360DigitalInfluence

You’ve successfully passed through “phase 1″ of your company’s social media evolution where just a few expert voices represented your brand online.  Now you are handing over the keys to a larger, more representative group of speakers.  How can you make sure that this proliferation increases, not fragments, your impact online?  How do you prevent someone going off the reservation?  Through guardrails, governance, and training (oh my!).  Here’s a checklist from basic fundamental to advanced degree: continue reading

I don’t particularly enjoy business books.  The format is predictable, most  are 80% too long with no salient points beyond the first 2 chapters and too often, they are self righteous works from pundits with scant real world examples to back up their platitudes.

TOUGH LOVE, a new business ebook presented as an innovative Hollywood screenplay defies the issues above in both format and content and manages to entertain in the meantime.  You may know the author, John Moore, as the WOM Enthusiast at WOMMA, the Chief Marketingologist at Brand Autopsy, or the author of 2006’s Tribal Knowledge.  While Tribal Knowledge shared “Business Wisdom Brewed from the Grounds of Starbucks Corporate Culture”, TOUGH LOVE approaches the same company (thinly-veiled as Galaxy Coffee) at a very different time in its business - the present.   Galaxy has hit a rough patch after wandering away from its core beliefs while chasing the “growth” dragon.  While the story is woven as a screenplay, the lessons - John’s thoughts on the brand challenges from the perspective of a former insider - are shared through the interactive “Marketer’s Notes” throughout the .pdf.  Here are my favorite 4 TOUGH LOVE takeaways:

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If you’re wondering who owns the eyebrow-lift-inducing Facebook vanity “hotasianbuns”, look no further than Chicago’s own Wow Bao.  Wow Bao is a concept of Lettuce Entertain You, but it has a social media voice and plan of action all its own.   Geoff Alexander, Wow Bao’s Managing Partner joined me on a panel at WOMMA’s School of WOM and shared enough of those elements to make me want to learn more.  The personality and choices that Wow Bao has made qualify it as a Brand Worthy of a Weekend (BWOW) - a brand for whom there is a passionate set of fans that would give up a weekend with their families to come “immerse” themselves in the brand - learn more, meet the people behind the brand, and want to have a hand in crafting the brand’s future.  So what’s Wow Bao’s recipe for a talkable, weekend-worthy brand? continue reading

Thus far, 5000 inspired Johnny Cash fans around the planet have contributed painted frames to an online video of the Man in Black eerily singing “Ain’t No Grave” off  his forthcoming (final?) album of the same name.  Are these hardcore Johnny Cash “fans”?  Doubtful.  I think it is far more likely that this has tapped into the deepest of our human desires.

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Yesterday I ran into an old friend of mine who I hadn’t seen IRL (in real life) since 2005.  He had, however, recently reached out through social networks to ask me to become a fan of a band I had never heard of - Coventry Road.  The fortuitous in-person encounter allowed me to ask about the motivation for the “become a fan of” request.  He told me that the first question club owners now ask is not “where’s your demo” but “how many Facebook fans do you have”?  Far from the upstart organizing tool of 4-5 years ago, building a digital audience is now a requirement for a band starting out - not a nice to have or an advantage.  continue reading

This year’s SXSWi was a cacophony of parties, cowboy hatted street teams and networking with a few panels and prepared speakers tucked in between. My extreme desire to sift logic from chaos and the peace of a few hours of distance has left me mulling the following 4 takeaways:

Content Creators Must Get Paid – If you braved the distraction of a fire alarm and came back into the building, you were privy to an educated man’s verbal smackdown the likes of which I had not previously seen in public – Marc Cuban vs. Boxee’s Avner Ronen. continue reading

The theme throughout all the answers to TED 2010’s title “What the World Needs Now”was the need for innovation in everything from nuclear energy to education to foreign aid to disease prevention to music to graphic design.   So where does the world need to innovate?

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Day 2 of TED2010 covered everything from suspended animation in humans to the need for better democratic argument in our society.  What continues to be top of mind, however, are issues of id and identity.  These were touched on in some way by 4chan founder Christopher “moot” Poole, game designer Jan McGonigal, and multiple demos from both Google and MSFT.

4chan is an insanely popular and prolific anonymous imageboard that has no memory or archive - threads are deleted after a few days.  While I don’t know what the causal relationship is, obscenity, porn, and rage run rampant in the environment of anonymity and inpermanence.  Is it a collective online id?  If you could say or post whatever makes you feel good regardless of how it will make you look or impact reputation, who would you be online? Maybe, but its not entirely bad - the community has come together and organized to do everything from protest scientology to using online tools to find and punish a board member who uploaded a video of abusing his cat.  The community even organized to game Time.com’s voting system for 100 most influential people and got their founder a #1 berth. Now, “moot” is afraid that the coming specter of universal online identity will make havens like 4chan an endangered species.
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It would be impossible to wrap up the first day of TED in 1 post.  Themes emerged around the power of diet (to do everything from prevent angiogenesis leading to cancer to reversing childhood obesity), taking scientific lessons from space and spiders to improve our daily lives, and the Nobel-winner-documented delta between happiness and economics (hint: means, not end).

The theme that is most relevant to our ongoing discussion here, however, is the possible societal echoes of the transparency that social media facilitates.   continue reading

This week I participated in a Social Media Week New York panel “Putting the Social in CSR” along with Bonin Bough from Pepsico, Deb Berman from Just Means, and Chrysi Philalithes from (RED).  Its an extremely timely topic and one we have been thinking a lot about  from a number of different angles.  The great news?  Social media provides the media for corporations to leverage their Corporate Social Responsibility investments to yield greater fruit for both the customer and the beneficiary. continue reading