A few weeks back, Marta Kagan asked me if I'd be interested in coming up to Boston to present at Marketing 2.0:unfiltered, an event put on by Espresso. I said yes and so, over the last few days I put together the above presentation to share with the group. (Giving it tonight. I hope they like it...)
For background on it, we came to the conclusion that an updated version of the What's Next presentation I did a year and a half ago would be an appropriate way to open the night up. As with last year's version, if you've been following things like many of us have, you won't be surprised by anything here. It's truly not anything revolutionary. It's more of a concise view on what's been happening lately and what that points to for how we should be approaching things to create a better future for marketing.
Mostly, I had a lot of fun putting it together and simply wanted to share.
As always, would love any constructive feedback you have...
Adrian delivered a great talk on the evolution of branding and posed some questions around what type of people we need to build strong brands today. Dion shared some thought-provoking views expanding upon his earlierposts regarding the idea of Manners for the Modern Brand™.
For a little background on my presentation, I made the unfortunate error of committing to a headline/topic before I ever considered what I'd want to say about Modern Brand Building. (We needed something to put on the Deepspace page for what the September topic would be.) Campaigning turned out not to be quite the right term for what I wanted to say, but I think it ended up working out alright for now.
It's certainly not a new thought (staying true to what your brand is really about), but one I thought needed to be brought back to light as more and more ways to communicate with people come forward and marketers can be tempted to dive into them before thinking through if it is the right thing for their brand/client's brand or not.
It's also something that has become an issue as Jon Steel noted with CMO turnover on the client side having increased and with every change of the guard, a change of the brand often ensues.
Anyway, would love to hear any thoughts, comments or criticisms. This is very much a work in progress
So here are the slides from the presentation I shared with everyone at work on Friday during our monthly, "What's Next" lunches. These lunch sessions are one of my favorite things about working at space150. It's fun to see what people are interested in and what makes them excited to come to work every day. Not only that, but with my having only been here around six months, it gives me more insight into the people presenting, which helps me get to know them better. Anyway...
Quick background on these lunch sessions: Each month, three or four people are called upon to share either what inspires them or what's going on in a specific area. So far, I've seen some of our creatives talk to what motivates them and share trends and up-and-coming names in art and design; some of our tech team talk to emerging technologies, showing off what they can do and how they're relevant to our clients; and finally some of our modern media team share the newest ways we can help people find what they're looking for more easily and get more relevant information in front of them for our clients. Like I said, it has all been very fun to take part in as well as quite inspiring and energizing.
For this one, I was asked to share what's going on in marketing and where things are moving. What you'll see/did see is that I ended up using a little bit of what I've beenposting about here and some of what has been getting covered both within the trade pubs and on blogs to give me the outline. If you follow the plannersphere and other social media and marketing blogs, then this probably won't be much new, but it might connect the conversations a little more. Or maybe not.
Mostly just wanted to share it since I did put a bit of time into pulling it together and was inspired by many of you who've been writing about similar subject matter. Also because what limited free time I did have last week went into putting it together instead of writing on here.
Note: Most of the examples in it are the more covered ones used to support the topics they're associated with. With limited time, I opted for the easy-to-find examples. Sorry about that. One that isn't as covered across the blogs and in the press yet is the My Vegas site. For more info on it see David Armano's post.
As always, if you've got any thoughts, questions or comments...
This video explores
the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share
information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and
works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near
future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create
information effectively.
(Side note: You probably have seen another one of his videos, first posted to YouTube last January - The Machine is Us/ing Us. His digital ethnography group has been working on a few interesting things, including a YouTube ethnography project.)
It's perhaps a bit mind-boggling when you step back and think about just how much information is available to us now. It only makes sense that new tools are being created and improved upon almost every day that allow people to sort, store, evaluate, organize, share, edit and create information on their own terms.
It used to be that much, if not all, of this was done for us and we were forced to learn a system of sorts developed by someone else for organizing information that may or may not have made sense to everyone forced to use it. The same is true for information was created and edited.
But now, people have much more freedom to choose the way they create, organize, evaluate, absorb, share and store information. Maybe they want a system prescribed for them. Or, maybe they want to create their own system. Maybe they want to take information as it's given to them. Maybe they want to edit it in a way that makes more sense to them.
I've been personally trying to think through this type of thing for this blog. I don't know if I really like the way I've been using all the various categories, and am evaluating a new way of using them. I've been using them more as tags, than categories, and I don't know that this is really the best way to store all of what I post here. But then again, maybe it is.
Anyway, to tie this back to brands and such, this is an important thing to think about as we create more and more content (information) for the brands we work on. We need to think about all the various ways people are going to be able to use that information.
We need to make it easy for them to do what they want to with it. We need to make it easy for them to find, however they wish to find it. We need to make it easy for them to share, however they wish to share it. We need to make it easy for them to store, however they wish to store it... You get the picture.
Just because something makes sense to one person, doesn't mean it will to the next. We don't all follow the same rigid systems and rules now. If this scares or concerns you, you need to re-frame your perspective. We shouldn't want to control all of this for the people who use our clients' products or services. It limits our opportunities and potential. Which leads me to another point...
Instead of trying to control so much, which can lead to staying narrowly focused on how our clients can tend to see the world they operate in, we need to open our eyes to what is really going on. We need to better understand all of the ways people are interacting with, using and thinking about our clients' brands.
Understanding all of this will open the door to new opportunities for increased short-term sales, long-term growth and possibly expansion into new markets. (I know, not a new thought...) And that's the good thing with the growing amount of information and the number of people sharing and editing information. We can more easily find these opportunities.
We should know how people are tagging photos of our clients' brands. We should look at how they're using their products or services in those photos. We should understand how information about our clients' brands is being tagged and edited. We should look at how they're talking about them in blogs and comments. And so on, and so on...
As more and more of this is being done by the people actually using them, we're starting to get a more honest and real view of things. Instead of people telling us what they think we want to hear in focus groups, we're seeing what they really think and do on a much broader scale. Instead of only being able to do ethnographic studies on a handful of people in a few select markets, we can look at a wide range of people from all around the globe.
If we only look at what we put out there on behalf of our clients (or what they put out there on their own) and how we have organized and communicated it, it severely limits our ability to lead our clients bravely into the future. It keeps us narrowly focused on the path that they want us to be going down, when we need to be looking at the off-shoots of that path and understanding just how much potential they have. We just have to start looking with open eyes.
Provided of course, that we know how and where to look.