Almond Butterscotch named his photo Connected and lonely
That’s one of the most common questions I get when I’m giving speeches or meeting clients. Hell if I knew but the last couple of weeks I’ve been giving it some thoughts, new thoughts though. If you’d asked me one year ago I’d dreamed up some sort of new service or maybe I’d be talking about Instagram, Path or some other new social network. That’s of course in one way part of the answer but lately I’ve spent more time thinking about the vacuum that would appear of people stopped using Facebook.
I’ve been using Facebook since early 2007. It’s been one of my most important channels to keep up with both old and new friends. In the last five years I’ve [click to continue…]
Mother Teresa knew social media long before it existed!
Tons of brands are recruiting social media experts. Here’s a little something for you all to think about.
A typical ad reads: To apply for this role we believe you; are an expert in social media, know how to spot trends, got extraordinary abilities to express yourself in text, have proven studies within communication, PR, media or equivalent with at least 1 year of working experience, have the knowledge to make sure our social media presence is in line with other communication activities, can plan and schedule our presence
[click to continue…]
About 2 month ago I was invited to Best Internet and beautiful Zagreb in Croatia to host a full day workshop on the future of communication. Me another 85 people had a great day where I mixed speaking sessions with, what I love the most, open discussions.
Before this event I was contacted by the leading business newspaper in Croatia – Lider. They wanted me to answer 10 questions that they would base an article on. Today as I was cleaning my desktop on my computer I thought – since you probably understand as much Croatian as I do I thought this could be a good blog post. So here we go.
Johan Ronnestam answers 10 questions about the future of communication (in Croatia to some extent 
1. Once you are on the internet your competition is whole world and people speak in one language (mostly english). How can local brands stay local or share national values while ‘living’ in virtual world?
Johan Ronnestam: By being just that – Local. In a globalized world people will look for the unique brand that delivers something beyond what you can shop in every parts of the world, every country and every city. The times when we all wanted Starbucks coffee is soon to be over. Everyone [click to continue…]
February 16, 2011
in Advertising Awards,Art,branding,Cases,Entrepreneurship,Images,Innovate,My Books,People,Quote of the day,Research,SEO,Social communication,Software,Speaking,Svenska,The trend is my friend,Video
Some of you might have followed my blog since way back while others followed me only a couple of days. So I decided it was time to dig into Google Analytics and gather my top 100 blog posts, based on traffic, (I have written 596 to this date) between the years 2005 and 2011 for you to read.
I did actually start my first blog back in 2002 but quickly stopped blogging. It was more of an installation experiment. Then in 2005 I slowly started posting again. Up until now I’ve had over a half a million pageviews and 367374 unique visitors dropping in.
Oh, by the way. If there’s anything you like – please Tweet it or put it on your FB page. It would make me happy.
So here we [click to continue…]
January 13, 2011
in branding,Images,Innovate,Just another day,Link of the day,Quote of the day,SEO,Simplicity,Social communication,The trend is my friend,Video
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 [click to continue…]
We’ve all heard it before. A brand is not a logo, nor is it your products or services. Your brand is the sum of peoples feelings when they think about your brand. Or said in a more ‘techy’ way – An emotional translation of what first comes to mind when neurons fire in the brains around the world when your brand, products or services is mentioned.
As people spend more and more of their life socializing online and searching for products and services your brand is naked, exposed and on it’s own. There are no sales people telling people about your product anymore, you’re left with seconds to raise interest before people leave you and most important – your brand no longer belongs to you, it belongs to all those people online who either say good things about you or worse, tell people that your brand suck!
Here are 5 things to think about when keeping your brand together in the future social world.
1. Brand presence not brand site
I’ve written about this and that before. But it’s something worth repeating. You should not – I repeat – you should [click to continue…]
There are no secret formulas, no secret recipes or magic potions when it comes to social media marketing. All you’ve gotta do is take in one single fact: People have moved lots of their behaviors online and you’ve gotta follow.
To succeed in moving your business, communication and advertising into the digital world, ask yourselves the following questions:
- If people search for things related to my business via Google - how can I make sure they find me?
- We’ve used to organize events in the real world - where can we organize events in the digital world?
- When people started to use phones you gave your sales people phones - why are you not giving them Skype, MSN, Twitter, Facebook and live streaming accounts?
- You would never automate a personal relation that could lead to sales - why are you automatic every single sales process online?
- People don’t listen to brands, they listen to other people - how can we make sure other people say good things about us?
- Since people tend to spend their time alone behind the screen - how can we continue to build human digital relations using video, photos and copy?
- In the real world you do PR towards paid media – how can you shift your PR activities to be picked up by earned media online?
- Traditionally you’ve spent lots of money on media - how can you shift focus to spending lots of money on value that leads to eyeballs online?
- In the offline world you would value how people navigate in your store - how much do you value how people navigate in your online world?
- Building a great house requires an well paid architect – why then are you hiring the cheapest architect when building a great online presence?
- In the old world comparing products was hard - does your products stand the future transparency were everything can be compared?
- Back then you could create a 3 year marketing plan – what can you do to turn it into a 3 month marketing plan?
- Focus groups used to lead you right - is your organization prepared to listen to real time data instead?
- Building brands took years and years - how can you build your brand in months?
- Competitors introduced themselves at the next fair - are you prepared for the ones who wont introduce themselves at all and don’t care about the old way of doing business, only your old customers?
- You used to write business plans - how can you get moving and learn on the way.
If you’ve got 15 right answers then you’re fine. If not – start running!
State your problems first. Then it might turn out social media is not what you need. And if it is. The do something unique made to work. Don’t just treat it like another channel where you can dump your offline activities.
A sloppy little drawing I did this morning inspired by the works of Al Baik.
Oh…like when you do traditional advertising you actually need money. It’s not free to reach success. And oh nr 2 – online communication is about creating equity over time. Campaigns might work every now and then but overall you should strive to build a socially distributed content driven platform over time. Then you might get fans. Might…
