Im just back from next09 in Hamburg and Disruptive Media in Stockholm (you can find my talk here). It has been a hectic but really learningful week, filled with great people, great talks and new insights. This morning I watched one of my favorite speeches in a long time again: Brian Solis on "putting the public back in PR" - the reason I guess I find this talk at the top of my conference experience is because Brian is so right in my opinion. It leaves me to touch on something that I mentioned in my own talk at disruptive media - why should we ever engage ourself in a brand ? I mean:
1. a brand is not a person
2. brands are normally really boring
3. they normally don't do anything in this world if they can't measure it or can't make money on it.
aka. they're not human.
So why should we engage ourselves in brands ? Well first of all because of the utility and convinience they provide. but I think that Umair Haque (or Jeff Jarvis ? don't remember) said it very well at next09. "the only reason we engage ourselves in brands is because they make us better". The experience of the brand is giving us some sort of value that we didn't have before. The experience of the brand get's us closer to our own personal truth (whatever that is)...
The great thing is that with social tools - it is so much more fun to create this involvement in the brandexperience - it's not really easier, it still has to be a brilliant creative mind that comes up with the call-to-action for the involvement. The hardest thing is to find that magic something in your brand that people loves - and it might not be the thing you think it is - what are people saying about you - and where?
Now the thing that people are already saying - might be what you need to start out with =) - now go ahead and engage some people
[branding, disruptive media, human, return on involvement, social, user experience, value, social marketing]
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at Next09, Hamburg 5th and 6th of may, I am tranforming my "why every company should be a rock band" ebook into a new speech - the overall theme of the conference is shared economy, but I will be talking about shared branding and where it is that rockbandism is actually helping you a whole lot with your branding. I would maybe even go as far as saying that rockbandism is the precondition for good branding these days. I have been thinking a lot about how you share your brand, mainly I think it's interesting who you want to share it with ?
- It could be your customers, potentiel customers and the market out there, but it could also be your suppliers and your stakeholders. I work with social branding everyday where you actually talk about what return you get from involving your customers in your company (and there's a whole lot of strategic work involved in this question, because why on earth would people involve themselves in your company ? - ta da - rockbandism is why.
And a part of rockbandism is actually to share your brand inwards - aka. making sure your company is authentic and a rockband. If you are a company like innocent drinks it's would take a huge blow to your authenticity if somebody found out that you actually shipped your goods around the world with planes. (They don't - it's not an option for the logistic managers at innocent drinks, planes are out of the question).
So if you really want people to involve themselves in your rockband - you need to share your brand inwards before you share it outwards. Other approaches than that would be a shame.
Another thing that you could share is the management of your brand, where you lead the brand and put the management and decisionmaking out to the users, but again, how do make sure that people actually wants to manage your brand ?
hm. more to come.
ps. crossposted at henrietteweber.com
[social marketing, shared economy, shared branding, rockbandism, branding, marketing]
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Due to my latest blogpost on Toothless Tiger, especially the "user generated context" has reallly got me thinking about not being talked to by brands, interacting with brands but actually enter a brand. If user generated context actually holds water, you would be able to create an atmosphere where you would actually be able to feel the brand. Facilitated by online tools, but taking place in real life. One of the things that makes me doubt that this could actually happen (which to me, would be extremely creative), is the same feeling I got from Second Life, when that was really hot a couple of years ago. I think Second Life totally rocked in some ways - but it also blew pretty hard.
Especially since the community was visual and it was a whole new world without knowing what to do or any games or tasks - unlike World of Warcraft (Yes a friend of mine has slowly turned me over to World of Warcraft and I think it rocks). I just got the feeling of "im online in a community not doing anything except for living - i might as well be offline and do crafting or something like that. Second Life is the only community and game where I actually found myself hanging around, not knowing what to do, or not having a purpose. It wasn't clearly defined to me.
Anyway - if you should be able to enter the user created context of a brand - influenced by the people who is passionate about the brand - you should have a clearly defined purpose as a user or as a potential client. There's several initiatives you could do, but I think trancending online games to real life, with a clearly stated purpose, close to the users, build around the brand in mind, would actually rock and be really close to art and remarkable. Now THAT's Cool!
[usergeneratedcontext, branding, brandidentity, gaming]
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