This morning I’ve spent some time on Kiva.com relending money to entrepreneurs across the globe. The last thing one is told to do is to introduce Kiva to my friends and by doing so help Kiva reach more entrepreneurs. Since I’ve got a blog with some traffic I thought I might as well paste the mail in here instead.
Here we go:
Hi! I just made a loan to someone in Philippines using a revolutionary new website called Kiva.
You can go to Kiva’s website and lend to someone across the globe who needs a loan for their business – like raising goats, selling vegetables at market or making bricks. Each loan has a picture of the entrepreneur, a description of their [click to continue…]
Domino’s Pizza has gotten themselves into a lot of trouble thanks to one of their employees. What’s interesting is the fact that they’ve ended up there even though they’ve done their homework on online presence. What’s lacking is obviously enough brand fans.
ReadWriteWeb reports on a video broadcast by two of Domino’s employees. The video that among other things, features an employee who farts and sneezes on a sandwich, was viewed over 500,000 times. RWW writes that Domino’s were quite fast to publish the response (below) to the video where they of course are explaining how something like this could happen – but is it enough?
This is only the beginning. As technology becomes easier to use brands will face industrial sabotage like this every week. The problem tomorrow or obviously already today is the fact that one single employee or competitor for that sake can do a lot of harm…A LOT OF HARM.
In order for companies to stand future attacks, brand communication becomes more important than ever since it’s the only protection they’ll have once something like this happens. Brand communication is the one thing that turns us into loyal and long term brand fans and therefore also gatekeepers.
Brand fans = drones. (Star Wars rock’s, doesn’t it?)
Imagine if Domino’s Pizza would have had a couple of million brand fans only waiting to be called into war. The fans would have killed the employee video with comments and created related videos. Once the official response above was published fans would instantly have created a viral spread of the video. Blogs would have been swarmed and Microblogs would have been buzzed until nothing stood in Domino’s way…
If you’re a brand owner. Start thinking. What can your brand really do for your customers. What can you give away. How can you make your brand fans loyal. And how can you gather their contact details so that you can direct them straight into the war zone? Start building walls, tanks, guns, jet fighters and everything you can think of. Then get your brand fans into training cause when the shit hits the fan you’ll be to close to the front and recruiting new soldiers will be the last thing on your mind.
ps. Just to clear things up. I’m a drone in many cases
As Twitter grows bigger and bigger I came to think of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Birds. What looks like a flock of beautiful birds end up being our worst nightmare.
Candy brand Skittles have produced some kick ass TVC’s (Skittles leak being one of my favorites) through out the years and now they’re innovating the use of social media within fast moving consumer goods.
This blog post started in my head after seeing this discussion below between two of the bloggers I’m following. David Armano from Logic+Emotion and Jackie Huba with Church of the Customer Blog. They’re talking about Skittles and how they changed turned their entire website into a Twitter search for the keyword skittles. Jackie doesn’t like it, David does.
Skittles is of course not the first FMCG brand to do cool things online. Altoids has been rockin’ the web with cool content since about 2001. Jackie Huba mentions Jelly Belly and their content heavy site. The thing though with strategies like this is that you’re not taking advantage of the social crowd out there. Instead you’re constantly paying to pull traffic to your own site instead of placing yourselves where the customers are on their terms.
What’s really cool with all this to me is not the fact that Skittles is using Twitter but instead the little widget they’ve created that goes on top of whatever they want.
So, instead of building they’re on site or even mashup, they’ve created the ultimate mashup – a Skittles widget that navigates you directly to the respective channels online – Youtube for video, Twitter for chat, Facebook for friends, Flickr for photos and ultimately Wikipedia for product info.
This case is a simple yet cool explanation what you can do online today. I’m speaking quite often about the power of distributing your content outside of your own domains and this is a good example of it.
Sum up. Experimentation has to be a part of your communication. Sitting at home waiting for the ultimate strategy won’t work cause the net is ever changing!
Branding today is about creating a brand platform, then dramatize it and start screaming to people – COME ON AND BUY MY PRODUCT. IT’S GREAT. Of course in a slightly creative and modest manner than that. But it very often about traditional advertising in classic media channels.
Branding of tomorrow is about knowing who you are, what your brand stands for and start experimenting with innovation, partnerships, entertainment and above all involving your potential audience as a part of your product development. And note – call them audience, cause the will pay to stay but leave if they don’t like the show.
It’s all about constantly innovating your brand and then making sure you know what people think of your work. Do they like it? Do they hate it. What do they miss, what would they do differently. Speak to them. Learn their language. Once you think you know the formula to success – erase your brain and start all over again. We do not want repetition from brands that lead we want the new stuff, the shit that makes us go wow!
The first step to keeping on top of your game is getting into the conversation. There’s no need to wait even if people aren’t talking about your brand just yet. Get in there and learn!
First step – automize your intelligence information
The key to becoming successful when becoming a brand conversationist is to know…yep, you guessed it, where people who talk about your brand are hanging. Put your ears to the rail and listen for. And remeber that most of these things you can output as a RSS feed into Google Reader or Netvibes. Built a dashboard!
The 59 services you can currently keep track of using Friendfeed.
Get into the discussion
Once you know where people are discussing your products, your brand or anything else related to your mission (cause you have one of those huh). These are the tools you should get accompanied with.
And don’t forget to get into blogs and comment on subjects relevant to you!
Spread your digital presence
Getting into the conversation is not only about spying on others and then going after the buzz. Your digital presence – website, campaigns, digital events, groups…everything has to go beyond their own sphere and servers. In order to do this you’ve gotta start spreading your information socially. There’s tons of tools but a first must have are these.
The god of spreading content – SEO (Note, not paid search)
And more and more and more and more. This goes on forever. But you’ve gotta be everywhere!
Last but not least! Create advertising and communication that matters to people. We want to have fun – as I said earlier this year. You’ve gotta be a clown!
Ok, that’s it for now. I’m aware that I’ve left a couple of question marks in the heads of you guys who don’t know what RPC, RSS etc is. But I don’t have the time to elaborate on that now. I’ll get back to it soon
Nothing is like it used to be. A couple of years back I attended a Luxury marketing meeting in Monte Carlo. I was one of the speakers and I spoke about how the younger generation will want to see more things from the Luxury brands than just good old beauty shots of expensive products. A couple of posts back I highlighted the IWC print campaign which is a step in the right direction.
Today however I’m amazed with how prestige cuvée champagne house Krug balances innovation with luxury.
Krug has limited the edition to 4,000 numbered copies worldwide and 12 sets with a bottle of Krug Grand Cuvée in a gift box only available at the Ode to Art Gallery in Singapore.
What’s truly nice about this piece is the fact that it’s demonstrates what branding is about today. If you’re looking to spread your brand it’s all about becoming talk of the town and not necessary pay to place your ads all over town.
This activity is about innovation, creativity, partnering with great people, a great print house, the Krug brand, industrial design, video, print, ideas, effect, visuals etc etc etc. There is something for everyone out there.
When you create communication pieces like this they’re spreading them self due to the fact that they offer something unique that is relevant to a multiple of audiences that in their turn spread the content further. In this sense my blog now becomes another branding surface for Krug.
Krug spreads their brand in social networks based on creative and innovative ideas
If your communication initiative is good enough you’ll probably end up with all good branding surfaces. The thing is that bloggers like me and other brand surfaces like to blog about bad stuff too. So make sure your piece of communication is up to the job, otherwise you might end up damaging your brand instead.
So, to conclude this post. What you gotta do is to create brand activities that are absolutely on top of the scale when it comes to innovation and creativity. If you partner up with someone or as in Krug’s case a bunch of great people, your campaign will kick off like never before since there is so much in there for everyone.
ps. I found the campaign on Luxury Insider. Down in Monte Carlo I met the founders of the site, a great bunch of young entrepreneurs.
A couple of days ago ComScore published a Top Social Media Sites 2008 list. The list that I found on Techcrunch is an interesting read since I for one thought that Facebook and MySpace would be on top. But instead we find Blogger as the largest social media site in the world. Blogger and WordPress together actually outnumber Facebook and MySpace which means blogging is the number one social media activity in the world right now.
Blogger however is only a site while WordPress also provides an open source platform to bloggers who want to host their own blog (like me). This probably means that WordPress is up there with Blogger fighting for the number one spot.
It’s notable to see that Facebook is the one with the most positive trend. Blogs are showing a healthy growth too while Windows Live has taken a dive. Next years graph will show us if Windows Live has changed their trend with the new features launched in the end of 2008. I do however miss sites like Twitter, Digg and YouTube in the results. They’re just as much social media sites as Flickr, Scribd and Facebook.
Personal publishing remains strong and we can expect more people than ever getting involved with social media in one way or another in 2009.
Your advertising has to change
Reaching out to consumers however will require a more complex and advanced execution of communication than ever as people distribute their online behavior on more sites than ever.
Creative advertising that entertains your target group becomes more important than ever if you wanna stay ahead of your competition.
Ideas that don’t include a social spread are only half way there.
Understanding of technology is key.
Brands that focus on distributing their communication rather than trying to pull traffic to their own campaign sites will be the winners.
Making sure your content is relevant and close to brand and product is more important than ever.
One idea - visible everywhere in every way. (i.e. don’t place video in one place, place it everywhere.)
Make sure measurement and statistics is in place to show where to feed more money and where to cut the investments.
Change campaign set up on a daily basis in the beginning of the campaign.
Don’t forget the technical back end of the social sites – provide applications, widgets and code that supports your overall idea.
If you end up producing valuable content to the masses that have no relation to your products you’ll end up playing clown without getting paid.
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: [click to continue…]
I have just finished sending my christmas gifts. This year I’ve skipped the Porsches and the Learjets. Instead I registered an account on Kiva.org. Apart from a loan to Ms Chhum Sreng I’ve bought loads of gift certificates. These ones became the perfect christmas gift. Kiva, that I found on Jardenberg.se is the world’s first [...]
In this recent study Forrester asked people in North America what information sources they trusted. Look at the 2 bottom bars. The least trusted source of information is a company blog and social networking initiatives from a company or brand. Lately I’ve been talking a lot about how communication must shift from event based communication [...]
ReadWriteWeb reports on a new startup from Portugal called Tarpipe. Basically Tarpipe does for PR companies and social networking nerds what Yahoo Pipes does for Web 2.0 developers and feed junkies. Hmm what the heck does that mean? Well, with Tarpipe you can ad all kinds of social networking accounts like Flickr, Jaiku, Twitter, Tumblr, [...]
There’s a lot of talk about viral marketing and especially YouTube video virals. Brands and agencies seems to think that viral marketing is a viable marketing method. It COULD be. But it might just as well FAIL big time. Of course it depends on the actual video but many great virals have been doomed to [...]
This blog is written by Johan Ronnestam. He's widely regarded as one of Sweden’s leading speakers and authorities in the field of modern creative and conceptual thinking and skill of innovating brands and their communication. The readers of Microsoft Indikat has named Johan Swedens most influential authority within digital communication
