Brains on Fire

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  Inspiration.

  Posted on February 6th, 2012 by Robbin and currently 8 commenting.

  
  The Erics, looking for inspiration.

  Hello! Hope you’re excited about the week ahead of you. I am.

  About a year or so ago, I posted a blog asking YOU a simple question. And since I LOVED the answers and they all inspired me, I am asking again…

  I really need you guys today.

  I love writing. Think I have shared this before, but I believe writing inspires thinking and exploring and sharing. And thinking and exploring and sharing are good things.

  If you are reading this and hanging out with us, I have to believe you think we add value in your life.

  So, I have a question for you:

  If you and I could spend an entire day together — or if you and anyone from Brains on Fire could spend an entire day together — out walking in the sunshine or drinking some beers or sitting on the side of a mountain, what would you want to talk about?

  I need a little bit of inspiration today. I guess we all do some days. And because I am crazy about you, I’d love for that inspiration to come from you.
  Send me some questions or just your thoughts. I promise I will use your inspiration wisely.

  OXOXOX,
  Robbin

  Tags: inspiration
• 

  Permission to love.

  Posted on January 26th, 2012 by Robbin and currently 3 commenting.

  
  This tiny little love note showed on my computer one afternoon. I keep it close by and still have no clue who wrote it.

  Some of our team has just returned from a long weekend of training for one of our clients. I love hearing the stories they bring back home from these experiences with our clients and their advocates. Alexis shared some of the emails she got when they returned today. After reading this amazing thread of heartfelt notes, Cordell sent me one of his classic one liners.

  It simply said:

  “It’s amazing what happens when you give people permission to love.”

  Our purpose at Brains on Fire is lofty, but real. We believe we are changing lives and one by one by one, we like to think we are changing the world. I believe with all my heart that Greg is right, we really do give people permission to love their customers, their employees, their purpose, their passions, their stories — simply by helping them find and shine a light on their true voice, spirit, soul, and meaning.
  
  Chime in. Do you give yourself permission to love? Have you seen that change and grow organizations for the better?

  Tags: Love, Permission to Love
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  Co-blogging Goodness Round 2: Eric and Jamie Tackle Scaling Community Online and Offline

  Posted on January 25th, 2012 by Eric Dodds 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.)

  Tags: brand community, Community, digital, economies of scale, Jamie Plesser, Marketing, offline, online, scaling, Social media
• 

  The Art of the Imperfect: Mix Tape

  Posted on January 23rd, 2012 by Geno and currently 0 commenting.

  Mix tapes were the social media of my teenage days. My friends and I carefully crafted playlists to share with each other, layering song after song in the hopes that we could produce a magical, imperfect mix tape. I’m not sure my goal was to ever make the perfect mix tape. I was always inspired to throw a random, wild card song in the mix, and it always got a response “Wow, that track #5 was something!”
   
  Even the artwork on our cassettes was magically imperfect. Drawn with colored pencils, magic markers and hand-written notes. More than a track listing, they were like musical diaries.
   
  But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s talk about friends, high school friends. My nickname in high school was “Freak.” Why? Because I walked the line of an athlete and I played in a band. My best friends became my friends through music. We made mix tapes to get to know each other, impress each other and inspire each other. Those tapes turned a car ride with friends into a Wayne’s World movie scene. And admit it, a mix tape was the perfect way to break the ice with the opposite sex. So, I think it’s pretty fair to say mix tapes were – and still are - social media.
   
  Today it’s hard to get your hands around all the social media we are creating. We all work so hard to create conversations and collect eyeballs – brands, marketers and people. Brands get frustrated at marketers if fans don’t like, post, comment, tweet and recommend. Marketers freak if people don’t do any of those things. Then you have people, everyday people, conditioned by the lure of social media gratification that says we should expect people to respond to all our photos, updates and tweets. I’m not judging – I do the same thing.
   
  We have busy lives in the real world and the virtual world. We dance between them with old friends, new friends, things we love and things we love to hate. That’s why sometimes I just want something to hold that’s real and imperfect, like a mix tape. They were a collection of a person’s likes, time and generosity. Something personal for another human being.
   
  I’m not saying you should make a mix tape for your client, your customer or a friend, but you could do something magically imperfect. Write a hand-written note. Invite someone for lunch. The point is the mix tape is about simple stuff you share in common with people you know. It’s you putting you into something that you hope will be meaningful to the recipient.
   
  And remember embrace imperfection… after all we’re all human. 

  Tags: Brains on Fire, geno church, Mixtapes, Social media, Word of Mouth
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  Permission to Dream.

  Posted on January 17th, 2012 by Robbin and currently 1 commenting.

  The other day a handful of us at Brains on Fire met to talk about something we seldom have time for these days.

  Brains on Fire.

  Cordell created, in normal Cordell fashion, a little keynote. On the screen in the front room of our offices were these words and a relaxing soundtrack in the background.

  HAPPY FUTURE.

  The next slide looked like this:
  

  Personally, simply giving myself permission to dream was a gift. And kicked off an entire day (and weekend really) of dreaming about what’s next for this tribe called Brains on Fire.

  So many days we forget to let go of what is right in front us (like our TO DO lists and meetings and deadlines). We forget to take time to think and dream about what could be, what we long to be a part of, what we want to happen.

  I have seen the power of this statement both in my personal life and at Brains on Fire.
  
  If you can see it, you can have it.

  So here is my gift for you and/or your team this Tuesday morning…

  Change the music and maybe even your location. Find a pen and some paper (or take your ipad and some tequila, whatever inspires you). Grab a few selfish and well-deserved moments and sit on a beach and dream about what you want to make happen next. Give yourself permission to dream.

  Happy Tuesday. Make it remarkable!

  P.S. Will you join me for a WOMMA Wednesday Webinar tomorrow at 1pm CT? Let me know if you can make it. I love to know who’s listening! Makes it more fun for both of us.

  Tags: Permission to Dream, Planning, Setting Goals