more time to plot a strategy for real growth. Given that the recent good news comes in a miserable economy, I’m betting the venerable paper pulls it off.

If you look at the Times from another perspective – that of partnerships, social media behavior, and content – the company’s actually a shining example of how to hold onto core values and evolve at the same time.

Here are four things it’s done that serve as examples for any traditional company, including advertising agencies.

Get over the not invented here syndrome

For more than a couple of years now the Times has offered up content from a number of new sources that in earlier days would never have justified an appearance under the masthead. But there they are: ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm and other blogs’ content front and center on the Technology page. Stop there once a day and you practically have a centralized source of content. Granted it’s filtered by the Times, but there’s only so much filtering you want to do on your own anyway.

Lesson:  There are plenty of great sources of content outside your walls and beyond that generated by your staff. Why not take advantage of it, whether it’s for your company blog, the blogs you maintain for clients, a YouTube channel, or any of the other places you need content?

Embrace change and new technology as fast as you can

OK, perhaps the Times hasn’t always been lightning speedy at this, but in the last couple of years they’ve done a pretty decent job. Case in point is their iPad app. Not only were they among the very first publications to have one, it was well thought out with a clean, simple interface and just the right amount of content for a pad. All the sharing you need is built in. And while its elegant lacquer-black type on the iPad’s white linen background presents the ideal screen experience, their standby iPhone app’s not bad either. I’ve read 5000 word magazine articles on the thing.

Lesson: Create utility. Make your brand available everywhere.  Consider the context in which the user is engaging.

Be social in every way possible

I like how the Times does this, too. Times People is what every brand with customers or subscribers should do: introduce them to each other. It’s a benefit to users. It helps to spread content around. And it gives readers an added reason to come back and share what they find. The Times also does a pretty good job on Twitter. They’ve created their own lists of writers by category, and even gathered recommended lists of other writers and bloggers by categories that include technology, the arts, opinion and more. They don’t always engage as much as they should, but it’s still a valuable feed to keep you informed. Need someone interesting to follow? Go grab a new list.

Lesson: Take advantage of all the social tools and tactics. Market your employees and their content. Gather your company’s social presence and make it easily accessible to customers and prospects.

Great content wins out in the end

Want to know the reason that properties like the Times along with other content creators of note (including great creative advertising agencies) will always prevail? Quality content. Not only does the Times continue to deliver stuff you want to read, they’ve done a damn good job covering the very topic we’re talking about right here: digital technology and social media. Consider two great examples from the last week alone. One on whether Twitter encourages a distortion of who we really are. A second on whether the digital age diminishes originality and encourages plagiarism. Great stuff that will keep you thinking.

Lesson:  Don’t abandon the core values that got you where you are.  Just bring them to life in new places and apply them to relevant subjects.

What do you think? Is the Times doing it right? Can you replicate any of their practices? Will the “paper” survive?

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The long term benefit of friends and followers exceeds the short term impact of a campaign

As more and more brands race into social media it appears they’re bringing with them the exact same short-term mindset that they apply to advertising campaigns. I hear it all the time.

“If we do this (fill in the blank: Twitter, Facebook, blog, whatever) how many (fill in the blank: clicks, inquiries, sales, customers) will we get and how soon?

“Because we need it right away. Like tomorrow. Or next week. Otherwise we can’t sell it in.”

Despite all that’s been written, discussed and in many cases proven (thank you Blendtec, Zappos and Gary Vaynerchuk)  regarding the long-term value of listening, engaging, building and mobilizing community, and engendering loyalty, lots of marketers still insist on applying the traditional advertising model to social media, demanding an instant correlation between spending and results.

For years, digital agencies have pointed out the shortcomings of advertising campaigns — they have to be repeated over and over to maintain visibility and impact — arguing instead for platforms that integrate into people’s lives.

Well people, social media is, in many ways, like a digital platform.

When it’s done right, if mirrors the tactics pioneered by none other than the Grateful Dead.

And it generates the same kind of lasting results. It produces an ongoing journey, allows the community to influence the experience, introduces like minded people to each other (a reason in and of itself to be part of a community) and rewards them in such a way that they want to invite their friends to come and join.

Consider all the press and pundits who’ve questioned the effectiveness of the recent “Hello Ladies,” campaign. (I wanted to write a post without saying the name of the brand behind it just to see if I could.)  A gazillion views and all anyone can ask is, “Yeah, but did it sell more product?”  In fact it did. But not because of the videos alone. Promotions and discounts buffeted the campaign, topping off the buzz with real incentives.

Still, half the world had nothing but praise, while the other half felt compelled to point out that video views (social media) don’t translate into revenue. Even Brian Solis, a social media pioneer, correctly predicts  that the videos will diminish in impact over time, but surprisingly suggests they should have included customized offers and discounts as part of their monologs.

You think so? I’m not sure incentives and offers in the videos would have aided views. Plus it misses the point. That being we should stop being so obsessed with the immediate impact of social media efforts. The real benefit of “Hello Ladies” is that like any good engagement advertising it generated over 95,000 new followers for the brand on Twitter and, combined with other marketing efforts, bumped its Facebook likes up to nearly 800,000. Those new community members are the real value. Long term value. Thousands of people who’ve opted in to be part of the conversation.

Engaging Brian Solis from EdelmanDigital on Vimeo.

Presuming that the “Hello Ladies” folks now engage with those fans and followers, they have something even better than a positive blip in weekly sales. They’ve got their equivalent of Dead Heads — people to whom they can market and introduce new products; a community from which they can crowdsource ideas and content; people they can mobilize to bring even more fans into the fold.

We all know that if you want to sell a lot of something you’ve got three things you can do.

One, do what Apple does and come up with an awesome product that everyone wants.

Two, run a promotion with incentives to try or buy the product.

Three, get good at contextual marketing so that you can push messages (don’t spam) to customers who’ve opted into receiving them on their terms.

And, if you really want, you can continue to use social media for short term, campaign oriented results. Give something away. Beef up your engagement ad budget. Incent people to un-friend or re-friend their friends.

But if your objective is to take advantage of social media, stop evaluating everything you (or others) do based on the immediacy of results. Long-term relationships are always better.

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This is bad news. We have just entered the age of crowdsourcing, consumer generated content, and plethora social media tools and technology that enable consumers and spectators to become creators and broadcasters and it turns out this transformational moment coincides with a measurable decline in creativity.

You know what that means? I do. If there aren’t already enough bad TV spots on air, heinous videos on YouTube and insufferable online ads popping up to take over our screens we can now expect the next generation to produce even more. Egads, the last thing we need is less creativity just when we’ve all become content creators.

But according to Newsweek – and some real research – this is exactly what’s happening.  IQ scores are up. Creativity is down.

The findings are based on tests that have been in use for over 50 years.  Pioneered by E. Paul Torrance in 1958, the evaluation system, while not perfect, has accurately predicted kids’ creative accomplishments as adults with enough reliability to remain the de facto standard to this day.

Historically those who’ve done well as children have grown up to become entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, software developers, and, of course, creative directors.  Between 1958 and 1990 creativity scores went up; but for the last 18 years they’ve inched downward year after year.

No one knows why this is happening, exactly, but if you have kids in public school, especially those that emphasize standardized testing, you know that we’re not doing much to encourage creativity and problem solving compared to the efforts put into rote memorization.

Interestingly the solution isn’t about teaching more music or art or creative writing necessarily.  It’s about problem solving. Neuroscience now informs us that the relationship between the left side of the brain (concentrating on facts and what you know) and the right side (scanning distant memories for relevance) is what yields that aha sensation. And there are exercises and educational approaches that can both stimulate and encourage that catalytic moment.

What should educators and parents do?

1.  Emphasize project-based learning.  Develop curricula that call for fact finding, idea generation, solution evaluation and implementation.

2.  Encourage role playing at a young age. Seeing alternative views and perspectives helps creativity.

3.  Don’t answer your kids’ questions; make them explore possible answers on their own.

4.  Mate with an opposite: families that celebrate uniqueness enhance flexibility and adaptability.

5.  Diligently practice creative activities and problem solving.

Got any other ideas? Besides turning the schools over to Tim Brown and Sir Ken? Please share.

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Earlier this week YouTube announced it would pony up $5 million, and eventually more, to back emerging auteurs whose videos attract viewers to the popular site. There are two ways to look at this new initiative.

First it’s an effort to get more quality content onto the site. The funding will motivate professionals and talented amateurs alike to create, upload and promote their content.

But second, and more importantly, it’s an acknowledgment that it’s not YouTube the brand or YouTube the platform that draws traffic, but rather the videos and the people who create them. YouTube will inevitably recruit better content creators and then have something new to market.

Customers are your greatest asset

Youtube, of course, isn’t the only brand that’s figured this out.  Plenty of smart businesses realize their customers and users are their most valuable asset. They not only represent repeat business, they become advocates whose endorsement (whether on blogs, Twitter or conversation at a cocktail party), content and participation drive more business. (If you’re not yet thinking this way, you may want to read Joesph Jaffe’s new book Flip the Funnel; it will both convince you that it matters and present you with some useful tactics.)

But an active community might be worth even more

But the YouTube initiative isn’t just about attending to customers. It’s actually closer  to “ladies night.” You remember ladies night. A bar lets women drink for less in hopes that more single females show up and act as a magnet for the opposite sex. Neither sex comes for the bar or the venue as much as they do for one another.  Essentially the bar is gathering a community worth marketing.

Offline advertisers have always done this. VW built an entire brand image around the people who drove the cars rather than the cars themselves. Ralph Lauren Polo did the same. However in those cases the “communities” were contrived and lived only as two-dimensional images on magazine pages or as scenes played by actors in TV commercials.

A community can be the reason to “join” a brand

It strikes me that one of the next opportunities for brands is to market the real communities they build. Or at least promote them as an added benefit. Aren’t there people who purchased Dell computers in part for the customer-run service is?  Or runners who bought Nike not only because it offers Nike + but because the community itself is a virtue?

Red Sox Nation: a made up moniker for the team's fans used as a marketing tool by the organization

So far it appears that most brands see the value in creating a community only as a service to existing customers but not as a feature worth marketing. But why not make it another reason to embrace their brand or buy their product?

The “gift of community,” as I like to call it, should be part of every brand’s marketing plan. Offer customers and prospects a way for them to connect with each other so they can meet, share, learn.

As Clay Shirky reminds us in Cognitive Surplus “humans intrinsically value a sense of connectedness.”  Smart brands realize that customers can create value for each other.  In the future smarter brands will learn to market that fact.

Some communities worth marketing:

Harley Davidson’s Facebook fans

New York Times People

Garmin Connect’s User Base

Got any others?

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