Stories are art, crafted to take the reader on a journey designed by the author to deliver a meaningful emotional experience. This seminar, and I recommend you seek out one of Robert’s London seminars if you have the chance, provided me with a rich learning experience that helps me in my desire to understand better the correlation between our emotions and values and the brands we buy.

I believe brands need to be storytellers. Using craft and structure to reveal the complex associations of values, benefits and features to their audiences using language they intrinsically understand and connect with. Their stories must tell the simple truth of their existence, helping their audience to see clearly their value, design and importantly create a platform for long term engagement.

It is in the storytelling therefore that some brands fail. They offer the same quality of service or product as successful brands, and yet they don’t translate this into their own success. They fail to capture the imagination of their audience and we must ask ourselves why?

In tough market conditions many brand owners are forced to treat their brands as commodities, pressured by the demand for sales and a focus from the boardroom on buying short term brand loyalty. This has two long term implications for the brand. Firstly it can turn a premium brand in to a value brand that is traded (which isn’t sustainable) rather than positioned, and secondly it makes the brand compete with other brands in the wallet and not in the minds of the audience.

Whilst audiences want brands to recognise and reward loyalty, we as brand owners need to inspire them too. If all we do is reflect and remind them that money is always the key driver in their life, we’re letting them down. The brand owner must focus beyond the effective management of their marketing budgets and simply trying to buy customer loyalty.

We must convince audiences that when value in the economy is shaky the values of the brand remain constant, offer tangible benefits and give them something to believe in and sometimes aspire towards having.

“But the majority of brands have to deal or die” is the answer from many brand owners but this simply isn’t true. Some brands, with very little money, have managed to engage their audience and developed deep emotional relationships that inform, entertain and differentiate.

They have become storytellers, that enable their audience to connect with the values of the brand and absorb meaning through the craft of their brand story.

So what are the components of an effective story:

1) Unlike stories that are fiction brands must tell the truth of their existence. Why do they exist in the world, to serve what purpose for their audience? Here the reason is all important. We want to create (A) because (B) needs it to enable them to do (C). A brand story, in its telling, should smoothly transport the audience from A to C, be utterly transparent and feel right. You know when your been strung a line, you feel it. It you don’t believe it, you can be sure your audience wont either!

2) Frame your story to reflect accurately (without dwelling on it) the pain in your audience’s life you wish to remove with your brand. I use the analogy of people reading horoscopes. Those people that believe them look for themselves in the writing of the horoscope.

If they recognise themselves or a character trait or a situation they are experiencing they instantly develop a deep bonds of trust with the writer because “They get me!” It shows your audience that you understand them intimately. Adversely, if you simply scratch the surface of understanding your audience how can you hope to translate learning into meaningful products or services?

3) Craft your message using all your learning about your audience to be instantly recognisable and understandable. You must speak the same language as your audience or risk them missing the point of your brand.

4) Take your audience with you on a journey that has a clear destination in mind. The characters of a story are all moving toward some desired outcome, every action either positive or negative will move them toward it. So too must your brand story, it must help your audience towards a deeper understanding of the values, benefits and features of your brand and not simply make un-connected statements regardless of them being true.

5) Entertain if possible but at the very least inform your audience so they can differentiate your brand from others. The example I always refer too is Blendtec. Their blender may not be a sexy brand but that didn’t stop them thinking about and translating the values and benefit of their blender into something that is both fun, entertaining and informative.

“Will it Blend” started life as a campaign and has grown into a community where the owner of the company asks the simple question, “Will it Blend?”. It being everything from industrial magnets to hockey pucks! Delivered through YouTube, short video’s of them attempting to blend a whole raft of objects entertains but subtly re-enforces the benefits of the brand that being that Blendtec blenders are very robust, dependable blenders.

Reflecting on the great depression of the 20s and 30s, audiences going to the movies actually grew. People found the money and went to the movies to escape the harsh reality of living and for the 90 minutes telling of a story found a world crafted for them by screenwriters, authors and play writers.

Audience’s today don’t want the constant reminder of the frugality’s of living. They need value of course but they also want to be told a story and believe in something. They want to know we care about them and not just the pound they carry around in their pocket.

We have on average (Dunbar Number) 150 social connections, so for me that represents 4650 potential social connections. There isn’t time to manage all these social connections effectively, we’d be mad to try but some people do and I’m seeing more people dump their profiles all together as they’ve hit social media burnout.

Social connections are important and valuable both to the individual and the communities they are part of. This has been well documented over the last two years and I won’t go over well trodden ground but I am concerned that people have begun to question the benefit of their social connections. This is on the back of feeling their commitment to keeping their social connections open has begun to affect their work and home life. There are lessons we can all learn to ensure we don’t find ourselves in a similar situation.

Chose to lose some social network platforms.

Dumping the social networks that you joined in a rush of enthusiasm but aren’t actually value social networks will free up your time to focus on the connections that really benefit each other. By value social networks I mean those social network that don’t feed you personally in terms of knowledge, learning and connections or you don’t feel contribute to the growth of the community.

Remove overlapping contacts.

If we stick to the principle of one person equals one connection, how many duplicate connections do you have with a person across your social networks? It’s easy to accept a friend and a follower, without giving it a second thought when we connect with them on other networks already. Consider how many people use Twitter to feed their Facebook profile or vice versa? If you follow people on both networks you’ll expose yourself to the same content twice.

Recognise what is social media noise and and then ignore it.

Remember when you were a kid traveling on holiday with your parents. You’d sit in the back of the car watching the cars coming in the other direction. Then you simply started to not see them. They were there, but you didn’t register them any more as they’d become part of the background noise.

Social network noise is the same. We waste a huge amount of time reading stuff that neither requires our input or really warrants it. I skim read quite a lot of content taking time over a few posts, comments and messages. If I can’t answer quickly, I’ll go back to it later in the evening if I have time. Important note here, no one will suffer if you don’t respond or comment. The world and your life continues regardless.

Time to read, time to respond, time to leave it be.

Be regimented about when you log onto your social networks. During work time (Unless your business is online and driven by social networks) focus on work. Keep lunchtime for re-charging the batteries, read comments, posts and messages during your lunch break but leave answering them until later in the evening after you’ve spent time with your family, done chores and have an hour or two spare.

I tend to leave Twitter and Facebook until evening and sometime don’t look at them at all if I don’t have time. If you refresh Twitter and Facebook on your smart phone, laptop etc. every couple of minutes, you’re spending too much time on your social networks and it will impact on your home life. How many of you have heard “Do I have to post a message to your Facebook to get your attention?” Be conscious of the amount of time spent online.

It’s all in the mind.

Ever spent hours and hours thinking about what someone has written on their Facebook or Twitter profile, trying to decipher if a message has more then one meaning or if it is meant for you or not? I have.

A hard lesson, but a useful one is to never take a post personally, it’s not worth giving it mind space. Some people write deliberately cryptic messages designed to attract attention and comments. It’s about control and you could be surrendering your control if your respond to them. Take control back and remember, maybe not everyone you know on your social networks are a real friend.

Do you really need to join?

I get lots of invites from friends and contacts to join them on new social network platforms something which is only going to increase over time. Most of these are automated features of new platforms designed to grow participation quickly.

Ask yourself:

Do you really need to be on this social network platform?
Does it provide the same features and benefits as other networks you’re on?
Are the same people on that platform as are on your existing social networks?
Can you contribute your knowledge and expertise to that network, is it of value?
Can that network provide learning and useful contacts for you?

It’s import that you value the social interactions you have and feel your contribution to them adds value to that community and in doing so you gain learning from them. If you feel burdened by your social media connections I hope these ideas will help you maintain your interest without sacrificing your work or home life.

With a combination of both inspirational and practical speakers including our very own Marketing Director Declan Metcalfe, Your Marketing Show will provide delegates with worthwhile tips and suggestions on improving their own marketing.

The event will also mark the start to the “80 Days around Marketing” programme to celebrate the 80th birthday of the North East branch of the CIM.

Your Marketing Show will be held at The Radisson SAS Durham in the North East on 3rd March.

If you would like to book for the Your Marketing Show 2010, please book online using the CIM Events Booking System. Alternatively please call The Chartered Institute of Marketing Region and Branch Events team on (0)1628 427340 or by email on cimevents@cim.co.uk.

As with any business in a recession charities need to be where their audience is or they run the risk of being left behind, and it’s clear some smaller charities are struggling to change lanes and adopt social media as a key part of their strategy. Some charities, however, have made the leap and have been reaping the rewards of new social opportunities.

Age Concern with partner Innocent Smooties developed ‘The Big Knit’. Started in 2003 the campaign has raised, to date, over £600k for older people in the colder winter months. The campaign now includes Flickr, YouTube and Blog channels which enable the people who’ve got behind the campaign to be part of the story. Clever widgets such as the ‘Hatometer’, which can be embedded into supporters blogs and websites, shows how many hats have been knitted so far.The founder of the Charity: Water, a not-for-profit dedicated to bringing clean water to impoverished villages in Africa, got an e-mail from Amanda Rose, a British woman who wanted to test the idea that Twitter, with its 30 million users, might be able to raise money. Twestivals were set up by local volunteers of Twitter users in 200 cities across the world who organised parties, concerts and gathering raising $250,000 in four days (check out http://newcastle.twestival.com for the North East Twestival). The Twestival ethos has been picked up by local Twitter users who have used the concept to raise money for local charities.

Macmillan Cancer Support What’s New? community was developed to build a support network around both the charity, cancer sufferers and their families. It shares information, provides a forum for people to share experiences, ask questions and connect with each other. They also use it to highlight events and campaigns, recruit volunteers and raise money.

The key is using the community around the charity to develop valuable social capital in a win, win scenario. The charity wins because it reaches a much wider audience with its message and hits its campaign target, the partner/sponsor wins because it leverages its brand in innovative positive ways to new audiences. The community wins because it gets behind a charity, has fun and raises much needed cash.

So, how can smaller charities and not-for-profits with far less resources use social media?

Firstly, it’s important to understand that pretty much everything a charity currently does to raise awareness, educate and raise money is transposable and can be given real power with some essential social media tools.

Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Flickr and YouTube are key tools for getting your message out there and getting people to follow, and be part of, charity activities. Each channel can be set up easily and provide a digital presence for the charity as well as offering separate pages for individual campaigns. Together they can significantly improve the overall visibility of the charity online and help develop a diverse support community around the charity. Having corporate sponsors of your social media channels also provides sponsorship opportunities that can generate revenue for the charity.

Twitter, the micro blogging platform, is superb at building a charity’s profile and that of the people who work within it. To get the most out of Twitter here’s a couple  things to consider before setting up a profile for your charity.

- Define “influence” (What do you want to say)
- Establish Your Angle (Who are you targeting)
- Make it Easy to Get Involved
- Do not use Twitter to BROADCAST your brand message
- Focus Beyond Tweets, send people to where they can join you or donate

Engage with people. Social capital, the good you generate by connecting with people and sharing knowledge, ideas and thoughts is at the heart of social media. The amount you give of yourself is comparable to what will come back to you when you need help promoting your charity, events or campaigns. Find out where you target audience is and connect with them.

Once you’ve connected, be active. Think about what your audience wants from you, what interests to them and talk about it. It should be a mix of information relating to the charities activities, events you’re organising, the people of the organisation  (The volunteers and staff etc.) getting on with the good work of the charity. Be opinionated, but don’t broadcast, it’s not about pushing your message down people’s throats.

Social media has the ability to reach people you’re not even aware of, who might be looking to contribute their time or donations to a charity like yours. If you’re campaigning make you messages to the point and desirable. The idea is to hook people (capture their interest and make them want to pass your message onto their friends) into your message and send them via a link to your website or micro site for the big hitting message, which charities have never had trouble coming up with!

Be personal. People like to talk to people, so give your staff the encouragement to talk about the charity’s good work on their own social platforms, educate them as to what is acceptable and preferable, and release them to drive your message to their friends, families and peers.

Taking donations online. Building donation widgets into your website, blogs and social media platforms is easy to do and offers charities the chance to gather donations when you’re talking about your cause or campaign. Facebook for instance accounts for 20% of JustGiving’s revenues, so getting on the right platforms can enable you to tap into valuable, sustainable new revenue streams.

JustGiving, Mgive, Everyclick, Myspace Impact are just a few of the corporate donation models available. Some are free, some charge a set up fee and a percentage of the donations it processes on your behalf, but all give you the opportunity to press for a donation at the point of impact, when people are feeling inspired or touched by what you are trying to achieve.

So, opportunity is still abundant in difficult times. Smaller charities with less resources can take a great deal from the execution of social media campaigns by other charities, which are well documented online. SlideShare, the online resource for presentations on every topic under the sun, lists over 1800 presentation regarding charities using social media. Start there and find ways to reach more people, publicise events and raise money.

The edges of our media space are expanding faster than our ability to make sense of them, of new technologies, of how people use them and of the shake out, that will mean some old media will fall by the wayside.

But this is an unravelling story seen from two very different perspectives. The user, swept along by the rush of the crowd to try new media, to make that media fit their lifestyle and the marketer, trying to position a brand where its’ target customer is.

We are at this juncture, living through exciting and yet worrying times because history repeatedly reminds us that the intervening years between the birth of something new and it being fully realised, is a path marked with successes and failures in equal measure.

It is our fear of failure that plays into the hands of those who make their living trying to predict the future we marketers so desperately want to know about.

A recent TimesOnline article has marketers raving about the simple insights of a young man, who whist on work experience wrote a short paper on how teenagers use media. According to him, teenagers (boys mainly) use their games console for conversations, not their mobiles, which incidentally is primarily used for text and music. They don’t read newspapers, preferring instead to get their news online and they don’t buy movies or music, seeing nothing wrong in pirate DVD’s and peer-to-peer downloads.

And what about teenage girls? I speak from experience here as I have a teenage daughter, who has Facebook, MSN and YouTube open simultaneously on her laptop and only uses her mobile or ipod for music / texting whenever she is on the move, and disconnected from her laptop.

What surprised me about this article wasn’t necessarily the insights it revealed, it was the reaction of people to these insights. It was like the volume had been turned up by this young man and for the first time these marketers could hear the authentic voice of a generation.

Who can really know where we’re going; the futurists, the edge dwellers and technology hipsters?

Egos and reputations are at stake, which makes people, who in their time gave us clarity and made sense of where we were, look further and further ahead, not for us this time but to cement their own reputations, their own place in history. They fixate on new worlds, where they can coin new phrases, name new movements and re-claim their place in media folklore. They change the language (For no other reason it seems than that’s what they feel the world expects of them) from social to collaborate to individual and so on.

I don’t have much time for them to be honest. As a user I’m loving living through the revolution and as a Marketer I’m busy trying to make sense of the changing world for our clients and helping them understand how their brand engages their customer across social media spaces.

And what will win through in the end. Which media will still be around when this revolution reaches it zenith? Well history also has a lesson to teach us about this too. New technology is only revealed in retrospect to be turning points in a revolution.

So we need to accept we’re as bound to get it wrong as we are to get it right, so move forward or be prepared to get left behind. Enjoy being part of history in the making, leave the future to the generations to come after us.

Thankfully our tool chests are brimming with tools to help us carve out rich seams of knowledge and understanding relating to our audience that feeds our strategic thinking. That’s not all, add to this the torrent of real time feedback being generated across social media spaces about our products and some would say we’ve never had it so good. How could we fail to build strong brands?

Sadly, the truth is many brands are over communicated and tragically miss their mark and that’s a real shame, because it needn’t be so.

Seth Godin, recently posted about the purpose of a book cover was to create maximum impact. Reading it I remembered looking at some old movie posters and thinking that one of the hardest jobs in the world, in my mind, is describing a 90 minute movie in one sentence without loosing any of the impact of the narrative. Talk about a tough gig, big respect goes to those guys!

The one that sticks in my mind (though there are many others) was the theatre poster for Platoon. An iconic image with the line, “The first casualty of war is innocence.” It worked on me and millions of other who were draw in to see it.

Distilling a message out of all that marketing data without losing its impact and relevance is something we’re going to need to become better at because space and time is tight in people minds.

Marketers need to become effective miners and sievers of data. They need to measure information against the essence of their brand and shake out the insights and meaning that enables them to reduce and purify their message.

The strongest brands have the simplest message.

I’ve planned a few focus group sessions in the past when I was part of the team that re-branded Frisp Crisps and I have to say I remember them as being interesting and generating some useful feedback, particularly that the crisps were considered as being quite ‘foody’ and filling, more than a snack. That fed into the decision that new ‘foody’ such as Buttered Jacket Potato & Mature Cheddar would fit with our customers’ perception of the crisp brand.

It was also useful to see them place packaging in order of perceived quality, heavy gauge paper type bags being clearly seen as a premium bag and the rather flimsy film packaging of own label brands being a value brand. This was all good stuff for the re-brand, and we felt some real insights into how people relate to products came out of those focus groups.

I can’t help thinking though that 80% of what came out of the focus groups was understanding we already had and that’s the crux for me really. We are taught that to understand we must ask questions which is all well and good but when we consider asking a question we’ve normally considered a number of potential answers and are looking for verification, it’s human nature to do so. Do some of the answers generated by focus group attendees therefore reflect what they think or what the brand manager thinks?

Like focus groups, social networks and communities enable us to observe and engage with our target audience. Some of the biggest brands in the world, Mattel being one, have embraced the principle idea that listening to what their target audience talk about (Manly themselves and their families) will deliver as yet undiscovered insights and prompt questions that the brand team have not yet thought of relating to their products and importantly about their target audiences lives. The community in question for Mattel is ‘The Playground’, a private community for the mothers of young children.

I’d argue that the anonymity of talking freely online empowers people to say what the truly think without the influence of our own ‘self awareness’, of wanting people to perceive us in the way we want to be perceived. This will reshape how we learn about our target audiences but will this replace traditional focus groups or market research? I think not.

Social media isn’t a new broom to make a clean sweep of traditional marketing metrics. It’s offers brand managers another dimension of metrics, that will keep our thinking honest and our minds focused on our audience.

 

Social Media Funnel

I’ve seen lots of social media maps, some good some not so good.

The problem is they sit there in lofty isolation, a sea of mostly unfamiliar names and quirky identities.  They are a secret cypher known only to social media cool kids it seems. These maps are not connected to the real world (The one in which hard pressed marketing professionals are fighting hard for their budgets and their jobs) in any recognisable way. We’re missing an opportunity here and, if we’re honest, being a little bit condescending to boot. Another thing, social media buzz words are such a crock! Real people don’t talk like that!

So here’s something all marketing and sales professionals understand, ‘The Funnel’. Everyone, more or less goes through the same process of Awareness (I have a need), Consideration (Evaluate the alternatives), Preference (The sum of looking and listening to arrive at a decision) and finally Action (Satisfying the need).

I though it might be useful therefore to visualise how a number of social media channels working together (The list isn’t exhaustive by the way) can help sign post people through the funnel to some meaningful action connected to your brand, product or service.

Of course there is always a note of caution. Social media channels have to be aligned to target audience, and that means you have to get inside the minds and lives of the audience and build the right channels. The “If you build it they will come” attitude to building social media channels wont work and will more likely damage your brand.

Growing your Digital Footprint

We find ourselves drawing this diagram all the time for clients when we’re talking about social media so we thought we’d reproduce it here and get some feedback.

Conversations tend to go something like, “Why social media?”.

After introducing them to the idea that engaging with audiences, listening and harvesting feedback, gaining insights into audience thinking and breaking down corporate barriers is the most rewarding business change event they’ll ever implement it’s much much simpler to draw it.

If their corporate, e-commerce, flash website sits at the centre of their digital marketing strategy, implementing a social media strategy around it is making a much bigger target of your brand, that will attract the as yet un-reached, empower critics and creators who want to talk about your brand increasing their digital brand footprint.

The excitement in the voice is hard to hide when clear value, both for the audience and the brand is this obvious.

WHAT’S all the buzz around social media?

The explosion that is social media came about due to the convergence of three forces: people, technology and economics. People wanted to talk, and technology caught up to the extent that it became possible to connect to friends in real time using a multitude of devices. These are made affordable because the infrastructure is now in place making it easily accessible to the vast majority.

The easiest way to think of social media, I believe, is as a conversation that millions of people are having, one that’s growing louder as more and more voices join in. And guess what the topics are: they are talking about you, your brand, your product and your services.

This is no flash in the pan either; it’s a sea change that businesses have to get to grips with.

At no point so far have you seen it referred to here as a sales channel, but it can be. Companies, Dell for instance, have successfully developed a sales channel that uses social media channels to tap into its consumer base. Don’t rush to the phone and call your digital agency and ask for one just yet though. Dell spent years building trust and putting real people in the firing line to take on customer issues, being visible and saying, “Hey, we’re here and we’re listening.”

We are a discerning bunch who regularly use social media. We like to be informed, entertained but not, I repeat not, overtly sold too. The number of companies I see tweeting “I’m thinking up great ideas to promote my online store at www……….” Please, show me some respect, some originality, some idea that you know who I am and what I like.

I advise people to listen, listen, listen before they engage with social media. Discover where your customers are online. What tools do they use? Are they creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators or inactive in social media? Without this understanding you could invest time and energy in creating a forum and discover that your customers are predominately spectators who like to read but not contribute to online conversations.

Clever businesses are developing listening strategies that harvest feedback and provide fresh insights into what their target audience is thinking. They are talking with their audience, taking down the corporate wall and getting closer to the people who buy their products and use their services.

It is these companies, the ones taking social media seriously as a tool – opposed to a frivolous distraction their employees spend too long using – that will reap the benefits.

——- ENDS ——-

Declan Metcalfe is marketing director of Stokesley-based Better Brand Agency (www.betterbrandagency.com).

For more information about our Brand Graphic Design and Creative, Marketing, Social Media and Social Networking,  Web and Digital services please Contact the Better team.