Brands, Social Media & the Illusion of Control

Posted: April 29, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

I think its in Buddhism that they talk about the illusion of control – that as much as you think you have control of something its just an illusion. The current sentiment from many brands in response to social media participation is that they fear losing control of their brand by letting themselves go on social media like Twitter.

Brands can influence the idea of the brand through communications, advertising and PR etc but ultimately the idea of the brand isn’t its logo or latest ad campaign it exists in the mind of the consumer. So much of the control a company thinks it has over its brand is lost when it comes to peer to peer evaluations of brands and individual experiences with the brand.

In my opinion we really should be well past this point in the debate as it is now clear to most that pariticpation in a conversation about you is better than it happening behind your back when you aren’t there to defend yourself. So really it’s time that comapnies realised the best way forward is to let go of the idea of control of their brand and instead just focus on positively influencing consumer sentiment through every channel available to them.

Vision Street Wear

Posted: April 28, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment »

I submitted an article to a company blog about this website over a year ago but it’s still one of my favorites and I wanted to have something about it on this blog.

If you look on www.thefwa.com these days the number of video background sites are too many to count but back when this site was launched it was one of very few. Its just so on brand, forget that a video background (don’t know of there is an actual name for these) site is a great way to sell clothing & footwear because it can sell an image, the skate industry has been generating branded content for decades which its target are very used to consuming and so electing to use this format was a good choice. The skate, surf and snowboarding industries were doing branded content decades before other brands had even heard of it and by using branded video content as the background to the website Vision have nailed it. Skaters sit around watching skate videos when they aren’t skating and they pick up on what the pro’s are riding and wearing, so duplicating that in the website itself was a great idea. If you click on the products section it wont just show an image of the shoe but someone wearing the shoe skating.

This is a great example of selling not on product attributes, you can hardly see the shoes in some of the footage but on brand attributes, emotional payoff and image. Its a cool way to show the shoes and that’s what counts – the emotional side it triggers. It makes me want to bust out my old Tony Hawk from the late 80′s and scuff my knees up.

VisionStreetWear

http://visionstreetwear.com/

The Fantasy League Trick

Posted: April 28, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Many of you would have seen the Reebok NFL Fantasy League viral video where a handful of NFL players perform super human feats of skill (see below) which has been hugely successful which I gauge through the fact that I have been sent it via about 4 different peer to peer channels which to me suggests its saturated my peer group at least. The use of cgi to create an effect where the skills in the video look super human but almost not (they are world class athletes after all) is a sneaky trick that results in very high levels of engagement and can be explained with basic 2nd year psych theory.

According to psychologists in the area of human information processing when we view an object or scene we do not process all of the information in front of us but rely on a bank of previous information which we attribute to something based on expectation. For example when you see a car your brain has hardwired into its neural network information about cars you have seen and experienced in the past. It then looks for the bits that are missing or new and processes those elements rather than processing the whole concept again, much in the same a proxy will cache information. This explains how anything new is more likely to be interesting to us because we are busily engaged trying to fill in the information gaps and form the concept. In the case of something like the NFL Fantasy League viral there is a more of a dissonance because unreal elements have been introduced into the mix which therefore means there is more of an information gap which requires filling and hence greater engagement in order to close that gap and form the concept in our brain.

This partly explains why a campaign like this is so engaging and so popular, not only is it cool and very well executed but this slight dissonance where you’re forced to some degree to ask the question, hang on is that for real? prompts a deeper level of engagement. In effect it opens up information processing channels and the message cuts through far more efficiently. There are surely other ways this kind of cognitive gap have been exploited even offline but with the success of this viral and a very similar one by EA Sports to promote Fifa Street we might just see a few more like it in the near future.

Collaboration v The Semantic Web

Posted: April 24, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Google News has a recommended stories function which posts stories based on my previous media consumption and no doubt uses a complex algorithm of keywords, geocentricity, content strings and others beyond comprehension as its basis for story selection. However no matter how sophisticated this algorithm is or how long I have been reading stories via Google News (of which I am assuming it only analyses my media consumption through Google News) it just cant seem to deliver stories that interest me.

For example this morning the three stories it posted in the recommended stories category were:

Cassi’s mum defends her Australia’s Next Top Model ‘bogan’ daughter-  from News.com.au

Deepest budget cuts since 70s to fill ’45bn pound hole’ – from gaurdian.co.uk

Gretel Killeen’s crop top tantrum – from News.com.au

OK the gaurdian.co.uk story is interesting but anything published in the gaurdian.co.uk pretty much is so I’ll call that one a lucky hit however the others are the complete antithesis of what I am interested in spending my time reading.

There are some in the digital world that are heralding the not too distant coming of Web 3.0 ‘the semantic web’ but if the might of Google and its incredibly sophisticated algorithms are still after years of use sending me stories about Gretel Killeen’s crop top tantrum how do we truly expect that a true semantic web, i.e. “Tim Berners-Lee’s idea that the Web as a whole can be made more intelligent and perhaps even intuitive about how to serve a user’s needs” (reference) is likely to come to fruition anytime soon.

On the other hand we currently have social media platforms and in particular Twitter which allows its users to collaboratively accumulate and curate the information they wish to consume which to me is and will always be superior to an algorithm, not matter how complex and sophisticated, attempting to predict our preferences.

Through Twitter we can choose to follow individuals with similar interests or points of view and share in the information and content they choose to consume using intuition more than empiricism to determine not only what information we want to consume but also what we think we perhaps should consume in order to further our knowledge in a subject area.

Web 3.0 ‘the semantic web’ is a fantastic buzz word and a great idea but personally I think it will be sometime yet before a set of algorithms can reliably deliver content and preferences as per Tim Berners-Lee’s vision. Social media platforms give us access to collaborative information sharing which taps into a collective intuitive process that is far more adaptive and dynamic than any algorithm could ever hope to be, at least in the medium term.

Reference article -

http://therumpus.net/2009/04/the-rumpus-interview-with-twitter-co-founder-bi%0Az-stone/

Twitters Evan Williams on Ted

Posted: April 21, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment »

I have to admit I am very slow to the whole Twitter phenomenon even for an Australian which is itself fairly laggard in terms of its embrace of the [new] social media. This talk on Ted by Twitter Co Founder Evan Williams is short and sweet but he portrays its uses as being of profound potential. I have to say it is almost moving to hear of some of the ways users are not only using the medium but shaping it to form a truly user empowered means of distributing and sharing information.

Viral Misconceptions

Posted: April 21, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment »
It seems that many marketers and advertising experts alike still retain a fundamental lack of understanding of viral marketing and how and when to employ it effectively. The term viral refers to the peer to peer spread of a campaign much like a viral epidemic (as argued in depth by Malcolm Gladwell in his 2000 book The Tipping Point) and is a frequently referred to and integral part of modern marketing vernacular. However it is a concept who’s use is often misguided and as a result is rarely of itself a glaring success.
The proper use of viral involves a strategy which embraces true user centric communications planning placing the user and their experience at the center of the planning process. This is an essential step in the formation of successful viral marketing for if the campaign is more skewed towards brand objectives than user engagement it will not develop the momentum characteristic of successful viral campaigns. Often times brands and planners look to viral as a means to getting more out of limited budgets through false expectations that if they can luck into a well executed viral that it will yield low cost reach and frequency. This is wrong and is dangerous thinking for those keen to pursue this form of marketing. The proper motivation from a brands perspective for viral marketing should be to develop a campaign that strikes an accord with the user by delivering a campaign  idea which resonates sufficiently with the user that it then develops the momentum. This is really just common sense but for some reason time and again marketers are drawn into the thinking that they can exploit the notion of viral to their advantage which really is also just an exploitation of the user and an affront to the philosophy the brand should hold towards delivering an authentic  value proposition in all of its communications.
This topic deserves a more in depth study which is beyond my own time constraints at the moment but in summary it should be noted that when planning a viral campaign that significant resources must be invested particularly at the planning phase but also a commensurate amount of resources at every stage.  If the right amount of planning and creative input is allowed a viral will more than just deliver reach it will be  appreciated, remembered and possibly even described as cool and that’s how a brand can develop true loyalty and a legacy it can leverage for many future campaigns to come.
An exciting example of a successful viral campaign who’s planning was skewed incredibly in favour of the user is the Dorritos Hotel 626. The campaign site was an interactive game used to support the bringing back from the dead a number of discontinued flavours and did not once mention the word corn chip but was a resounding success for the brand (see case movie below). This is very brave marketing but it just goes to show that if brands are willing to embrace a philosophy of authentic user centric communications they will reap the rewards.
http://hotel626.com/

Wordle

Posted: April 20, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , | Leave a comment »

I have always been intrigued by tag clouds – the way they display the volume and often times relationships between words and phrases is something profound. Its kind of analogous to the neural network of the brain (reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_neural_network) and how some pathways are more prevalent than others.

Here is a tag cloud generated from the words in this blog using ‘Wordle’.

wordle

http://www.wordle.net/

Warm Season’s Greetings

Posted: April 20, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , | Leave a comment »

The Belgian beer brand Zatte Vrienden let its users send a warm seasons greetings to their friends via a card users wrote in piss. The user would drink some of the beer first and then write the greeting in the snow in yellowy pee. Not one I’d send my granny but would have been a laugh to send to friends and supposedly many Belgian beer drinkers did just that.

Digg Stack

Posted: April 20, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , | Leave a comment »

This reminds me a bit of the scene in the Matrix where the guy is sitting in front of all the computer screens while streams of green code fall in front of him. Digg Stack is a product within Digg Labs and although its been around for a while its an old favourite of mine. Twitter has superseded it in terms of information sharing but if you are looking for kicks on the internet and want to see what the digital universe are bookmarking give it a try.

Snapshot of Digg Stack in action

Snapshot of Digg Stack in action

http://labs.digg.com/stack/

Are you greenwashing?

Posted: April 20, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment »

I am always amused at how people join ’causes’ on facebook like the ‘Save our Oceans’ cause and a mulitude of others in the thought that the mere act of joining the cause is doing something to help the oceans. Don’t get me wrong I understand the need for awareness and I also understand the butterfly effect and how a mulitiude of little butterflies can make a change but really this kind of public cause support to me is no different to the greenwashing that we rightly acuse many brands of.

The people that join these causes may indeed be well intentioned and likewise concerned about the ocean but joining a causes group on facebook does nothing to actually solve any of the problems it seeks to. The user however still gains the social kudos from joining the cause in the highly public forum that facebook is so really this is no different to a brand like BP calling themselves beyond petroleum and changing their logo to a green and yellow flowery thing.

Perhaps I am being a little harsh there are afterall people in these causes that give money and perhaps all of this social media participation in causes is an indication that we are on some sort of cusp of massive social change. However I cant help shake the feeling that people although they are concerned about the environment deep down interact with the issue more like a moral and in some instances one of fashion than the now clear calamity it presents which requires nothing less than action. OK I may have just fallen into the irate greeny catagory with this post but in all fairness if we are going to hold brands to account for green washing then perhaps we should all look at our own attitudes and behaviour to causes and be careful to treat them with the seriousness and urgency they deserve.

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