RSS
The “One Question” series:
How have you used content to build your brand?
We were delighted to sponsor and attend the launch of C.C. Chapman‘s and Ann Handley‘s new book, Content Rules.
While there, we decided to ask some of our fellow attendees for their thoughts on content and brandbuilding. Some highlights:
- Doug Haslam, Voce Communications: “It all goes back to basic communications…messaging, forms of content, channels.”
- Lauren Vargas, Radian6: “Content…is a conversation starter.”
- Gene Begin, Babson College: “We use content…to share the student experience.”
- Amber Naslund, Radian6: “I don’t distinguish between [brand and content]….Developing the brand [is] all about developing content.”
- Georgy Cohen, Tufts University: “We’re curating the best stories people are already telling about their Tufts experience. We find those stories and give [them] more prominence.”
- Adam Zand, Marketing and PR Consultant : “Content is Queen. C.C. Chapman is the Duke.”
Congratulations to Ann and C.C.! Now go buy their book.
Categories: Branding, Strategy and Management
Like SoDoKu for Twitter
Thinking of plugging some form of 140-character messaging into your communications practice, such as LinkedIn or Twitter updates, but find yourself at a loss for newsy inspiration?
If you’re like me, you might feel that once you’ve crafted the best way to say something, the hard work is done.
But the statusphere is as much about frequency as it is content. And, depending on your community of readers, you may need greater or lesser degrees of novelty or variation in your messages. So if you don’t possess the background or natural impulses of the Managing Editor (still like me), you’ll need a little editorial calendar of sorts to help think through the work.
Here’s a handy matrix I’ve developed to consider all the things I might compose notes or tweets about, and the many ways I might spin them to take advantage of the sharing / re-Tweeting / back-and-forth qualities of social media.
In the category column, you fill in whatever topic you want to promote. The top row suggests a range of ways you can frame any given topic. There are probably other ways to structure this row, and you might not need them all — but if you have a different approach, please comment and share!
Here’s an example for a hypothetical biomedical research institute:
Here’s a little key:
- Question: A classic trick to get the click—be sure it’s provocative. (And be sure the answer is surprising or useful, or you’re going to be ignored next time.)
- About you: This is the placeholder for real, personal exchanges with a person or a group.
- Update: Status notes on an ongoing theme you’ve established. Think countdowns, or progress reports, something with a time element.
- Hype: Just that: the most hyperbolic way you can say or announce something and still be taken seriously. Must sound unique and important.
- News: The most natural of themes for many of us: the ad hoc notices. Your press releases are an obvious source of content for these, but also think about when your people speak or are quoted in the media, or updates to products, or service growth in a new market, etc.
- Benefit: Messages designed to persuade, appeals of some sort or other, but “tarted up a bit”—not just “sign up now!” but sign up now because…
You could (should) fill out each cell with many, many messages—that’s where the frequency, and possibly the novelty, come in. Another way this can save time is to write a bunch of messages in advance, and, using a program like CoTweet or Hoot Suite, schedule them for automatic publishing.
The beauty is the rationalization of the problem, transforming mystery and anxiety into a clear plan. Plan the work, and work the plan.
Some tips for increasing the impact of those microbursts:
- Use hashtags to publish across channels, like tweeting with #in to cross-post on LinkedIn, or #fb to cross-post on Facebook (but do this sparingly if your audiences are similar across platforms.)
- Use the hashtags of relevant trends and topics in your community. This will help people following a topic (e.g., #charity or #autism), or ride the wave of breaking events (e.g. #snowmageddon or #oilspill).
- Schedule your messages to follow established traffic patterns, and to address different time zones. For example, if you send the same message at 10a, 4p, 10p, and 10a Eastern Time, you can reach early in their day or around lunch time—two moments of high social media volume) across most global time zones. Here’s a handy tool for figuring out time zones.
- Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday tend to have the highest social media volume. On one hand, there’s more noise to compete with, but you’re more likely to catch eyeballs too.
- Cultivate (or institute, if you have enough people) a ring of people who might propagate your messages (such as through re-Tweets).
This is by no means a comprehensive “Twitter strategy”!
And there’s a ton of material on that elsewhere (including other posts on this blog). And should you have the fate or fortune (depending on your point of view) to have lots of actual interaction, you’ll need a separate policy—and discipline—for maintaining dialogue. I offer this matrix as a way to rationally plan your outbound messages: those that you generate and share with the world.
What echoes back is your next challenge…
Categories: Digital Media, Nonprofits
Explaining graphic design to grandma
The field of graphic design has experienced a great deal of change and flux over the last century or so — from a technology perspective, as well as from cultural and economic perspectives.
So, it’s only reasonable to assume that some of our family members might not understand what it is we do, and that others have some preconceptions or even misconceptions.
Here are a few “call and response” approaches to handling these career-defining conversations around the dinner table.
Statement: You’re a designer, so that means you work with Photoshop. And computers. Right?
Response: Yes, I do work with Photoshop, and many other applications. And, yes, they all work on a Computer. But while they’re critical to what I do, they’re just tools. If you gave me your measuring cups and a rolling pin, I’d have some of the tools of a baker, but that doesn’t mean I’d have been able to make all the desserts you made today. It takes skill and timing, practice and even some intuition to be a great baker or chef. Same is true for anybody practing graphic design: you’ve got to be facile with the tools of the trade, but that’s just the beginning. It can take some practice with that measuring cup and rolling pin to make a good pie from even a frozen pie crust. To create unique desserts from scratch — that takes skill and imagination… and that measuring cup!
Statement: Graphic design. You mean advertising?
Response: No, I don’t mean advertising, but there is a strong, co-dependent relationship between graphic design and advertising. As with so many things in life, it’s best not to look at this as a question that can be answered with a yes or no, black or white. Here are a few points to help draw a fat gray line between the two fields. Graphic designers are often concerned with defining the aesthetic of a “brand” for the long term, rather than promoting sales through the shorter term “campaign.” Graphic design firms are usually paid for the designs they create for their clients (and for orchestrating the design and production process), as opposed to ad agencies, which often make their living through large media buys. Would it be pushing the envelope to say that designers’ prime motivation is to communicate through the manipulation of words and images, while an advertiser’s prime motivation is to sell through the manipulation of those same tools?
That last bit might start a good conversation, so I’ll leave you with those thoughts for now!
Happy holidays!
Categories: Design, Outside the Square
Ready to be blinded with science?
UPDATE: If you missed the webinar on Thursday, never fear! You can enjoy the whole presentation online here.
A little blast from the past for those of us who have been around since the 80′s.
But we don’t invoke Thomas Dolby for just any old reason (I never thought I’d type that phrase…)
We’re just ramping up to “blind” you with a little science of our own!
Our own Tamsen McMahon will be presenting a webinar entitled “A Scientific Approach to Social Media” in partnership with our friends at Awareness Networks on December 16th — just a couple days away! Join Tamsen as she details a foolproof framework for approaching any social media project that will produce documentable, repeatable, and tangible results. In this webinar, you’ll discover how to get your personal or organizational digital presence started on the right foot — or make the one you have now more effective.
Click here to register. And if you’re on Twitter while you’re tuned in, use the hashtag #awarenessinc to take part in discussion and commentary around the webinar. We’ll be sure to keep an eye out for your thoughts!
Categories: Digital Media, Outside the Square, Strategy and Management
The problem with “human brands”
I had the pleasure last Thursday of attending Jeff Pulver’s BrandsConf at the 92nd Street Y in New York City: a virtually non-stop firehose of short-format sessions focused on brands, branding, and more specifically, “exploring humanization of brands” [emphasis mine].
While the conference was a little short on “how to,” topics ran the gamut from philosophical arguments about the importance of “human brands”, to the difficulties inherent in balancing personal and professional brands, to case studies about brands in social media (though in Sesame Street’s case, that was more about the “monsterization” of brands…), to examples of organizations that had effectively “humanized” their brand through the judicious, and clever, use of human-like characters or mascots.
As you might imagine, though, when you’ve got 50-something speakers in 40-something slots, it takes a little while to process all the information you’ve taken in… and then figure out what it actually means to the current state of branding.
And so: as much as BrandsConf — and even we here at Sametz Blackstone — have been talking about creating “human brands,” my biggest takeaway from BrandsConf is that “human branding” isn’t possible.
It’s simply not possible to make a non-human thing, human.
In fact, what you get when you aren’t honest with yourself about that reality are weird mash-ups of plainly corporate and almost-human behaviors (“Frankenbrands,” as my colleague Meg calls them) or, perhaps even worse, brands that appear human in most ways, but lack the soul, the quirks, and the randomness of actual humans — mostly because all the real humans that work for them have been forced into a narrowly defined mold of what a “human” is (in other words, “Brandroids” — also Meg’s term!).
More often than not, it seems, attempts to “humanize” a brand just lead to character-izing it instead.
The problem is, I think, that there are so many different ways to be human. Unless a company hires a veritable army of identical people (which is obviously not possible), or hires a bunch of different kinds of people, and then legislates their human behavior into a Borg-like cybernetic unit (the being otherwise known as Brandroid), it’s impossible for a company to act, react or respond the same way a human would in every situation.
Yes, companies are made up of people, and people are human, but that doesn’t make the behavior of companies human — nor, I daresay, should it.
Essentially, companies are ideas, at their core: ideas thought of by humans, maintained by humans, and supported and sustained by humans.
But, again, they’re not human. Why?
Because humans don’t scale. They can’t. The growth of your company, while undoubtedly positive, will put an unavoidable dent in your “humanness.” Which, in turn, means “human branding” can’t scale, either.
But — and here’s the real challenge — branding at a human scale does.
So the question changes: instead of wondering how to create a “human brand” (though we could stand for brands being a bit more “humane“…), we have to explore how we might create a human-scale brand.
What does that look like? What could it look like? What should it look like?
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
•
Image credit: Swami Stream
Categories: Branding, Outside the Square, Strategy and Management
2010: The year social media settled down, Part 2
“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899
I predict that in January you will be awash in predictions, about all sorts of things. We might do that here, too, so stay tuned. But as 2010 winds down, I thought I’d revisit some predictions I made about this year, in the post, “2010: The year social media settled down, had kids, and became boring (but earned a steady income).” I didn’t make any floaters like poor Commissioner Duell’s, but a bit of critical retrospection is worthwhile.
First, I’d say I got the title half right. I think social media began to settle down and give us useful products, but it’s not earning a lot of money yet, and certainly not yet boring. In fact, after an additional year marinating in the hype and thinking about what’s next, I think it’s fair to say there remain some really great innovations and surprises next year, not just in the technologies that emerge, but also in the interesting ways we will put them to work—for ourselves, our organizations, and our communities. And here’s a year’s worth of stories that lead me to believe that: Copy this link and subscribe to it in your RSS reader.
More in the mea culpa column:
- I said “[s]ocial media is not unlike every previous communication innovation.” Well, yes and no. That was pretty equivocal language. It’s like every other major innovation in that each changes everything after. I just didn’t see everything changing. Now I do. But, insofar as we are adapting social media to serve human desires and needs even better, it’s similar.
- I was too optimistic about standardized practices. Most of us are still trying to figure out what works, and few things are either universal or permanent. That probably won’t change next year, either.
Where I think I got it right:
- Success will depend on each of us (and our organizations, on their own scale) developing sustainable habits. I mean habits and not practices, because really a lot of this requires behavioral and attitude change, not just adopting methods or formulae.
- Social is taking more budget share (duh); I don’t deserve credit for that pearl, but it’s surprising how fast the share is growing. Some estimates put budget share percentage (in aggregate across industries) in the high teens or even twenties: not too shabby for a medium few took seriously until two or three years ago.
What we will still be talking about next year (predictions!):
- Social media ROI. OK, the simplest way to look at this is, “Investment” is measured in dollars, so “Return” has to be shown in dollars. This gives two alternatives: a) find a way to do that, or b) change the question. I’ve seen a lot of approaches to this, many of them good, so I vote for both approaches. It can be done, but it requires just about everyone to change or expand their expectations and ways of thinking. We simply need ways to show we’re not wasting time, period.
- Who “owns” social? This has turned out to me to be the most interesting question. For agencies like mine, it has seemed to be either advertising, marcomm, pr, or so-called “digital agencies”; our client organizations wonder if it’s marcomm, pr, legal, product, customer service, or (gasp) IT. They’re all wrong. Like some very bright person said at a digital media conference I attended this fall (I can’t remember who or which), that’s a like asking who in your organization owns telephones. The organizations that understand the implications of new digital and social strategy are not asking that question. And some agency people like ourselves are thinking about how we will serve those organizations in the future. (Hint: it won’t be by hiring a bunch of 23-year olds to tweet for them.)
Some solutions will never be certain, some practices never quite proven. Such mysteries provide a useful tension between what we want to do to learn, to push the envelope, and what we have to do to prove the value of our efforts. That’s great, as long as that tension pulls us forward, and doesn’t keep us paralyzed with indecision.
Here’s to Social Media keeping the faith (and on our toes) in 2011. For your reference, some worthwhile reading:
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog
http://www.twistimage.com/blog
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/
Boston Consulting Group report: The CMO’s Imperative
The Social Media section of MarketingProfs
Categories: Digital Media, Strategy and Management
Roger Sametz and Eric Norman to speak at AFPMA Conference on Philanthropy 10
This Friday, December 3rd, Roger Sametz and Eric Norman will be presenting at the Association of Fundraising Professionals Massachusetts 2010 Conference on Philanthropy. We’re excited to be a part of the conference again, to reconnect with friends and collaborators, and to attend sessions presented by some of the most passionate and committed members of the Massachusetts nonprofit community.
Roger’s presentation is entitled “Brand Control to Major Tom: Increasing your brand’s gravitational pull”:
While the new age of extreme participation and interaction means you no longer have the control you once had of all your brand and communication levers, there is great potential for more engaged prospects, donors, and advocates––and for more learning to advance your development efforts and enterprise. This session will help you to think of your brand as a system; help you to get the most from each component of the system; and provide frameworks and tools to help you to get more out of the communications you can control––and provide the context to influence the ones you can’t.
Eric will be joining forces with longtime Sametz collaborator, Terri Rutter of Harvard Medical School, to present “Donor 3.0. Engaging prospects today and tomorrow”:
New expectations are emerging from disruptions in our economy, changes in our lifestyles, and the new ways we communicate with one another. Understanding how today’s donors are different from those of yesterday—how they live, how they communicate, and what they expect from their actions—will help organizations optimize their efforts to engage and attract these donors and build mutually rewarding relationships with them. In this session, we’ll review initiatives by the Harvard Medical School Office of Resource Development for introducing new models, methods, and tools that organizations must master to connect with prospects and remain good stewards of their donors.
If you’re planning to attend the conference, please come up and say hello — and we’d love to see you at Roger and Eric and Terri’s sessions. For more information on AFPMA 10, including details on registration, location and more, head to their website here.
Categories: Branding, Outside the Square, Strategy and Management
A different kind of “socializing” over the holidays…
The holidays are just around the corner, and our calendar is filling up accordingly with social engagements.
But we’re excited about another kind of “social” this year, too — and we’ve got a couple of social media-focused events to point you to in the coming weeks.
Content Rules “virtual launch” and Boston launch party
Content Rules is a brand new book by our friends C.C. Chapman and Ann Handley (of MarketingProfs fame), and Sametz Blackstone is proud to be sponsoring their launch party on December 10th. It’s a sold-out event, and for good reason: Ann and C.C. both possess a deep understanding of what it takes to create compelling, engaging content — content that communicates clearly, targets the right audiences, and accomplishes goals. We’re hoping the book sells out, too (well, they could just print more… but still!)
You can head to their website, their Facebook page or their Twitter stream to be a part of their ongoing virtual launch — and make sure you pick up a copy!
Congratulations to both of you — and thanks for creating a fantastic resource for content creators everywhere!
Awareness Networks Webinar: “A Scientific Approach to Social Media”
Our own Tamsen McMahon will be presenting a webinar entitled “A Scientific Approach to Social Media” in partnership with our friends at Awareness Networks on December 16th — just a couple weeks away! Join Tamsen as she details a foolproof framework for approaching any social media project that will produce documentable, repeatable, and tangible results. In this webinar, you’ll discover how to get your personal or organizational digital presence started on the right foot — or make the one you have now more effective.
And if you’re on Twitter while you’re tuned in, use the hashtag #awarenessinc to take part in discussion and commentary around the webinar. We’ll be sure to keep an eye out for your thoughts!
If you’re checking out any of these events or are planning to attend, too, drop us a note in the comments.
Categories: Digital Media, Outside the Square, Strategy and Management
Twitter
LinkedIn