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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There needs to be a fair amount of well lets call it "selfinsight" in a company. But when you do something like, let's say, send out an extraordinary newsletter with the only purpose of announcing stuff about yourself ( aka. giving no value to the readers) - I just think you are wasting my time.
I want to talk about value here. I want to have value from receiving your newsletter, personal or professional - it has to give something to me. Otherwise I probably won't let myself have your news and sign up for a mailinglist if I thought that all I would get from it was noise.
I mean - if you send out a newsletter out, talking about the value of yourself instead of giving value to your readers, there's a fair ammount of chance that the newsletter will end up as badwill instead of goodwill.
so newsletters doesn't necessarily have to evolve news about yourself, it could evolve news about - lets say, your area of experience?
[business, communication, newsletter, badwill, value]
[114 comments]
I had a chat yesterday evening with my wonderful husband about all things web (very normal for a dinner conversation at our house). We talked about how community and presence marketing differed from other sorts of marketing and how it made companies use their online presence (elsewhere than their own site as a marketing tool)...
The reason we started talking about this was that one of our friends has made a web application and he is only picking bits and pieces from a community marketing idea that I have helped him out with. This is my eyes, is of course, wrong. In my eyes, it means that the flow of this web app ( or of any online activity) is decreasing.
- it's like blogging to make you look good, instead of blogging to be transparent, where you show the good, the bad, AND the ugly
The strength of all these wonderful new webtools is not just marketing - they are awesome as a package, and real awesome to give your company a conversational face on the internet - which is not just your webpage, but your profiles everywhere else.
You can't be present everywhere (and you shouldn't be).. but the tools that you choose to use, to "market" yourself.. you should use them fully. you should see them as your primary online marketing tool. and you should keep maintaining them and using them (kindoff like old networking strategies on new bottles)..
Flow is the experience that you give the user when he meets you, its what lulls him into the fantastic universe of well "everything you". It's where he starts to get you, to understand what you are about, what vision and mission you have, and most importantly: how you bring him value.
...
Oh and btw - I am looking forward to see ya'll at reboot this thursday and friday, where I have listed a speaking proposal about "return on involvement"... also, tomorrow IRL is having a COMPLETELY FREE community workshop with Pedro Custodio at CBS...( send me a mail to join us =)
[social media marketing, social marketing, social branding, reboot, blogging, value, presence-marketing, community-marketing, IRL, inreallife, Pedro, web-application, flow, webtools, conversationalface, everything-you, community-workshop]
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