Transforming Pixels to Gold

This is part 3 of a 3 post series. [View part 2]

An extract from Sonja Falvo's new eBook: http://www.sonjafalvo.com/books.html

FOCUS ON CONNECTING OTHERS IN A MEANINGFUL WAY

There are many ways to approach social media and as many ways to find success. People like Robin Dickinson find amazing success by not only creating direct connections to his company but more so by facilitating connections for others (on social media and off). But this is not about a conclusive idea on how to use social media or what social media platform is best for you. I want to keep an important question in your mind before you consider these things.

The initial goals most people I’ve worked with strive for on social media are big numbers; judgements on what is successful or not are based purely on amounts of friends, followers or connections etc. While there’s some merit to this approach, it is important to question why we want to be on social media. The obvious answer for business owners is to make money.

This type of honesty is a great platform for something much more profound. Consider this, your product at some point came about to “fill a gap in the market”. This essentially says, there is a human need not being met or a human problem not being solved and that’s why your product / business exists. So whatever you sell, somehow it solves people’s problems or meets some human need. This is not necessarily a material need -there’s markets for emotional needs, economic needs, intellectual needs etc.

In this way ‘making money’ is secondary to the more primary reason your company exists. Start by asking:

• How does my company contribute (fulfil needs / solve problems)?
• How does my company create connections and build meaning in society?
• When you understand that – social media / business / life success awaits you!

MEAT AND COFFEE

If you got to this point after reading the above, I’d probably say you’re thinking that ‘this is all very interesting but it’s a shame that it lacks meat’. Where’s the substance? How can all this be applied in the ‘real world’? So not to be branded the “ideas man” of this eBook – here’s a few paragraphs to sink your teeth into.

To be certain this example is real (enough), I thought about one of my favourite coffee shops a couple of blocks from where I live. It’s called “A coffee and a yarn”. The “yarn” part is the “having a yarn” (conversation) reference but also refers to knitting. It’s a coffee shop like any other -tables with cups full of sugar sachets placed in the middle -but right next to the sugar are baskets of wool and knitting needles. It’s a coffee shop concept that captures the knitters’ niche and it is growing in “coolness” as a thing to do to fill in the time (in Newtown, Sydney at least).

“A coffee and a yarn” -what is the deeper business intent? I suggest before diving head first into social media, to start by gaining an understanding of your deeper business intent. That way you’ll have a clear (or clearer) grasp on what sets you apart, but more importantly how your offering solves problems or meets the needs of the wider community. My personal thinking about the success of a coffee shop like “A coffee and a yarn” is not just that it targets a growing niche but it acts as a reminder of something that you could say is part of our cultural DNA.

It was once commonplace to get together in the process of making gifts for family, community or the tribe -slowly, manually and lovingly. We don’t do this anymore; we go to the shop and buy gifts or with a few clicks online, a gift arrives at our door sometime later. There’s no argument about the incredible convenience of all this – but with that communal making process gone, so too perhaps does a bit of heart with it.

A business like “A coffee and a yarn” contributes in a wider sense by being a reminder of this and in addition, supplying the space and mindset to bring this back into a modern setting. That’s my stab at what could be its deeper business intent.

THE PEACE OFFERING – FOR YOUR TRIBAL LEADERS

Now we know something of the business intent, we need an offering to help us draw in our tribal leaders. This can be done with social media. First imagine walking into an unknown tribe long ago with your message of deeper intent. Would you just waltz in empty-handed? I doubt that would be a good idea. Expect to be running out, possibly even with a spear dangling out of your back.

What you need is a “peace offering”. Robin Dickinson’s peace offering was his willingness and genuine interest to craft “Sharewords” for businesses free of charge. He introduced this idea on his blog, started with a small group and it grew from there. Let’s do something like this with “A coffee and a yarn”.

Our peace offering will be: an intimate gathering, free food / drinks and content for social media.

1. Create a blog called: A making community – the soul of the gift.

To interject this nice list I’m making, I think it will be useful to consider a real world analogy when strategising this social media approach. Imagine you wanted to create a community space in a town centre. The idea is you want people to get together, talk about your product, give you some ideas on how to improve it and hopefully sell loads of it. Because you’re worried about attendance, you’re prepared to give away some expired product lines you were going to ditch anyway.... How could that be a good idea? Still it’s what the majority of businesses do on social media.

So, rather than being a blog for one business, we want it to have the potential of being a community space around things people will be passionate about (this is a key difference to traditional business blogging).

A “Wordpress” blogging platform has some great community enabling tools – we will start with a “Wordpress” installation.

2. Create a post about an up-coming event called “A making community – the soul of the gift”. The event will be an intimate discussion group about the process of making gifts and what it means in a modern context. This will be followed by a craft workshop. The idea is to record this event (perhaps video stream it) so that this can be added on various Social media platforms. This is part of the peace offering.

SEEK OUT YOUR TRIBAL LEADERS

People often make the mistake of pitching only the big fish. If you do that, expect to have a lot of knockbacks. If you don’t have a big tribe, why would a tribal leader of the biggest tribe want you as an ally? Chances are, they wouldn’t – they’ll see you as just one of the many pitching them daily. So I suggest you focus your energy on small to average followings / connections on social media. Pitch the big fish when you’re a big fish – you’ll have more success.

1. Make a list of people with a similar range of community building expertise. Twitter is a good place to start. Do a simple keyword search on http://search.twitter.com or try http://listorious.com . Have a look at people’s profiles, if they’re creating relevant on-topic lists (e.g. craft / knitting etc.) it’s a good indication they’re also the type of community builders you want to target.
2. Extend the list to administrators of relevant http://www.meetup.com groups, Facebook pages: http://www.facebook.com/pages/ , http://www.eventbrite.com organisers and LinkedIn groups: http://www.linkedin.com/groupsDirectory . These people have a community building focus too.
3. Send the invite via email if you can find it (you want to make it a personal request). Otherwise use the social media platforms you’ve found people on. Don’t make a ginormous list that will be unmanageable either – focus on small and quality (remember the type of attributes you’re looking for to get the best results).

Ask people to comment for expressions of interest on the upcoming event. Then use the comment area as an organising / further discussion platform as well.

BUILD, BUILD AND BUILD FURTHER

All this stuff is procedural. There’s no point focusing too much on procedure and platforms when you don’t know how this will benefit the wider community. All the right procedures in the world, just won’t stick. You can have the fanciest letterbox on the street, but don’t forget it’s the house that you live in!

1. Use Eventbrite to legitimise and organise your event
2. Capture the event on video
3. Build all the social media spaces around: “A making community – the soul of the gift” (A facebook community page, a twitter account etc. Remember, this is not about your product or offering, if you want to attract a community – think about eventually creating a community space for others to use. Resign yourself to let go of some of the control. It will be liberating! And you’ll find people will be far more interested in your product anyway.
4. Post the video on several social video spaces. Tube Mogul is a free social video distribution platform – this will save you a lot of time.
5. Ask your new friends to be co-writers on you community blog. Profile there businesses / projects on it. You can use Wordpress’s ability to profile contributors to the blog. Start moving towards what http://www.mumbrella.com.au did for the Australian media and adverting space (industry news / guest posting / ongoing video episodes).
6. Use Facebook to connect an intimate group of people. Interview members using status comments (Facebook comment activity keeps the status on the top of other people’s streams, which helps gain more activity and prominence).

Overall the idea is to start with small step to make this concept bigger and bigger. The first stage is to leverage and combine the audiences of smaller community builders. This will be a benefit to all involved. Start by priming the wheels of Reed’s Law -then watch it take effect!

I’m going to stop there. I guess I just have to be the ‘ideas man’. There’s a lot more of this procedural stuff I could write about for days but I’m not sure you’d enjoy it and I wouldn’t like to start boring you to tears! So here’s hoping the tips to this point are useful. Beyond that, I hope you can see that with the higher value of your business in hand that the success you’re hoping to attract on social media is well on its way.

If you don’t believe me, have a closer look at what Robin Dickinson’s doing with Sharewords and the Centurions... A definite one to follow

This is part 2 of a 3 post series.

An extract from Sonja Falvo's new eBook: http://www.sonjafalvo.com/books.html

[View part 1]

Great tribal leadership on social media – an interview on Facebook

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David

Hi Robin, thanks again for being able to do this Facebook interview / conversation. As you know I think Sharewords is a brilliant concept. I see it as a great example of how connecting with people in a meaningful way has a reach far beyond the platform of social media. Was this the intention and how did the whole Sharewords concept come about?

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Robin

Thank you, David. I appreciate your kind encouragement.

Sharewords is part of a much longer term strategy that I have been gently unfolding online for the past year. My diamond focus is to 'Help you succeed in business' and I commit full resources to enabling this.

An important part of helping businesses succeed is to facilitate the strongest possible word-ofmouth recommendation. It's highly profitable and it works wonders. Ask any business owner or solopreneur what will help them grow and you get an almost reflex response is "Spread the word!"

i.e. tell others about my business so that I get more customers.

Sharewords is a proactive response from business people to take control and craft the words *they* want spread! Think about how you share recommendations with your friends and colleagues. You use 4-5 words -quickly and effortlessly delivered. It's not a clunky sentence, nor the old-fashioned elevator pitch.

So, as a professional business development facilitator, I've been running a "live" workshop on RADSMARTS to show people how to develop their sharewords. The response has been massive. It's how we met, David.

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David

The response is without doubt massive -I don't think I've seen as many responses to one blog post and it's still growing. The growth has also moved strongly into Twitter, Facebook and I believe a collaborative online newspaper.

I first became interested in sharewords after seeing perhaps 3 or 4 tweets about it from a couple of people I follow. What hooked me was the value of what you're offering – you provide a phrase (sharewords) that succinctly captures what a particular business is all about. This is done only after becoming very informed about what’s unique to the business and all free of charge. It goes beyond the usual free ebook or webinar and that’s what I believe really sets you apart – it directly shows that you are exactly what you say you’re about – interested and capable in helping a wide variety of business succeed. Your authenticity is easy to see.

A lot of companies interested in moving in similar direction might see this as a huge hurdle. The concern would be that if they offer so much value without monetising it, they’ll be taken for a ride

– their potential customers will just take what they need and move on.

What are your thoughts on this?

---

Robin

These are important observations you make, David. Things I have given much consideration to.

Think of the Sharewords post as part of the roll-out of a long-term strategy. Before publishing anything online, I thought long and hard about the hows and whys of my online participation, especially from a commercial perspective.

A key element of my online strategy is to attract and help a relatively small group of highly motivated 'like-minds' who also want to succeed commercially online. This value-based approach is very different from the volume-based approach that many businesses take i.e. get huge lists of large numbers of followers, subscribers and try and convert a tiny % into sales.

If I can find and help 100 succeed, who in turn can find and help 100 succeed, the leverage is enormous and highly sustainable. (This is called the Centurion project). Compare this with volume approaches that are resource hungry at a rate proportional to growth.

Implementing this value-plan effectively will take several years, and relies on attracting the right people.

Enter, the Sharewords post. The purpose of this post is to help me identify potential collaborators for the long-term plan. So far 24 people have joined the Centurion project as a direct result of their strong participation in this post. It has proven to be a vastly efficient way of helping strong people find me.

Outside of the context of this strategy, the Sharewords-style post -or online workshop as is probably a more apt description -wouldn't make any sense to me. To this point, I see many people blowing large amounts of their time, effort, money and intellectual property outside of any commercially solid plan.

How can that be sustainable?

---

David

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. A lot of projects / businesses tend to take two contradicting approaches with social media. One is what's closer to a campaign style that builds a whole lot of attention in a short space of time. There’s usually a big enough carrot (like a 10k prize) and in this sense it’s about buying an audience's engagement. At the same time there’s the hope that community continues to contribute and be engaged. One has an extrinsic value and is often short lived because it doesn’t always turn into an intrinsic value.

That’s the hard one – how do we create just being a part of that particular community as a value in itself – without the need for a succession of big enough carrots?

Personally, I’ve been a part of various social media communities and often ‘drop out’. I believe at that point it’s a question of motivation; people tend to be much more motivated in a group when there’s a sense of working towards a greater good. I see inklings of that in your project – perhaps that’s a part of your bigger picture?

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Robin

Sustained motivation is something I think about a lot.

For me, the drivers of sustained motivation in a community like the Centurions are a combination of a) attracting people who are naturally self-motivated and 'lower maintenance'; b) providing a regular scoreboard or feedback mechanism that tracks results; c) having a forum for regular, honest communication d) knowing that you are part of something big and bold and e) me being available to support members during their 'hour of need'.

Your point about 'working towards the greater good' is part of the fabric of the community spirit. That said, I make it very clear that this is a commercial venture aimed at generating more and more money for less and less work.

People have said that my approach is somewhat altruistic. For example, the many hours of sustained, high quality input I have invested into helping people craft their sharewords.

I don't think of myself as altruistic at all. I help people because I like helping people AND because it's commercially effective. It's been my offline business model for 20 years because it works so well to generate sustained profits -and I make absolutely no secret about it.

Does that make sense to you, David?

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David

Certainly does. I actually think the idea that giving high value and receiving nothing in return won't happen in most cases. It's more likely people give the same value back or sometimes even more. People call it reciprocity but really value exchanges are what we've been doing for eons.

If we take the example of Sharewords I'd understand your return as being:

1. Quality referrals / recommendations
2. Active contributions / involvement
3. Monetary Those things sustain each other and as you say make it commercially viable (online / offline).

Comparing the two though, I'd imagine point 1 has huge implications for this model in terms of

the exponential reach available online. I've lost count of how many times I've eagerly referred

Sharewords online / word of mouth and I'm just one of many. This reach must make it far easier to source the right community members (Centurions) who I imagine are key to taking this project even further.

What has been the result so far for yourself and the Centurions?

---

Robin

The results so far are:

1. Clear feedback that a value-based model can work. Until I launched Centurions, it was purely theoretical;
2. Better online metrics for less work. For example, blog views and engagement remain strong for vastly less work;
3. Increased sales: it's early days, but members are reporting positive sales boosts.

Being based on a geometric progression, the results and returns from the early phases of the Centurion model will be modest and barely visible i.e initially the graph is asymptotic. The mid-later stages become much more interesting as the results compound. I think it was Albert

Einstein who said "The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest". We shall see. I must say that I find a model based on the notion of earning more and more money for less and

less work fascinating.

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David

You're in a sense creating a tribe of tribal leaders around a shared set of values. That's got to grow your connections around your value approach exponentially (and it has). The effort of finding and directing connections gets distributed across all those involved so I imagine it must lessen the effort load.

So as you say, less work for greater outcomes!

It's indeed a very fascinating area and it’s great to watch it unfold for you.

Reed's law (like Einstein's words ) is a good example for how growth compounds on networks. Social media is an apt example.

2(to the power of N) – N – 1 = potential connections

N are participants, so 100 participants has the value of 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376 possible connections!

I came across it on George Beckenstein's blog: http://www.benckenstein.com/digital-media/swine-flu-susan-boyle-and-the-network-multiplier effect/

By the way before we wrap this up, where's the best place to find out more about the Centurions? And do you have any other quick tips to share for those wanting to do something like Sharewords and the Centurions on social media?

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Robin

Thank you, David. I really appreciate the opportunity to discuss these ideas with you.

If readers would like help creating their sharewords, simply come to the article and start participating. It's that easy.

For more information about the Centurions, simply email me at robin@radsmarts.com.

Wishing you and your readers every success in business and in life.

Robin :)

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David

I'll extend that wish too and thanks again, it's been a very enlightening discussion :-)

David

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View part 3 - What is your deeper business intent?

And why is this relevant to social media?

This is part 1 of a 3 post series.

An extract from Sonja Falvo's new eBook: http://www.sonjafalvo.com/books.html

I won’t spend too much time on the whys about participating in social media. You’re likely reading this because you’re already convinced of the benefits of it. In the simplest terms though, it offers the potential to widen the reach of your message exponentially without the need for an enormous budget.

Skip this part if you’re already a social media advocate but if you’re still wondering, Reed’s law states it best:

The value of potential connectivity is the value of the set of available transactions that are afforded by the system or network.

This means if a bunch of people (say five) want to hear at least one crazy thing I’m saying, you and the other crazy four people might also know five crazy people and each of those five know another five etc. etc.

In even simpler terms and for brevity’s sake, Reed’s law states it on one neat line:

2^N – N – 1 = potential connections

(N is the value of participants. E.g. the above example was 5 participants)

Let’s change the value to 100 participants and see what happens…

2¹⁰⁰ – 100 – 1 = 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376

That’s a lot of crazy people!

The reason this is so relevant and even more likely to occur on social media is that communication methods are super-charged here. Imagine a more traditional approach. If I rang you instead and told you:

The secret is... that it's all so bloody simple we can't even believe it

Would you call another five people and would those five in turn do the same? No, it’s just too hard! There’s too much time and effort needed with little reward. And I’m sure you have better things to do than tell people a whole load of gibberish. It has to be something so outlandishly crazy, highly relevant or inspiring enough to outweigh all that phone calling, chit chat effort. The other interesting factor is the relevance of any message disintegrates over time. The time it takes for this phone process to spread my message reduces its relevance even further

Was it even relevant to begin with?

This doesn’t happen to the same extent on social media. The time and effort for spreading messages is significantly lessened, so Reed’s Law is so much more likely to occur. Also, because communication effort is very low (often just a click), the necessity of a higher quality message (to outweigh effort) is significantly less. It will more likely happen. This means communication is primed and ready for your message on social media.

So, it’s good to know that our messages can even be crappy and still spread far, wide and very quickly!

This occurs…. Over and over again on social media – it’s happening right now. Does that sound all too good to be true? We’ll in some ways it is….

NO ONE REALLY CARES ABOUT YOUR MESSAGE (OR MINE)

Social media is so much bigger than Ben Hur and has conquered more places and people than the Roman Empire did 10-fold. With all this exponential growth (people joining and communicating on social media with crappy messages every second), our wonderful non-crappy messages sink before we even type.

I’ve got a few thousand people following / connected to me on Twitter & LinkedIn combined but truth be known, I rarely read what 99% of those people are saying. It’s not just that I don’t care, it’s because the sheer volume takes too much processing time. I’ve got a little baby girl, a wonderful wife, an online marketing job and a small business to keep happy. You can understand why reading / replying to thousands of messages hitting my social media streams, can’t be something I care too much about. I’m sure my followers feel the same. In fact, they probably don’t even spare the thought I just gave them.

Basically we’re a selfish bunch and on social media it’s not at all different. We go online primarily to meet our needs. So, if your message doesn’t directly address what people need, it’s not worthy of attention.

When you’ve fallen into a black hole, look for that spot of light – that’s the gateway

Now you know the hurdle, let’s jump over it!

TRIBES, THE GATEWAY IN THE SOCIAL MEDIA BLACK HOLE

There’s no need to get depressed. Firstly, if you’re familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs you’ll know that a sense of belonging is a core value for the majority of us. So that’s the stickiness of social media. Within all its vastness, it still offers us an easy way to find and form social groups based on shared values.

Since Seth Godin’s introduction to all this tribal stuff in marketing, we have commonly accepted calling these groupings “tribes” and they do function very much as you’d imagine tribes should. Individual tribes have a shared set of values, they have tribal markings (communication styles) and they too have tribal leaders.

One attribute of a great tribal leader is the ability to connect to other tribal leaders but more so it is the ability to facilitate connections between them. This transforms a linear “one to many” relationship into a circular “many to many” relationship, increasing a larger tribal circumference and strengthening its bonds.

On social media, don’t just find and foster connections but facilitate connections between others. This addresses the primary need of belonging and creates a larger tribal network as a platform to spread a collective set of values / messages. But in case I’m losing you right now, I know someone who’s doing some great tribal leadership work for his business; because what he’s doing and how it is unfolding is very apt, I have interviewed him. 

His name is Robin Dickinson:

View part 2 - An interview with Robin Dickinson:

Sharewords, Radsmarts and Centurions?

Here's my thoughts on what could work "For love or money"

See here: http://mumbrella.com.au/nova

Hi Adam,

Noticed the change to conditions to email the idea to you. So here it is to legitimise the entry :)

Also a couple of changes is to run the campaign in blocks of 30 days. The idea is to build more of a continual momentum - as you'd do it again for another person over another 30days - this would help to accumulatively increase the amount of tweets (with #2DayIsNOVA / @novafm and new @novafm followers) pinning to win the next 30 days of NOVA (because they can see the hype around current winners)

Thanks

David

#2DayIsNOVA
NOVA means “new” – Tweet why your today is NOVA using hashtag #2DayIsNOVA and win 30 days of NOVA experiences that YOU decide you want to have.

Other benefits

• Get a massive Twitter following (on your account): we talk to you for 1 minute on 5 morning radio shows a week – Just give us your NOVA update & our listeners will need to follow your Tweets to find out what happens. On top of that your account gets the web exposure from http://www.novafm.com.au
• You get to live your dreams for 1 whole YEAR and we remove the limitations

What you have to do 
Tweet something inspiring, funny, uplifting, or even stupid telling us why your today is NOVA. Tweet as much and as frequently as you like (Just follow & message @novafm and use #2DayIsNOVA so we can find it). If your messages get retweeted a lot – you’re probably doing something right – so tell you friends / followers as we regard your retweetability very highly.

Rationale
This idea is about seeding influencers. Social media influencers are generally behind things going viral. Anyone can follow and read a person’s tweets, so Twitter’s open platform and current popularity is a perfect candidate for viral potential.

What is a juicy carrot for a Twitter influencer? Simple enough – they wouldn’t be influencers if they’re not interested in influencing. The carrot is more exposure and a substantially increased following on their Twitter account (and off) supported by Nova.
But the even juicier carrot is offering the person a way of experiencing 30 days to enhance his/her life. A lot of major social media influencers (like @iconic88) become that way because other people are attracted to their passion for something in life – so you’d find there’d be a lot of interest (by people that can build even greater interest too)

Other points

• How many times his/her #2dayIsNOVA message gets retweeted will be one indication of finding the best influencer
• using “2Day” in the hashtag #2DayIsNOVA will get under the skin of your major competitor
• Once you find a winner, you’d work out with that person 365 feasible things to do that makes each day NOVA
• You’d be looking for the nice side of reality TV effect (giving an ordinary Sydneysider the opportunities to fulfil his/her dreams). It’s a bonus if this person wants to give something back (on some of these 365 days) like charitable acts etc. The positivity effect will enhance the reputation of the campaign – so this might be the sort of person you’d look for.
• I’d say the cost couldn’t reach anywhere near for the spend of a major ad campaign or even a prized billboard space but you’d manage substantially more eyeballs (that continues and increases through the 30 NOVA days).
• The winner won’t need to be on a gruelling schedule like that of the “Best job in the world” – 140 characters is much easier than a blog.

If you like this idea the charity I’d promote is Monica’s Rescues (http://www.doggierescue.com).

They look after and find homes for abandoned dogs. They helped me once and I haven’t yet had a chance to help them back.

They are also near going under right now – so they could really do with a helping hand.

The standard belief in most organisations is money incentives spur greater performance. Reward the behaviour you want and get more of that behaviour. B. F. Skinner showed how this worked a treat for pigeons, see below.... but what about those of us without the awkward pigeon walk? What if we have no beak or wings? Will this work for humans?

Apparently we're not as much like pigeons as some have us believe and it's been said the makers of the cartoon "The Simpsons" created the character "Principal Skinner" after B.F. The below clip might give us some insight on that one..

The claim here is once a job requires more than just mechanical skills, monetary incentives / bonuses etc. don't work. Strangely still, the larger the reward the poorer performance. It goes against logic and that's a very human thing to do - so no surprises there.

Some might not see the merit of employees doing more than just manual-based repetitive tasks, but if your company requires real innovation (and most would in such a dynamic market) then it appears monetary incentives are not the way to go. If a person is paid enough "to take issue of money off the table", what then can a company or a manager do to motivate staff?

According to the claim, when we want better performance, we need to give staff:

• Autonomy - a level of self-direction (apologies to the micro-manager)
• Mastery - helping people become the best in their craft (so they feel like they are making a real contribution)
• Purpose - an overriding purpose for the greater good (just amassing a lot money, probably doesn't fit here)

The idea of purpose is an interesting one. A post by Techguerilla talks about that using a slightly different term but one with that's perhaps more apt: "Intent":

Intent is essentially the combination of transparency with authenticity. Put simply, if your companies belief system is based on the premise that the greater the value you provide to your customers the more successful you will be then you have nothing to worry about, because the focus of your efforts across the organization should be in alignment with that belief. If on the other hand it is based on the premise that margins trump all, then I'd highly recommend treading carefully in the social media spectrum as it excels in exposing your true intent.

If that doesn't help us to rethink the way things are usually done, here's a great video about motivating pigeons:

I was recently asked to review KeywordCompetitor.com, a real-time Keyword Research Tool. I was interested since needing to implement some competitive keyword research and was a little lacking on the tools in the arsenol to do so

Having exhausted Google Keyword Suggestion, tools.seobook.com and even Brad Callen's stuff for insights into what's working for direct competitors, I thought this was worth a shot.

After initial trials, I was amazed I see how this tool helps you track your competitors in real time, improve your SEO and PPC campaign, through getting daily reports and monitoring any changes made by your competition. Helps you react quicker and also make a few necessary changes in your own campaign. There’s other keyword tools out there, but for its Price and Features, Keyword Competitor get my vote!

Post what?

I read a research paper by Douglas Holt about advertising and Postmodernism.  Holt's takes us through how Postmodern brands by appearing not to care if people bought their products, influenced a whole lot of people to spend. 

A good visual example is the 90s Kate Moss ads - there's a clear disinterest for whatever brand she might be wearing. You can sense her apathy, even after the possible three way interlude (with two equally apathetic looking lads). 

So, with a skepticism of  the "hard sell" rampantly high, brands appearing disinterested were by default seen as more authentic. This is call the "anti-branding" branding and is still very much used today. 

Gladly we can thank Kate (not God - he's dead) and the overuse of "anti-branding" for making this technique cliche. So instead of pointing to a brand's authenticity - it makes them look fake.

.

Why a new strategy?

Apparently we're in the post-postmodern paradigm so advertisers really need a new set of tools. We're also in the era of social media, allowing just about anyone that hits the right social nerve to be heard by a very large uncontrollable audience. This has created a forced transparency on organizations.

The good news for business is there are options: 

• Embrace and potentially capitalize on it
• Curl up, shut the door and wait for it all to go away (although it could be a very long wait)

Choose to embrace?

Holt points to the "citizen brand"  - that finds social authenticity by actively contributing to society. This is not just about our brands being accountable, but about how much they contribute on a social, cultural or even creative level - becoming a new measure of a brand's authenticity.

The interesting thing is it's actually a very powerful way to create attention, brand advocacy and a lot of sales. There's a couple of recent inspiring TED talks that illustrate this point well.

The power of uplifting stage-change

This is explained well by David Logan's ideas on tribal leadership. He spends a lot of time figuring out how key decisions are being made in corporate environments. Things get done based on the belief systems of groups that Logan calls "tribes". He breaks these belief systems into 5 stages from a "life sucks" angst to a free minded value-orientated "life is great" enthusiasm.

When a tribe moves closer to "life is great" this inspires direct action and an abundance of creativity, innovation and results such as exponential sales. When tribes move towards "life sucks", stagnation and fear-based environments persist. Tribal leaders direct the tribe and are agents of stage change. Here uplifting is not about overdosing on positivity, but expanding beliefs systems that inspire action, energy and produce prosperity.

The economy of experience

I'm typing on a computer and you're probably looking at one now. This couch I'm sitting on and this TV in front of me - all manufactured with a particular human intent in mind - to provide entertainment, comfort, shelter etc. etc. The fact that the majority of things that make up our modern lives are so manufactured, it's no wonder there's a market for authentic experiences. 

So, in an over-saturated market, our experience differentiates one brand's offering from countless others. Joseph Pine talks about this in terms of company's achieving the  "real real"  - true to themselves and are what they say they are. This is how a company creates experiences of authenticity for consumers. Put in another way, when a brand's offering takes our mundane, everyday experiences and transforms it to something else, something renewing or inspiring - not only does it stand out but we're more than willing to pay top dollar for. 

Uplifting experiences

What if a company created highly differentiated brand experiences that brings people to a "life is great" mentality? Brand advocacy would shoot through the roof and so would profits. 

Say this brand's offering is authentic (true to itself) wouldn't it's marketing need to reflect this (are what they say they are)? So the "real real" marketing practice would also need to be creating transformative (stage-changing) experiences.

Free transformative experiences

From the consumers side, marketing is free (it comes out of the company's pocket) and if that company's marketing is creating transformative experiences, an interesting thing happens - people start seeking marketing. There's no push with this style of marketing - it's all pull and that makes a lot of sense because it's uplifting, transforming and free!

What about the bottom line?

I subscribe to a lot of "internet guru" emails who seem to love talking about "the law of reciprocity". It's basic premise is this: when you give something of value, you'll receive not only equal value but a lot more. Others call it "positive guilt"  - I get  a lot of cool stuff from you for free, so I'll soon feel obliged to give back and even show my appreciation for your kindness by giving more.

So if the advertising and marketing becomes about creating highly differentiated stage-changing experiences for consumers, we might even see the situation where brand advocates "fund" such marketing experiences by buying the product/s.

Who's already moving in this direction?

I'm just going to pull a few from my very short term memory but there's a lot brands putting "experience" at the forefront of  their marketing. Stage-changing might not be at the forefront of these campaigns, but uplifting generally would be.

• Volkswagen, Fun theory - replaced every day items fun versions of the same in a cityscape - to test the idea that fun changes the way we do things
• McDonald's, Inner child - created a large scale McDonald's children's playground for adults in a cityscape
• Coke, Open happiness - Non branded music video celebrating happiness - connection to Coke only found after an internet search
• TED, Ideas that spread - the whole uplifting experience is what TED is all about: bringing together multidiciplinary thought leadership in one forum. It's "free" marketing is really the free content available online.

Some more WHAT IFs?

Potential ideas that came to mind while writing this.

What if...

• An international brand creates a social media run competition inviting budding documentary film-makers to mark-out a virtual (global-reaching) logo and share doco-stories about people and places on the way (could be a Guinness Book of Records contender - biggest logo).
• Some sort of telecommunications brand creates a tree style (3D) browsing connection application  - see who is near you that likes the same thing - combines mobile phone positioning technology with social media connections and your various interests / associations
• A software brand creates user nurtured virtual tree ("The Self Tree") as an mobile app that grows in relation to a user's daily goals and intentions. Users can interact and see their trees in a virtual forest of others
• An information brand  creates a social media voting space that enables people to tweet-vote on a policy by policy basis - about understanding the pulse of the people to affect change
• A youth brand via a Facebook application enables users to build virtual artworks that identify themselves / groups - like a virtual graffiti tagging that could appear through online spaces or in virtual worlds like Second Life
• A charity brand donates $1 for every 10 tweets that uses the brand name and a unique uplifting tagline
• A major global brand social crowd sources everyone needed to produce a full-blown movie around an uplifting theme
• A digital brand creates a dedicated online space for an impoverished person (i.e. homeless), so rather than begging for change that person gives printed flyers with a web address where people can hear his / her story - hopes / dreams / struggles and donate via Paypal (changing lives through digital!)

That paper by Douglas B Holt can be found here: http://www.lombard-media.lu/pdf/0308_brands.pdf

Images courtesy of Photolibrary - Get creative with stock photos, stock footage & production music from photolibrary.com

It’s been a few months since I got through Martin Lindstrom’s book, Buyology. It came to my mind again recently in a conversation with a friend about movie product placement and subliminal advertising. What struck me was the idea a lot of common, even logical notions about marketing are often just way off the mark.

Take the example of the rotting cancerous body parts decorating cigarette boxes - you’d expect these images would make people think twice about buying cigarettes, right? A group of smokers selected by a market research company also had the same conclusion. They all ticked the right boxes that determined this to be a major deterrent but the results from fMRI scans showed something entirely different.

These images where shown to actually activate the brain’s reward / pleasure pathways strengthening a smoker’s compulsion to smoke. It makes for a win-win situation for the tobacco companies - having anti tobacco lobbies funding advertising that triggers your desire to smoke!

So if the anti-smoking tactic is doing the reverse of what it sets out to do, would pictures of obese people on Big Mac wrappings help sell more burgers? It’s likely they wouldn’t, but I think that’s the point Lindstrom makes - even with all the raw data from market research, we’re still faced with a lot of assumptions about why certain marketing ideas work and others just don’t and it’s often those ‘common sense’ propositions that tend to get in the way of the truth locked inside our gray matter!

Don’t know, ask a Neuroscientist (in the making)…

I couldn’t find much explanation as to why those particular anti-tobacco images trigger cigarette cravings, so I spoke to a budding Neuroscientist about it. Her take was it was not so much the images’ disturbing content that’s important, but that those images trigger significant neural activity. It’s likely the parts of the brain responsible for addictive tendencies is already highly developed in heavy smokers, so to give an analogy - their neural pathways are more like open highways to the pleasure / reward centers than the normal suburban roads for other people.

Another idea is the pleasure / reward centers of the brain being closely linked to the pain centers, work like a balance. A disturbing image that creates a level of pain (in this case emotional) would automatically trigger a pleasure seeking response to retain equilibrium.

Although whatever reasoning holds, the fact remains that all this stuff is happening before we’re even aware of it…

So if I’m not consciously making the buying decisions, then who is?

Lindstrom points out how our buying decisions are far from conscious or even logical. Interestingly too, Neuroscience tells us that consciousness is but a fragment of the huge amount of information that our brains process at any given moment - evolved with efficiency in mind (ignore the pun), we can only focus on what our brains have already deemed 'necessary' for our awareness. And that little awareness we do have (from all the available sensory information) is further filtered through expectations. The human eye for example, has a very small focal point that perceives color and detail. Whereas the receptors responsible for peripheral vision are monochromatic and can't register the detail required, so one's memory and expectations fills in the blanks.

To demonstrate this how sharp (or not) our peripheral vision is, just watch this video:

It’s a little disconcerting knowing the very small drop in an ocean of our available sensory input is filtered by a whole host of automatic assumptions - and it’s all happening without our awareness involved. So the idea we’re making sound, objective decisions is at best flawed when our brains are only ever giving us part of the story!

If consciousness plays only a minor role, why not market to the unconscious?

With so much of the decision process happening under the surface, it’s a wonder why any marketing strategy bothers appealing to common logic such as with vendor comparisons or price busting etc. Though a lot of us will justify our buying decisions after the event with a whole host of logical arguments - probe a little deeper we’re likely hear: “I don’t know, it just felt right”, “I went with my gut feeling…” etc. and this all points to our logic’s dead end.

The problem is, the use of fMRIs or even EEGs (trade tools of Neuromarketing) is far from cheap, so if we’ve no other method to ‘hear’ the unconscious how do we communicate to it?

Dreams, myths and brands?

It may help recognizing the language of the unconscious is basically symbolic. A symbol is metaphor loaded with individual (personal) and often universal (archetypal) meaning. An attention to our dreams will likely verse us well in this regard or at at least help us gain further insight into how symbols communicate meaning.

The interesting thing about symbols is that they’re not static, you can’t pin them down to one meaning with the “101 Dream Symbols” book in hand. They’re relevant to time, place and person and in that regard they’re transitional. On the other hand, when a symbol resonates with something archetypal, for example found within our age-old stories and myths, it becomes a source of cultural significance. By understanding how relevant (transitional) symbols such as brands can strongly resonate with archetypal or universal symbols, we may begin to learn how some brands trigger strong emotional connections and have the type of mass appeal that turn them into cultural icons.

Article by David Wall originally on Photolibrary News

Images courtesy of Photolibrary - Get creative with stock photos, stock footage & production music from photolibrary.com

There's not a lot of industry news sites that offer the same extent of fresh articles and opinions throughout the day with a real sense of community input. Some of us at Photolibrary already find Mumbrella viewings as habitual as coffee, so we thought we'd throw a few questions to Tim Burrowes the editor of Mumbrella to find out what's in the Mumbrella mix that keeps reeling us back in for more.

Tim Burrowes aka Dr Mumbo - first Studio 33 appearance:

Post by David Wall, originally posted on Photolibrary News

There's bound to be controversy when you start talking about core features of anything, especially something like advertising and marketing - but say we invite a little discussion (and controversy) and state the obvious that essentially we're trying to address a communication problem.

The problem is simple - you the so and so of the whatever company needs to communicate that your product has value enough for someone to take notice and relinquish some hard-earned cash. A few ideas get thrown around and added to a document titled [fill in the blanks] strategy or [fill in the blanks] campaign etc. Essentially, we're still attempting to solve a communication problem.

So, what's this communication thing?

Because we're reducing things left right and center, why not do it even further by saying communication is all about gaining a mutual understanding? If we don't understand each other, communication gets really tricky.

And how does understanding come about?

Strip it down once more and lets say that at the very least when you can connect to some type of shared experience/s, understanding will follow. At that point the billion dollar question is how does a brand connect with people's shared experiences?

Your product at some point must have come about to "fill a gap in the market". This is essentially saying, there is a human need that is not being met or there's a human problem that's not being solved and that's why the product is there. So whatever it is you sell somehow solves people's problems and meets a human need. This is not necessarily a material need - there's markets for emotional needs, economic needs, intellectual needs etc. So the shared experience involves the conditions that brought about the need for your product to exist in the first place.

Some companies go beyond marketing and branding and ask the question: why?

Why does the company exist? What is its contribution? etc.

These questions are not esoteric but are at the core of knowing how brands can make a real connection and find social authenticity. When your brand does that, it becomes a cultural resource.

The economic drive is secondary to it's primary purpose that is about how it contributes or how it creates connections and builds meaning in society. Economics then becomes a value reality-check that tells us just how well it's achieving its primary goals - if it's socially relevant, if it still adds value, value is given back to it (in terms of money). And this keeps the product alive in the realm of economic exchange.

To put it simply: when your product is not about money, people throw money at it.

Why?

Because when making money is a primary activity drive, quality suffers - your product is no longer any good. On this level we start making lots of shiny but empty things and marketing becomes more a form of deceit. The purpose for these things is not to add value, not to solve any real problems but to get the most out of the least. Eventually the veneer cracks and businesses fall.

It's much easier to start with quality, marketing is then about communicating this quality and your company's value is rewarded by economic value.

That's why we're beginning to see at Photolibrary that what you actually want is quality - and we have an abundance of quality images, footage and music. The next step for us is to keep finding better ways to show you the quality content we have, help you easily find it and improve the systems that enable you to do so.

2010 will prove an exciting year here at Photolibrary, be prepared to be surprised!

Article by David Wall originally on Photolibrary News

Images courtesy of Photolibrary - Get creative with stock photos, stock footage & production music from photolibrary.com