Branding the Occupy movement: hype or hypocrisy?

Here’s an interesting article in the New York Times about how the man who helped bring the Occupy Wall Street movement to prominence, Adbusters editor and founder Kalle Lasn, has done a lot of work to brand the movement.  The question becomes, when does co-opting the strategies and tactics of the marketers and media organizations you purport to challenge make you…well, a marketer and media company?  Does it matter?

To Mr. Lasn, it’s obviously about fighting fire with fire.  Or, in the nowaday, fighting meme with meme.

“There’s a number of ways to wage a meme war,” Mr. Lasn…said in an interview. “I believe that one of the most powerful things of all is aesthetics.”

Regardless of your attitude toward the protesters,you can’t ignore the impact of social media and viral media in spreading awareness of their intent and activities.  After the Arab Spring, especially, this seems to point to digital and social channels as being the primary, or at least vanguard, means of getting the word out about a cause: the old-hat news media organizations seem to be hangers-on rather than proactive reporters who are “out in front” of the story…so the story ends up being dictated to them.

The lesson to the rest of us, even in the world of B2B marketing, is that social and viral channels offer enormous opportunity and leverage – more so than traditional trade press or PR, if we’re using them properly.

Changing relations: what to ask for in the new client-agency landscape.

For small to mid-sized businesses who might be using or searching for a Chicago marketing agency, it’s important to understand the revised landscape of the advertising and marketing communications business, in terms of the relationship between agency and client.  It’s changed profoundly, driven by the Web, social marketing, the economic travails of the past few years and more, and it’s affected every Chicago agency and client.

The big advertising holding companies and multi-nationals, the boutique design agencies and Web pure-plays and every 360-degree integrated agency.  The demand for better, and more measurable, performance and ROI is the norm, now – and with good reason.

What’s the new normal? It starts with these key points any marketer should bear in mind as they contemplate working with an agency:

1. Invest in a real relationship. Some marketers, especially smaller ones or B2B marketers, view agencies strictly as vendors, not partners.  They’re handicapping themselves by not making use of an objective, creative and business-building asset that can deliver returns far in excess of outlays.  Sometimes it takes patience to see the impact, but if you’re working together, appreciating each other’s input and staying the course, agency and client alike will love the result.
2. Collaboration matters more than ever, so if you’re shopping for an agency, make sure they’re not prone to retreating to an ivory tower and dispensing “genius” as though their work were Sermons on the Mount.  They need to intimately understand your business challenges, the nature of your own customers and prospects, and be able to workshop concepts and ideas with you as a matter of course, not as an exception to the rule.  They can learn from you – and you should be opening to learning from them, too.
3. You all need to look at the bottom of the funnel first; it’s customer/prospect contact and engagement where the money happens, where analytics can give you insight about what works and what doesn’t.  So you and your agency need to understand what drives consideration and purchase first, and make every marketing or communications decision accountable to it.  If it doesn’t move the needle, you’re wasting time and money – and you need an agency that’s willing to play there, not simply deliver clever/pretty/award-show-worthy creative.
4. Look for a solutions partner, not an ad agency: at Biersma Creative, we pride ourselves on “transformative” solutions to business problems, not just ads or Web sites.  Too many agency-client relationships get submerged in confabbing about font choices, or background colors, or other minor elements, and don’t tackle the need to deliver holistic solutions to pressing problems.
5. Ask if they can deliver business intelligence and insight, because if they’re halfway strategic, they should be able to give you some fresh insights about your business.  And build programs that can generate valuable feedback and hard data.
6. Develop an ROI measurement plan that’s realistic and comprehensive.  Start out by making sure you’re both on the same page about what constitutes “ROI.” Don’t assume your agency isn’t interested in metrics – even the smallest shops, if they’re truly invested in the work and in your success, want to see what results they’ve pulled for you.  Surprisingly, even the largest brands sometimes don’t share that information with their agencies (until the pink slip, that is) which makes no sense at all. How can the work be improved without some idea of its effectiveness in the first place?
7. Nothing beats face-to-face. Get together regularly; not just for lunch or presentations, but for workshopping or ideating.  You’re part of each others’ teams now, and need the personal touch that makes for real enthusiasm and spirit.

“O.co” a no-no.

Remember Overstock.com?  You could be excused for remembering it as Overstock, and not realizing that it had changed its name to…wait for it…”O.c0″.  Because plenty of its loyal customers continued to refer to it as Overstock.com…and thanks to that inertia, the company decided it was time to go back to a brand that people wouldn’t let go.

Netflix learned the same when it went through the tortuous gymnastics of splitting its business and creating the short-lived Quikster brand.  About the only good to come of that move was whatever billings the branding agency involved got for coming up with the name.

What happened to Overstock is just another reinforcement of how potent and powerful effective branding can be.  Going to “O.co” made very little sense, in the first place. There’s a certain impulse toward finding (and owning) the most elementary and fundamental branding possible; if you can make your brand synonymous (”Kleenex”) with some aspect of basic existence, that’s great.  But trying to “own” a letter of the alphabet will probably work out no better than trying to make your brand reducible to a single word (Pizza Hut as “The Hut,” or Radio Shack as “The Shack”) when the effort actually suborns effective branding.Language and naming work they way they do for good, concrete reasons.

Names succeed because they provide a cognitive shorthand for us — so “Overstock.com” makes all the sense in the world, because it’s a capsule that perfectly encompasses the intent of the brand.  But “O.co” or “The Hut” are simply coy and contrived by comparison, and don’t serve the needs of language, either.

There are plenty of synthetic brands out there, of course, but they’ve most often got the advantage of belonging to startups or companies that are changing their scope in profound ways.  In the case of brands like Overstock.com, the stake in the ground may be sunk too deep to move.

What’s the lesson for small businesses and startups?  I’d say there are two:

1. A simple and direct brand or name works wonders. It’s just plain truth: consumers won’t buy on the basis of your brand, but on the basis of what it represents.  So make sure that shows up clear and plain.  Can you be funny, punny or whimsical?  Sure — if it helps drive identity and a cogent idea of what your business is all about in the mind of your target audience.

2. Don’t get tricky. It’s easy to outsmart yourself.  But you’ll never outsmart your audience.  The sooner you learn that lesson, the better.

3. Change your identity only with great caution. Don’t futz with your name unless you’ve got a very, very good reason to do so — a reason that’ll show up in the bottom line, first and foremost.  Even if you think it’s a good reason, be sure to test your new name or identity concept first, to gauge reactions and likely responses.

4. Don’t do anything out of boredom with your branding. That’s not a good reason to change an identity.  If it’s truly affecting your business in an adverse way, you should consider a change.  But don’t try to “energize” or “re-invigorate” your business by making a branding change — there are better and more salient ways to improve your marketing than that.

5. Change for the right reasons. Those can include a brand being visually archaic, or off-key for your evolving business, or not well-thought-through in the first place.  But once you’ve got a sharp, well-developed brand in place, approach changing it only with the greatest of trepidation.  It’s your brand, and it’s your toehold in the minds of your customers — don’t mess with success unless it’s absolutely necessary!

Defacing Chicago landmarks with bad advertising executions.

Blair Kamin of the Chicago Tribune doesn’t like it, and neither should anyone who treasures the rich architectural legacy of Chicago. It may raise $25 million in much-needed revenue for the city, and be a temporary measure…but the actual execution of these ads is about as low-rent as you can imagine.  It might have been better to hire graffiti artists to do the work.

The new administration has given advertisers the chance to place ad banners our city’s landmark bridges. So, even given that it’s a temporary situation and these banners may be gone after December (though you can never count out a municipality’s interest in making easy money at the expense of good sense — I’ve got a couple of red light camera tickets to prove that!), we wish the city had mandated a more attractive means of executing the program than the oversized equivalent of wildpostings or bumper stickers.

There’s probably no solution that works here in a tasteful way, period.  But with a little initiative and common sense, there could have slightly more palatable ways of merchandising the taxpayers’ real estate this way.  Decorative framing, or situating them in a less-tacky manner, for instance.  Or mandating the graphics be in a style that complements the era of each bridge, at least.  A little more costly for the advertiser?  Sure.  But it’s more likely to be a P.R. boon than a debacle.

To international visitors, especially Europeans, America presents vistas they don’t find back home: miles and miles of highway billboards, for example, which are strictly controlled in their homelands.  And now, they get to enjoy the site of Chicago’s legendary architecture, hung with vinyl stick-ons. The trade-off between revenue generation and public welfare — because the beauty and heritage of Chicago’s architecture is a part of that welfare, have no doubt — has erred too far on the side of expediency for the sake of income here.  It’s a mistake that shouldn’t be repeated.

Traditionalists join the digital and social party, too.

Even traditionalist marketers are realizing it’s important to adopt digital and social media practices — or get left behind. We’ve avowed that to our own clients for years, and now we can point to this article, which shows how firms that have been previously focused on traditional channels are now getting into the digital marketing mix.

Eastman Kodak is an interesting case, as I know them as a former client; for a firm founded on innovation, they’ve been hard-pressed to keep up with the tides of change, as we all know.  But they and others like Harte-Hanks and Pitney Bowes are rolling out marketing efforts and product innovations that leverage digital in some exciting new ways.

Even firms in that bastion of conservatism, the financial services sector, are budging on social media implementation, to either drive new services — or, in the case of Bank of America, to attempt to salve its damaged reputation.  Even so, they’re still playing catch-up.

Generally, however, financial services organizations are lagging in social adoption.  According to B2B, “only 57.8% of financial services respondents said they have adopted social media marketing, versus 95.2% of advertising companies, 80% of consultancies and 71.6% of technology businesses.”

A well-considered, authentic and open social media initiative might be just the medicine for some of these firms, frankly.  The more you can humanize the people behind the brand, especially in these tough times, the better the connection you’ll create with your customers.  And that connection works both ways — in keeping customers informed, and making the marketer more cognizant of what the real concerns are among users.  Would BoA have made the blunder of proposing debit card fees if they’d had any kind of serious feedback loop and two-way social presence in the social media world? I don’t think so.

Measuring social media: a practical method of attaching value.

Avinash Kaushik has posted a great article on the fundamentals of measuring social media for business, and it complements our own recent rant about the need to think ahead about what your social media program should be out to achieve, and how you should measure that effort.

What’s really useful about his method is that it’s clear, simple, easy to execute, and helps cut through the enormous amount of static that’s being built up around social…as he summarizes:

We have IT-minded people engaging in massive data puking (one report with 30 metrics anyone?) and Marketing-minded people who are using lousy measures of success (”I got 158,632 Fans! Hurray!”).

His proposed framework measures four very sensible-seeming, progressive layers of engagement: Conversation Rate, Amplification Rate, Applause Rate and Economic Value.

Without the last, especially, a marketer is flailing at the wind if they’re attacking social media without any preconsidered means of measuring their result.

By following the methods he’s pulled together, it’s possible to get a real handle on the results of your social media efforts.   More importantly, it’s yet another step in developing some logical and unified tools for social media metrics, instead of the scattered and often misleading methods presently at hand.

Don’t be shortsighted in planning social media.

This post from Bloomberg covers a lot of the same ground we’ve talked about before — especially about the problems of a business going into social media without enough sensible forethought.  Without proper planning and consideration of all the true costs and implications of a properly-managed social media program, and without a way of generating solid metrics, a company is only going to find social media marketing a sinkhole – not an asset.

As a Chicago-based social media and digital design agency, we’ve seen our share of firms that want to jump neck-deep into the social media pool, because there’s so much buzz around it they feel like they can’t afford to be left out.  But it’s not enough to simply be “out there.”  If you’re not realizing substantial returns that justify the effort, why do it? How is social media any different than any other form of marketing or engagement investment?  There’s an entire cottage industry sprung up around the simple act of extracting measurements from SMM, with consultants playing out methodologies like this or this for attacking the issue.

In fact, the sheer number of conversations and posts on the subject point to the fact that SMM measurement is an evolving situation — and the philosophies and solutions for measurement may be just as varied as the channels and types of marketer coming to it.

But the main argument still holds: you ought to define return on your investment (or your ‘Return On Design Investment,’ as we call it here) in order to track your success in using social media.  That means hard work beforehand to figure out your goals, channels and benchmarks.  It means being disciplined and hard-nosed about social media, clear-eyed about what it can and can’t do for your business, and being rigorous and consistent in your execution.

Tips and hints on building and managing a B2B community, Part Two

Here are a few more basic considerations to keep in mind when building an online community around your B2B business:

• Appoint a Community Manager. It’s critical to have a proactive manager in charge of your community, to constantly monitor, moderate and enhance what’s happening there…and to create an accountability structure and audit performance against goals within your own organization.
• Map processes and communication, because you’ll want a clear understanding of how your organization should interface with the community, and how feedback from your forums should be digested and forwarded to the people in your firm who’ll benefit from it.  And you should clearly lay out protocols for who engages the community, and how they do it.
• Set your metrics. What constitutes success?  Some basic metrics other communities use include growth, engagement, percentage of active users, amount of forwarding and trackbacks, etc.  But take time to align those metrics with your larger business goals, too.  If your goal is better customer support, the results should show up in customer sentiment indices and satisfaction scores, for example.
• Build evangelism and advocacy. An online community is a golden opportunity to drive loyalty and evangelism.  Sometimes it’s as simple as maintaining a running dialogue with customers…but there are plenty of add-ons to that.  Like incentives and recognitions for members who participate regularly, or offer up suggestions or best practices to the rest of the community.  Creating member polls, for example, can easily and simply heighten engagement and a sense they’re part of an active community.
• Help members share their successes. There’s nothing better than giving members an opportunity to show off their own performance, ingenuity or product ROI.   Let’s not forget forums are superb testimonial channels – so encourage them to state demonstrable successes, not just in support of your product but as examples to others who may be looking for just such insights.

Tips and hints on building and managing a B2B online community, Part One

Online B2B communities are an important part of the social media marketing and support strategy for many companies that have elected to go all-in on social media.  It’s another instance where you, as a marketer, may need to consider creating an online community because of the pressure of others doing so in your category, though you shouldn’t minimize the importance of its other benefits:

• Building stronger ties with loyal customers
• Creating another avenue for dialogue and support
• Enhanced visibility as a support-oriented enterprise
• Tie-in opportunities with your other marketing and sales efforts

So here are some of the points to consider when considering building an online community around your B2B business:

• What’s my vision? Why are you doing it?  Is it to have a user support community, or an executive-level forum for industry leaders?  Is it to inform loyalists about new product developments?  Should it be vertically-oriented, by product silo, or more generalized?  Or all of the above – but partitioned appropriately?  And, most importantly, how are you going to allow members to interact with you and with each other?
• When should I do it? Does it make sense?  There may be existing online communities you can join, and simply attempt to lead or influence existing forums and conversations.  But it you want a more proprietary experience for your customers, you’ll probably want to develop your own community.
• How are others doing it? See what the competition is up to – and see the approaches companies outside of your own category take, too.  Learn from best practices and their mistakes alike.  And remember: even if none of your competitors are using communities, that’s no reason to not consider them yourself.  You may be setting yourself up to steal a march on rivals.
• Think internally, too. There’s no reason your focus should be on external/customer communities alone: if you’re a big enough enterprise, or have enough affiliates, distributors, et al, then you may want to build a community that helps those stakeholders interact (with you as moderator).
• Know your members! You’ve got to understand your customers, and their employees who may have use for your community.  Whatever you can do to help them use your product to improve their performance in front of their peers and supervisors, the better – that’s an aspect of customer service that no one ever forgets.
• Set roles — and use them as incentives. Game companies get this: the publishers of Eve-Online, a worldwide online game, mingle both developers and fervent fans as moderators of their online forums.  But it’s not uncommon in B2B communities.  So as a first step, draw up a moderator/management structure for your forums, starting off with internal oversight.  Then, seed your members with the thought that they can participate as moderators themselves.  Use it as an incentive for greater engagement and dialogue.  You’ll probably find more than a few of them are willing to take on such as role, because it augments their own visibility.

Content marketing has been crowned king in B2B.

Search engine marketing?  Meh.  PPC?  Phooey.  PR?  Getouttahere.  The king of B2B online marketing, according to Entrepreneur magazine, is content marketing — the linchpin of pretty much everything we preach to our own clients: create valuable or, at the least, interesting content, whether by blogging, posting white papers, participating constructively in industry forums or any of  a good many other tactics where the prospect can feel you’re sharing something truly worthwhile with them that’s divorced from hard-sell.

As the story explains,

Late this summer, HiveFire, a Cambridge, Mass.-based internet marketing software solutions company, surveyed nearly 400 marketing professionals about the state of the business-to-business, or B2B, market, and discovered that marketers are retreating from traditional marketing tactics such as search marketing and have made content marketing the most-used tactic in their brand-enhancing tool box. Fact is, according to HiveFire’s B2B Marketing Trends Survey Report, twice as many B2B marketers now employ content marketing as they do print, TV and radio advertising, according to the survey.

It’s up to every B2B marketer, therefore, to have a content marketing strategy in place: a way of generating the kind of content with allure that’ll draw your target’s attention — because if you’re not doing it, your competition most certainly is, or soon will be.

Sergio Zyman, the marketing ubermind of Coca-Cola in the 80s and 90s, said something trenchant about how it’s not only what you do that communicates about your brand, but what you don’t do.  That can be a positive or a negative — but if a marketer chooses to ignore content marketing, or only have a half-hearted commitment to it, they’re going to lose out to some very focused rivals who understand the strategy, and are taking the time and investing the resources that can make all the difference to their long-term success.

B2B users on the Web are searching for relevant content.  They’re not susceptible to static: they’re after information that can help them in business.  Your path to engagement and purchase depends on your ability to create content that can demonstrate your innovation and leadership.