... Few companies consistently translate rich insights from their customers’ lives into new and better offerings. The few that do can achieve a Long Wow, continuously delivering wow moments and building a true, deep loyalty that transcends traditional loyalty programs...
"X company already tried that and it failed (a statement with no insight into the poor execution or variables)."
"We can't create a concise business case that we're guaranteed uptake so it's safer to keep doing what we're doing (even though no money is coming from what we're currently doing)."
"We thought of doing X years ago, but we didn't have X or Y or Z and now we've moved on. It's too late."
"X worked for Y, but that could never work for us because we're in a different category."
“Life exists as a million deaths and a million rebirths.” - Toni Childs
According to the clever peeps at Wikipedia:
A brand can take many forms, including a name, sign, symbol, color combination or slogan. The word brand has evolved to encompass identity - it affects the personality of a product, company or service.
Brand experience isn't just the design; it's also the usability of a website, the intuitive functionality of a phone app or the approachability of customer service. Our perception as consumers is formed by how we’re able to interact with a brand.
The web is information tapas; a tasting menu for ideas. The function of a brand website is to provide the building blocks for a user to form an opinion about the brand. It is our internalised perception of a brand that motivates us to endorse it. No matter how convincingly an ad tries to persuade us when it comes to online we are in search of convenient information wrapped within an engaging environment.
So how does a brand create an experience? The answer is to get inside the head of the brand's biggest fan. We are defined by our actions. If the majority of your site’s returning visitors are heading to the same page(s) or entering specific terms into the search box the experience needs to reflect this behaviour. The most important expert on consumer behaviour is your site’s regular visitors. Listen to them by studying their actions.
Another element is the experience is the look and feel. Women tend to view the web as a service; while men typically interpret the web as a tool. How does your website represent both the male and female perspectives?
If a website doesn't live up to our expectations than our preception of the brand can become tarnished. As an example, Nike.com is a flash website that is sleek and stylish, but it doesn’t feel like a shopping website. Whereas, Zappos.com is not half as pretty, but it feels like both a service and a tool to use. If the only way to buy Nike shoes was on Nike.com the experience would need to change. But Nike.com doesn't exist to sell; it exists for fans to experience the brand.
Utilitarian shoppers are interested in e-tailing because of four specific attributes: convenience and accessibility, selection, availability of information and lack of sociality (Wolfinbarger and Gilly, 2001).
Most consumers' online purchase decision is based on their motivation and goals. I don’t think Nike.com exists to sell shoes. I believe it exists to promote the brand. The experience on Nike.com is all about exploration and appreciation of design. This is why it has the ability for users to design their own custom shoes, learn about shoe performance, get training tips and fantasise about how their lives might be different with a pair of Nike’s on their feet. 
Compared with conventional utilitarian shopping motivations, the merit of hedonic motivation is experiential and emotional. The reason why hedonic consumers do shopping is not for physical objective but for the shopping process instead. (Huang Jen-Hung and Yang Yi-Chun 2010)
The purpose of the website is just as important as observing user behaviour. Many websites intend to be all things to all people and it’s not possible and could damage the brand.
Nike.com is able to remain focused on its goal of creating a unique brand experience because their products are sold through 3rd party websites and their own bricks and mortar stores. Nike.com is all about the brand experience and not about buying shoes; however, there are a select few who are motivated by exclusivity and design. These consumers will take the risk of paying more because they are hardcore fans of the brand. But most consumers will look for the best price on eBay, Zappos or some other 3rd party seller. Nike doesn’t care because the brand website is serving its purpose of engaging with its fans.
According to Seth Godin, there are eleven criteria of a great story:
Occasionally I’m asked to explain what the purpose of social media is for individuals and businesses. Too often I’m greeted by sceptical views and a strong belief that social media encourages people to waste time. First of all, TV wastes time. Social media enables participation.As Clay Skirky points out in Cognitive Surplus, “Someone born in 1960 has watched something like 50,000 hours of TV already, and may watch another 30,000 hours before she dies.”Clearly, we have an excess of time. We are idle when taking the train to work. We are idle after dinner and once the kids are in bed. Despite our good intentions of maximizing our twilight years we tend to find other things to do rather than build that boat or write a novel. As much as we’d like to believe that we are all making the most of all of the hours in the day we do have some form of down time and it’s within this time that people chose to participate online.
The basic story would be told in an anchoring medium, such as a novel, TV show, or film. View the entire idea under construction at athinklab.comContent by http://athinklab.comThe hypothetical transmedia version of the Three Little Pigs is not the repurposing of story across different platforms. It is the creation of a holistic narrative that unfolds in different and unique manners across different media. It allows for a dialogue between creator and participant. Developers could decide if participant interaction, such as solving the sustainable materials problem, finding the wolf through clues and maps, or creating another character for the story, could move the story in different directions than the original version. Participants might urge the first little piggy to trust his instincts about the dark figure or create a hunter who steps up the stakes for the wolf and alters the time dimension of the wolf’s schemes.
Additional options might be a Three Little Pigs Kei Tai novel distributed in chapter segments to mobile devices; a geo-based iPhone app; Wolf Attack, an educational video game based on the physics concepts of construction and destruction; and development of an MMORPG.
18 Days in Egypt aims to be a crowd-sourced documentary about what happened there. Launched just a week ago by former New York Times video journalist and current Knight fellow at Stanford University, Jigar Mehta, the site wants to tackle the difficult task of providing the right context for the raw videos and news that others have posted and collected.
There are all kinds of excellent resources out there about community moderation, but the absolute best practice is effective parenting. Both kids and community members need to know where their limits are in terms of their behaviour. Rules make us feel safe. As much as we like to think all we want is freedom the limitless unknown doesn’t bring out the best in most people.At a recent GGDMelb (Girl Geek Dinners Melbourne) we casually discussed digital advertising and many around the room were on opposing views regarding what metrics to track in order to serve up contextual advertising. I ineptly attempted to discribe a video I’d seen on YouTube titled, ‘The Break Up’.
The video was created in 2007 by Microsoft for the company’s Digital Advertising Solutions. An ad for advertisers that illustrates where things are moving. The concept of looking at consumers in a new way deserves our attention.
What if we could go beyond counting hits on a page? What if we could think outside the box treating our customers as individuals rather than stereotypes? What if instead of guessing what a consumer wanted to buy we could ask them and deliver a product that fulfils their expectations?
I think the answer comes from a few leading philosophies- these being: the long tail, permission marketing and more intelligent algorithms. Since we’re no longer looking at websites, but platforms –how can we do better than banner ads and one off promotions? Why are we trying to sell things online like they do on TV? They are not the same media- not even close!
A few years ago I attended NextMedia, a conference in Toronto, Canada that was extremely influential with how I arrived at my current frame of mind regarding Digital Advertising. The first lecture was about marketers learning about word of mouth advertising from the Grateful Dead.
In an article by Gareth Rees reviewing a book on this very subject he attests, “The Grateful Dead knew this as far back as 1965, as David Meerman Scott and Brian Helligan reveal in Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History. According to the authors: “The Dead pioneered a ‘freemium’ business model, allowing concert attendees to record and trade concert tapes, building a powerful word-of-mouth fan network powered by free music.”
By encouraging fans to share bootleg copies of live events the band was able to reach out to an ever growing audience. The fans felt apart of the legacy and held a sense of duty to share their experience. This is why decisions for regulating digital media are so controversial. By restricting what users can and can’t do with copyright protected media (such as music and movies) companies are restricting fans ability to fully envelop themselves in the brand. Fans want to share not because they want to commit an illegal act, but because they want to go beyond the current limited experience. Quite simply, there is too much control and not enough listening.
So where do we go from here? I believe the answer is in personal recommendations, personalised customisation, transmedia and exclusivity. If a brand can cross multiple forms of media there are more places to sell a niche product which is what consumers are looking to buy. There are lots of examples that prove when a band distributes content for free and diversify their offering they earn more in sales. The authors of Wikinomics, describe prosumption as a non-passive consumer who wants to participate in the creation of products and services. Allowing fans to create their own video clip is only the tip of the iceberg.
Modern advertising is about relationships and that takes time to cultivate. It also takes more time for marketing to be able to create more than one newsletter and more than one special offer. The hardest part is letting go of control and providing tools allowing consumers to take on the role of authority. But the benefits of personalization mean that your brand wins more loyal fans because consumers appreciate being part of a conversation rather then disruptive ads. It’s harder and more time consuming and that’s why businesses don’t try harder to do a better job, but that short-sighted thinking will see their demise in the years to come when competitors sneak up from behind with a more authentic selling proposition.
When you switch your thinking from my website to my platform you'll begin to see that it's not as important to currate content as it is to allow users to customise their own experience. The more you allow a user to create their own content stream the more you'll know about them. The more users rate, review and talk to you about your brand the easier it will be to sell to them. That's the fantastic business model that is Threadless. Stop trying to tell consumers what they want and start listening to them.
So how do you get in front of consumers in the first place? Check out Hunch and Get Glue.
January 24th, was Community Management Appreciation Day (otherwise known as CMAD). It’s a new role in many companies and there isn’t lots of information out there about best practice, etc. Many companies hide their online community team for fear of disgruntled customers pulling a Travis Bickle. (I’ve never heard of anything like that happening, but it seems to be a common ‘security’ measure.) So it’s really important to celebrate these vital individuals who are commonly unseen.
An interesting thing about being a community manager, or a moderator, is that every company views this role in their own unique way. A community manager might be a part of the marketing or PR team at one company and a part of the customer service team at another. Jeremiah Owyang has created a great post about the corporate view of a community manager.
In truth, the community manager is neither marketing nor customer service. The community manager is something entirely unique from traditional departments. I believe that the community manager is a storyteller and an artist. A storyteller who understands how to lead groups of people down a common thought. An artist who inspires people to participate and share their own content.
If the community manager is to sit in any particular department it should be within an innovation team. Thought leadership is very important because too often the tools cripple an online community to reach greater heights. It’s sometimes hard to see the dollars and cents behind registered users the tools provided are minimal and horrible to use. Businesses are thinking, “now that I have an email address I can push products and potentially sell something”- wrong. This assumes that you know what the registered user wants, but in actuality; the registered user is a guide to brand longevity.
For a community to work there has to be a purpose for it, i.e. cultivating trust (sharing personal information), collaborating on editorial content, creating a tool, designing products, brainstorming ways to improve software, sell something, etc. The community manager’s job is to spot the top contributors and give them support. To build new chapters of the story which inspires members to flesh out details and develop the plot.
When regular users get bored of the same old conversation things turn negative quite fast. Regular members need another layer of engagement. Too often the loudest and most negative members end up sucking all of the energy and inspiration out the community. The focus gets lost in the reports of bad behaviour, spam and negative feedback. The individuals who are contributing to the story are the heart of the community.
Community management is about setting up a plot for fans to role play. Once the rules are outlined participation becomes a game. As an example, one of the first forums I managed was for a short lived Canadian TV series called Falcon Beach. Fans of the show loved to chat in the forum, but there needed to be a subtext–otherwise; the discussions quickly inflamed into arguments about who knew the most about the show and its stars. I decided to create a section for fan fiction; which gave the die-hard members a project that other members could rate and comment. Following my analogy I gave the fans a new chapter to write on their own. Although we don’t know what the story will be about we know the rules of creating the story. This made the fans feel like their participation was leading them to uncovering the unspoken thoughts of the show’s characters and helped the writers see their characters through the eyes of the audience.
Communities need a purpose- this is why Wikipedia is such a success. There has to be a common link beyond the initial motivation to participate; as well as, recognition for quality contributions. Otherwise, the vibe of the community turns feral and you’ll have a Lord of the Flies scenario on your hands. With the example of Falcon Beach it was very important to use the ideas from fan fiction and explore ways to involve the fans into the storyline of the show.
A community is a story that is never really finished; the real-time version of The Never Ending Story. This is why marketing or public relations cannot “own” an online community- you can’t influence it with promotions. Essentially, the community guidelines are the prelude to the story. The purpose of the community must be clear and sandboxes need to exist to house members who don’t expand the plot. The intention has to be very clear and the community manager becomes a gardener attending to the weeds and beautiful flowers. The result is a story that has a pulse and its own unique purpose.
