The 5 Senses of Social Media

We interact with the world through our 5 senses: hearing, visions, smell, taste, and touch. We should consider the 5 senses with our marketing efforts, specifically with efforts with Social Media.

Sense of Hearing – If you listen to your audience it will help you understand their language, culture, needs, desires, interests, etc. It will help you be relevant in offering value as part of your SoMe engagement. It will help you be a better brand and make better products.

Sense of Vision – There’s nothing worse than rehashing what someone else has already done. The Big Idea isn’t dead. Be Imaginative, be Innovative, be Passionate. Begin with a Vision.

Sense of Taste – Humor, sexiness, focus, intellect are all valuable assets in SoMe. However, there is a fine line between humor and potty humor, sexiness and porn, focus and myopism, intellect and being a smart ass. Stay classy people, keep your sense of taste in check.

Sense of Timing – Social Media is about timing and timeliness. Trends can change by the minute, don’t let an opportunity to be relevant pass you by. Don’t wait until tomorrow for a conversation you could have today.

Sense of Humor – Social Media needs to be social, or shared, or viral, or pass-aroundable. Nothing does that better than buzz-worthy content and no content is more buzz-worthy than humorous content. The most widely ingested media is humorous. Check out this video which clocks in with 214 million views. It is the third most popular video of all time on YouTube, behind Justin Bieber/Ludacris’ Baby and Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance (both of which are arguably funny):

Image courtesy Nayski

Your Customer Is Your Brand

Many brands still struggle with social media. They’re afraid to engage the public through SoMe for fear of losing control of their brand. What’s hard for them to understand is that they never conolled it, no brand has. Consumers’ perception makes up a majority of what a brand is. It is customers and users that decide if you’re a good company or not, if your products are quality or not, if your customer service is helpful or not.

This means that when you’re planning your marketing strategy, doing quality control, training your customer service team, it will be your customers who decide how successful you are, they are the ones who will tell others how good you are. All of your PR initiatives, marketing campaigns, branded events, make up your Brand Intent: your efforts to communicate the brand you want to be. The other 99% of what your brand stands for is your Customers’ Perception of your Intent coupled with their experience with your product and your customer service.

You’re not Selling Products, You’re Selling Engagement

Cigarette companies had it right. WAY back in the day, when cigarette companies still advertised, the would show their cigarette package mixed in with a scene of hip, cool, good looking young people having a great time playing pool or surfing (must have been tough smoking a wet one). They weren’t selling the product, they were selling the lifestyle.

Fast forward to a time when I have gray hair.

When you’re selling your service or product, consider that people are less interested in what you sell than what they can do with what you’re selling. Apple nails this with their new iPhone 4 ads. Let’s leave out their antenna issues for a second and watch the spot. It’s not about how shiny and sparkly the phone is, it’s the emotional impact of what being able to talk to a friend or love one face-to-face means.

Many agencies and brands have gotten so caught up in what they’re selling that they’ve forgotten why they’re selling it. Next time you’re looking to differentiate your marketing message, think about your customer using your product for the first time, the anticipation finally being paid off with “wow”. This is the sound of your client engaging with your product (unless your product sucks, then it’s a different sound, perhaps “ugh”, maybe “aargh”). Film your spot, design your site, and write your copy around that. Distribute it. Watch sales rise.

Your #1 Marketing Channel? Customer Service

I used to HATE Comcast. I payed a fortune for TV, phone, and Internet. Most of my issues revolved around TV: no sounds, freeing picture, no service, etc. As an early adopter and technology geek I am fairly forgiving of technical problems as long as customer service is responsive and addresses my problem. In order to communicate with Comcast you had to use email, which took forever for a response, or the dreaded 1-800-Comcast. This last, more instant channel was and still is a nightmare. After getting shuffled through 5 departments, have of whose accents you couldn’t understand you ended up with some who said “I dunno. What’s your account number?”

This all changed when Frank Eliason at Comcast got the blessing of management to launch @comcastcares on Twitter. I can simply Tweet that I have a problem and within minutes (on a weekday, weekends take longer) I get a response.

The point is not to slag Comcast, I’ve done that enough on other sites. The point is that I’m no longer a Comcast Hater. As I said, I’m forgiving of technological glitches, now Comcast is addressing them in a timely manner. This has dramatically shifted my perception of Comcast’s brand.

Zappos is another brand using customer service to grow it’s brand. it’s ‘customer focused” culture has skyrocketed it’s repeat customers helping the brand not only grow conversions from existing customers, but to generate great word-of-mouth marketing as well as free PR.

If there is one thing that brands struggle with right now is brand ownership. They believe that they still control their brand. In reality, they never did. A brand is not built on websites, pr, and TV commercials, it is built on how customers perceive it.

Brand Intent v. Brand Perception

This is not to say that marketers are out of a job, far from it. Brands control their intent, that is to say through marketing, design, PR, advertising, product development, customer service, etc. a brand can develop a personality, culture and conversational tone. All of these things will influence customers for better or for worse. But the User Experience is made up of more than banner ads and pop displays. The quality of the product, it’s accessibility, support, sales are all part of customer service.

Word-of-mouth has always been and will always be the single strongest channel for marketing. Customers with a good experience tell one person, with a bad experience tell 10, etc. With social media this formula has increased dramatically as bloggers and tweeters rush to get their reviews out there.  If the dynamics of the good customer experience versus bad customer experience hold true, it is in the best interest of brands to make sure that even those with bad customer experiences are treated well through customer service. Doing so can very likely turn even a hater into a lover and turning a lover into an ambassador.

Image by Nebbes61

User Experience Can Be Simple

I’ve been thinking alot about User Experience lately. Okay, I’ll admit it, I think about it constantly You could say I have UX OCD, thank god it’s balanced by my ADD!

I see a great deal of fantastic UX design (CNN), sometimes side by side with very bad UX (Facebook). User Experience, even just the User Interface portion of it is not relegated to the Web though. The greatest form of User Experience ever is the sandwich. Think about it: it requires no special tools and can have completely customized content. A sandwich can be flat, rolled, cold, warm and can include a variety of brands from private to Oscar Meyer before engaging with your mouth. Is this taking UX to a too simplified place? Not at all, anymore than discussing the genius behind Modernista’s non-website. For those of you not familiar with it, Modernista’s non-website is merely a layer of navigation over Google results for their name.  Technically it’s genius, but more importantly it uses this abstract of a website as a way to qualify clients. If their non-site is too weird for a potential client then its obvious that that client isn’t potential.

Don’t think for a second that User Experience is relegated to web designers. I mentioned the sandwich to give you a point of reference for how broad a reach UX has. Let me give you a recent personal example. As recently as 10 minutes ago and as personal as my breakfast. I’m talking about butter. Stop & Shop butter.

Believe it or not there is a glaring User Experience mistake here. Do you see it? It may not effect everyone but it does effect anyone with both salted and unsalted butter in their refrigerator. Imagine that you’ve just reached into the fridge to pull out butter to put on your corn or bread. Now imagine that you quickly glanced at the box and decided “I need the red butter, that’s the yummy, salty one” because the salted butter box is red. Now imagine how it will taste when you grab the red stick instead and read no further. You’ve just slathered your breakfast toast with unsalted butter. Have you ever tasted unsalted butter? It is NOT yummy.

Of course each stick has the type on it, but half way through a stick the wrapper is crumpled and yucky, barely legible. Why a designer chose to make the unsalted butter box blue but the stick wrapping red, and vice versa is beyond me. However, it is a good example of User Interface design that most of us can relate to. User Interface, and User Experience is everywhere and we all have to deal with it. How many of us have poured orange juice into our cereal because we haven’t had our coffee or put our glasses on and the cartons look the same? How many of use have cars with cup holders that can’t hold out coffee mugs? How many of us have struggled to figure out how to activate the automatic faucet in a public bathroom?

The fact is that more of us are involved in User Experience than we realize. My wife is a kitchen designer. She is constantly solving User Experience and Interface issues. Customer service is another extension of User Experience. Other examples with which you may be involved?

Crosswalks
Answering the phones at your office
Public bathroom cleaning
Slicing salami at a deli
Deciding if the IN door on your store swings in or out
Picking the music that will play in your changing rooms
The signature at the bottom of your email
Choosing when to do road work
Putting your name on your mailbox
Spraying graffiti on a wall
Making sure there are pricing labels on your products
Choosing which mobile platform to develop for
Cleaning the lines for your draft beer kegs
Throwing away your old company collateral

Any others you can think of?

User Experience can be complicated but it can be as simple as paying attention to and being thoughtful about some of the the things I’ve listed above.

Creative Rules

I’ve been in the business of being paid to create things that help sell stuff for well over a decade, actually, coming up on two decades. So, I may be a bit biased. It always seemed to me that the most creative marketing was the most effective. After all, who stands around the water cooler talking about the direct response commercial they saw on the History Channel at 1am? But, the Old Spice guy gets an interview on Ellen. The “pass around effect” is a legitimate measure, at least in my mind, of the effectiveness of a spot. No commercial, website, billboard, or Twitter engagement is going to guarantee a sale, but, if it changes consumers’ perception of a brand or product, helps them remember it hen they’re filling up their cart at Target or picking vacation spots, you’re half way there.

How often does anyone buy a car based on those commercial spots where they just show a bunch of driving footage and pitch you on the low price and warranty? I’d bet alot fewer than buy a vehicle based on the spots showing a hipster rodent in a little car or a truck pulling a yacht. If it’s not memorable, it’s not effective. If it’s not creative, either through humor, sex, visuals, cleverness, then it’s not memorable.

This has been proven in a couple of recently released studies by IPA, the University of Toronto and Ryerson University:

http://adage.com/globalnews/article?article_id=144942

Why Best Practices Are Not

I hear the terms “best practices” and “think-outside-the-box” quite a bit, from colleagues, to vendors, to clients. The problem is, even thought I hear them in the same sentence, they are exact opposites. “Best practices” is a set of standard to be applied to any scenario, in other words: a cookie cutter solution, or an off-the-rack suit. Outside-the-box thinking is a new solution not based on existing standards, a custom suit. While I often find that clients and vendors say “outside-the-box”, they don’t really mean it, they mean something clever that is still very much in-the-box. I get it. I don’t blame them, an economy like the current one isn’t exactly a fertile place for people to take risks.

“Best practices” is a bit more disturbing. The term is being used as a value proposition or a differentiator more and more. The problem is that the world has changed. Social media has changed it. I’m not talking about Twitter and Facebook, or any of the technological aspects of social media, I’m talking about users. How a consumer interacts with a brand or vendor has changed, not just online, but in every facet of their lives. Consumers want communications on their terms. Users won’t just watch your commercial and go to your stored to make their purchase. They’ll Google for reviews, they compare prices, they’ll tweet for feedback, they jump to another brand because they had a better mobile site or switch stores because they got a coupon in the mail that day. People understand the power of the Internet and understand that they can get personalized attention. That understanding has led them to be more critical of customer service not just online or by phone but in brick and mortar stores.

How do you stand by “best practices” when there is so much diversity in the abilities, needs, and desires of your audience? How do you do it when your brand is not like other brands? I read a recent blog on “best practices” that claimed the optimal screen size for a web site’s design should be 1024×768. Well, my mother’s computer would only support 800×600, my go to web browser is 320×356. So, which is  the standard? The fact is, none are. Lazy developers, designers, and marketers like to fall back on “best practices” so they don’t have to do the work of getting to know their audience, or to avoid developing multiple options for different audiences. This blog is set up for 1024×768 as well as 320×356. That’s because I know my audience has a fairly new computer (2-3 years old) or a mobile device.

This is just an example of the problem with “best practices” from a technical web design standpoint, now think about social media. Twitter has alot of trouble telling us how many active users they have. Some access Twitter via www.twitter.com, others through any number of third party sites, desktop and mobile apps, and some through SMS. If this creates a nightmare of technical issues, think about the millions that use Twitter, their interests, their lifestyle, their content, their intentions, their networks. Think about the idea of transparency. That’s a big buzz word among social media experts. It is claimed to be one of the tenants of social media best practices. I just had a lengthy discussion (lengthy for Twitter anyway) with another Boston social media strategist about content of social media. He claimed that venting publicly about your insecurities was a sure way to lose business. In that respect, transparency is not a best practice, clearly you should not be transparent about your insecurities. But as another user commented, this is hypocritical. The originator of the comment claimed that it was fine for Twitter but not for a corporate blog (though Senator McCain would probably disagree with transparency on Twitter being okay). Even just in this one opinion there are significant differences in what is considered best practices on Twitter and best practices on a blog. However, if you’ve found that being honest and open is actually goof for business, how does best practices apply? It doesn’t.

The fact is that everyone is becoming a marketer, if not for their business, then for themselves. And everyone is a consumer, even businesses. Each has to define it’s own strategy according to it’s audience, goals, mission statement, desires, etc. What works for some on Twitter doesn’t work for others on Twitter. Your Facebook widget isn’t going to work on QZone. What feels comfortable for some individuals and brands in social media, doesn’t sit well with others. A soft-sell marketing strategy works for some industries but not others.

So, take your “best practices” and put them back “in-the-box” where they belong because some times you DO have to reinvent the wheel.

Brand Permanence

Brand Permanence is an important strategy that many companies tend to forget, especially when changes in the advertising industry, consumer behavior and world economy are on all of their minds. Companies may change their identity, not just what their logo looks like (Pepsi), but what their company is all about (Dunkin’ Donuts’ paninis). Many companies are adopting new business models and communications tactics in the wake of the socialization of the web (web2.0). Many are significantly pulling back on their marketing efforts during the economic crisis. Not all of this is good.

What is Brand Permanence? It is a simple matter of staying true to who you are as a brand and staying relevant and present in consumers’ lives.

Obviously, pulling back on marketing may seem smart from a purely numbers perspective, but once your brand leaves the collective conscience, your competitors fill the space. The precedent for this couldn’t be anymore clear. Not to say that brands shouldn’t be looking at ways to reduce costs, just that they shouldn’t axe their marketing, stick their head inthe sand, and hope that things will go back to the way they are.

Customer loyalty is hard enough to come by without muddling your brand. Both Pepsi and Tropicana (owned by Pepsico) have recently changed their logos, the later of which was recently rturned to the original once it was found that it confused customers in stores. When a consumer thinks of your brand, they think about your logo, your product history, your customer service. If they aren’t consistant, neither will your customer loyalty be. Coke’s logo was created in 1885, Pepsi’s was created in 1898. Since the late 1800′s the Pepsi logo has changed 11 times. Coke’s logo has never changed. Guess which is considered the #1 carbonated beverage?

It would seem strange that a product with a logo designed by a bookkeeper in 1885 would still appeal to the youth of today, but that was the original intent of the Coke logo and it’s simpe red and white scheme. Apple computers has had, essentially, the same logo since 1976, the bitten apple. While the color scheme and stylized treatment has changed slightly, the essential, simple, bitten apple has remained the logo for the company for over 30 years. But it isn’t just Apple’s logo which has remained consistent. Apple’s commitment to building better digital products to enhance users lives. From the first bulky desktop to the latest version of the iPhone, this committment to enhancing customers’ lives through electronic devices has remained intact as has their committment to customer service.

These last two points are the most important: staying true to your core product or service values and customer service. BMW and Mercedes Benz have long been considered consumer favorites and maintain Top 10 slots as European brands. BMWs 1917 logo design remains, as does Mercedes Benz’ 1909 logo design. But their consitency as quality engineered luxury vehicles is what helps them dominate mindhsare.

New England born Dunkin’ Donuts has been a favorite of coffee drinkers since I’ve been alive. They have remain loyal to their original logo, but recently havee been trying to compete with Starbucks and Panera. From all accounts (I don’t drink coffee), adding paninis to their menu and fireplaces to their stores, has only made their coffee worse, and their donuts stale. So, despite arguements to the contrary, Dunkin’ Donuts has muddled their brand permanence by changing their core values.

In 30 years Microsoft has made one change to their logo, but at times has been confused by it’s core values and faltered in customer service. That has helped Apple, take a bit out of Microsoft’s mindshare. Google, who, in just over 10 years has only removed an exclamation from their logo, but has consistently improved their product and brought more services under the auspice of providing users with easy to use access to outside data. We’ll see how they and Microsoft stat true to their core values, honor their brand, maintain customer service, and stay visible over the coming decades.

While most of the brands mentioned will weather these debacles, if only because they’ve been around so long, they offer lessons to new businesses. Your branding, at least the part you control (the perception of your brand belongs to the user), isn’t something to slap together. Really focus on your values as a company, create a mark that will represent your goals and identity, be consistent with how you interact with your audience, and always maintain good customer service.

Give Your Customers What They Want

While work continues on Gathr.me, I spend alot of time thinking about what users, my customers, will want out of the product. I often blatantly ask, sometimes I just listen. My goal is to develop a product that my users will love. There has been alot of talk among the partners about the need for a desktop version of Gathr.me. Sure, beyond the web and mobile versions, a desktop version seems less important, but it will be important to the users who want a desktop version. That is why we are building Gathr.me in such a way as to accommodate any current platform and device, as well as trying to imagine future ways in which people will want to interface with us.

To make my life easier (or to keep me working everywhere), I’ve been looking at netbooks. Since I’m unemployed, pricing is a huge consideration or I’d just buy a MacBook Pro. Instead, these $2-400 netbooks will fill the gap and allow me to work without being chained to my desk. Of course, I’ve already researched which I can hack and load the Mac OS onto the easiest. Sounds extreme huh? To buy a perfectly good computer, whipe out the Windows OS and replace it with the Mac one? Not if you’ve used the Mac OS, or all your other devices are Mac. But this isn’t the point. The point is, that because Mac doesn’t make a netbook, and I can’t afford their laptops, I’m going to put in the extra work to create a Macenstein of my own. From my research I’ve found this to be a VERY large community. Which begs the question, why isn’t Mac making a netbook? Mac has said they don’t want to play in this space, because it is immature and the current product offerings suck. Odd, I don’t remember their being alot of great mp3 players before the iPod. Sure there were some, but they all kinda sucked. So why isn’t Apple giving their customers what they want? Maybe they just don’t know them well enough?

Speaking of which: I’ve thought for a long time that brands need to get to know their customers better. Social Media provides a great opportunity for this. My car manufacturer, sends me a notice every time I need to check something on my car. But retailers I use, like Target, iTunes, Home Depot, Borders, have ramped up their emails to sell me stuff. Don’t they know I’m unemployed? Facebook, MySpace and other social networks I belong to beat me over the head with singles ads, despite the fact that I’ve been with the same woman for 10 years. Do they know something I don’t, or do they just not know anything?

Even smaller groups targeting me don’t know me well. Today I got my ubiquitous email from Chris Brogan. He is one of a handful of blogs I am subscribed to. Oddly, this email was a subscription drive. If I’m already subscribed, after all, h has my email, why would he need to push me to subscribe? I’m assuming this is some kind of technical glitch, after all, he’s a pretty savvy web2.0 kinda guy.

All of these cases represent the same issue: not giving customers what they want, or giving them what they don’t want or need. This is usually caused by demographics, shallow research, or basing your business model on the “average customer”, not all of your customers. It’s obvious that brands, large or small, need to look at their customers, get to know them better, and deliver products, solutions and communications that they’re asking for.

Focus Groups Are a Waste of Time

I’m sure I’ll get some old-school marketers to vehemantly deny the truth of this fact, but focus groups are a waste of time. To be more specific, if you’re looking for honest feedback, or real world testing, don’t waste your time and sandwiches on focus groups. If you’re looking to cover your ass with your client, water down your campaign, turn your product into a toy, make deli runs, play with a video camera, by all means: assemble your group.

There are reasons why focus groups are a waste of time:

Real World It’s Not – unless your product is meant to be used in a conference room by overly critical office workers who probably have no interest in it, a focus group is far from a real world consumer/product interaction.

Group Dynamics – anyone who has taken a sociology or psychology class knows that when you put someone in a strange environment with strangers, they will not be themselves. Some will clam up, play stupid, some will try to dominate the group, even say the opposite of what they think. You will see hyper-critical feedback, even negative solely based on the fact that they’ve been asked to judge.

Inappropriate Audience – if Steve Jobs had sat down a group of people to steer development of the iPod, we’d still be using a discman. Chances are that most focus groups do not represent your target audience. Even if they do, they may dislike your product simply because they’ve never seen it or their cool friends don’t gave one. Focus groups don’t take into account influencers.

Education – if you are good at what you do; experienced, talented, skilled, educated: why do you need a roomful of people that have nothing to do for lunch telling you how to redesign your product or reshoot your commercial?

Crowdsourcing – the Internet will give you much more honest feedback, in quantity. Launch your campaign or product, see what people are saying about it and how they are using it, then build that into version 2.

Examples of focus group decisions:
New Tropicana packaging
New Pepsi logo

Examples of not using focus groups:
Twitter
iPod

Thoughts?

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