Social Networks – A State of Becoming

Bob Dylan suggested that we are at our best when we are “constantly in a state of becoming,” in the Martin Scorsese documentary, “No Direction Home” Our seemingly unrelenting rush towards all that is social and new seems to support his idea in a weird kind of way.

Who knew that Bob Dylan, the enigmatic soul of the 60’s would be the guru for business in the new millennium. Social networks have become an expression of the need to belong and the technology that supports it has given wings to this “constant state of becoming.”

Businesses are finally sitting up and taking notice of social networks as a means of spawning a customer dialogue about their products and services …allowing people to share where they are going, when they will be there and what they like about it. Your product or service can be the benefactor of this new social medium but, as there usually is with stuff like this…there is a catch. You have to plan and support these new mediums with dedicated resources, and when I say resources I mean people!

Businesses are not only supporting social networks discussions about their products but they are advertising on those networks in places like Face book like never before. All of this takes planning and co-ordination and there are business entrepreneurs out there right now building business models for the future that offer social network support, tied into online buying, unique social network customer discounts through software like Foursquare …and the beat goes on.

The upshot of all of this is that social networks, which are designed to be shared by and for the masses are slowly becoming the dominion of big businesses … hey wait a second, wasn’t an online presence supposed to level the playing field between big business and small business? If you are a big business the news is all good - you have the resources to plan and support social networks.

Small businesses, despair not … for you are in the constant state of becoming and you too can reach out to help fulfill this promise of consumerism, but you have to be smart about it and be selective about your marketing strategy. Understanding your marketplace and your audience and properly resourcing social network initiatives will define your success or failure in the very near future.

E-Learning – Focus on Content

While E-Learning has been around for awhile...most professed E-Learning experts have not been. They have evolved or re-invented themselves from technology based solutions such as selling/programming software or hardware. The marketplace is littered with such solutions with little or no thought to content.

Who is developing content and what expertise do they have? The answer is simple...few and little. Few developers have the capacity to synthesize complex E-learning content into meaningful information that can help change behaviour or teach new techniques. And there is little expertise in marshalling or repurposing media that will enhance comprehension.

My/our expertise goes back to interactive laser disc production in 1985 and the Interactive Design Workshop at the University of Nebraska. Myself and partner Doug Knipe worked together at Consumer Distributing to implement a more robust version of the Teledon project. Ostensibly it would allow Consumers’ shoppers to buy direct from a kiosk using a combination of laser disc imaging technology and the Teledon communication protocol.

Interactivity has changed; as has media technology, but the lessons learned on how humans interact with that technology have not. What it taught us was that technology was always secondary to an intuitive learning process and understanding how to synthesize typical dry text/graphic based content (PowerPoint) into behavioral learning is an art form.

" ...technology was always secondary to an intuitive learning process and understanding how to synthesize typical dry text/graphic based content (PowerPoint) into behavioral learning is an art form"

E-learning demands a team approach that includes skills in graphic design, scripting, video production, simulation design; audio production, illustration and perhaps the most important …project management. It is not a marriage of convenience between software/hardware developers and graphic design/video production companies!

Advertising Creative – Not a Game of Inches

When you miss...you miss big for the most part with advertising, Developing unique, attending grabbing creative that can affect people in a way that changes their behaviour is a complex process that involves an emotional investment. Most people involved in the process (insert client here) think they know and understand their audience and what motivates them. Unfortunately this is virtually never the case. Most clients are too close to the process of making and selling a product and don’t understand how their product fits into a lifestyle.

And more than that, great creative concepts, appeal to our artistic nature and you usually can’ put your finger on why it works…

it just does.  Try this left brain -right brain test to see what your predisposition is? Right brain people are generally considered to be more creative, yet left brain people of the world seem to control business so it tends to set up a clash of styles. Business decisions makers don’t understand the process can’t qualify it and can’t support the process with trust and patience and so they keep coming up lame creative. Perhaps even more important is, they do not believe in it and as a result they end to suffering the consequences in business.

Art and advertising go together, and when I say art I mean original art not graphic art. Today’s advertising is very forgettable with little thought or patience given to creative inspiration. Take an example of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec who has become famous as the bohemian art of the Moulin Rouge. He captured the spirit and emotion of the belle époque, the "beautiful era" in Paris, through his posters and prints. He painted café art (advertising) in Paris. Do you see any art like this in the malls and on the highways today?

The greatest advertising concepts in history are all based on humour, emotion and insight into the human psyche. For example Gary Gilmore, the infamous spree-killer, uttered the words “Let’s do it” just before being executed by a firing squad in 1977. A few years later the comment became an inspiration for Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign. If you really want to understand more about great creative take moment to check out the trailer for this great documentary on advertising creative called Art & Copy .. its a real eye opener. 

Kinetic Typography + Stephen Fry = Savvy Communication

Actor, writer, journalist, comedian, television presenter and film director Stephen Fry narrates this very pointed poke at the political correctness of the self-styled police of grammar and language. Fry makes the most important point that the objective of language is communication and the rules need not always be followed to perfection. Enjoy.

Marketing - Big Business vs. Small Business

Over my more than 25 years of marketing experience, I‘ve come to put customers in two distinctive camps, and for lack of better terms - I’ll call then small business and big business. Now this may be a bit simplistic but it will do for the purposes of my thoughts on this issue.

Big business has always had an advantage, and it is not what you might think. Sure they have bigger budgets more people, etc. but, the long term view is the most telling advantage that big business has over small business.  Big business by its nature has to plan long term and, budget for those plans. Small business on the other hand doesn’t always plan as well as it should... usually a product of making a living; but for those that do plan long term and think big the rewards are great … you get to become a big business!

Small business tends to plan short term and not think in a longer time frame or on a larger scale. This short term thinking includes clients who choose to try and keep much of their costs for marketing initiatives, internal and by internal we mean using internal staff and resources. Now to properly frame the discussion we need to understand what the term, marketing can include. It can encompass sales, promotions, franchising, customer service, data management, branding, advertising, etc….. as you can see a very important part of any business.

While most small businesses understand the need, they often pay lip service to planned marketing and as a result long term planning of marketing initiatives for small business fall by the way side or we hear the all too often, “we can handle it internally.” This usually means handing over the responsibility to someone in the organization who is already overloaded with work, and whose skills are remotely related to the demands of the marketing initiative. The result is incomplete, slow and short term implementation… all the things that small business is supposed to be better at than big business.

Our suggestion is to consult with professionals, put a long term plan together, think big and then put a practical plan together that makes the best use of your internal resources and qualified external resource to get the initiatives in place and effectively monitored for performance. Don’t short change your company with short term thinking.

Where Good Ideas Come From

I am always on the lookout for fresh and fascinating books that can be applied to both my personal and business life. I recently came across Where Good Ideas Come From by Steve Johnson. He has created this wonderful book trailer video that encapsulates many of themes he discusses in his book and it is well worth the watch. On a marketing note, this video is a very creative idea and an excellent example of "walking the talk" in promoting his book.

Learning From Failure

We rarely learn from our successes and learn even less from our failures and that is real shame. I will relate a short story to give you an example. I was travelling to Salt Lake city to manage a live event for Mine Managers on behalf of Barrick Gold in the early 90's. I was fortunate enough to travel on Peter Monks'  personal Jet. For those who may not know Mr. Monk is Chairman and founder of Barrick Gold, the world's largest gold mining corporation and one of the world's wealthiest men. We had a chance to talk a bit about how he become successful in the business of mining (that's an interesting story too but we'll leave it for another time) and how he had come to be so successful in general.

He told me that he had bankrupted 7 different companies before he achieved his ultimate success with Barrick Gold. Each of his enterprises, as he explained had been successful but at some point, often due to outside influences, the venture had gone bankrupt. And to ad a little colour, most of these companies such as Clairtone Sound Corporation were multi-million dollar enterprises in the 50's and 60's (when "multi-million" meant something) . He talked about how each of these ventures had taught him valuable lessons for the next enterprise.

I guess the valuable lesson in all of this is that don't assume that failure is lesson in and of itself...it is simply a teacher that will provide valuable lessons for those willing to be taught.