Brian Solis's Blog, page 113

17 Cartoons that Will Change Your Business

When writing my new book, What’s the Future of Business, Changing the way businesses create experiences, I felt that text wasn’t enough. So, I sought the wit and creativity of my good friend from the ole Web 2.0 days Hugh MacLeod aka @gapingvoid to help summarize each chapter in the form of a toon. Then we got to talking, why limit the cartoons to just the book?

Hugh MacLeod is not only a dear friend but also one of my biggest inspirations. His artwork is a magnificent harmony of emotion, wit, logic and satire. When I thought about the future of business, I pictured it beyond words on a page, I hoped to bring together art with the art of storytelling. I couldn’t think of anyone other than Hugh to visualize what the future (WTF) is and should be.

As such, we decided to free them from the confines of bindery and instead stitch them together in this free Slideshare. We’ll be releasing each of the individual graphics and the story behind them over the next few weeks. I hope you are inspired by his work the same way I am.

Number 1: The Internet is very big and it basically wants to kill you.

The internet is a global system of interconnected computer systems blah blah blah where www stands for both World Wide Web and Who Where Why. The way I look at it is a collective of people, data, and things.

Understand that it is what it is.

But its true nature and potential are yours to define. It just takes mastery of the “5I’s”. Squeeze intelligence out of information. Translate insights into ideas. Enliven ideas through Interactions. Influence behavior and inspire new possibilities.

Note: Slideshare will ask you for an email address, which unlocks a free download.

17 Gapingvoid Cartoons That Will Change Your Business from gapingvoid

What’s the Future of Business? My new book…#WTF

Connect with me: Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook | Google+ |Youtube | Instagram

How to Foster a Culture of Contribution: Communities Take Investment and Engagement, Not Just Content

Guest post by Greg Narain (@gregarious), co-founder of Chute, a social media platform that helps brands and publishers obtain rights to UGC content.

Customer-contributed stories are not only powerful, they’re also influential and important. Yesterday, customers conveyed their stories through text and voice. Today, we’ve moved to visually rich tools like photos and videos. While compelling to look at at face value, there’s quite a bit more hidden within.

Ever one of these stories affords us much more than just a means to fill a page or gallery. Media provides us a glimpse into how our customers use our services and products, how they interpret the values we stand for, and inspire future ideas and anecdotes for us to build on. A picture is worth a thousand stories.

Succeeding with user-generated media can be a daunting challenge without the right preparation. Most brands still dive into these efforts with a “hashtag mentality” – throw a hashtag on something and they will come. Unfortunately, that rarely succeeds.

While consumers increasingly create media on a daily basis, they are likely not creating it for a specific brand. Even less likely, though, are the odds that they are creating media for you on demand – regardless of how large the media buy behind the campaign is. To maximize success, brands must breed a “Culture of Contribution.”

Communities develop norms for behavior within the group which instruct them on what kind of behavior is expected and what is discouraged. This impacts not just the way they think but also the way they act. Despite our customers being well-versed on making media on their own, they need to be encouraged and guided towards contributing media back to your brand and their fellow customers.

Developing a Culture of Contribution takes time and energy. Aside from the rare viral hit, success requires a long-term view and dedication to the task at hand. There are several tactics worth considering as part of this journey.

1. Know your audience.

In today’s data-rich world, not knowing your audience is no longer an excuse. As consumers engage with a brand, they leave behind a virtual trail of their interests and intents. It is easy to glean several important items:

What content have they been most drawn to?

What content have they most engaged with?

Who are the most vocal or active contributors?

Each of these provide insight into what motivates your community and ultimately the threads you can use as you stitch together your efforts.

2. Compete for their Attention.

We cannot ignore that our efforts are in competition for everyone’s attention. An activated customer is one of the most valuable assets you have in the social landscape. They will evangelize broadly and be first-adopters for new initiatives. Turning passion into contribution should be our primary goal. This goal is only furthered by creating the right incentives and promoting their contributions back to the community at large.

3. Give it time.

It is critical to give these efforts the oxygen they need to survive. It is easy to be discouraged by first-time efforts, however, building a great community always takes time and starts small. To that end, a few simple techniques are worth considering.

For special events and at the onset, create campaigns specifically crafted to encourage your customers to participate. These will most often take the form of a contest or something related. They focus your audience’s energy around a specific task and have the best chance for success.

For publishing and other content creation, integrate calls to action for contribution around your ideas to draw great content from the community. This ties in well with editorial pieces and other content tied closely to your brand. Your more savvy consumers will have content on the ready or accept these unique opportunities to create new media.

Cultivating a “Culture of Contribution” is not simple by any means. Some companies trade in products and services that easily lend themselves to media-centric stories while others must dig deeper to surface these opportunities. Regardless of how hard the initial process is, however, the rewards of building a strong community ready to create compelling, targeted media is hard to deny.

Social Media and the Bystander Effect

Guest post by Francisco Dao, noted tech author and founder of 50Kings

If you logged on to any of your social media accounts this past Monday you undoubtedly saw an outpouring of posts thanking our veterans for their sacrifice along with multiple links to the typhoon Haiyan disaster in the Philippines. As I scrolled through my feeds I started to wonder if the appearance of support was actually discouraging people from helping either group. How many people decided posting was enough? Have social media platforms become the ultimate example of the bystander effect where nobody does anything because they assume someone else will?

The bystander effect is a well documented sociological occurrence in which people do not offer assistance when others are present. Instead, they share. The more people who appear to be available to help, the less likely any one of them will help. In some cases, such as the murder of Kitty Genovese which brought the bystander effect to the public’s attention, nobody will step up to provide assistance because everyone assumes somebody else will.

If you consider that social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter resemble massive online rooms full of people, they present the perfect conditions for the bystander effect to take hold. Most of us have hundreds of Facebook friends, surely someone will step up and offer aid, right? Considering so many of them are posting about the issue it’s not an unreasonable assumption, but when everyone assumes the same thing, nobody ends up doing anything.

My friend Brian Solis led a project for the United Nations in 2010 to help increase awareness of Malaria in Africa and also generate $10 donations for bed nets. He found that initially most people shared rather than donated, essentially accomplishing just one of the two goals. In his research to uncover why, he found that people believed that their act of sharing was worth much more than a $10 contribution. He found that people truly thought that their digital influence or social capital equated to tens or even hundreds of individual donations from their connections. This inflated sense of net worth in social will only bankrupts the real nature and value of the network effect.

What happens when everyone believes they have excessive digital influence and social capital?

When we delve deeper into the factors that contribute to the bystander effect, we find that distant problems shared on social media present the ideal conditions for lack of action.

1. Ambiguity of need. If people aren’t sure what kind of help someone needs, they are less likely to offer. In the case of veterans, some need help but many are successful. Furthermore, most people don’t know how or where to offer assistance. The veterans administration? Find a random charity? Give a dollar to the guy on the corner who claims to be a veteran? Both the need and the manner of providing aid are ambiguous. In the case of typhoon Haiyan, the problem is literally on the other side of the world. All we know is what we see in pictures and what we know from a few links that might have a donation button. Social media helps us share our sentiments but does little to clarify the ambiguity of the problem at hand.

2. Cohesiveness of the group. A group which shares strong bonds between its members is more likely to offer help over one with weak bonds. Social media bonds are largely virtual. We don’t really know many of our social media connections at all. Using myself as an example, I have 911 Facebook friends and I’d estimate I’m legitimately friends with maybe 100 of them. The rest are basically entries in an online Rolodex. A social media group is likely to be far less cohesive than one you would encounter in the real world.

3. The option/possibility of diffusing responsibility. As I mentioned earlier, the larger the group the less likely people are to step in and help. In a small group, it is unreasonable to assume that someone else, or someone more qualified, is available to provide aid. But in a large group, it becomes easier to assume that there are people who are better equipped to offer assistance, and therefore easier for any one person to ignore the problem based on the assumption that someone else will take responsibility. In a giant “room” such as a social media platform, it is no stretch to take for granted that someone else will be there to help.

Returning to veteran’s day and typhoon Haiyan, I’m curious to see how our actions compare to what we display on social media. How many of you posted or tweeted some message of thanks to veterans without contributing anything of value that might be helpful to a veteran in need? How many of you shared a link about typhoon Haiyan without donating anything to aid in the Philippines? I’ll volunteer myself as the first hypocrite. I didn’t post about veterans day but I did share links about typhoon Haiyan and until I wrote this post, I had not contributed. I have now.

The social psychology of the bystander effect is proven and likely working against you. Don’t let social media turn you into a do-nothing.

The Ultimate Moment of Truth and The Art of Digital Engagement

In 2012, Google along with Jim Lecinski published a fantastic book that explored how digital customers made decisions in what Google refers to as “The Zero Moment of Truth.” The ZMOT as it’s abbreviated, helps strategists discover relevant strategies and tactics on how to show up at the right place, at the right time and with the right content in a digital ecosystem.

In a world where consumers “Google it” to begin their digital journey, ZMOT revealed that brands need to re-think the connected experience and the resulting click path. But what happens when the web sites that appear in traditional Google search results no longer suffice for someone so connected that impatience becomes a virtue? This is after all someone who begins the journey on a smart phone or tablet tapping review sites and social networks to make information come to them before conducting formal research. Some call it the lazy web. Others refer to it as the social web. In the end, it’s just how people make information come to them. Once they do, it becomes the norm.

Even though web sites technically work on smaller screens thanks to adaptive and responsive design, they’re still web sites. In the very least, they go against the very nature of how someone interacts with the screen and what it’s designed to make possible. Here, it’s less about clicks and scrolls and more about pinching and swipes. That’s not all of course. The intention of a web page is called into question, or should be, in a time of connected consumerism. Step back and think about it for a moment. The information included on web sites isn’t written for you and me, it’s written for the person approving it. When you consider context in addition to the screen in the Zero Moment of Truth, you learn that people aren’t seeking marketing copy, they’re seeking the experiences of others to help humanize information and apply it to their state of mind, needs, and aspirations. Let that sink in because I’ll wager it’s not where a majority of your investments are allocated right now.

So, the truth unfolds…

In my latest book, What’s the Future of Business, I introduced the Ultimate Moment of Truth, that moment where people who convert an experience into discoverable content in any one of the countless social platforms people use to stay connected these days. And in this connected economy, the Ultimate Moment of Truth, or UMOT, becomes the next person’s Zero Moment of Truth, over and over again.

In addition to web sites, landing pages and corresponding SEO and SEM strategies, businesses now must consider how to create experiences in every moment of truth that aren’t just meaningful or remarkable, but also shareable. The future of brands now lies in how UMOT meets ZMOT throughout the customer life cycle. See, without design, these experiences are left to chance. Instead, marketers must begin to architect, foster and optimize positive experiences in each moment that’s native to each screen, efficient in steps, and tied to desirable outcomes.

When Google learned of my work around UMOT, the team reached out to consider how me might work together to help marketers better connect the dots to enhance the ZMOT. Our first collaboration resulted in a whitepaper that’s free to download, “Give Them Something to Talk About: Brian Solis on the Art of Engagement.” I’ve included parts of our discussion below.

Stay tuned for what’s next!

Give Them Something to Talk About

First impressions matter. They matter to people and they especially matter to brands. At Google, we’ve taken a long look at how, increasingly, first impressions are formed online and have a big impact on what we decide to buy. We call this online decision making moment the “Zero Moment of Truth,” or ZMOT for short. In his latest book, What’s the Future of Business: Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences, Brian Solis, a principal analyst at Altimeter Group builds further on ZMOT’s implications. He zeroes in on how consumers’ first impressions of a brand often come from fellow consumers sharing experiences online. The accumulation of these shared experiences, Solis says, means brands need to pay more attention than ever to customer experience, journeys, and the relationships they nurture.

What does engagement mean for you?

Engagement is really about Actions, Reactions and Transactions; something that I refer to as A.R.T. Engagement, for me, is something that locks in an interaction or exchange. Thinking about engagement in that way inspires a different approach for content creation; you want somebody to feel something, not just see it.

If you think about engagement in this way, is it measurable?

Absolutely. You define your desired outcome and that outcome becomes what you measure. It’s the relationship between cause and effect. Unfortunately, most marketers don’t consider the outcome to be more than some low-level engagement measure — a ‘Like’, a ‘Share,’ a comment — when in fact you could introduce an emotion. If you love something, you share it. This isn’t just about impressions; this is about expressions. You want people to share it and do something and that should be designed into your engagement strategy.

How can you enlist ‘shares’ to support a campaign objective?

No content should be designed today that isn’t inherently shareable. Take the Jeff Gordon Pepsi MAX commercial on YouTube. It comes from that same thinking that goes into Super Bowl commercials, where you stop and go, ‘Oh my god, that is the best commercial I’ve ever seen!’ For some reason marketers only get that creative once a year, but YouTube and the social web are unlocking that type of thinking. Everything you introduce to the social web should have the same caliber of creativity that goes into a Super Bowl commercial.

Is there a tendency for marketers to feel so overwhelmed by technology that they lose sight of their basic instinct for how consumers behave?

Look, I’m a consumer, you’re a consumer. When we talk about the brands we love, it’s very human and natural. But when we try to talk to people like us, we blank out and turn into ‘Marketing Man.’ We lose that human nature, that empathy. If you take a technology perspective, you are forever reacting. The minute you take a step back and say, “What’s the bigger mission?” you start to realize what you are trying to do is change behavior. This relationship between cause and effect is very human. Once you articulate that vision, technology becomes an enabler. It starts to work for you.

Consumers share brand experiences, whether the brand is listening or not. Do brands listen enough to those conversations?

Author Maya Angelou said: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Take Twitter, Facebook, YouTube — what is shared is experiences. Somebody is eating a delicious dinner; that picture is published and shared. Somebody spots a product that makes them feel fantastic; it too becomes a shared experience. There are shared experiences that represent every step of the customer journey. These conversations existed before technology, but now they are searchable, retrievable and building on each other. Shared experiences, in aggregate, become the brand.

What happens when a brand’s marketing doesn’t reflect its image among consumers?

You may say: “This is our brand, this is what it represents, this is what we want you to feel, say, share.” But always ask yourself: “What is the collective experience that is published across the social web?” If you compare the two, many times there’s a disconnect between promise and real world experiences. I refer to this as the ‘experience divide.’ In many experiments I’ve found the brand promise and the experiences that are felt and shared are not even close to being aligned. That’s a problem.

How can brands close that gap?

If we spent less time ‘talking’ about our brand and brand promise and more time designing how we bring it to life, the experience divide would naturally narrow.

What can brands do when online consumers’ first impressions are being shaped by other consumers’ experiences?

These conversations — these shared experiences — they don’t self destruct. They build upon each other, creating a collective index. Search engines plug into this cloud of shared experiences and that Ultimate Moment of Truth, or UMOT for short, of shared experiences becomes the next person’s ZMOT. Experiences form impressions. Impressions become expressions as they’re shared. Expressions form new impressions. The link between UMOT and ZMOT is the future of branding and relationships.

This is a new way of thinking. As a brand you have to create the experiences you want people to have and share, and reinforce that through positive conditioning, so those are the things people find — over and over again. To get people to share more positive things, you have to first make sure they have a positive experience. This is a renaissance opportunity for brands to look back: ‘Why did we start this company? What are we trying to do?’ Because in the social web, it is those experiences that become your brand.

What’s the Future of Business? My new book…#WTF

Connect with me: Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook | Google+ |Youtube | Instagram

Impatience is a Virtue: What’s Next for Social Business

Guest post by Philip Sheldrake as a reply to Chris Heuer’s post, “Social Business is Dead! Long Live What’s Next!”

As he finished a game of Cut The Rope on his iPhone, my young godson asked what my phone was like when I was his age. I broke it down for him. I was in my twenties before someone offered to take north of ten thousand dollars for a basic digital camera, and not much less for a GPS device. And I got my first basic mobile phone (I explained that means just making phone calls and sending text messages) as I approached thirty.

A few days later, as she dispatched her umpteenth snapchat of the morning, my niece asked me why I obviously enjoy what I do for a living. Imagine a whole lifetime, I replied, during which the only innovation was a tweak to the angle of the plow shear.

Scientists and engineers have been good to us. We’ve come to expect serious technological innovation with the regularity of the seasons. So, just like Chris Heuer, I’m more than ready for corresponding organizational change.

Now.

As in right now!

Having reflected briefly on the vast progression of the Internet and the web, computing, mobile infrastructure and social media services – as if you needed a reminder – let’s look at what’s changed at the typical organization during this time, my adult lifetime. Or more pertinently what hasn’t.

The org structure and the titles sitting round the board table today are very much unchanged from two decades ago but for the addition of a c-title with an ‘I’ in the middle.

Indeed, it was twenty years ago that integrated marketing communications first emerged championing a customer-centric outlook to replace inward-looking habits. And two decades later, customer-centricity may be a new religion by diktat but not in practice. From my observations, the truly, fully, consistently, customer-centric organization remains in the minority. Under scrutiny, many claims of customer-centricity turn out to be little more than the prioritization of an organization-centric view of the customer, and many advocates of social business still feel compelled for this reason to list customer-centricity as a core social business behavior.

So how is it that social, mobile and related technologies can be adopted en masse and rapidly for our lives outside work, transforming how we express ourselves, maintain relationships and get on with our lives, yet organizational life remain so intransigent?

I believe the answer is relatively simple. Design.

The tectonic forces of the 20th Century led us to design organizations that resist change. Such entities excel at efficiency, at repetition, with varying facility to adopt incremental, evolutionary tweaks to the way things are. There was no facility to recognize the complexities of the marketplace and operations let alone deal with them. So the design worked well enough, particularly when the competition was designed similarly. It competed and survived to this present day by searching for ways to make things a few percent better with a few percent less resources.

Microsoft Yammer co-founder and CTO, Adam Pisoni, writes: “Our modern ‘scientific management’ corporations remained competitive by optimizing for efficiency, a result accomplished through greater specialization and driven by overlaying process and rigid structure across the business. In this way, we arrived at the cornerstone of the modern company – predictability. Success was built around predictable costs, revenues, customers, and employees. Inherent in the notion of predictability is a sense of control. For corporations, it seemed that harnessing this control while setting and meeting expectations would keep them on top forever.”

Yet what served us very well for the best part of a century now frustrates and disappoints us. Reifying the organization as more than the sum of its human parts for the moment, we have created a monster that won’t be tamed for the 21st Century. In actual fact, it is doing precisely what we trained it to do.

How can we break this deadlock? Here’s Chris’ advice: “While Stowe Boyd still remains an ardent supporter of the impact and power of social in the enterprise as he notes in this GigaOm post citing McKinsey’s Social Economy report, I think it’s just time for us to find a phrase that is more attractive to corporate leadership.”

Now I’m a keen student of persuasion and the power of language, but really? Will the monster cower and roll over for its tummy to be tickled upon the simple incantation of a new turn of phrase? If I didn’t know Chris was sincere the title of his blog post could be interpreted as little more than linkbait.

In Stowe’s response to Chris’ post, he reasserts this point of view: “One of the toolsets to apply in this quest for the fast-and-loose business are ideas about working socially and tools to support that. However, the greatest advances are likely to be more closely linked to fundamentals of organizational culture, and the relationship of the individual to work and the organization, rather than a social business breakthrough, per se.”

In other words, social business was never just about social media, despite many twitterings treating #socbiz and #socmed as synonyms. It’s about people being able to behave differently as a result of new technologies, indeed wanting to behave differently, centered around common purpose and shared values.

If you share my optimism and assume we’ll get somewhere called social business at some point, then there are only two ways this can happen. One. We change the monster. Two. The monster is killed off by new creations built as social business from scratch.

The latter will happen, is happening. But like Chris, Adam, Stowe and Brian, I’m impatient. I want to see many long-established organizations transform. And if not now, then most definitely this decade.

The only way I can see that happening is by tapping the monster’s own strength, using its strength against it rather than directly opposing it, a technique anyone skilled in jujitsu will recognize. In The Business of Influence (Wiley, 2011) and Attenzi – a social business story (2013), I determined that the appropriate strength to channel is performance management. If people (individually and collectively) perform as they are measured – as indeed Chris points out in his post in relation to senior executive remuneration – and if we wish the organization to behave differently, then we need to infect that performance measurement appropriately.

I suggest we do that by extending the organization’s capabilities for performance managing the flows of money, the flows of time, and the flows of material, to tracking, analysing and understanding the flows of influence.

Whether the eventuality is called social business or some future neologism I couldn’t really care less. What’s considerably more important is the simple fact that people designed organizations. And we can redesign them.

For data on the evolution of social business, please read Brian Solis’ most recent report, “The State of Social Business Evolution 2013“

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Introducing Wolf & Wylan, a new line of pocket squares that directly benefit cancer research

My good friend Jesse Redniss, Senior VP of Digital at USA Network, and I are aiming to bring back the lost art of gentlemanliness with a twist, one that blends style, character and digital philanthropy. And, we need your help.

Jesse and I are introducing a very special line of pocket squares in honor of October and the fight against #breastcancer and #Movember to combat prostate and testicular cancer. This very special line flies under the brand of Wolf & Wylan and we have two designs that needs new pockets to call home.

Think of us as the TOMS or Warby Parker of pocket squares.

We just launched an Indiegogo campaign to help raise awareness and money for these important October and Movember charities. Not only do you help important causes, you get one of THE first pocket squares from the new Wolf & Wylan line. But that’s not all, our Movember design is created by none other than famous 3D pop artist Charles Fazzino. It features famous landmarks from all over the world sporting a handsome stache! It’s also available in a variety of colors…

So please jump in and help support important causes and bring back the art and spirit of gentlemanliness…with one or both of these gorgeous pocket squares! 100% of the profit goes to charity! Once you do, please help us spread the word!

Visit Indiegogo now and step up your style!

So, I’ve Co-Founded a Men’s Accessory Line with Jesse Redniss for #Movember

My good friend Jesse Redniss, Senior VP of Digital at USA Network, and I are aiming to bring back the lost art of gentlemanliness with a twist, one that blends style, character and digital philanthropy. And, we need your help.

Jesse and I are introducing a very special line of pocket squares in honor of October and the fight against #breastcancer and #Movember to combat prostate and testicular cancer. This very special line flies under the brand of Wolf & Wylan and we have two designs that needs new pockets to call home.

Think of us as the TOMS or Warby Parker of pocket squares.

We just launched an Indiegogo campaign to help raise awareness and money for these important October and Movember charities. Not only do you help important causes, you get one of THE first pocket squares from the new Wolf & Wylan line. But that’s not all, our Movember design is created by none other than famous 3D pop artist Charles Fazzino. It features famous landmarks from all over the world sporting a handsome stache! It’s also available in a variety of colors…

So please jump in and help support important causes and bring back the art and spirit of gentlemanliness…with one or both of these gorgeous pocket squares! 100% of the profit goes to charity! Once you do, please help us spread the word!

Visit Indiegogo now and step up your style!

The New Kodak Moment: Why Storytelling Is Harder Than Ever

Guest post by Greg Narain (@gregarious), co-founder of Chute, a social media platform that helps brands and publishers obtain rights to UGC content.

As a brand who innovated and heralded a technology that made time stand still – the Kodak moment became a colloquialism equivalent to capturing a moment worth savoring forever. For several generations, Kodak was the world’s record keeper. But those times have quickly come and gone.

Every moment ever photographed was a Kodak moment. Until they f***ed it all up. As my friend Brian Solis succinctly points out – the Kodak moment now marks the implosion of an amazing brand…the moment they missed how consumer behavior was shifting. It marks the hubris to resist the forces that made it successful. Worst of all, it commemorates the rift between a brand’s vision and the people who make a brand what it is.

Looking back several generations, the costs and challenges of photography and videography limited how much media we could create. Brands didn’t face this challenge – flush with the money and resources to create the most effective media. Today’s smartphone-rich world, however, affords everyone the opportunity to participate in storytelling.

Now, capturing is the easy part – we do it constantly through the phones we carry or the devices we wear. The number of recorded moments were small in comparison. In 2011 alone, we took 11% of all the photos ever taken, and in 2013 we’re projected to have captured 3.5 trillion. These artifacts of time were once precious, once Kodak moments, but we’ve become so rich in visual memories that we make them self-destruct. And maybe it’s better that way.

We have an infinite amount of perspectives to shape our narrative, but this doesn’t mean that we’ve become better storytellers. With this influx of media, it’s no longer up to brands to create the media, it’s up to brand to craft the story. The fundamental challenge is to process and package those moments to tell amazing stories that stop time and capture our imagination.

Every image tells a story, but we’re beginning to see trillions: trillions of images, trillions of stories, trillions of Instagram moments — but no narrative. What’s missing is the care and curation that makes stories great. This is every brand’s greatest opportunity.

This So-Called Digital Life: Re-Evaluating the Value of Social Media

I think I’m getting tired…

My connectedness is slowly seizing my quiet moments.

My sanctuary of enjoying my thoughts alone is now threatened.

The moments of watching life pass by as I take pause are now replaced by the need to plug in and socialize without truly socializing.

I swipe, pinch and zoom, and scroll as if I’ve become a digital conductor of sorts.

The light of my mobile screen is the calming I need to fall asleep each night and the stimulus that starts each day. I’m not alone in this statusphere.

The truth is that my thumbs hurt every now and then. It can only be from relentless txts, emails and updates. I know I’m not alone.

I often feel alone when I’m not connected or that I’m missing out when I read the updates of my friends. It makes me rethink my priorities in ways that wouldn’t be the most productive…at least by yesterday’s standards. Should I have joined them? Maybe getting out would be just what I needed. Again, I know I’m not alone.

I’m not addicted. I’m not in need of a digital intervention or digital detox. I intentionally live this connected lifestyle because I find value more times than not. It’s a choice. But, still I wonder. I wonder if the value I get out of my interaction across a dizzying array of networks is right or simply right in the absence of discovering alternative value or utility.

It comes down to virtue I suppose and where I choose to rank the qualities of social networks and connectedness in what ultimately defines who I am and what I do. Again, it’s a choice

In social media, there has to be something more fulfilling than attention and validation around this digital self-expression. There must be something more rewarding than the measure of people who see or respond to my expressions.

A Like, Retweet, comment, response, or view shouldn’t mean as much as they appear to, yet I see those who are consumed by the duality of a social life support system…living life in the real and digital life and trying desperately to tie them together. By way of illustration, Millennials and Generation Z kindle an unhealthy fixation on the number of interactions and followers they have on Instagram and Tumblr. Just follow the activities of a 13 year old on Tumblr, SnapChat or Ask.fm to see appreciate the inordinate worth placed on the number of people that follow them or respond to updates. If they don’t get what it is they solicit, they’ll try again…this time with a bit more fervor. As time passes, they’re self-conditioned to expect a baseline reaction.

With every action, we expect an equal or greater reaction…

Selfies.

Meals.

New profile pictures.

Provocative questions or random icebreakers.

Humble brags.

We invite attention because we’re learning to lean on it and the reactions that pour through our screens warms us. It reminds us that we’re appreciated, that we’re loved, that we’re alive.

But, perhaps it’s this value system that requires reevaluation. I believe we can invest differently in order to get more out of this digital lifestyle

I refer to today’s value system in social engagement as the 5 Vs. With each update, we look for something in return and each represent a shifting balance between…

1) Vision (I learn something, I’m inspired);

2) Validation (I’m accepted or justified);

3) Vindication (I’m right, cleared);

4) Vulnerability (I’m open); and

5) Vanity (Not egotism, but accidental narcissism. I’m important),

These 5 V’s coalesce differently with each update and produce distinct emotional results based on the measure we apply to our own actions, reactions and inactions.

Whether we realize it or if it’s simply a matter of our subconscious seeking attention, inspiration, empathy or any other stimulus, we are compelled to share. That’s just human nature of course. In a connected society though, we owe it to ourselves reflect and deliberate new possibilities. This is for us and those whom we influence and inspire. Yes. This is bigger than just you and me. None of us have the answers. We’re learning. And, that’s what this is about…learning to learn.

I had the opportunity to interview Anil Dash at Pivot Conference in New York. Both a friend and someone whose work inspires me, Dash and I explored the state of the social web and its impact on a digital culture. The spirit of the conversation embraced the notion that the value system of the social web may have evolved upon a crumbling foundation of wrong and right. What is wrong and right anyway? Maybe the answer lies in the web we lost according to Dash.

“We will spend three-to-four years with our thumbs on our cell phones,” he shared with me during our interview. That statement caused the audience to gasp. It was obvious that they were thinking about it in the moment and long after the discussion was done. But our time together would only produce additional reflection. “The fact that I spend more time reading my social streams than I do reading to my young son is a problem,” he continued.

Dash believes that the answer lies in rethinking value to re-train ourselves in how we use and appreciate social media. Dash along with Lifehacker Founder Gina Tripani co-founded Thinkup, a new startup that connects your social networking accounts and tells you what matters about the time you spent there. ThinkUp aims to also help you “learn a little bit about yourself” and to “feel good about social networking.”

He, like you and me, seek not only balance, but significance and meaning to help us become something more than an accidental narcissist. It’s the only way to save a social web that we may be losing. The value we take away from this digital lifestyle must only be surpassed by what we invest in it. That’s for each of us to define. And define it we must.

Your Brand: The Next Media Company – Become A Content Organization

Guest post by Michael Brito, author of Your Brand: The Next Media Company

There are four fundamental truths shaping today’s digital ecosystem, which I outline in my upcoming book, Your Brand: The Next Media Company.

Number one. There is a content and media surplus in the market place. There’s no shortage of advertising, marketing messages, mobile devices or social interruptions trying to command our attention, daily.

Number two. There is an attention deficit in the minds of consumers. Our brains are finite and we can only consume a small amount of content and then actually make some sense of it.

Number three. Consumers’ lives are dynamic and extremely unpredictable making extremely difficult for brands to reach them with a message.

And four. All consumers are influential and aid their peers down the purchase funnel.

For these reasons, you need to start taking content serious and begin to make the right organizational changes to adapt to the external chaos in the marketplace because it’s not going to change for you.

This also means that you need to elevate the conversation beyond just content marketing. Content marketing is by nature, tactical. It can easily be done in a silo. If you are a marketer, there is absolutely nothing stopping you from creating, aggregating, and curating content and then posting it in social media channels without having a content strategy.

You can hire consultants, agencies, and even third-party journalists and bloggers using platforms like Contently or eByline to create content and campaigns on your behalf. It’s fairly easy and affordable to use services like Poptent or Genius Rocket to crowdsource highly produced video content. And guess what? You can do all of this without actually talking to anyone in your company. Now, the content itself might not be epic or change any specific consumer behavior but it’s not hard to do, and it’s not all that expensive.

The reason why many of the brands struggle with content, storytelling, and scale is because they are looking at content from an elementary point of view. Content is not a box you check, a bubble you fill in, or a bullet point in a PowerPoint presentation. It’s more than SEO, more than videos, Infographics, Instagram photos, or tweeting during a half-time show. You can’t learn about content strategy from clever blog titles like “10 Proven Tips to Learn This” or “5 Smart Tricks to Learn That.” Content must be considered a strategic imperative for your business. You must become a content organization if you want to take your business to the next level.

Just as there is an art to storytelling; there also needs to be a strategic and operational plan that can help you create and distribute content; integrate it across paid, earned, and owned media; and measure it effectively. As a marketer or brand manager you must move beyond the content marketing buzzword and commit to building a long-term content strategy that will allow you to execute your content marketing initiatives flawlessly and at scale.

Your brand must become a content organization.

This is much easier said than done, of course. Here are four, very easy considerations to get you started.

1. Why. Before you even think about Twitter, Facebook or any other social media channel, you must first establish “why” you want to invest dollars and resources into a content strategy. In other words, you need to establish a vision and business goals. Is your goal to drive brand awareness, reposition your brand or generate leads? The “why” will help ensure that all of your content marketing activities will be in alignment with your brand’s goals and objectives.

2. What. What exactly do you want to say online? Your content narrative is essentially the story you want to tell across all of your distribution channels. In some cases, you may have different storytelling principles in Facebook versus Twitter versus a corporate blog. The following are key inputs that will help determine the story you want to tell online:

- Brand narrative (core values, brand positioning, product attributes)

- Non-business issues that are important to the brand (sustainability)

- How the media contextualizes the brand when they write stories

- How the community contextualizes the brand when they tweet, leave comments, or write blog posts

- Audience/persona definition

- Historical content performance

- How consumers search for your brand, product

- The top 10 or 15 customer support issues

3. How. This is where your content operations will take center stage. In several reports over the last few years, marketers have been vocal that their biggest challenge with content is that they don’t have enough time, enough budget or resources and approvals make the content lifecycle months instead of days. Building what I call the content supply chain will help facilitate workflows from content ideation, creation, submission, and approval to distribution – as well as the integration into paid media. This also includes building a centralized editorial team, assigning roles and responsibilities and investing in smart technology solutions that can you scale your content operations globally. Part of the “how” should also involve mobilizing employee advocacy (brand journalism) and customer brand advocates and enable them to help you tell your brand story.

4. Where. Mapping where you want to tell your story involves prioritizing your social media channels and determining the resources you have internally to properly manage content creation and community management. This is essentially the content marketing piece of your strategy.

This should give you a solid baseline on the internal resources you need to think about as you transition your brand into a content organization, or what I refer to as a media company.

Follow Michael on Twitter or via his social strategy blog.