The Human Hive

March 31, 2009

Italian honey bees bearding outside the hive e...

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Buzz is, well, all the buzz.  How to create it.  Where it comes from.  How to sustain it.  What it should cost. Unfortunately, being buzz-worthy is often mistaken for gimmickry or cheesiness.  Buzz is the natural outlet of excitement.  Part science, part discipline, buzz is a naturally occurring human phenomena.   Of course, there are accelerators like advertising, PR, social media, etc.  But they don’t create buzz; they drive it.  The excitement has to be there to begin with.

In essence, creating buzz is just creating a brand.  The mass media age tended to make people lazy marketers; letting promotion be the buzz not the product or service.  However, with the fragmentation of mass media, the global economic situation, and an ultra-connected consumer base, brands are being forced to go back to the roots of buzz.  In short, it is becoming more and more difficult to fake it. 

If you break down successful brands (both large and small; both entity and personal), they have 3 common traits:

  1. They become a cause or an idea. They mean something beyond just the product or service they are offering.  This isn’t a mission statement, nor is it a glossy annual report.  This having a brand driven by some higher purpose.  It is the answer to the question “why does this brand exist?” Patagonia clothing is an example of this.
  2. They have elements of surprise; unexpectedness at every level.  Consumers are easily bored, but also easily turned-off by gimmicks and trickery.  They also have generally low expectations.  So the brands that offer a level of unexpectedness will create something for the customer to talk about beyond the product.  Southwest Airline’s singing flight attendants is an example of this.
  3. They have a story; a tale or legend that MUST be told by those that come in contact with the brand.  Every brand has a story.  Unfortunately, most of them fall victim to well-crafted marketing-speak, clichés, and corporate buzzwords.  Here is a simple exercise … write down your company’s story, but do it as a bio of a person.  Talk about the birth, growth, etc.  If you get excited writing your own story, then your customers will as well. 

Hype is easy; it just takes money.  Buzz is hard, because it takes patience and integrity - and the focus to work on the things you can actually control.  Final thought:  you need all 3 elements because each piece serves the other.  Call it a system of check-and-balance for relevance.

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One Candle

March 16, 2009

My social Network on Flickr, Facebook, Twitter...

Image by luc legay via Flickr

Everyone that touches a brand influences the reputation and perceptions of that brand to the people around them – employees, customers, vendors, etc.  - essentially the branding side of word-of-mouth.  It has really always been this way.  It has just been constricted by natural communication speed bumps – the size of the echo chamber, message control, media-driven perceptions, and more.

Today, there are two factors that have rapidly accelerated the influence of individuals:

  1. The rise of peer influence; where we trust someone like us more than the “expert” in the advertising.  We don’t really care that 5 out of 6 dentists choose a toothpaste.  2 or 3 friends that swear by a product are much more influential. 
  2. The impact of social media.  This has created a state of hyper-connectivity; where news is driven by eye-witnesses and companies are transparent whether they like it or not.  Social media has also dramatically increased the size of an individual’s influence – from just a hand-full of friends to potentially 1000s around the world.

What does this mean for the people in charge of marketing/communication/sales?  It means that you are no longer buying mind share through advertising; you are “buying” influence through relationships.  In essence, corporate brander/marketers need to learn how to treat each person that touches the brand as an influencer – similar to how PR works with the media.

This requires a change of thinking across the board; essentially moving from broadcasting messages to having conversations.  However, the biggest change of thinking is how you deal with the faces of your brand – you and your employees.  Considering the two factors mentioned above, employees have far greater influence on your brand than any other source; often even more than your customers. In essence, the collective candlepower of your employees is brighter and more sustainable than any advertising campaign.  This thinking starts at the ownership/executive level.  It continues on to every person in an organization, especially for those that are the daily “face” of the brand – salespeople, customer service, front-line employees, etc.

Outside of creating a culture of transparency and unity, the greatest tactical impact may be on how you implement and use social media.  This is one of the reasons we believe that social media is ultimately a personal branding tool – especially the use of the hottest tools: Twitter and Facebook.  Don’t believe us?  Try these experiments:

  1. Set up a Facebook page for your company (using the new Facebook protocol for business pages).  Set up a personal page for yourself and encourage your employees to use Facebook.  See how many “friends” your corporate page receives vs. the personal pages.  Further, compare new business opportunities and meaningful conversations between the two.
  2. Do the same for Twitter.

We are not recommending an “either/or” approach.  We think you need a corporate and personal presence in social media.  Our point is to just watch which one will be more effective.  This exercise should show the necessity of investing more in your personal brand – and in the individual brands of your employees. 

Now go talk to your IT department about allowing firewall access to Facebook and Twitter.

 

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Meet Your Neighbors

March 11, 2009

As fairly early adopters of Twitter, it has been interesting to watch the “neighbors” move in.  From a business-users perspective, we have observed that there are 4 kinds of people/brands living in the Twitter neighborhood:
  • The Conversationalists.  These are the people that “get it”.  They are using Twitter as a way to participate in and start conversations. They are typically social off-line as well.  Of course, they are not doing this just for the grins.  They realize that these conversations will lead to growing their brands and potentially selling more stuff.  For corporate big brands we would include Zappos, Ford, H & R Block, and Southwest.  (Check out this great article from Mashable.com - http://mashable.com/2009/01/21/best-twitter-brands/).
  • The N00Bs. These are the people that are new to Twitter and are making rookie mistakes.  These mistakes include:
    • Tweeting as a company, not a person.  The bigger brands can get away with this because they already have a presence.  Plus they don’t hide who the people are behind the brand.
    • No photo, link, or incomplete bio.  This is like walking around with a paper bag on your head and trying to introduce yourself.
    • Letting your Following-to-Followers ratio get out of whack.  If it is more than 2:1 Following v Followers, then you have some sort of digital body order.  Or people aren’t following you back because you didn’t have a photo, link, etc as stated above.
  • The Promoters. These are the people who see a large group of people and can’t help sell to them.  They are the Twitter equivalent of door-to-door salespeople - or the people that put flyers under windshields.  All they do is post tweets and links for promotional purposes.  You can spot these people because they will be following several thousand people but only have a few followers.  A sub-set of this crowd are those that obsess over their Twitter ranking.
  • Black Hats - These are the spammers.  The people that create bots that auto-follow based on key words, geography, etc.  Twitter does a decent job of nailing these people (the “suspicious activity” screen you sometimes see).

Because Twitter is a conversation/word-of-mouth tool, it tends to purify itself from a combination of Twitter going after spammers and promoters - and members within Twitter blocking or calling out people who improperly use it.

Final thought …
For businesses interested in using Twitter, the most difficult thing to overcome is that Twitter is not a broadcasting medium; it is a conversation tool.  If the culture of your brand is to talk to people, you will be fine.  If it is not, you won’t.

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