Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much!
On far less lofty ground, marketers, advertisers and media types have for decades hypothesized about McLuhan’s precise inference, and the implications for which medium best fit what message.
And in the process, we often theorize right over the real point.
So there I was minding my own business when I came across an article on Fast Company entitled What Every CEO Can Learn From Best Buy’s (Continued) Branding Mistakes. Written by David Brier, who I know to be not only a great writer but also a branding expert, the article made reference to the new tagline the much-maligned Best Buy recently trotted out after what was surely an exhaustive 18-month odyssey. Truth be told the 18 months was spent “working to reframe the retailer’s brand proposition” and the new tagline was one item that came out of said reframing.
The new tagline for Best Buy is, wait for it “Making technology work for you.”
He goes on to talk about branding in general but I want to focus squarely on this horrifically bad tagline.
As one who has read, dissected and written about many a study regarding social media, brands and consumers, I can tell you I for one was quite surprised to see read the findings of a survey recently conducted by Market Force – a worldwide leader in customer intelligence solutions.
In querying more than 12,000 consumers in the US and UK, they wanted to see how consumers engaged with varying industries – retail, restaurant, travel, entertainment and financial businesses to be specific, via the big dogs of social media: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.
I’ve been a long-time supporter of MediaTemple’s (MT)Residence program along with Gary Vaynerchuk, Neil Patel, and many others whom I respect. I wanted to share my “7 questions to answer to become a social business” with you here..
Social Media is pervasive and is becoming the new normal in corporate marketing. Brands who get this right are starting to build their own media networks rich with customer connections numbering in the millions. Right now, Coca-Cola has over 34 million fans on Facebook, but they’re hardly alone. Disney follows just behind with 29 million fans, Starbucks boasts 25 million, and Oreo, Red Bull, and Converse play host to over 20 million fans. If we were to look at other networks such as Twitter and Youtube, we would see a recurring theme. People are connecting en masse with the businesses they support and new media represents the ability to cultivate consumer relationships in ways not possible with traditional earned or paid media.
It seems that everyone claims to be a Twitter expert these days. Of course, most are not. But several of the real Twitter pros I know—including those who have written books about using Twitter as an effective marketing and public relations instrument—have figured out how to best leverage the 140-character microblogging tool to promote themselves, their books, their firms, and their clients. And some of them actually follow their own advice!
How Smart Marketing Book Authors Use Twitter
For example, Mark Schaefer of Schaefer Marketing Solutions is the author of the book The Tao of Twitter: Changing Your Life and Business 140 Characters at a Time. He and his firm provide affordable outsourced marketing support to address both short-term sales opportunities and long-term strategic renewal.
Mark uses Twitter to help deliver on that promise for a number of his blue-chip clients, including Nestle, AARP, Anheuser-Busch, Coldwell Banker, Scripps Networks, Keystone Foods, and the U.K. government. He also very effectively promotes himself and his book on Twitter as part of his own marketing, branding, and relationship-development strategy.
Courage. Now, there’s a word not often used in marketing – though often used in business. We call leaders courageous when they make unpopular decisions, usually internally, that change process significantly enough to create a turnaround. Perhaps to drive costs down, perhaps to drive morale up – but always to make a significant change. In marketing, in my humble opinion, courage is the ability to very clearly identify, select and stick with a target audience.
I believe those (marketers) who are most courageous are the ones who dare to dabble in the psychology of status – a concept first introduced by Herbert Hyman (1918-1985) in 1942. The premise of the psychology of status is that individuals use groups of reference to evaluate aspects of their lives – both positively and negatively.
I’ve just come out of the news:rewired conference about the future of journalism both buzzing and confused.
Why confused? Well, how many of these people in any way love what they do? From the tone and energy of most of the speakers you’d have thought the arctic chill had come early. Maybe they were going for ‘calm and authoritative’. It mostly came across as ‘bored to be here, bored to be talking about this and bored by you.’ Fair enough, if you’re trotting out generic stuff about two-way connections with readers. But some of the other stuff was actually quite interesting. It’s amazing how persistently unfashionable enthusiasm is in the UK.
Why buzzing? Well, partly thanks to Mary Beth Christie from FT.com who, on the topic of monetising online media, called for a ban on the term ‘paywall‘. Shopkeepers do not erect a paywall for us to buy milk. Bus drivers do not erect a paywall that we bang against before bleeping our Oysters. We pay for content, just like we pay for bread: we don’t demolish democracy to get there.
But mainly I’m buzzing thanks to freelance interactive producer Philip Trippenbach’s talk on stories vs interactivity. Stories have traditionally been the lifeblood of the media, but situations or issues that are complex, systemic, non personalised, and non localised are actually stifled by the distortion and personalisation of narrative – what they need is interactivity. Events need stories, systems need interactivity.
From Trippenbach’s blog summary of his speech
Class is one of the most influential systems in the world, and Trippenbach is currently producing Britain’s Real Class System for the BBC. This will take the form a nationwide interactive survey that then becomes interactive visualisation, so viewers can mashup, personalise – yes, create stories – from the rich wealth of data. This is definitely a man who loves what he does, and does it well.
I’m a story fetishist, and this transformed the way I see stories, interactivity, and the media. Dude.