The other day I got a note in the mail. The old fashion “ink on paper” kind. It started like this:

Dearest Darling Robbin,

Hmmmm.

I have to tell you in the middle of my crazy, busy, over stimulated workday, those words stopped me dead in my tracks. I took a deep breath and smiled at the “over the top-ness” of this salutation. What came after that was nothing short of the kindest words anyone’s written to me in a long time. Just a couple of heartfelt observations mixed in with some wit and honesty.

It was a nice gentle break from the tasks in front of me.

This note was from a guy who I’ve known for sometime. We’re friends in the true sense of the word having lived as neighbors for a few years. But these days with our kids grown, we’re mostly business friends.

I thought to myself. How simple it is to write a note of gratitude. To sit quietly for a little part of your day and write fearlessly from the heart without the worry of sounding silly or unprofessional.

It was a nice reminder that kindness is underrated.

Don’t you think?

And you know what? Later that day, I found myself paying this unexpected kindness forward. Without even realizing it was happening really. Don’t you love how that works?

How will you use the power of kindness today?

Last weekend the weather was delightfully warm here in Greenville. The sun was shining, the birds were singing – it felt like spring. On one of several strolls with my dog, I came across three little boys playing with a box in their front yard. As I watched them play, it was obvious the box was not just a box. It was a fort, a playhouse, a tank, an infinite number of possibilities limited only by their imaginations.

My Saturday stroll was a good reminder of how differently we think as children. When kids look at a box, they don’t just see a box – they see possibilities. They see a box not as it is – but for everything it could be. Childhood is an infinite summer (even when it’s just a winter reprieve in late January.) As time marches on, we begin thinking more concretely. We see a box where we see a box. Our days cease to be defined by quickly melting popsicles and tire swings, bellyflops and neighborhood games of “Kick-the-Can.” We begin to mark our days and months with rituals of responsibility – bills paid, inboxes cleaned out, items marked off our TO DO list. Slowly, in a little boat for one, we allow the splishing and splashing of the tide to draw us out into the sea of adulthood, drifting further and further away from fun, imagination and possibility.

For the creative adult, we spend most of our lives trying to find a way to return to the eternal summer of childhood. A place where the mind and imagination work in harmony – one challenging the other to be better, do more and dream bigger. A time when mistakes were nothing to be feared, just a spark for improvisation. A moment when night writing with wildly twinkling sparklers made all of us feel like the poet laureate of our front yard.

Hemingway once said, “The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing.” I am inclined to agree.

Today I’m encouraging all of us to think differently. Tap into our imaginations. Change up the drive home. Stand on our heads. Challenge yourself to see something you’ve seen a thousand times before in a new light. Try to describe the taste of  a strawberry. Pick up a piece of sidewalk chalk and write a love letter to someone in your life. Practice seeing possibility instead of accepting reality. Find your inner child and give him/her a spin on the tire swing.

It’s Wednesday, after all.

ps: I stumbled across this video over the weekend. A look at well-known logos through the eyes of a 5-year-old. If you haven’t seen it – take a peek. And enjoy.

Me: “I need a suit tailored.”
Bill: “I charge [x dollars]. It will be perfect.”

I didn’t think much about it until a few days later, but when it did hit me, I realized how much impact his promise carried. It was the most starkly simple spoken promise I’d recieved as part of a purchase in a long time.

To some extent, craftsman-type services afford you the ability to make that promise. They’re black and white. Either my suit fits perfectly, or it doesn’t. Either my car is running right, or it isn’t. Either my sinks and showers drain properly, or they don’t.

I think that there’s something about ‘black and white’ things that we love as humans. It takes some of the guesswork out, and it can make meeting and fulfilling expectations a heck of a lot easer. Think about how nice it would be for a board to say to a CEO, “we need to increase sales by 10% next quarter,” and the leader’s response to be, “It will cost [x dollars] and sales will increase by 12.5%. I promise.”

But that’s not always the world we live in. And that’s not always the world that craftsman live in either – we both live in a world where we interact with humans who desire beauty and creativity. Humans are less than predictable, and beauty and creativity are difficult to execute, and many times subjective.

Nonetheless, the black-and-white art of tailoring my suit (which fits perfectly) led me to ask some great questions:

• How can we make our services and their results more black and white?
• Can we make measurement of our work more black and white?
• How can I build my skills so that I can, like my tailor, make strong promises that I’m confident I can keep?
• How can I instill confidence in clients?

(1) If you live in the Greenville area and you need a suit tailored, contact Bill Mitchell of Billiam Jeans.

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?

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?

For more details, visit: www.hoosierhospitalityconference.com

For more information, check out: www.FindOurCommonGround.com

Information on the full forum series can be found at: www.tenatthetop.org

To register for the event, visit: http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?oeidk=a07e5fh6c9d81e798b9&llr=iwqthmdab

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?”

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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.

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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.)

EMOTIONAL MARKETING: SPEAK TO THE HEART

As I stood in Target toiling over the purchase of a dish soap refill last weekend, it occurred to me that I have become unusually loyal to my liquid dish soap. In reality, this loyalty has very little to do with dishes, and much to do with Dawn’s turn-my-heart-to-mush marketing. Marketing that has been so effective, in fact, that every time I purchase a dish soap refill, I view myself as singlehandedly responsible for the well-being and survival of the baby seal (or baby penguin or baby duck…) featured on their packaging. In my mind, purchase of a competitor’s brand = “I hate baby seals,” while purchase of Dawn = “I have just made an investment in this little creature which will ensure he continues to live out his days happily sliding down snowbanks, getting into shenanigans with his baby seal friends.”

TURNING “THEM” AND “ME” INTO “WE”

A quick glimpse at how Dawn is leveraging emotion to turn average dishwashers into animal-saving superheroes…(and consequently, inspiring people to get passionate about their dish soap.)

• As featured in their commercials, Dawn is a preferred partner in helping clean cute little critters after an oil spill. While the spirit of the commercial is undeniably philanthropic, it also subtly reiterates the message that their product works. If Dawn is tough enough to clean up a wriggly, oily otter and gentle enough for a baby duck, just imagine what it will do for your dishes and your hands. Instead of jamming an obvious “WE ARE SO GREAT!” message down our throats, Dawn appeals to consumer emotion, letting the message speak for itself – through their actions.

• As noted on the bottle, Dawn consumers can visit a website to enter the code found on the label. For each code entered, Dawn will donate $1 toward wildlife rescue. (And in fact they have – donating $500,000 in the past year.) By offering a way to actively participate in their philanthropic giving, Dawn positions consumers to become a hero before they’ve even opened the bottle. All they have to do is go home, log online and enter their code. Good karma at the click of a button, warm fuzzies between consumer and brand.

• As an animal lover, this philanthropic partnership between the brand and consumer sends a message to my mind and heart: my passion is their passion. And that makes it our passion. Instead of a “them” and a “me,” we become a WE – working in harmony for a cause near and dear to my heart. I feel good about myself, my purchase and the brand. The brand gains a loyal fan in spirit. What does that mean? It means I talk about their brand and their mission with the people I know. I feel compelled to Tweet about, and hold htem up as an exemplary case study in emotional marketing. It means I find myself standing in Target unable to bring myself to purchase another brand of dish soap. And I think we can all agree that’s all worth so much more than a Facebook “like.”

THE LOGIC OF EMOTION

At the end of the day we’re talking about a product intended to wash dishes – not save the world, right? So what is it about Dawn’s marketing that compels me choose their product (and pay more for it) over another (equally effective) competitor?

In his article, “People Buy Based on Emotion and Justify with Logic,” Brian Ahern explores the influence of emotion on action.

Feelings are incredibly powerful. No matter how much we’d like to believe we’re rational creatures who occasionally act emotionally, the truth is, we’re actually emotional beings who occasionally act rationally.

Why is this so often the case? Because of how we’re wired; how our brains work. When I say the word “elephant,” you have a picture of an elephant in your mind. You may picture an African elephant with tusks, a smaller Asian elephant without dusks, the lovable Dumbo or perhaps an elephant toy you played with as a child. Whatever the case, you have a picture in your mind. That’s because we translate words into pictures.

Next in the process come feelings. The mental image of an elephant generates a certain set of feelings in you. Perhaps you have memories of an elephant you saw in a movie, maybe you thought of a trip to the zoo or you had feelings attached to memories of the toy you played with as a child. It’s those feelings that ultimately lead to action. It’s a process; words create pictures, pictures lead to feelings and feelings culminate in actions. [1]

So let’s take it back to the dish soap example. Logically, I realize that a competitor’s brand will probably clean just as well as Dawn. At the end of the day, I will have sparkling, clean dishes whether I use Dawn or another brand. And the other brand will likely cost less. Logic says buy the soap on sale, save a dollar, clean the dishes and be merry. On the other hand, Dawn’s marketing message has been deeply rooted in my soft, mushy, animal-loving heart. Emotion says: buy Dawn, support something you believe in, help them make the world a better place. Be part of something bigger than dishwashing.

And am I going to say no to THAT?

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YOUR TURN TO CHIME IN: When was the last time emotional marketing won over your heart (and/or dollars)? Was it the delight of receiving free samples with a Sephora purchase? Or the emotional reward of knowing your Chipotle burrito helped support local, family farms?