Fantastic talk.

Chris Lehman (one of our favourite principals on the planet and two time podcastee), challenges us all to think about how schools must evolve, shaped as much by the students as the educators themselves.

Relevant for whatever industry or sector you’re in.

Schools should teach us how to learn.

Schools should teach us how to live.

Related post : Social School Design

Originally posted on GnatGnat

The humanisation of brands

With a little help from Gary Vaynerchuk, the current opening slide in my keynotes and masterclasses outlines the fundamental impact social has had on brands (this includes charities, local authorities, schools, companies, even individuals) :

It offers us all (as MediaSnackers is a brand also) an opportunity to be human again.

Check out this great ad from Panasonic event highlighting the fact that “websites can’t tweet” :

Another example of this humanising idea is something we call ‘hardwiring conversation’ (into product lines or even ads) :

Instead of inviting people to the main Barclaycard site they steer them to their Facebook page, creating a chance to connect on a more personal level with prospective customers.

Then there’s Vitamin Water, which is the first we’ve seen of an actual product running with a Facebook logo on it (which is used instead of website) :

This water brand even used the online Facebook community to develop and create a new flavour called Connect.

And to finally nail the point home, this nice little screencast from Mashable chaps, illustrates how to use Twitters’ advanced search (check out how we used it to make finding customers/clients/audiences easy)—another glimpse on how the social web is being driven by content created by individual people :

Many leaders would agree that the most valuable asset in any organisation / company is the people. Not any of its products or processes. It’s communication policies or so called social media strategies. Allowing staff to take front and centre stage is a powerful step towards leveraging social media and is one of the major barriers of its adoption to date.

We already know that social media has killed B2B due to its peer-to-peer nature, this humanisation idea is broader manifestation of that concept.

Any other examples out there of brands being human through social media? Or hardwiring conversation into the products / services? Maybe you disagree… leave a comment and prove us wrong.

You just handed it to the community

I don’t have answers… but I sure as hell have a conclusion based on experience.

When I designed and built for a living it was all brochure sites, control & throwing money at ideas without much consultation and seeing what stuck. Rarely did anyone, say something ‘failed’… failure was never one persons fault. The Marketeers did their thing, the Designers did their thing, the Developers did theirs, the PR was spun, the advertising was all there… yet the customers, looked at it and went ‘Meh’.

Now it’s all “share ‘this’ and share ‘that’… get in their spaces, be present, join in, show we’re still here… micro-sites may have died, but we can still have a page on Facebook, if only we brand it up! It’s gotta look like us, otherwise how will people know?”

Has anyone put this timeline together yet? The visual brand is dying on it’s arse… Not only is it being diluted across a zillion social spaces, it’s the last thing that we’re still trying to control like it’s 1994. Does the consumer really care, they are interested in who is helping, being friendly, building relationships and doing good things (either in the community the consumer cares about or outside in the real world)

Companies are hanging on to the visual identity because we haven’t the foresight to gamble on what is next on the horizon. Well, maybe the intelligent few, which I consider you lot to be part of, may like to consider.

Lets consider that no-one can be bothered to visit your precious website, the traffic dies down to a dribble, a purchase is made on someone else’s space like Etsy or Amazon or a Facebook shop were you have almost zero control of your branding visuals. Conversations and dialogue is what cements relationships with the lovers of your business. The branding has reduced to an avatar and a ‘www’ that is barely clicked… a /facebook is much more favourable.

What now? Where’s your investment?

If I make someone laugh, am I a comedian? Maybe. If I make 100 people laugh, probably. If I stand on a stage in front of 5m people and no-one laughs, am I still a comedian? No. I have given myself a title based on the relativity of my community. The day that community isn’t impressed or decides to call me a ‘fool’, I am forever labelled as such.

Is that scenario possible for a brand? We’ve already seen evidence of the visual aspect of a Brand being diluted to an avatar on a Facebook page, what happens if the only thing we have left, our ‘voice’, is lost too? The general consensus these days (social media powers employees to engage with communities and fuel business) means that the brand will need to be injected into pure dialogue we use to qwert our way throughout the Interwebs.

Staff will need language courses. I kid you not. Marketing will be handing out brainwashing exercises to keep us in check, whilst HR will be scouring the Web and communities to hire the best advocates that are already branded in their dialogue. We will be hiring based on the understanding of why the company exists, what it stands for and the ability to echo that understanding in social spaces.

The power of the written word doesn’t seem to have disappeared with all this influx of dynamic content… if anything I’m still just as ticked off by an advert in video form as I was by an animated gif… and I had to build those ugly things for a living.

Sure, MacDonalds creates ads for various demographics of it’s customer, but how many of us can afford to do that? The more personable the Web and respective communities become the more we will have to face the fact that text in the form of a comment or tweet will have more impact (long-term) than any brochure, billboard poster, TV ad or website design… those things get redesigned all the time anyway. The only consistency is the logo… and we even replace those if it’s deemed not working.

Employee’s on the other hand… and when I say employees I mean the future employees that love and endorse a brand like they would their own kids, will stick around until they die. Branded for Life. That is what we’re all seeking. Skateboarders all over the world brand themselves with the logos of the companies they love and die for. Search out Santa Cruz, Independent or Thrasher tattoos… evidence that a brand has truly got under the skin of its users. For those that realise the look means fuck all, they will succeed in the future and are probably on their way to succeeding right now.

For the rest of us, what are we hanging on for? Pride? A pay packet? Or are we defiantly in denial? Because we sure as hell aren’t being as effective as we could be. How many of the brands have you been involved with, have the customers gone out and got themselves a tattoo of the company logo, knowing that the only thing to remove it is a laser, flames or maggots? With exception to Apple, I believe not many of us can be proudly associated to this level of branding.

Branding is here to stay. But jeeez, lets see it for what it is and start planning to get it under people’s skin, by being good and great and friendly, helpful and amazing. Yep, some people will never be interested in your business offerings, but that doesn’t mean you can’t stand up for what you believe and damn everyone else.

Me? I’m waiting for the time when I find such an incredible accountant or supermarket that I want to get their logo literally under my skin.

How do you feel about the brand, where is it going? Are you annoyed at the limitations of social spaces to brand them how you want? Are considering a redesign because your impact is ‘Meh’? What’s your story? Don’t sit on the fence, I don’t want you to ‘like’ this, I want you to pick holes in it, laugh in my face or resonate with me. Bring it on in the comments.

Managing content creation and online pedigree

Our second in a new series of video podcasts (vodcasts) focussing on those interesting folks who manage social media for their brand / company / organisation.

Jennifer Cisney is the Chief Blogger and Social Media Manager for Kodak.

0.00—0.24 intro
0.25—2.15 day-to-day activities and duties
2.16—3.29 who creates the media content and the numbers
3.30—4.47 process of education (internally)
4.48—5.26 what if no-one wants to create the content
5.27—7.34 what types of content is created
7.35—9.34 measuring success from social media activities
9.35—10.43 what type of business tool is social media?
10.44—14.24 impact of monitoring the social stream
14.25—17.13 broadcasting to narrowcasting / corporate governance / freedom
17.14—18.01 the strategy and how it changes
18.02—19.03 signing up to new platforms / core set of guidelines
19.04—21.06 becoming a chief blogger
21.07—22.47 the future
22.48—23.11 outro

Subscribe directly to these vodcasts through iTunes by clicking the ‘subscribe’ icon opposite (download iTunes for free here).

Not using iTunes? Then just copy / paste this feed and drop it into your vodcast aggregating software.

Find out how to easily subscribe by watching this short video.

Feast on our other MS Vodcasts

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