I love the point made by Charlie Crowe of C Squared: “A brand can be built over generations, but destroyed in 140 characters.”

Definitely worth keeping in mind!

The most poignant comment, though, was made by Kamel Oudi, Digital Media Director for Louise Vuitton France: “Each brand has a heart, a DNA.”

He urged brand custodians to follow their brand’s DNA ‘down the natural evolutionary path of your story, your brand and your people.’

He discussed the recent Journeys Awards, a crowdsourced campaign in which Louis Vuitton showcased emerging filmmakers following a brief from Wong Kar Wai. As pointed out on the mipblog:

The work was particularly meaningful because it demonstrates there’s a use for social media by luxury brands, which sometimes worry there’s no way to maintain exclusivity and cachet on democratic media. But with clear boundaries in place (for example, the same “journeys” text appeared in all film festival videos) and a clear communications strategy, users followed the tone set by Vuitton, speaking in the same artistic, ephemeral accent that the brand used.

Here’s the video of Sho Tsukikawa, which won the jury prize. Well worth watching:

If you haven’t factored this into your business yet, you’re already on the endangered list!

That’s why I wanted to share with you his talk at Stanford University last month. In it he talks about how people like Scott Monty are humanizing the brands they work with, how new Zappos employees are forced to tweet to connect them to their brand and the concept of doubling pennies.

He finishes in true Scoble style with an understated truism – we all have a burning desire not to connect with thousands of ‘friends’ that we hardly know, but with just four people, the right four people…and that is all it takes to change the world, just four connected, passionate people.

Connect the dots – the right four people who have cracked the formula for building doubling pennies – an extremely powerful combination.

Definitely worth watching:

]]> http://metarand.com/2009/12/02/seggr-report-on-digital-curation/feed/ 0 http://metarand.com/2009/10/15/social-business-design-humanizing-the-company-at-every-turn/ http://metarand.com/2009/10/15/social-business-design-humanizing-the-company-at-every-turn/#comments Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:41:00 +0000 metarand http://metarand.com/?p=817 Kara Swisher has done a fun interview with Ford’s social go to guy, Scott Monty, in which he does his impersonation of Bill Cosby’s cocaine skit:

Cosby: I said to a guy, “Tell me, what is it about cocaine that makes it so wonderful,” and he said, “Because it intensifies your personality.” I said, “Yes, but what if you’re an asshole?”

Scott’s message is that “social media is the cocaine of the communications industry“. If you have crappy products, if your company behaves like an ahole…people are going to find out about it way quicker through social media. The glass half full stance does point to the same holding true for great products and companies too.

It’s a memorable analogy, but the key take out for me from this interview is Scott’s comment that for Ford, “social media is absolutely key to everything we are doing“.

Take advertising, for example, Ford has moved to using 15 second spots with real people telling their stories. “Advertising is social mediaesque“.

Scott also essentially defined social business design: Its about humanizing the company at every turn, whether in HR, product development, customer service, PR or other areas.

“Look at me, I’m the cool brand you need to identify with”;

“Hey guy, you really need to buy me, I’m the product that will make you whole again”.

The challenge for anyone working in the social business design arena is not being complacent and accepting the parameters set by clients -

“We have a total budget of $500k, how can you use this to push us in our market using these new social media tools”.

The challenge is convincing a client to change their entire product development, marketing, sales and distribution cycles to become more integrated around a synchronously engaged model, a model that goes way beyond retrofitting.

The challenge as well is telling them that far from making their business more cutting edge, in fact, this radical redesign will make them far more like the businesses that existed pre-industrial revolution.

In putting forward these re-architecting challenges, I am building on a thesis put forward by Luke Harvey-Palmer:

So much of the theory and practice that resides at the core of Social Business Design sounds like the same principles that successful villages and communities existed upon largely up until the early 18th Century.  For these villages, commerce was very much about the community, and conversations and relationships.  With the Industrial Revolution and the rise of globalisation most recently, corporations have forgotten the notions of community, collaboration and consultation.  Before the advent of advertising and the ‘agency’ people were persuaded to buy products by the people who made and distributed the products…and this all took place on local markets, where everyone gathered to enjoy the social aspects of business!

and continued by Robin Hamman of the Dachis Group:

Whilst it’s true that, at present, most social media monitoring is being used to protect existing mass processes, I remain enthusiastic about it’s potential to help genuinely social businesses gain a foothold by helping them identify opportunities, make contact with those with a need (“the market”) and build awareness of their ability and eagerness to fulfill that need. That, however, requires more than just a monitoring solution – it requires a consumer focused strategy, utilising a variety of social tools to support consumer involvement in every step of the process, including product or service definition, testing, refinement and marketing.

Being bold with clients about re-architecting rather than retrofitting will ultimately deliver far greater return on (change) investment.

[pic courtesy of Burwash Calligrapher]

New industry sectors coalesce and crystallize as a result of a number of factors converging.

In the case of Social Business Design this is an area that has been bubbling under for about 18 months with a range of different tags, such as Enterprise 2.0, but it never really gelled together. There were differences of opinion on who the market was, how to approach it and what exactly did it constitute. Was it simply setting up a corporate blog, an internal wiki and a customer forum or was there more to this area?

Charlene Li’s book Groundswell went a long way towards gathering impetus behind this new industry sector, but still the gel wasn’t quite there. When she left Forrester and set up the Altimeter Group people took notice, but their attention wasn’t galvanized.

And then Jeremiah Oywang left Forrester as well and joined Charlene. People started to sit up and really take notice – they were primed for something to happen. Around about the same time David Armano, an exec with the Dachis Group gave a presentation at the Social Fresh conference titled Social Business by Design. The industry now had a moniker to focus around.

The key inflection point though came last week when Dachis acquired Headshift. Much has already been written about this and most industry commentators will agree with the following tweet from @amayfield:

Headshift/Dachis is massively significant. Not marketing…this is a new sector shaping up: social business.

The Social Business Design meme is now starting to spread rapidly courtesy of one of the classic tenets of this industry: sharing. David Armano had placed his deck of slides on Slideshare two weeks ago. It has since been featured on Slideshare’s new “hot on Twitter” section and is gaining a lot more viewers.

This depth of attention around the topic is rapidly turning to more widespread adoption of the term, both by potential industry practitioners and by their potential clients. An industry is born.

What is Social Business Design?

Anne McCrossan has delivered a cogent summary of this arena:

Social business design sits at the intersection of organizational development and marketing, and can loosely be described as the practice of developing communities of engagement to develop ideas, activities and outputs for commercial and social benefit.

As organizations adopt the principles of social business design, intangible, soft assets like brand value, purpose, human resources, processes and capabilities come to the fore. Social business design is about engendering involvement and it’s inbound.

Slightly differently, marketing services and ‘broadcast’ media operate on the basis the message and transaction are the means to the end. Marketing services communicate primarily outbound.

Her entire post is pure gold and I highly recommend anyone who has read this far to jump over to her site and continue reading.

You will be hearing a lot more on the topic of Social Business Design and I will aim to synthesise and analyze as much of it as I can.

ADDED: Gaurav Mishra has posted a comprehensive summary of this burgeoning space and I wanted to point to his thoughts as they complement the thread in this post.

The key take out, for me, from his comments are that both Altimeter and Dachis focus on using emerging social technologies for transforming businesses, instead of merely reaching out to customers.

This is a salient point. As the social technologies shift, so can the emphasis that an agency puts in those technologies. For example, Augmented Reality is still in its early infancy as a technology and a few years out from being of use within the enterprise. However, when it does mature as a technology it will have an immense impact, until then it is on all of our watchlists, but it’s not worth confusing clients with until it matures somewhat.

Ross has pointed to five key trends that are the leading edge of this transformation:

1. The democratization of influence

It used to be that influence was a direct result of a person’s placement on some form of elevated platform – the CEO of a multinational, politician or a journalist with a media empire backing them.

These folks are still heard, but more and more voices of influence are emerging from completely left of field. Tools such as Twitter have liberated the great unwashed masses. Anyone can start a movement and many are.

2. Quantifying influence

How well a brand campaign runs has always been one of the advertising industries great smoke and mirror acts. No more. Influence is becoming far more measurable. In fact, as Ross points out, there will be more metrics for individual influence as well and these will be used as for more accurate guide to who we hire and do business with.

3. Individual reputation trumps corporate influence

We are more likely to trust a company based on the reputation of the individuals running it than ever before. Steve Jobs drives Apple’s influence. Jeremiah Oywang’s move from Forrester to The Altimeter Group was more about him as a key influencer than about Forrester.

4. Influence is the new media

We listen to those who we trust, we listen to those who deliver us value. If a newspaper continuously delivers news items well after you’ve digested them from your personal newsfeed, the newspaper’s influence over you will decrease significantly. Ross sums this up well – publishing itself won’t get an audience – only influencers will create views.

5. The influence economy is born

Again, Ross has this covered: the $550 billion advertising industry may be transformed.

I’m really looking forward to the conversation next week.