Brand 2.0

Presenter: Kevin Yam – Directer, mobile and interactive platforms, National Geographic

Few other publications have the longevity of National Geographic, but like any magazine, it has had to adjust to adapt to technological changes and the way that users choose to experience media.  A few years ago, the company looked at all of its media offerings – magazines, tv, games, online, image collection, music, books, films, and maps – and discussed how it could offer that compelling content together across all of that existing media.  As they develop new content, they consider how it could be used (licensing) and how to best tell the story in many different ways.

Developing this led to a heavy focus on user experiences, which forced them to examine the context in which their content was consumed.  With the emergence of mobile, consumers now have immediate access to information and resources, and National Geographic wants to be there with their rich, outstanding content.  This recent led to the development of a Bird Finder app which helps users identify birds (using location information), and incorporates sounds and video.  Additionally the app allows them to “check in” the bird, creating crowdsourced maps of where types of birds have been seen.

They also recently completed a project to tell the story of going to Antarctica – Bus 2 Antarctica.  They used new and social media to help tell the story of, “1 man, 10 weeks, and 10,000 miles,” traveling from National Geographic’s offices to Antarctica.  He kept followers up-to-the-hour on his travels via Twitter (@bus2antarctica), a blog, facebook, an interactive map, and media partnerships with FOX, ABC, and CBS.  The traveler used only an iPhone, still camera, video camera, GPS, and a tracking device to report his stories through all of these media.  It helped to prove they could tell a tremendously compelling story, in real time, for an extremely low cost.  Every brand needs to consider how they can take advantage of new and social media to tell their story or provide brand content.

New Rules of Marketing & PR

Presenter: David Meerman Scott, New Rules of Marketing & PR

No one doubts that the rules have changed and social media has made it necessary for businesses to interact with and engage with customers and potential customers.  If companies want to be successful in this new world, Meerman suggests a few principles they’ll have to abide by.

Lose control – Brands don’t just have to adapt and change to their customers’ wants/needs, but they should let their customers help them shape the brand.  It lets them feel most engaged with the brand and makes them more likely to evangelists of your brand.

Be human – Customers are individuals and they want to be dealt with on a one-on-one basis.  They want to deal with a person, not a big faceless corporation, and they want to be genuinely listened to.

Nobody cares about your products except you – People care what they do for them (make their lives easier, better, etc.).  Highlight the benefits and services you provide and don’t use big, fancy, or irrelevant language to talk about them (See The Gobbledygook Manifesto).  Find out the information people are looking for – which you are an expert in – and give them content.  Every brand should be constantly putting out content that illustrates its values and is relevant and interesting to their target consumers (Brand Journalism).

Create triggers that encourage people to share – If people love what you provide them, give them a way to share it with others.  Give them both a method and very subtle reminders to do so.

No coercion required – If people love you, they’ll want to share your message or talk about your brand.  Strive to be the type of brand people want to tell others about – Apple, HP (video), etc.

Stop making excuses – These are the new rules, and the only reasons not to follow them are self-imposed.  It doesn’t matter what your product/service/industry is, anyone can follow these rules.

Organizational Pitfalls on the Path to Multichannel Experience

Discussion lead: Zachary Jean Paradis, from Sapient

Despite the complex title, it was really about the challenges of making sure your marketing message is consistent across a lot of different media outlets. The primary challenges involved “traditional” organization structures which focus on siloed bits of information or roles. Even with the best communication, it is quite a struggle to get these messages spread from the top-down. Adding to the challenge are the use of multiple agencies and multiple countries/locations.

In the realm of changing organization structure, someone from Walmart mentioned that they had recently combined all of their e-commerce efforts under a “global e-commerce” area to ensure they were consistent. Several groups talked about fluid environments – involving folks from many different areas – and creating “execution teams” or groups charged with implementing a particular campaign/messaging effort. These groups are incentivised based on their success at accomplishing a common goal, which, in theory, creates a multi-channel effort. While focusing on the overall success of the communications goal, it is still tremendously important to focus on channel revenue attribution (a fancy way of saying, “take a look at how much each media contributes to sales”). By doing this, you’ll be able to track how successful each channel is and provide the best ROI for your efforts. It’s important to keep the customer service/front line folks in the loop, as they’ll be key to letting you know what is really working – even helping to measure by asking the simple, “how did you hear about us,” or “what made you call.”

There were several groups – both on the agency side and the brand side – which talked a trend toward “customer experience” consultants.  Folks from Mother and Naked Communications,talked about a focus on understanding the needs of the customer and delivering a story and promise no matter what form this may take.  Someone from USAA reinforced this point, stating that they didn’t set forth to build the first iPhone app that lets customers deposit checks simply by taking a picture of it, but it came out of ideas to make the customer experience easier (How do they let military men/women who move around alot and may have limited access to the internet while on duty do business easier/better).  Brands need to closely monitor customer needs and deliver on their brand promise.  New tools, like Twitter, Yelp, etc. make it easier to find our what their frustrations are and where your brand may not be delivering consistently on its promise.

Finally, there’s a fine line between delivering your message across multiple channels and “spam.”  Be sure you’re not saturating the market with your message.

Say No to Bud InBev Deal

I’m not sure if you’ve been following the news lately regarding Anheuser-Busch, but they could be taken over by InBev. Here’s the story…

Why discuss this in my media, marketing, advertising, online marketing, homebrewing blog?

Anheuser-Busch has been a pioneer within the digital media space. Despite the fact that Bud.tv failed, both AB and the online marketing community learned quite a bit from its branded online video effort. You can’t have continued success without a few failures, and AB took the failure in stride and appears to have grown to be better online marketers because of it.

From all accounts I’ve heard, InBev is good at making these types of companies work more efficiently. Most analysts are pretty sure that InBeb will implement its cost-cutting measures at AB if it purchases it. Most of the time, cost-cutting measures start with marketing budgets. You can be sure that if this is the case, you won’t see nearly as much experimentation coming from AB in terms of online marketing (and certainly not to the level of investment as Bud.tv). While it’s obvious that larger companies have still not completely jumped into online marketing, it will be disappointing if experiments like Bud.tv no longer allowed to take place.

Applebees UGC

I know that everyone’s trying user generated content (UGC) nowadays, but the latest attempt by Applebees left me shaking my head.  How many times do you find yourself at Applebees and someone decides to bust out their video camera?  It’s not something that probably happens often enough that it deserves this campaign.  Perhaps Applebees is hoping people will now bring their video cameras with them and will videotape, but this has the potential of easily backfiring… all it takes is one person to videotape what the food looks like when it arrives and compares it to the great looking picture in the menu.  Based on their recent commercials, it looks like Applebees is planning to use the videos submitted to change up the first few seconds of their new commercials.  It’ll be interesting to see how many videos actually get submitted.  I guess you never know… there are plenty of aspiring actors and videographers out there.