• What are you doing with your minutes?

    Posted on January 30th, 2012 by and currently 0 commenting.

    2011 from hey_rabbit on Vimeo.

    I found this on GOOD. Oh MY. Have I told you how much I love almost every bit of content they produce and curate?

    This video is no exception. Seems that Madeline captured a bit of video everyday for a year of her life, then edited each video down to one second for each day.

    The random minutes of life collectively make up our life’s bigger story in such a magical way, don’t they?

    The other day Geno and I were talking about a CEO client we admire that takes over an hour to walk from the building entrance to her office. She takes the time to stop and talk to her employees and customers. Geno’s take on that: “People don’t realize that something magical can start just by asking a one employee or customer for a cup of coffee and listening to what they have to say.” Then doing it again and again and again.

    Word of mouth is at it’s core conversation and conversation is a powerful thing. It’s the collective conversations that unite and change organizations from the inside out.

    As a person and a marketer or a leader, how are you using your minutes? Are you heads down from one task to another, or are you sucking in all that each minute truly offers?

  • Co-blogging Goodness Round 2: Eric and Jamie Tackle Scaling Community Online and Offline

    Posted on January 25th, 2012 by and currently 2 commenting.

    Co-bloggin’ goodness, round 2: One is a seasoned corporate marketer working for Best Buy. The other is a small-agency young-gun in a constant quest for his spurs. Both are passionate about making positive change in the industry, and they want to share their thoughts with you. Jamie Plesser and Eric Dodds bring you the second post in a monthly co-blogging series that tackles tasty marketing topics from both sides of the line. Meet the crew:

    Eric: I was raised in Upstate South Carolina and roped in by a small, big-hearted agency called Brains on Fire. I’ve had my hand in qualitative research, account management, community management, and even a little bit of strategy. You can usually find me hiking outdoors, tinkering with a bicycle, or tackling the next improvement project at my house. (Oh yeah, I just started using Twitter again, too.)

    Jamie: I’m a native Kansas Citian but call Minneapolis home. The Twin Cities rock on many levels…except for the length of the winter. Work-wise, my gig is in the consumer marketing space at the corporate HQ for Best Buy. I dig live music. I wish I was better than a novice guitar player. I love Kansas Jayhawk basketball. And I am a Royals fan in hibernation. (If you’re into the Twitter thing, you can find chatting or ranting with friends and colleagues over there.)

    This month’s menu: “Scaling community online and offline: is online easier to scale than offline? If so, how? What are the main barriers to scaling offline?”

    ————————

    Dodds

    Ah, the online versus offline community discussion. I’m passionate about figuring out what role each plays for companies, so thinking through this month’s topic with Jamie has been really great.

    In the past two years I’ve actually had the privilege of being involved in both types of projects – one with a gigantic offline component, and one whose goal was online growth. For the offline project, my job was to beat the bricks to grow a grassroots community of both employees and customers. (Good times working with Jamie.) The other project focused on helping a company grow their online fan base, primarily through Facebook.

    When I think about both of those experiences, the simple answer to the question, “is scaling community online easier than offline,” is, absolutely. Why? For starters, it’s easier for both the companies and the customers – especially the customers. Click, click, done. Almost nonexistent barriers of entry.

    Looking past simple answers, though, that this question about scaling begs an even bigger question: what is the purpose of scaling?

    Answering the purpose question is critical because online and offline are a [hack saw and a razor blade - come up with a different example?]: they both cut things, but they work best in very different situations, and produce very different outcomes.

    Here’s are some of the differences I learned working on those projects:

    Offline

    Without question, the work I did offline, which was for a relatively short time period compared to the year I put into Facebook for the other client, the connections that people made through the program were extremely strong. Far stronger than anything that developed online in the same project. I remember single offline events where meeting and working with people produced hours and hours of unsolicited investment in the community by members, hard-working promotion of the program by members, and actual friendships that lasted long after the program ended.

    I remember getting emails about the program from members 6 months after I’d met them, asking how I was doing me and updating me on their life / their involvement with the brand. That kind of strong-tie connection, though, doesn’t come without blood sweat and tears:

    Barriers to scaling offline:

    • Time: Building things offline is much, much slower. It’s a long-term investment that needs time to build and grow. From my experience, face-to-face relationships mature much more slowly than online relationships, and forging those bonds takes time. (How many ‘friends’ can you make online in a day?)
    • Money: Building community offline is much, much more expensive. Offline events and programs can drain budgets with surprising speed. Traveling is expensive. Offline collateral is expensive. Coordination is expensive. Personnel are expensive.
    • Manpower: Executing awesome offline programs takes a lot of manpower, and a lot of man hours, and in my case, sleeping on the floor of a band’s touring van for a few weeks. Depending on the type of event, you’re looking at setup, tear-down, staffing, support, and more. It’s a handful, and it can take a lot of hands to do it well.

    Beating the bricks offline: some connections I made on the road.

    Online (social media)

    The social media team that did the work of building an online fan base was only two people: me and someone from the brand. We had tons of amazing support from our managers and internal teams, but as I look back, the amount of growth that the two of us achieved by being the brand’s voice on Facebook is pretty amazing. Using content alone, we were able to almost triple the number of fans in less than a year.

    We fostered as deep of relationships as we could through that content and online conversation, but here’s what really struck me: the deepest relationships and strongest word of mouth that developed were a small number of instances where an initial online conversation led to an offline surprise and delight for the fan.

    Through some rather sticky situations, we also figured out that for this brand, social media was a really good way to disseminate important information about events at lightening speed, or keep people up to date on play-by-play happenings they might be interested in. It’s amazing how quickly information can move on the Internet.

    Lastly, we determined that for certain types of customer service, Facebook was simply more convenient and effective for both us and the customer.

    Like offline, though, all of the progress we made didn’t come without lots of hard work, but there were also some barriers that are unique to the medium:

    Problems with online scaling:

    • Measurement: Proving return on investment for social media is just plain hard. Not that it’s easy for other mediums, but since online is a different tool, it requires different reporting, which can be hard to sell.
    • Ease of coming and going: Since social media relationships are heavily weak-tie, your fans can leave at a moment’s notice, and they do. Or they just ignore you. In my experience, few brands ever ‘earn the right’ to be a regular part of a customer’s social media landscape, mostly because the real goal is selling something to them.
    • Monetization: It varies by industry and company, but in my experience, sustainably monetizing social media beyond coupons, giveaways, and short-term promotions is very difficult.
    • Customer service investment: Online customer service is still takes an incredible amount of investment – it was the most laborious aspect of anything we did on Facebook – and in some ways, it wasn’t ever as good as human-to-human offline service.

    Why are you scaling?

    I come back to the purpose for scaling: everyone wants a huge audience, but to what end? What type of scaling makes sense for your brand? What type of investment makes most sense for your long term growth?

    Successful scaling of either online or offline grows out of solid, measurable goals, and my guess is that many companies will use a smart combination of both.

    ————————

    Jamie

    The idea of brands building communities always brings a wry smile to my face.  Why?  First off, I believe that the majority of people within companies don’t have a good understanding of how brands should think about consumer communities and how they can help solve marketing challenges.  I’ve been in more meetings that I can count where the idea of building a community was suggested as a solution to a business or marketing challenge.  When in these meetings, I ask questions and seek to understand why there is a need to do something community oriented.  I usually get an answer that has to do with “connecting with the influencer” or “getting to the mommy bloggers.”  I’ve found that if I hear these rote explanations it’s pretty much a red flag that the people aren’t really sure of what they are talking about.

    The second reason why I’m fond of this topic is that I’ve worked on the front lines of trying to bring together a group of kindred spirits and I know how hard it is.  It is not easy work but when done well it can be rewarding.

    On the surface, today’s co-blogging question is pretty easy to answer from a national brand perspective.  Online approaches to scaling a community are easier than offline.

    But the important question is why is that such as easy answer?  Really, it gets back to one word in the original question: scale.  National brands are built on the premise of trying to leverage economies of scale.  When it comes to trying to either connect with communities or trying to develop one, digital and online platforms represent the opportunity to build scale quickly while being able to manage costs and maintain efficiencies.

    What’s the cost for a brand to establish a Facebook page? Zero.  A Twitter account? Zero.  A Google+ page.  Zero.  A Tumblr page? Zero.  An Instagram account?  Zero.

    Now I’ll admit that I’m being a bit facetious here.  I know that brands do spend legitimate money on developing digital experiences, spend media dollars on platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and invest resources on teams of community managers.  But my point is that it costs roughly the same amount of investment to build a digital community presence for one person as it does for 100,000 people.

    While digital tools represent the ability to get to scale cheaper and easier, my perspective is that automatically going with this approach may overlook what I think is a very important component to communities: the power of personal connectedness.  If you look at data from Keller Fay, you know that far and away the majority of word-of-mouth conversations happen offline.  If you look at data from Nielsen, you know that active social media users are even more social offline.

    To me, this signals that there are benefits for brands to build offline connections with consumers that may not translate automatically to communities in the digital space.  This doesn’t mean that it cannot happen within an online environment; rather, it may not have the same depth as it does offline.

    For brands to be well served in community efforts, I believe they require groups of kindred spirits to come together and connect.  Certain brands have this happen innately in their consumer base and those folks aggregate together naturally – both offline and online.  For these brands, it’s easier to go with a strict digital approach and let the offline connections foster on their own.

    For other brands where this connection with consumers is not quite as organic, then honest discussions need to take place about what the brand is looking to achieve through the creation of a community, what the expectations are, and whether those expectations are achievable through a strictly digital approach to the program.

    (Photos courtesy of creative commons license: Jeremy Brooks.)

  • Unplugging is the New Black.

    Posted on January 9th, 2012 by and currently 4 commenting.


    Photo via Libby Williams. Grab a cup of coffee this is a long one.

    A friend passed this article on to me.

    The Joy of Quiet.

    Oh. My. Goodness. Take a few quiet minutes sometime today and read it to the end.

    I have. Twice.

    I have always loved this quote from Thoreau (keep in mind he was born in the early 1800s):

    We have more and more ways to communicate and less and less to say.

    About a week ago, the very same friend who sent me this article casually announced over dinner,

    “I deleted my Facebook account today”.

    “Really?”, I said in disbelief.

    “Yup.”

    Seems the new Facebook timeline made him painfully aware that he’s been saying the same thing over and over for the last three to four years. And it made him feel foolish.

    “It’s just a time sucker and I don’t have time to waste.”, he said.

    I saw a stat recently that said the average Facebook user spends over five hours a month on the site. Wow. That’s a lot of time, in my humble opinion. And that’s just the average.

    Here’s another thing. I have often said that Facebook and social media make me lonely. Because the truth of the matter is most people jump on Facebook (or any social online tool) when they are alone (physically or emotionally).

    I feel that in my heart.

    Yeah, yeah. There are those of you so happy you have to share. I get it. And I do it too. Happy is good and worth spreading.

    But I love this line and think it is worth repeating from the Joy of Quiet.

    Joy is the kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.

    Some things are meant to be shared and personally I do think of my Facebook account as an online scrapbook. It makes me happy to glance at photos of my friends and my kids from time to time. BUT it can’t replace the real thing.

    It can’t replace real connections.

    As the article said, the information revolution came without an instruction manual. As people and especially as marketers a manual might have been nice in hindsight. I have always believed marketers got a little too overzealous about social media and the significance it held for their brands and organizations.

    Yeah, Yeah. I know those of us at Brains on Fire sound like a broken record about this notion.

    But what is exciting me lately about this latest discussion, is I do believe the world of marketing will see all this “unplugging” as a wake up call. And perhaps marketers will finally realize that social media tools have a wonderful place in connecting employees and customers, but they alone are not the total solution. And surely we are coming to realize these “essential” truths:

    It’s quality of relationships over quantity.

    The real beauty of creating online relationships with your customers is the ability it gives you to connect offline.
    And even though offline takes work, it’s SO worth it.

    One of my favorite lines from our book is from an interview with the VP of Brand Marketing of Fiskars talking about the value of the Fiskateers:

    “For me, it’s not about the numbers. It’s about growing even deeper relationships. Today we are constantly engaging the actual people that use our products. They are absolutely fueling better products.”

    And trust me. Fiskars gets the value of offline engagement. It’s part of their brilliant and courageous success.

    Nowadays we really DO have more and more ways to connect and that’s a good thing.

    But as Thoreau suggested many years ago, let’s live our REAL lives in a way that creates meaningful stories and relationships. Let’s create content and experiences and share knowledge as brands that is truly relevant to our customer’s lives. Let’s add value that is beyond simple distraction. Let’s connect and surprise and delight and inspire.

    Then we will have something meaningful and truly worth talking about.

    And we will ignite that wonderful, magical, powerful marketing tool called Word of Mouth.

    Okay, your turn. Let me know what you think about The Joy of Quiet and how the new trend in unplugging is relevant to marketing?

  • It’s 2012 and It’s Still About People…

    Posted on January 4th, 2012 by and currently 69 commenting.

    I am so excited about 2012. Aren’t you?

    I love the start of things.

    We’re kicking off the New Year with some fun and exciting news.

    You can now LISTEN to Brains on Fire, Igniting Powerful Sustainable Word of Mouth Movements thanks to Audible.com. Yeah, we’re kind of excited about it around here. Paul Strikwerda, the narrator, has been a joy to work with on this project. We fell in love with his accent and his story.

    From Paul:
    It’s a narrators’ dream come true: to record a book about word-of-mouth movements. That’s my bread and butter!

    Each week, a lot of scripts come my way. Some of them resonate with me. Many of them don’t.

    After I had read the first chapter of this particular book, something strange happened to me. I felt an unusual but pleasant tingling at the back of my head. By the end of the second chapter I knew what it was: my brain had started to catch fire, but why?

    I think it’s a unique combination of ideas and personalities in the book, and the way the story is told. Instead of talking at their readers, the authors are talking to them, pulling them into the various campaigns and making them of part the process.

    Secondly, Brains on Fire is not some dry description of a theoretical marketing model. It’s based on the grassroots experience of real people and real companies with flaws, failures and surprising successes.

    While finishing my first read, I realized that Brains on Fire had touched me on a different, more personal level too. My wife has Multiple Sclerosis and she is very active in a movement promoting awareness, understanding and continued research into the causes of this mysterious disease.

    As the economic tide was turning, it became more and more challenging to mobilize people and find the funds to fight MS. Reading Brains on Fire gave me inspiration and practical strategies to keep the momentum going and the movement growing.

    I hope you’ll have a listen!

    So… just for fun and to help celebrate our newest addition to the family with YOU, we are going to give away 20 audio books to the first 20 of you to comment on our blog today.

    (You’ll need to share your email with us so we can shoot you an audible gift password. Or if you’re shy to do that and you make it the top 20 list, just email beth@brainsonfire.com!)

    Happy listening!

    P.S. We’d love to hear what you think. You can listen to a two minute sample read on audible.com.

  • Magic.

    Posted on January 3rd, 2012 by and currently 7 commenting.

    After taking a little time away, we’re back on board the ship at Brains on Fire and ready for all twenty twelve has to offer.

    Since I’m guessing everyone is super busy today, I’ve decided to simply share this short video. Can’t remember how I found it (facebook, maybe?) But it reminded me that magic often happens when you least expect it.

    I love that about life!

    May your heart be WIDE open to all the little (and the big) magical joys this new year will bring. Turn the sound up.

    Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

    OX, Robbin

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