Digital Ecosystem for your Brand? Now what's that!!!

Just came back from a 3 hour breakfast at Roots Cafe - great poha, chilla jasmine tea and early morning drizzle...And the sight of two cute kids wallowing in the small rain water puddle...Wish I was 4 again:-)

Penning down few thots in the head on digital eco-system...While consulting clients through my Social Media consultancy - Once Upon A Time, I very often try to explain the need for a digital/online/social media eco-system...

Of course they don't always understand the need for it, grown up as they are on a 'one-size-fits-all' mass media diet.

Here are few of the guidelines - some learnt by personal experience curating the content for Cinnamon Stays, my UnHotel brand and some from Guy Kawasaki's book Enchantment...

1. Is your brand/platform/POV worthy of an eco-system? Is your product, service, ideology boring/ bland - then try to fix it first!You cannot build an enduring community/ eco-system around stuff that people hardly care.

You can buy lots of online, SM ads and people may even like those so that you have a tidy fan base but that's all a mirage.

In the new world, spend the most time on having a worthy cause. Anna Hazare has one. He doesn't really need a SM plan, calendar!!

2. Create Meaning. Give consumers, readers something meaningful to do.

What does that mean - Take the very popular Vodafone ZooZoo campaign. Let's visit it's fb page. While they seem to have done a reasonably good job of a solid fan base and daily interactions! They have just about tapped the tip of the iceberg...

More can be done in terms of getting ideas from consumers who love zoozoos(crowd-sourcing). Ideas to improve customer service for eg.

We are heading towards Social media fatigue and the way to keep your fans and consumers engaged are not cute viral videos and contests only but a more meaningful exchange on a daily basis.

3. Welcome criticism. This one makes most clients go paranoid. How can we allow negative comments? Lets delete the dissatisfied consumers rant. Lets ignore him(he is anyways a statistical rounding off error!!) Or even lets punish him for publicly criticizing my brand!

Recently I spent close to 20 days getting a complaint resolved by a major telecom brand. I used SM to first complain and rant and later protest and berate the brand. Yet the over-all response from the brand was hopelessly unwelcoming!!!

I guess my lifetime worth for that brand is very high. No amount of mass media 'song-and-dance' interruptions will now ever change my stance. They just blew a big chance to engage and enchant a vocal consumer...The life-time damage of an ignored customer is very high in the new connected world.

So while many brands are very busy measuring the total count of positive and negative feedback on online platforms, they mustn't just be complacent by knowing the statistic on a nice power-point slide.

The strategy to deal with online criticism should be exactly the opposite.

Lets engage the dissatisfied lot(of course we can't do much about the non-genuine ones). Let's figure out smart ways to 'welcome criticism'. This requires a culture change at the company, not just sophisticated measurement tools!! That's what brand management 2.0 will largely be about - a culture of welcoming criticism(via Guy Kawasaki). What are you doing about it?

Blabnote : The World's 1st Vocal Social Network

Conversations, social media, ferments within my company and social experiments have taken/ are taking quite a lot of my time. But am enjoying this social school.

Pawar - the Mican trainee who is doing a project on digital media sent a link for blab-note - the voice-only social network a while back! Check it out here...

Blabnote, a British start up that is currently in private beta, has created what may be the world’s first “vocal social network.”

The product is far from perfect but it's the first step towards a voice-enabled-interaction future...The keyboard must now have a clear expiry date:-)

MySpace is Full. What About Yours?

So, finally MySpace sets up shop in India. Read the story at DNA here,!

Methinks, they are a bit too late. Orkut and Facebook have the first mover advantage. Mahesh of Pinstorm had this to say...

- MySpace in India has to establish itself in a territory where Orkut is the king with over 8 million users —that’s about one-third of all Indian youth online — a greater share than even Star Plus has of this demographic on TV.

- Too many of us are on too many networks — and it’s too much incremental trouble to get on to another network for very little incremental benefit.

Agree with you on that one Mahesh!

- No Indian social network has yet gained any significant advertiser confidence. Of the Rs 600 crore spent online in India last year that Pinstorm tracks, barely 1-2% went to social networks.

Well on this one, I feel Indian media mostly doesn't understand social networks.
To understand it, you got to do/be social not just understand/ know social and behave like big media/ big company!! We are still a heavily hierarchical company-media-network.

With my limited exposure, I find that media(print and magazine)in the West are trying hard to integrate the 2-way social aspect into their medium but in India it's largely lip-service or a blind eye.

Generally speaking, the Indian mediascape and clients are sitting at the periphery of social media, lusting at ways and means to monetise social media w/o realising what it is.

Thoughts like conversation, engagement, influence, participation fade in the back-drop of shouts of monetising the eyeballs, ROI and advertising potential and reach of the social media...

Coming back to MySpace - well myspace is full. Am happy with LinkedIn and Facebook!! But as a platform for musical bands, I think MySpace has a great positioning! One more grand threat to music companies!!

Facebook : Counterpoint

My online friend Satish at Naked NY commented on the Facebook Indigestion post...Said that my Facebook experience could be at dramatic variance with the teen sentiment/ relationship with Facebook!

So, I asked a young friend of mine to put her thoughts around the subject...Here's her take...

My virtual umbilical cord (and no, this is not about the progress in medical technology!)
"The age of the global citizen...half my childhood buddies are all over the world...i know at least one person in every continent(maybe even Antarctica..i wudn't be surprised) friendships made for life...with only a geographical barrier...bridged by something as technological as the internet."

"Technology and relationships don't mix, like cold steel and heartfelt warmth maybe? Well, I'd beg to differ."

"School friends, college friends, colleagues, friends' friends, a lot of alliances you would best forget but there are just as many that matter so much."

"My best friend in 6th grade who left for boarding school in Shimla. Or another bestie who moved home to Japan when i was 14. My first crush who has lived in Colombo since we were 12, but i got in touch with again 7 years later...all thanks to Facebook."

"With such fast paced lives and with everyone in a different part of the world it's difficult to catch up for even a cursory drink, making the Boozemail application one of the largest used on Facebook."

With newsfeeds giving you a play by play update on your friend's lives(which you can update the settings of to ignore lesser acquaintances, and bring your inner circle into the limelight) to building an entirely virtual social life for the simple reason that, having a real one that functions the same way, is plain impossible.

"Facebook is what binds me to my old friends and actually helps me get closer to people I never got a chance to bond with earlier. You may realise that you and a casual friend may have similar interests from the groups you join, the applications you prefer, and a million other things considering Facebook is so customised you can read a person's personality just by visiting their profile page. for eg. Leena and I studied in the same class for 6 years in school, casual friends, but she only realised i was a fellow fan of The Doors when she read my status message. It simply said, 'Bhavna is: stoned immaculate'"

"Friendships are born out of sticky situations, escapades, lurid stories brimful of laughter and tears. Getting caught for bunking maths class and playing basketball instead or talking about your dreams and your passion over a cup of coffee while watching a beautiful sunset cannot be recreated even with the best graphics."

"We bond through sharing good times and the not-so-good (rather horrible, horrendous and torturous) ones and this is not an emotion that transmits through an LCD screen. So when you think about it, Facebook is nothing close to the real thing, but it's one hell of a replacement when the real world is out of reach."

Thanks B for sharing your thoughts...

Day 4 - Boot Camp Bytes

And today, finally the meat of the boot camp. The often mis-understood, mis-managed, and 'black-box' subject of digital creatives...

Just came back meeting my college friend and his cute 3 year old son Yash. He reminded me of Neo!!My friend's adorable son - Yash. High-point of the day- Yash's squeal of delight upon seeing his new toy car...

Back to the workshop...Some of the key observations/ learnings of the day, in no particular order...

1. Digital creative, UGC, content in general forces us to ask the question - what business are we really in? Or more specifically what business do we want to be into...

These convergence days are exciting times. Bollywood meets MTV meets advertising meets Web 2.0 meets mobile content meets UGC meets PR meets something new every day! So, where do we want to go today:-)Paul and Brian from RightClicka, the social media experimental lab epicentred on music!!

2. As an industry and as my specific discipline(account planning), we have always been obsessed with the study of popular culture. But now with digital technology and democratisation of creativity, there is this huge opportunity of inventing popular culture...But are we ready as an industry to harness it. Don't think so:-(

3. The digital creative companies of the future need to be open-sourced. Their structures must be more collaborative and experimentative. And they must model themselves on software companies - projects, teams, constant learning and open to out-sourcing!

4. Digital Creative also demands that many of us wear multiple hats. Strategy and creative hats, project management and IT hats, strategy, creative and tech guru hats, project management and story telling hats. Successful models will have to burn their silo walls is what I feel.Our two Chinese interpreters for the day(at the back). I am liking the multi-culturalness of this boot camp...

5. We need 'cool scouts' - guys who are constantly on the look-out for 'cool content' & 'Cool Inventors'. And many of our current agency creatives may not be the guys who can invent 'cool'. These guys are scattered in music, movie, gaming industries...We need to hire/ work closely with them on digital projects.

6. I also strongly feel that 'the One Line proposition' led thinking has to give way to 'Multiple line/ context conversation' led briefing...Small ideas will coalesce to form the Big Idea! Digital Creative might also be of a 'Shoot-then-aim' mould!

This is the most complex topic as any real change demands structural changes in our business without disrupting the regular work and revenue streams. Balancing deep change with quarterly revenue targets:-) Tough task because as an industry, with all the back-slapping and PR around new tools, our fundamental structure( am restricting myself to mainstream agencies/ networks) hasn't changed in decades...

But if we need to change our core/ DNA to digital then we will have to disrupt our work, thought and administrative structures...Else the smaller, nimbler, smarter 1st generation digital shops will always enjoy a lead over the agency...

Of course much of this change might be messy, evolutionary, revolutionary...or forced upon by business imperatives...

But whatever be the outcome, digital content/ creativity/ market/ business model is an exciting playground. I am loving it!!

ROI on Tribes and Other Bakwaas

Was generally checking out other planner blogs here...Stumbled upon the Diginative by Fran Hazeldine, a London planner.

His recent post/rant is on the Discovery Channel Tribe promotion...

I agree with Fran, I don't think Discovery got the essence of tribe.(The copy and the tonality is so outta place) Looks like they have trivialised the concept...While I do not recall an Indian example, this quick ROI approach to youth marketing is a global malaise.

These days I am particularly wary of clients who want to capitalise on 'social networking', do a 'cool' promotion or want to use 'youtube' for their brands...

Many of them are blatantly ignorant of the Web 2.0 spirit, hugely insincere in their intentions and their short-sightedness sucks big time!!

Mass Man and the Electric Environment

Was chatting online with a friend about social media in the morning. At night caught up with Neil Postman's book - Disappearance of Childhood...

Let me share this excerpt pp 69-70 from the book...

It is alleged that upon being told that through the telegraph a man in Maine, could instantly send a message to a man in Texas, Thoreau asked, "But what do they have to say to each other?" :-)

In asking this question, to which no serious attention was paid, Thoreau was directing attention to the psychological and social meaning of the telegraph, and in particular to its capacity to change the character of information - from the personal and regional to the impersonal and global.

A hundred and twenty years later Marshall McLuhan tried to address the issue Thoreau raised. He wrote:

When man lives in an electric environment, his nature is transformed and his private identity is merged with the corporate whole. He becomes "Mass Man." Mass Man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity. Mass man was first noticed as a phenomenon in the age of radio, but he had come into existence, unnoticed, with the electric telegraph.

So, what have we become now? As many of us seamlessly connect to a global community, conversation, brain...As we think in bytes, live under the tyranny of 'perpetual immediacy' and twitter 24 X 7 X 365!!

(Picture sourced from Gettyimages!)

New Age Brands Have a Different Ning!

A little late in the day(48 hours back to be precise), I discovered the online social networking brand Ning introduced to me by my new digital partner and co-conspirator(John Lambie)!

Okay, back to Ning. After 48 hours I try to discover more about it. Google for the site but find that it's down for repairs. However, I still end up liking it. Because it's got a sense of humour and a message that's warm and human. It's also got a cute little bear trying to repair the site...

Ning like a person apologises for the technical snafu and directs me to the Ning blog and enthusiastically gives me an approx. timing when it would be up and running...

In fact this is what the message reads - At midnight tonight, we're going to take Ning offline to add a few new features. We'll be back in action by the time the bars in California close and you'll be free to resume your late night social networking.

Guys my 10 year old credit card company, 7 years old mobile service provider company, my 8 year old bank none talk to me like this - in a normal voice that's full of life, zest and quirkiness!

I like the brand feel of Ning...Here's the post in 48 hours for Ning...Never wrote one for my bank or the credit card, etc.

I guess as we step into this new age/ digital lifestyle era, brands even while they ride mass media vehicles need to have a human voice. Stuffiness of the analog, hierarchy driven marketing era won't get brands love marks from customers!!