Month: March 2011

Put Some Skin In The Game

Building something entirely new. Creating something fresh from something that existed. Evolving business to a new place. Changing a culture. True innovation. Standout success. Attaining influence or authority. Building a devoted following. Creating lasting relationships.

There’s one thing that all of these have in common…

You must invest something of personal value and worth.

It might be your ideas, your energy, or your reputation. Maybe it’s something tangible, like money or resources. Perhaps it’s a bit of all of those combined.

But leading – truly leading from within, not just sitting in a position of annointed leadership – requires an element of vulnerability that few are willing to risk. It means betting on your own hand, and being part of the things that you’re asking others to do with or for you.

If you have little invested, you have little to lose. And it’s hard to trust your intentions if you can’t be bothered to commit – and risk losing – something you value in the name of the thing that you want.

Let your team, your volunteers, your customers, peers and colleagues know what you’re willing to put on the line to achieve something. Don’t just work on a project. Don’t just build a plan and execute on it or delegate it. Invest in it. Personally and professionally. Put some skin in the game.

And let them see you do it.

Then watch how the game – and your own perspective – changes dramatically.

Amber Naslund

image by banspy

Personality matters more than platforms

When I say the phrase ’social recruiting’, what do you think of?

Agencies putting job roles on Twitter? HR building relationships through LinkedIn and trawling blogs? Or even unscrupulous recruiters creating Foursquare ‘places’ near competitors advertising new jobs? All this and more was discussed a few weeks ago at the #trulondon Social Recruiting Unconference, and very interesting it was too.

But this just blows all that out of the water.

screen-shot-2011-03-24-at-105837

We want to add some talent to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune investigative team. Every serious candidate should have a proven track record of conceiving, reporting and writing stellar investigative pieces that provoke change. However, our ideal candidate has also cursed out an editor, had spokespeople hang up on them in anger and threatened to resign at least once because some fool wanted to screw around with their perfect lede.

We do a mix of quick hit investigative work when events call for it and mini-projects that might run for a few days. But every year we like to put together a project way too ambitious for a paper our size because we dream that one day Walt Bogdanich will have to say: “I can’t believe the Sarasota Whatever-Tribune cost me my 20th Pulitzer.” As many of you already know, those kinds of projects can be hellish, soul-sucking, doubt-inducing affairs. But if you’re the type of sicko who likes holing up in a tiny, closed office with reporters of questionable hygiene to build databases from scratch by hand-entering thousands of pages of documents to take on powerful people and institutions that wish you were dead, all for the glorious reward of having readers pick up the paper and glance at your potential prize-winning epic as they flip their way to the Jumble… well, if that sounds like journalism Heaven, then you’re our kind of sicko.

For those unaware of Florida’s reputation, it’s arguably the best news state in the country and not just because of the great public records laws. We have all kinds of corruption, violence and scumbaggery. The 9/11 terrorists trained here. Bush read My Pet Goat here. Our elections are colossal clusterfucks. Our new governor once ran a health care company that got hit with a record fine because of rampant Medicare fraud. We have hurricanes, wildfires, tar balls, bedbugs, diseased citrus trees and an entire town overrun by giant roaches (only one of those things is made up). And we have Disney World and beaches, so bring the whole family.

Send questions, or a resume/cover letter/links to clips to my email address below. If you already have your dream job, please pass this along to someone whose skills you covet. Thanks.

Matthew Doig
Sarasota Herald-Tribune

This (which I found via the awesome FleetStreetBlues) has unsurprisingly spread like herpes through a newsroom, being retweeted and posted to Facebook pages and blogs by journalists worldwide. But what’s great is that that happened not because of some convoluted social strategy but because the copy itself is simply so ballsy, personal, disruptive and refreshing.

As Matthew Doig’s own surprise at the reaction attests, this was so successful because it is so obviously authentic to his team’s style and attitude. That’s being social – being interesting, individual and honest.

If you achieve that, the platforms will largely take care of themselves.

Have you seen any other job ads that *really* made you talk?

Molly Flatt

B2B Storytelling Case Study: Some Ideas Take Off In Unexpected Ways

I’m in the idea business. As a senior creative director and partner at a B2B marketing agency, I work at creative ideation and storytelling as it relates to branding and content marketing.

Every once in a while, when I have a really wild idea I think may have no chance of flying, I’m reminded of a story I was once told. It’s one of my favorites and I hope you enjoy it.

Barbershop-to-Biplanes: A tall tale turns out to be a true story

I don’t remember his name, but I will never forget him. One summer during a break from college, I was working as a physical therapy assistant at a rehab facility when I met this interesting old guy with a great story. He was a patient recovering from a stroke, and he told me the tale while I was helping him exercise one day.

Read more

Who owns your brand?

In the past, marketing owned the brand, using a tightly controlled set of messages piped through carefully selected channels to ensure brand “ownership” through control….but that’s no longer the case.  The increasing integration of social media into our consumers’ lives has shifted brand ownership away from marketers and into the hands of the consumer.

We marketers like to think that social media is primarily a set of tools for our marketing purposes, but in reality, social media is also a strong set of tools our consumers use to share and influence opinion about our brand.   Our consumers now have “the channel of me.” Consumers’ opinions now create the “reality” of the brand — if enough consumers say negative things about your brand, your brand loses its credibility, and (thankfully) vice versa.

There are two main ways we can react to this change:  we can fight it or accept it. I highly recommend accepting it.  If we fight to retain control of our brands, we are likely to hold on so tight that we suffocate the flexibility and outward-looking awareness our brand needs for survival.

Read more

The Future of Broadcast is More Than Integrating Tweets into Programming




The future of broadcast is literally at our fingertips…

The living room is the epicenter of family, the hub of the household. Perhaps more so than the dining table, the living room hosts hours upon hours of family attention and interaction every week. Whether we were gripped by the music and voices emitting from radios or entranced by the moving images illuminating our televisions, we celebrated everything from togetherness to relaxation around a common centerpiece.

This once mighty magnet of attention, through its iterative forms, is learning to share its powers of attraction forever changing the idea of the family cornerstone. Now attention is a battlefield and the laws of attraction are distributed.

Like passing ships in the night, the TV and the Internet have yet to intimately embrace one another. Instead, each are vying to become your center of attention. In reality however, you and I know that they’re already co-existing as people increasingly bring their laptops and iPads into the living room. When Forrester Research published a report that, for the first time, marked the equalization of time spent between TVs and the internet, it was and wasn’t a surprise. Indeed, it was inevitable. Depending on where you reside in the adoption bell curve, this news is either overdue or early. Either way, it’s both a culture shift and shock.  If for but a moment, these two ships are frozen, floating across from each other without obstructing the respective course. However, the wakes cast through each journey to this point are felt on both sides.

Change lies ahead and how it looks and what it means are unclear and debatable. But, what’s not in question is its importance and consequence.

If you are in the business of trying to reach consumers to earn attention, your world no longer rotates on its previous axis. Progressive brands are already experimenting with media and corresponding budgets to capture attention where and when it’s focused. For example, Proctor & Gamble is moving spend away from TV soaps and daytime dramas toward digital and social channels. This move signals the beginning of the end of an era and also the beginning of the end of business as usual.

This is None of Your Business…So Make It Your Business

Forrester surveyed over 40,000 people and if for nothing else, the findings serve as evidence necessary to turn our wheel and change course. Three short years ago, only one-third of Americans shopped online. Now, two-thirds rely on e-commerce to shop. Comparatively, 35 percent of respondents visit social networks today, up from 15 percent in 2007. Like e-commerce, we can make an educated guess as to where that number will climb three years from now.

The proliferation of the Internet is far more disruptive than we realize. It seems as though decades and in some cases centuries of media production and consumption are becoming obsolete overnight. As a good friend of mine said in reaction to Forrester’s controversial report, “I knew this would happen, but so soon…?”

Suddenly traditional media properties including newspapers, broadcast radio and TV, magazines, et al, were caught off guard when the new media revolution hit. Suddenly everyone is turning to Facebook, Twitter, GoogleTV and the iPad as the savior for the future of all traditional media. But this revolution didn’t happen over night. For many years a quiet riot assembled until whispers amplified into cries for change. And when their pleas went unacknowledged or unaddressed, they, we, embraced the democracy of social media to ensure that our voices were heard.

For businesses and media properties, I’m sorry to say, social media, geo-location, and tablets aren’t going to save you. Thoughtfulness and empathy are the keys to unlock the gates that will lead you onto a new path of awareness. It’s the steps you take that reveal how to earn relevance within each medium that captivates your consumers.

I Want My Web TV

Sound familiar? The promise of a convergence between TVs and the Internet is ambiguous at best. New media isn’t going away. It’s always new and that’s the point. What’s clear is that for the time being, attention is equally divided between TVs and the internet.

Culturally, we already see the coalescence of these two activities. But, attention might not prove to be what it was. Continuous partial attention, while disputed, is something that is in play for the Twitterati, those highly dexterous individuals who can watch TV, live tweet the experience, and discuss it with friends in real-time. What if the living room becomes virtual, connected through individuals connected by a platform, time, and common interests. It’s no longer a matter of what if…this is the new reality TV and we are inserting ourselves into the production through live commentary viewable and searchable by those audiences who have willfully connected to us.

The water cooler is already moving to the PC and social is emerging as the long fabled catalyst for the overdue convergence of the TV and internet.

The future of broadcast is social. At the same time, the future of the internet is linked by shared experiences. As such, consumers will bring their mobile phones, tablets, and laptops to the digital living room to watch and share experiences and create a greater conversation and sense of belonging.

Producers will now increasingly create content that includes us in the event and the storyline. Architects of social and hardware platforms will need to rethink how TVs and the internet converge to foster consumption and engagement. And, those brands who subsidize content production, will have to transcend the practice of following attention to captivating it through innovation and experimentation.

The audience is not the audience of old. It’s now an audience with an audience of audiences. And I guess that’s where everything begins now. The people who used to sit in front of a television and talk about their experiences to friends, family and co-workers are now empowered to do so right here, right now. Perhaps more important however, people are building full-fledged networks around them, creating a distribution channel of audiences with audiences and their reach is as influential as it is infinite.

How will you steer experiences in the future?

Brian Solis

Originally posted on BrianSolis.com

Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook

Build Relationships, Not Billboards!

The marketing paradigm is shifting with much greater “power to the people” facilitated by social media.  If you want to continue to reach your market, it’s not about advertising any more, but about building relationships.

Consider the following differences:

Advertising Building Relationships
1.     Telling

2.     Starts with “me” (the brand, the product, the service)

3.     Focuses on “what can you give me?”

4.     Goal:  instant impact

5.     Where’s the money?

 1.     Listening, hearing, empathizing, asking,

2.     Starts with “you” (the customer’s needs, wants, interests and expectations)

3.     Focuses on “how can I serve you?”

4.     Goal: ongoing engagement

5.     Who are the people?

1. Telling vs. Listening

It may sound counterintuitive, but if you truly want to be heard above the growing social media “noise,” you need to listen.  Listen to what your consumers and potential consumers are saying before you even put one word out there:  What are they saying, what are they feeling, what are their pain points, what solutions do they need?   Then when you do “speak” (type), empathize with them and ask them questions.

Read more

Is It Time to Shift Marketing Dollars?

There are 100 opinions on what percentage of social media should be in your 2011 marketing mix, but across every industry there’s one unified call for quantifiable ROI.

We marketers know that Return on Investment and Return on Information depend on a company’s goals. While it may be difficult to measure the short-term effectiveness of a Twitter campaign in profitability terms (ROI), it’s no excuse not to pursue an initiative or forego measurements.

Do you know the ROI of the ad on the bus bench? Or four hours on the golf course with a CEO, or the in-flight magazine ad?

Read more

Brand Advocates are People Too… Nurture that Relationship!

It is true that Brand Advocates have value in part due to the reach of their relationships within and across their social networks.  When they encourage their friends and colleagues to buy our products, our brand’s buying power increases exponentially, and it simply makes good business sense to leverage those opportunities.

The risk here is that we can become so focused on our Brand Advocates’ social reach that we see them only as a means to an end (sales) and stop seeing them as people.  We might get greedy and start looking right past them to market directly to their networks, ignoring our Advocates themselves.  While that marketing method can still be somewhat teffective, it costs more, it is more difficult to implement and maintain, and it is dangerous to our brand.  We cannot de-value our Advocates and expect our brands to thrive!

Read more

Seven Unglamorous Steps to Better Writing

Powerful language is the soul of effective communication. It’s also the soul of successful marketing, business, and government. Remember “Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall”? We cannot measure the global impact of those six words.

What’s the secret to better writing? Two necessities: more reading and more writing. Both are unglamorous; but both are effective and productive.

Before you hire a writing coach, put your reading and writing on steroids with these seven principles.

Read more