The joy of teaching

This video showed up unexpectedly in my email today, courtesy of the talented Nicholas Todd who produces content for Boulder Digital Works.

It was perfect timing. Right now I’m in the midst of planning BDW’s August sessions, and to be honest, having a bit of a hard time getting pumped up to do one of these in the middle of summer. But then I watched this and got excited all over again. Reminded me of why it’s both inspiring and rewarding to gather with people you admire and respect and do something of value.

Some of my favorite lines and sentiments shared by my cohorts.

Seek out the people you don’t agree with. Find the rich mix of people on the fringes. They’ll get you there faster.

Gareth Kay
Director of Brand Strategy
Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

This (digital) is new for all of us. There’s no textbook for it. As much as I enjoy teaching, I learn as much from the folks attending.

Scott Prindle
V.P./Executive Creative Technology Director
CP+B

It challenges what I assume is the truth and what I think I know.

Kim Laama
Creative Director, AKQA

Hang out with people in real life (not just on Twitter and each other’s blogs.)

Tim Malbon
Founder, Made by Many

We all know the line. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. And those who can’t teach, teach gym.

But here, we teach, we learn, we share, we connect, we even make stuff. A couple of us even get to do a little bouldering under the watchful eye of John Winsor. And at the end of the day, as you’d expect from modern Mad Men, we enjoy a quiet, civilized, alcohol-free evening. (I have to say that for legal purposes.)

Anyway, hope you’ll join us for our August sessions. You can register here.

When the readers become writers what do the writers become?

Above is a recent talk* I gave at the University of Oregon about the evolution of advertising creativity. We’ve moved from defining brands through their words to defining them by their behaviors.  “A brand isn’t what a brand says; a brand is what a brand does.”

We’ve gone from being storytellers to marketers who need to master the tools and tactics that will get others to tell stories for us and or create them with us.  As my my friend Mike Arauz likes to remind us, “We tell our friends about your brand not because we like your brand, but because we like our friends.”

We need to ask new questions in order to craft a more relevant brief. And while attention-getting, original, unexpected, entertaining and emotional are still the criteria we use to evaluate creative, we need to make work that is shareable, interactive, participatory, useful and ongoing.

Have a look.  And as always, feel free to re-purpose in any way you want.

*This is one of many talks and keynotes I’ve delivered at U of Oregon as the Richard Ward Executive in Residence this week.  Will share more soon.

Building social brand value

Social brand value results in willingness to pay a higher price for a product or service

This week’s Fast Company has a pretty good piece on what does and doesn’t work in social media. The question they ask is: how do you build social brand value?

We should probably start with a different question: what is social brand value? In the past, almost all of a brand’s value derived from the product, its characteristics and ultimately its performance. Today, a brand is as likely to be defined by the value created by a community and its members.

According to Vivaldi and Partners, the brand consultancy whose research inspired the Fast Company piece, social brand value (for a user) is the perceived value that results from the exchange and interactions among and between brand users within a community.

For the brand it’s the percentage of its equity resulting from those interactions.  While the numbers invite debate, Vivaldi insists that at least 15 percent of customer loyalty and 30 percent of brand perception (seems high to me) is driven by social interaction within a community.

Its argument is built around five dimensions; combined they yield brand value.

• Affiliation Value:  Social interaction creates feeling and assurance, as well as emotional ties among users

• Brand Evangelism:  Community members both promote and defend brands
• Conversational Value:  News and information spreads faster among an active community
• Identity Value:  Connecting with the right community (think Harley Davidson owners and Apple users) makes users feel better about themselves
• Informational Value:  Relevant knowledge and support solve user problems and perpetuate loyalty.

It’s important to note that social brand value, or social currency, is not the same as social media.  Generating awareness with a gimmick, collecting fans and followers, being present in social media does not necessarily add to a brand’s value.

It’s what we do once we get them there. (Whether the there is a platform, forum, or in the case of Apple, a retail store.)  How we add value, contribute to the conversation, introduce customers to each other, allow them to participate, give them a role based on their personal preferences, and foster overall connections to our brand and others in the community is what matters.

As Fast Company makes clear, Starbucks loses to Dunkin’ Donuts when it comes to customer advocacy.  Starbucks may have more followers, but Dunkin’ involves its customers in more active ways.  Their online create-the-next-donut contest, for example, generated nearly 300,000 entries, making those involved community members far more likely to say good things about the Dunkin’ brand than Starbucks customers say about the siren.

And no surprise, Wendy’s prevails over Burger King.  The former engages with ongoing games, connections to influencers, and motivations to actually try the product.  The latter relies on high awareness gimmicks, that while fun and visible, fall off the radar screen rather quickly.

In fact, the brands with the greatest social value include Apple and Google, the former, of course, basically absent from the platforms we associate with social media, but effective through the passion and participation of its active, vocal and loyal customer base.

What should we take away from all of this? According to Fast Company:

• Advocates are more important than followers
• Social tools are a means, not an end
• Gimmicks marginalize trust

While Vivaldi reminds us:

• Social brand value has to be part of a brand’s culture and behavior, not just it’s media presence.
• Simply distributing content across the web does not necessarily yield benefits to a community and therefore may have little contribution to social value.
• Consumers may have control of the conversation, but clearly brands can influence it.

What about you?  Are you building social value for your brand?

I have become a Possibilian

David Eagleman reads from Sum, 40 Tales of the Afterlife

Yes, it’s true.  I have become a Possibilian. It seems that in the digital age, if you are an optimist about creating, sharing, innovating, collaborating, it’s the only sensible choice.  Anything and everything is possible.  Of course, it’s also possible that I, we, all of us, are wrong about that. Which is another advantage of being a Possibilian:  you’re open to the possibility that you are, in fact, wrong.

I learned about being a Possibilian at SxSW when I sat in on David Eagleman’s reading of his charming and brilliant book, Sum, Forty Tales from the Aferlives. Eagleman’s collection of 40 totally unrelated stories about what the author imagines might happen in the afterlife explores numerous possibilities, all of them the beneficiary of Eagleman’s rich and wild imagination.

A part-time writer/full-time neuroscientist, Eagleman spends most of his time in a lab conducting research. He took seven years to write 70 stories about what might happen when we expire, then carefully reduced the total to 40 and published his book. To his surprise, it has taken off.  Time magazine has raved about it.  Brian Eno has composed an opera.  And Eagleman has now done readings all over the world.

I can’t say that this book has much to do with either marketing or social media. But it does have an awful lot to do with creativity.

Creativity is looking at the same world or subject or problem that we’ve all looked at for ages and finding a totally new and interesting way to present it, make people think about it, or simply get them  to pay attention.

Until Eagleman, I hadn’t thought much about the afterlife in quite a while. Nor had I thought much about God or religion. But he got me to do so. How? By doing what any great creative person needs to do, whether they’re an artist, writer or photographer: he showed me something familiar in a way I’d never looked at it before. Or in this case, read me something I haven’t heard.

My favorite of his readings, was Sum, the first chapter of the book, which imagines this:

In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but shuffled into a new order; all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.

You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex.  You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes.  For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet.

You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it.  Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies born.  Once you make it through, it’s agony free for the rest of your life.

It gets better. Strongly suggest you read it if you haven’t already.  And consider becoming a Possibilian.  Join those who, according to Eagleman, “celebrate the vastness of our ignorance, are unwilling to commit to any particular made-up story, and take pleasure in entertaining multiple hypotheses.”

The concept aligns perfectly with the digital age.  As Eagleman says, “We can’t possibly know enough to be either religious or atheist.” I would add that when it comes to everything going on right now, we can’t possibly know (at least all the time) whether we’re right or wrong or whether it will succeed or fail. That’s why we keep experimenting.

Conversation: Why I came to SxSW

Real conversation with a real person. Social without the digital media.

I arrived in Austin yesterday around 5:00 pm, checked into my hotel and headed over to the convention center for my badge.  A few people mingled outside the main hall. Carpenters and electricians raced to get displays and rooms ready for this morning. But other than that it was quiet enough to mosey through the halls, figure out where everything was, and to peruse the display of books at the unattended bookstalls.

I met Chad Feehan, the young director of a movie called Wake, making its world premiere at SxSW.  He was busy stapling small posters to poles around the convention center.  We talked for a few minutes about making movies and what it’s like when all you have in your advertising arsenal is a box of posters and a staple gun rather than Hollywood’s promotion machine.  I wished him well.  And we exchanged Twitter handles.

Yes, there are plenty of reasons to come to SxSW. Panels on everything and anything from crowdsourcing, to the iPad, mobile technology and social media promise new ideas.  Keynotes from Clay Shirky, Jaron Lanier, Gary Vaynerchuk and Ev Williams will surely inspire and inform.

But the real reason to come to SxSW is for the human connection.  Face to face conversations with people you meet for the first time as well as those you’ve previously met, but only online.

So much of our interaction these days is via Twitter.  We give a few seconds of thought to a point we want to make or a reaction we’re compelled to offer.  We may go so far as to write a thoughtful comment on a blog post we’ve actually read or respond to the comments others leave us.  But here we can find all those people and actually connect.

My personal encounters continued. I had one-on-one conversations, over beer, with Steve Hall of Adrants and Faris Yakob of TBD. My digital exchanges with Steve typically consist of sending him a link I hope he’ll include in his blog, or answering a quick question he has about a campaign.  Last night we actually talked about life, and change, and social media and his moving to Rochester. Being Dads we even asked about the kids.

In Faris’s case, it was our first real-life introduction.  I’ve known of him for two years, been reading some of his stuff for almost one year, and interacting with him on Twitter and blog comments for the last six months.  We know lots of people in common. We even spoke recently at the same event series on different dates.  But until last night we’d never met.

Thanks to Foursquare (another post for later today or tomorrow), we discovered we were within a block of one another and got together at a bar near the Convention Center. We discussed everything from the new agency model, to transforming creative companies, the impact of social media, how to give a presentation without using any Keynote slides, and the financial model that determines whether a book gets published.  I shared a few lessons from Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto as we talked about how CMOs could ever learn to choreograph the many services and platforms needed to market today. He turned me onto Packrati.us as we both shared our challenges with how to filter and organize plethora content that comes into our lives. It was great, adding dimension and depth to all the 140-character conversations we’d had in the past.

My next few days will be pretty full; there are lots of other real people to connect with. If you’re one of them, and I don’t find you, I hope you’ll find me. Thanks for reading.

Image by: photocapy