Leading a brand? Thinking about how to create a long term integrated communication platform? Think no more cause I’ll share the model I’ve been using for the last three years when leading brands into the future of advertising, communication and advertising.

Normally I’d work a company or brand through a series of workshops. We would then slowly start to follow this model over time. Changing how you, your brand and marketing organisation work with advertising and communication is not something you do over night. I would recommend brands to keep on doing what they do best – shoot fireworks -while slowly start to change their way of communicating their products and services from ground up.

Moving your communication into the future is also tough on your organisation as your moving from campaign based communication activities to instead building long term equity that will generate results over time. Send your entire marketing organization as well as your IT department and management team on several digital communication crash courses cause your CEO better understand what you talk about when you’re talking conversion, SEM, SEO, AdWords, H1, Keywords, Stats and shit.

Have a read. If you like what you read – get going. Change!

Here we go – The Key To Future Integrated Communication by Johan Ronnestam

The basis of your online communication platform

The first thing we’ve gotta agree upon before moving further into the model is the following: Your brand consist out of two things. The product/services you offer and the content you’ve created to explain what your product/service does. In the worst cases companies have more or less done nothing beyond publishing images of their products with accompanied product name. In the best cases they’ve done tons more. We’ll go in to this bellow. This is the essence of your communication presence online. Hopefully you’ve got this wired, however, you might actually have this presence online without owning it your selves.

Value and conversion leads to traffic and sales. Your objective and key performance indicators.

People don’t have time to read your shit. You’ve gotta provide them with a true value. After all, your products and services are nothing without the problem they solve. This is what you’ve gotta base all your hosted communication activities on.

Value first

The more value you provide your target group with, the more traffic you’ll gain. This is based on the simple principle of the link. If you keep bragging about your products without truly do something good for people you won’t earn any links. If you on the other hand share ideas, knowledge and solutions that helps your target group to be better you’ll see that people will come. Once you’ve opened up that stream of people you’ll have the opportunity to point the towards the products and services you market, the same product and services that of course can be used to do whatever you tought people to do.

Let me share one example – Michelle Phan. I started to follow this girl online already two years ago. Back then she was an independent girl who just liked to share her thoughts on how to wear make up. In November 2010, Phan became “the No. 1 most subscribed female on YouTube and the first female to reach 1 million subscribers. Michelle Phan joined Youtube on July 18, 2006, and as of November 2010, she has created 100 videos that have been viewed over 260,000,000 times. The one where she does a Lady Gaga makeup has a stunning 23,457,472 views.

Michelle Phan sharing the value people want

Michelle does what the traditional make up brand don’t. She shares value. While Michelle teaches young women all over the world how to do their make up, brands like Chanel, Biotherm, Clinique, Loreal and Lancome does one thing – sell sell sell. Michelle shares knowledge while these brands just throws a pretty girl in your face saying “you can look like me”. No wonder Lancome suddenly this year in February turned Michelle into their spokesperson. Today Michelle even got her own make up brand.

So, value first. Before selling. Make sure you think about your reason for being. Do you sell football shoes, teach people how to score, do you sell wine, teach people how to buy the right wine (like Gary Vaynerchuck does), do you sell cars, teach them about how to drive better and more cost effective, do you sell clothes, teach them how to style themselves.

The content you create should of course go social

Once you’ve decided how to provide your potential visitor with a true value. Make sure you spread that value across the net whereever possible and relevant.

Your Potential Customer Is Out There – So Your Content Should Be Too

If you produce videos send them to YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, Blip and tons more. Use TubeMogul to handle the process. Your images on Flickr and others. Documents on Slideshare and Scribd. If you go live, use Livestream or Bambuser. Heck, head over to Brians and Jess3 Conversation prism and do the homework.

Once you got that value right – focus on conversion

So, this is the next step where tons of brands go wrong (as I’ve written about before). They simply haven’t got their conversion wired. In order for you to really know what you’re doing you’ve gotta set your targets right. Do you want people to buy online, should they download your product sheets, contact you or maybe just spend five minutes with your products online? Anything is right as long as it suits your needs. Once you’ve got that wired, set up your funnels right in your stat tools and start working those A/B tests. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING should serve a purpose if you’re looking to convert those visitors of yours to clients.

The funny thing is that once you start eyeing those performance metrics of yours you’ll end up getting insights about your traffic that you can never learn from anyone else. Business online is all about knowing your own audience and constantly improving your site. After all, a banner or button in the wrong place might kill your conversion or increase it by 400%.

5 things you can never forget when converting your site visitors into buyers

1. Usability is key

Usability is by far the most important thing to think about when you’re looking to convert your visitors into buyers. This means no funky animations, links should be easy to click on, preferably underlined, less is more, guide your visitors etc etc.

There’s tons that has been written about this area. Whatever you do, don’t buy any bullshit that people click thru a site if it’s cool. Ask anyone who’s been working with e-commerce and they’ll tell you. Why do you think Amazon looks the way it does? Go ahead and follow some blogs and you’ll be up and running in no time. Start with The UX Booth.

2. Product presentation

I don’t know if you read my post about the car brand SAAB the other day. Well, this recording below (excuse my bad english in this one) was actually done for this post. It got me worked up though and that’s why I posted that other thing the before this one.

We’re alone when surfing the web – compare that to the real world where a sales man is following us around in the store, always ready to answer any questions we might have, we’re all alone on the web. This means information, information, information, information and more information. If I’m looking to be convinced to buy a car online I’ll tell you right away – I wont be pleased with a freakin flash site that sings a song and let me rotate the car once. I want at least forty-five 60-second movies showcasing everything there is to know about your car. I want photos, not 5 wonderful photos taken by Europes most expensive photographer. I want 100+ photos that are showing that car from every angle. Of course you should package it all beautiful, but don’t have me loading any animations and shit.

Then, only then might I go to that buy button. Remember, your competitors are one click away!

3. Copy
Copy actually do matter. Write it good, write it well, but remember what I talked about in nr 2. I’m alone, so don’t go wasting to much of my time! I was planning to write a longer piece about this, but Smashing Magazine has done a great job already. Go there ›› (thanks Per for the tip)

4. Feeling secure
Logos from payment providers and other things like awards and shit. That’ll do the trick. After all. We’ve been monkeys in an earlier lifetime.

5. Faces
This might sound funny. But a face looking straight at you actually has proven to do good. Make sure you online presence contain humas, preferably not from actors, but instead from humans that you might actually meet in your office. Hire a great photographer and do them good!

So where does the traffic come from?

I have focused here on writing about prospects and not existing customers. Given that I’ve listed 4 traffic sources that more or less are the same for any company with an online presence. Above and below the line advertising, search engine marketing, search engine optimization and finally social media.

Above and below the line advertising

Here’s the good news. If you know branding, advertising and all that good stuff we’ve been doing for years. You’re in for a ride. Brands will realize that TV, Print, Outdoor, Banners – all those yummy above the line things – will rule the next 10 years. There’s simply now way to grab peoples attention but to shake them around in a medium where you cannot miss them. Of course, people say young kids does not watch TV, but the still do if it’s relevant. After all we’re pretty alone behind that screen when it’s time to click something. Being friend with a brand will help!

Search and The Social Internet – They go together like birds, bees, the flowers and the trees.

There’s two ways to pull traffic through search.

1. Adwords, at first glance it’s easy. However, if you’re running a business with mature competitors, say for example online travel it will be everything from easy. You’ve gotta get down with how to get your brand visible in the paid search areas. Either you know how or you start to study hard. Read books, books and more books. Then start to follow some of the high profile SEO bloggers in the world. Why not start with Seomoz, Searchengineland and Greywolfs SEO blog. Some Swedes I’d ad to the list are Jesper Åström, Nikke Lindqvist and Simon.

2. Search. The second way to get yourselves visible in the search engines is of course the SEO side of it. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people go on about their blog and the fact that it doesn’t drive traffic. But hey, it’s not that simple. If you’ve got a blog present, the chance is that other bloggers or maybe even a newspaper links to that blog. In the long run this will do good for your presence in search engines.

(I know I know I know…affiliates, banners, bought links etc etc. I just don’t have time to go into all of that now. This post is a top level post)

Conclusion.

Future communication is all about relevance. Relevant product, relevant services, relevant content and advertising that support those things. If you’re creating brand communication offline – fine, your only objective should be awareness and making sure people understand what your brand stands for. But when you’re communicating products and service – make sure the actual products and services are top notch and then create relevant communication that makes people search for them. If they do you’re home free! (that is if you’ve made sure to be seen everywhere online).

But worth repeating. Create advertising that make people search for your product or service category. Then by making sure your digital activities are focused on value, spread over a vast number of social networks, your AdWord campaigns and earned search positions in place you’ll make sure to get people hooked.

A qoute from Jeff Jarvis, the writer of ‘What Would Google Do‘, is in order here: “Construct information (on your website) so it can be understood by machine and man. In a word, be clear. If you’re a dentist, say you’re a dentist, not a smile doctor. Use the word “dentist” in the title of the page, the headline, and the beginning of what you write – make it so obvious even a computer couldn’t be confused. This also means that when human beings come to the page, they’ll know what you do. Clarity is always beneficial.”

So how do you get going. How do you make sure your brand platform is ‘future proof’?

Move your media budgets!

Most brands today seem to think change can be achieved within the production budgets. This is wrong. There’s just not enough money in that pot. There is only one way to make this happen. You’ve gotta take money from that eyeball highjacking fund called media and instead spend more on earned eyeballs.

Move 10% of your allocated media budget in order to gain a long term digital effect

Of course you shouldn’t move it all today. Start small but start. The next time you’re campaigning. Cut the media with 10% and start focusing on value as I wrote about earlier. Do the Michele Phan thing, whatever that means to your brand, products and services. Boom – now you’ve entered the long term value creation communication process. Keep doing it for another 6 to 12 month and make sure you track what you’re doing. You’ll see change coming your way!

Come on! You can do it!

Yesterday I was sent an email from The Economist through their social communication agency We Are Social. The mail presented their latest campaign – Thinking Spaces. A campaign presenting a number of opinion leaders and their ‘Thinking Spaces’. One part of the campaign contains a social component where they’re asking bloggers to contribute with our own stories alongside those of the leading personalities already featured like movie director Claudia Llosa, musician Jamie Lidell and Spotify founder Daniel Ek among others.

The campaign piss me off cause they’re asking me to contribute with quite a lot of content and traffic generation without really giving anything back. On top of that it’s clear that Spotify is featured for more than one reason as there’s obviously a hidden marketing component where I’m asked for my favorite Spotify playlist. (I would know since I’m running a Spotify playlist site on the side)

Dear Economist, let me tell you a little bit about me and MY thinking space.

This is MY thinking space.
If you would have respected my thinking space you would have started this campaign entirely different. I don’t get why you have created a flash site when you could have integrated the entire campaign on a blog platform. You could then have written a series of posts explaining your campaign to people and in that post also publicly linked to the blogs you asked to participate. This way you would have given us credit before you actually ask us to give you credit. Now the actual campaign leaves out social contributors.

The questions then?
I don’t want to answer a set of question about my personality that fit’s your campaign mold. On top of that I don’t get what Spotify has to do with it? (of course I do since one of your ‘leaders’ is the Spotify founder Daniel Ek). Why didn’t you ask participant to crowdsource your questions for you? Or give us one single question. One single question would have challenged my creativity. Now you’re more or less asking for my resume and an entire novel.

When you do social campaigns – give something back before you ask for support!
If a campaign like this would come from a brand like Kiva, Unicef, The Red Cross, Amnesty or another aid organization I’d love to participate without getting anything back. But a commercial brand like yours, The Economist, has to do better. On the campaign blog I read: “The Economist might feature your own Thinking Space on the site, along with those of the original featured personalities.” That’s not enough for me! If you succeed with this link-bating campaign I’ll end up in a long list of blogs that I don’t know if I want to be associated with.

Why didn’t you think social for real?
I don’t see why you didn’t choose 50 bloggers from around europe and built the entire campaign around us instead? I bet the budget you paid for this campaign and that flash site would have covered it. You also have access to something we don’t – a paper. If you would asked us bloggers for a unique story and in return done a piece on our blogs in your paper rather than on a campaign site you would have gotten fantastic content, trust me! And if you don’t then why bother asking for my participation in your campaign.

All in all. It’s good that you’re trying to go social with your campaigns – but don’t act like the dinosaur brand you are – think smaller, think friendly, think like you’re one of us and think social.

Finally.

I get that I’ve contributed to the SEO & link-bating part of your campaign. That is of course if people don’t decide to link to this post with the title The Economist Thinking Space campaign then I’ll be the winner.

Now I need to get back to spending my summer in the best possible way.

Best regards from the Swedish archipelago.
Johan Ronnestam

ps. Some blogs obviously got hooked. So far these blogs have joined the campaign:

Bibliobibuli, Chewytha scratchynutz: Tribeca, Code is poetry, The Curious Brain, Creative Bits, Creativity Online, Eskimon, Geoffrey Dorne, Lasse’s Findings, Marty’s Musings, Moleskinerie, Neoplayground, Nicola Davies, Notcot.org, Not For Paper, QBN, RA Forum, RiotInc, Rubbishcorp, Shawn Blanc, Theendofdecember, This May Be It, Unseen Said, Viva La Network, We Are Pop Slags, Wink at creativity

There’s a lot of talk about viral marketing through video. But given that you have produced something worth seeing, how do you actually get it on the run?

Well, it’s not necessarily that easy and the biggest single mistake brands do is they believe a good little piece will take off by it self. Is that the case? Of course not. You gotta give that moving beast of yours more than a push, you’ve gotta strap some rockets to each and every frame and hope for a safe launch into outer space.

Spreading video online is not about putting it on YouTube. You’ve gotta see the whole web and each and every site’s own potential.

Björn Falkevik, professional new media producer is one of the most competent consultants there is when it comes to new media publishing. He is sharing this great process map of video spread on Flickr and his blog. Unfortunately it’s in Swedish but I think you’ll get the picture anyway.

Björn Falkeviks social video publishing (Swedish)

Apart from spreading it SEO is important. Scott WilloughbyRand Fishkin and SEOmoz.org clears more questions in this short video.

Finally. Use tools like Tube Mogul to administrate the spreading of the content. And you might wanna consider using agencies like Unruly Media to spread it. If you end up pushing something out there Viralvideoshart compiled by Unruly brings some intelligence to why and where you’re getting spread.

Nothing comes for free but learning the tricks of the trade keeps you ahead of the competition!

One of the worlds most awarded websites has been redesigned. And the way Absolut.com is heading doesn’t come as a surprise. The new site has been give an slick, well designed user and SEO friendly interface. Many parts of the site has been moved from a flash based interface to a classical CSS based interface. Everything is done with the touch of Absolut.

This is definitely a first switch from Flash based sites of many to come. I’ve personally been part of building lots of flash sites through the years. But the possibilities to create rich user and SEO friendly interfaces with CSS gives us no reason anymore to use Flash for entire sites.

Also the fact that marketing departments around the world have undoubtedly noticed that their visitors leave after seeing that first loader will lead to change.

All in all I like the new Absolut.com better than the old. But there’s a few things I would have done differently:

The flash intro
Get rid of it. It takes time to load. We’ve seen it before and it doesn’t ad anything. There must be something different you could do with it?

Products
Why do you still separate the product experience from the brand campaigns. Integrate this better. The shouldn’t be any need for me to visit both products and a campaign site anymore. Mash it up! Also, why can’t you let people rate, comment, trackback, tag etc. Afraid of getting bad publicity?

YouTube integration?
The site has taken a step from interactivity to passivity. Why aren’t there any videos? Absolut could easily create the worlds most visited YouTube channel that could be reflected on Absolut.com. I think the time is over for sites that look to draw all traffic to their own site. You’ve gotta distribute your content in all different channels in different ways. And Absolute should be ahead of their game here.

Where’s the conversation?
Ok, we’re aloud to comment on blog posts etc. But where’s the stuff that generate conversation. Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, social sharing, commenting, reviews, ratings, user generated drink recipes, ideas etc. 

The blog?
Jacob Nielsen once said “People spend most time on other sites”.

Why is the new blog some sort of innovated blog that actually works bad compared to established blog standards. I think we could have expected more from Absolut. And why not base it on WordPress? This way it would load faster, it would give you access to hundreds of thousands features created by the open source community. It would give you credibility too.

Innovation?
Last but not least. I definitely think that this new site is nice. But it doesn’t ad anything in my book. Absolute has taken a step 5 years back from an innovation stand point of view. This is an ordinary site with some flash content and beautifully designed pages. I sure hope we don’t end up seeing this site staying on as a launch platform for new flash based campaigns but instead see more true but user friendly innovations that reach the broader audience with the Absolute brand message still intact.

So, conclusion

Original conclusion
This new site cannot be a strategy coming from online savvy people cause the tactical execution is great. Someone has identified that Absolut.com as it worked before didn’t deliver on usability and SEO and therefor needed to be changed. The project must then have been controlled by people within Absolut’s organisation who doesn’t understand how to create the next generation web presence.

Alternative conclusion
I’m totally wrong and this is the first to come of many releases that will put Absolut.com on the map again. But then I also expect a switch to open source, mash ups, conversation, openness etc.

In order words. You sure as hell wanna make sure that brand of yours is found among the top searches on Google. SEO is more important than ever. Building websites that get listed and linked up is key.

So, if you wanna get our management team on board, do the following 3 steps:

1. Print this beauty that I found on Anton’s blog.
2. Fold it into a B52 bomber.
3. Throw it straight into their face.

My scotch whisky blog keeps on jumping back and forth from page 2 to page 9 on the global Google.com search engine when you search for ‘whisky’ and it makes me go mad.

I’ve tried every trick in the (SEO) book to keep it steady on that second page since that drives about 1-2000 unique visitors a day. Then today I found the SEO pyramid made by Matt McGee. Now I’m filled with confidence. I will succeed!

You should head over there and climb it.

ps. While you’re at it. Take some time and visit Coach John Wooden’s pyramid of success. That one is a chocolate bar!