"astroturfing"

I hadn't run into this expression before but "astroturfing" refers to marketing or PR campaigns that try to take on the appearance of a grassroots movement. Definitely perjorative, this emphasizes the importance of transparency and authenticity in communications. Humans may not be so good at logic, but they are excellent at sniffing out a fake, especially with repeated interactions. And then they punish them.

I Power Blogger

Despite being a user of Blogger I had never seen this little piece of branding collateral before. A simple little riff on the "powered by" convention for advertising online software services, this shows a nice alignment between the brand and the grassroots ethos of the blogging community.

Cooling the Meme Forges

One of my enduring interests is the industry of the idea studios - those organizations that span the world of business and art and create many of the brands, symbols, and supporting media. 

It is a strange world and has surprisingly fewer players at the high-end than one might expect. 

WPP (which stands for "Wire and Plastic Products" of all things), Omnicom, Interpublic, 

Publicis, Denstu, and Havas are the Big Six. They span the world of marketing agency, brand consultants and public relations and between them they generate somewhere close to $50billion in annual revenues and employ over 280,000 people. 

While I've been meaning to write about these companies for a while now, what got my attention today was Dentsu warning on missed profit targets. The knock-on effect of the economic crisis is hitting marketing budgets. I'm sure this is just the first of these that I've seen, but I'm confident we'll see more.

Convergence Culture

I’ve had a hugely busy couple of weeks, but in those discretionary moments when I'm not typing furiously into a laptop – usually while waiting for subway trains, streetcars or buses – I have been reading Henry Jenkin’s Convergence Culture. This is a core text for understanding the communications channels, forms, and communities in which brand culture is practiced.

The first two chapters are must-reads for those interested in brand culture. Jenkins opens his book with analyses of Survivor, The Apprentice, and American Idol, looking at the structure of the shows and the participation of their audiences. The engagement of the fan communities were engines for a broader, mass market enthusiasm. Of special interest were the ways the show creators interacted with the audiences, entering into a multidirectional/multimodal conversation played out across many channels and generating a vast knowledge and countless hours of involvement with the entertainment brands, and the sponsor brands as well.

The rest of the book is pure gold, too, but I’m going to massacre his elegant presentations with my summaries so you should probably just read it.

Dell Spot

At the YourSpace conference a few weeks back I learned about Dell’s experience with “the conversation economy”. Nearly three years ago blogger Jeff Jarvis at Buzz Machine wrote his "Dell Sucks" entry (with apologies to Dell for linking it again - this time it's meant well).

Jarvis had purchased a lemon and received poor customer service which he carefully documented. His post touched a nerve in the Internet population and was so highly referenced and linked by others that, for two years, when you searched "Dell" on Google, it returned the "Dell Sucks" post.

I’m sure they explored all their options first (probably including a number of calls to lawyers, search result gurus, and professional "cleaners”). In the end, though, Dell responded with a rational and focused improvement on customer service, launched the "Studio Dell" community and the "Ideastorm" innovation conversation. Three years after that post, customer satisfaction is up from 58% to 84% and negative blog posts down from 49% to 22%.

Enter Facebook. Dell has created their own "fan" page, called "Dell Spot".

There are only three conversations, with some 40 posts. 37 of those posts are in the conversation "Why Dell sucks".

Consumers who have had poor product and customer service experiences are venting loudly (as they would have any way) and arguments are being advanced in Dell’s defense. The dialogue seems to be resolving in to two camps. One group is portrayed as apologists for “poor customer service” but present a position that "cheap technology is just that: cheap. Pay more and expect more". The other is being portrayed as “whiners who want quality at no cost” but their shoddy customer service experiences cannot so easily be discounted.

All this is happening on the Dell page - it's quite amazing. There is a blast of criticism right there under their ads, but there are also Dell employees, happy Dell customers, and even tech support from other companies making cases quite often consumers are rude and entitled boneheads. Ironically, it was one of Dell's employees' responses that impressed me the least. Post #33 in reply to a good natured jab at Dell was met with the response "it was sony battery...fyi...dont talk with little knowledge duh!! LOL." Fortunately the two involved in the exchange were adept in not engaging in flame wars and resolved things amicably. Still, I would hope that people at my company would not insult a customer, but would rather meet a criticism from someone who is not an enemy – only re-stating headlines about known product problems – with something a little more balanced, and invite the person to join Studio Dell.

This is another example of how companies like Dell, who are playing in the conversation economy, need to invite these dialogues internally as well so their employees become well-informed, rational, articulate brand ambassadors.

Work is engaging

In the “engagement” grail quest, many companies confuse people having fun at work with a need to make the workplace more fun. The result is too often things like “Hawaiian shirt Fridays” and other good-time obligations that hum with awkwardness rather than any successful and sustainable “fun culture” initiatives.

Fun is what happens when we play. At work, having fun is not the objective. We come to do a job and to get paid. Sometimes we are lucky enough to get a sense of accomplishment, involvement, or even doing something good. We know how to have fun and do so in our own lives and it can be insulting when your company tells you that you aren't having enough fun doing it and then gives you some arbitrary new bar to jump so that you can prove you aren't just competent but that you're also a "team player".

That said, having fun at work is a possible outcome of a well-functioning workplace where people feel confident in themselves and their teams, clear on their role and how it delivers on “the big picture”, aware of their priorities, and recognized for their successes.

As a leader, you can make the workplace more fun by ensuring your team understands what it is to be focused on, that they have the tools, training, and structure to do it, that communications are clear, that dialogue is encouraged, and that you celebrate your successes. When this happens, the activity that is “the work” has the potential to become more play-like and fun grows organically from the relationships of the individuals involved.

GoCrossCampus

GoCrossCampus (GXC) is a massively multiplayer online turn based strategy game from some students at the MIT brain trust. It lives in that space between board games like Risk, Eric Zimmerman/Word's Sissy Fight 2000, and Facebook – an admittedly strange blend. I've been expecting something like this for a little while now but am delighted by the charming approach taken.

The creators are now taking seed money from some VC groups and looking to bring the game to the workplace as a team building activity. I love it.

(Cross posted to transforming games)

Autocannibalism

I received a letter from my house insurance company. It's wishing me a happy birthday by my professional name on (4/0) 20lb matte full-bleed party balloon stock. My policy number appears under the date, a privacy notice in spat-out sans 8pt is smeared across the bottom of the message.

There are so many problems with this piece:

• It demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of why we communicate with each other. They are my insurer - I want them to be solid, sober, responsible, and compassionate. I don't care that they can do a mail merge from a database. I want to know that they are on top of my security. They should have a communication that conveys they have a respectful interest in my well-being and hold my personal information in the most discrete manner. Balloon letterhead - they might as well be waving a bottle of tequila and a handgun in our nursery.
• It highlights for me the inequality of our relationship - this company knows my birthday, my address, they've had people through my house and advised me on things to fix. I haven't even been to their office; I'm not even sure where it is. And now I'm not convinced of their good judgment.
• They assume an intimacy without entering a conversation and ignore our existing relationship. We have every reason to talk to each other - I have a home to ensure, and they are my insurer. Ask me about it and offer professional guidance. You had someone in our house who advised us of things we could do to make it safer. You know that I haven't called to update you about that - Ask if that has been completed as it will improve my rates; ask if it would be helpful if they had a reputable contractor they have vetted contact me about that minor repair. Why haven't they called about that, anyway? BECAUSE THEY DON'T CARE. And now it's top of mind for me.
  

The net effect is that I feel less secure. How much am I paying for this? Either too much or too little; either way, it's a reminder to CHANGE INSURER. Happy Birthday to me!

YourSpace

I attended Sharpe Blackmore Euro RSCG's "YourSpace" event today, exploring the application and relevance of social media to contemporary marketing.

Speakers included:
Ken Wong (Queen's Business School) and three of his star graduating BCOM students, Cleo Cheung, Albert Lee, Sal Patel
Mathew Ingram (Globe and Mail)
Jesse Brown (CBC Radio)
Janice Diner (Ripple Social Media)
Chris Williams (Media Contacts)
Tom Blackmore (Sharpe Blackmore)
and host, Ron Tite (Sharpe Blackmore)

The presentations were quite interesting and I have pages of notes that I will be digesting into some posts over the next few days.

I was not surprised by the eagerness of marketing professionals to adopt these approaches but was a little shocked at how few people in the field have started playing with or participating in them. Not a 20-something crowd but I expect we'll see some interesting results in coming months.

We travel at low-bandwidth

Crystal Castles' xxzxczx me – the aesthetic of the video is such that I can’t tell whether or not it was degraded by the youtube distribution. Great alignment of signal and channel, noise disappears into style and the piece appears native to where the community is using the sound.

Motivation

There are new things happening. Information transmission is increasing and the cathedral of mass media now has coffee shops in the congregation and a bazaar on the grounds. There is a hum of creation and sharing – a groove, like culture is jazz to be played and riffed on. Ad hoc communities are forming about nodes of group definition and forming reservoirs of knowledge and expertise. Trajectories of meaning and precedent are being altered by their mass, their gravity.

These new constellations strongly impact on marketing and communications. The number of media impressions per person per day is skyrocketing and the resources being employed in their promotion is astronomical.

Those of us working in communications see the rise in power of the audience. Intelligence and opinion are legion and the voice of an individual – well-placed and smartly delivered – can alter the perceptions of millions.

At the same time we see increasing concentration of ownership in the industry, massive conglomerations of design, brand management, public relations and media purchasing. The craft of marrying emotion and commodity in symbol is increasingly sophisticated.

And still popular literacy for this strange semiotics is a red queen stalking increasingly chimerical marketing campaigns, multi-channeled and micro-targeted. Consumers are embracing the relationships with their commodities as represented by their brands, engaging them. The ownership of the symbol in legal terms has not changed, but is socially contested ground and those companies who fight it risk alienating those who believe most fervently. Push marketing is becoming a dance and brand crafters are looking to their brand communities, internal (employees) and external (consumers), to define, evolve, embrace and advocate for the brand.

It is the rise of brand culture. It’s an interesting time to work in communications. I will write here about the things I am learning and seeing.