Start-up Marketing 101

Having a failed start-up has been one of the greatest learning experiences I've ever had on many levels. In particular, I've learned a great deal with regards to being efficient with marketing. But as I've watched the start-up market, I've realized that it goes beyond that. It because they have no marketing budget, they have to behave differently when it comes to how they build ground-swell for the company and products. Build it and they should come, is not really a winning strategy. It all comes down to passion, connection, culture and community. So, I put together this slideshare presentation as a way of gathering my thoughts around what exactly they were doing that big brands and all of us as marketers could learn.

Start-Up School 101: Lessons For Big Brands

View more presentations from Leigh Himel

Happy Birthday Twitter

Rachel our community manager at It's Time To Shout had posted a note this morning:

It really struck me. There are a lot of really annoying things about Twitter.

BUT

I don't know another technology platform that has been so fundamental in helping connect weak networks in such an incredible way. For our project It's Time To Shout, it has allowed us to connect with women, families and communities who have been dramatically impacted by Ovarian Cancer. The stories posted to our site, the emails that we get that are private thank yous for the work that we are doing. The ablity for us to bring such an important message to women out there everywhere.



Twitter has been a big part of our success. So today, Twitters Birthday, we want to say thank you thank you thank you Twitter and may you continue to grow and help us change the world for the better.

1 + Co-Creation Does Not = Innovation

I don't think I'm a design snob. In fact, I think there have been many brilliant co-created programs over the years. Listening to customer feedback, including customers into the design process in one form or another can yield brilliant results.

But when I read this post on Forrester I have to admit I cringed a bit. Do we really think that having contests for new logos will lead to a better end result?

We might all hate the fact that Apple could care less what their customers think (except after extreme pressure over time) but they are poised to become the largest public company in the world. If they co-created their logo or their products with their customers would the results have been the same?

Whether you buy into co-creation or not (again examples of success on both sides) if you lack vision it won't matter. And that's the problem with using GAP as the example of company that could have seen success if they had just included their customers into the process. The new logo is only a symptom of a larger issue within the company. They didn't need a better communication strategy they needed to look at their brand DNA from the inside out.

The real lesson here is that replacing innovation with co-creation will only yield middle gray results and that just isn't good enough anymore.

My Cognitive Surplus: It's Time To Shout & The Story Of Elana Waldman

The last six months has been probably one of the most life changing periods of my life.

I’ll try the abbreviated version. I saw a video on Facebook of a friend of mine’s wife, Elana Waldman. Elana was talking about the fact that she had Ovarian Cancer and the reason that no one really knew about OC is because they’re were so few survivors.

For some reason, I couldn’t get the video out of my head. It actually bothered me. So one day I woke up and had an idea. If the awareness was low because there were so few advocates, then what we should do is get all the people who are alive right now affected by OC to put their stories up in one place – a living collective and memorial to speak for all women who have and might have ovarian cancer.

Elana and Mark loved the idea and www.itstimetoshout.com was born.


But the story doesn’t end there. At the time I had suggested this concept, Cancer hadn’t really touched my life in a fundamental way. But two months into the development of the project (with a whole lotta help from all my amazing friends), my own father got a diagnosis of Pancreatic Cancer. Five months later, and about two weeks before our site actually launched my father died.

Bruce Mau has a quote, “Let Events Change You” and that is exactly what happened to me. It was a life changing, stop you in your tracks kinda life moment. A 32 year old woman who has a husband and a two year old daughter gets Ovarian Cancer and is fighting for her life. A seventy seven year old Doctor who happens to be my dad gets Pancreatic Cancer and five months later I am next to his lifeless body and saying a final good-bye.

Life my friends, is very short and can change in an instant.

My friend Lianne asked me if this got me thinking more about death and in fact, it hasn’t. What it’s gotten me thinking more about is - LIFE.

What do I want to spend the next forty years (Gd willing) doing with my time?

And that brings me to Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus that I recently finished reading. Ok that’s certainly more weird timing. It’s a book all about our free time, what we choose to do with it and how we connect that to what we share of our lives. Not only as individuals but as a society and culture as a whole.

As he puts it,

“The cognitive surplus, newly forged from previously disconnected islands of time and talent, is just raw material. To get any value out of it, we heave to make it mean and do things. We aren’t just the source of the surplus; we are also the people designing its use, by our participation and by the things we expect of one another as we wrestle together with our new connectedness.”

I love the fact that Shirky doesn’t just skim the surfaces but makes the work readable all the same. And while I think he probably meant this as a business book, I think that anyone who is looking to use social technologies to further social change should really take a look.

As for me, I’ll take a number of lessons as we do our next phase of outreach for It’s Time To Shout. Twitter has been an incredible platform for us and it’s not just about the number of “followers” we’ve managed to connect with having only launched a few weeks ago (over 150) or our Radian 6 reach (over 550,000).

It’s about the conversations and connections between Elana and the community of people who are touched by Ovarian Cancer and what our movement can mean to all of them.

For more on our project please go to visit our site to see Elana’s Story at:
www.itstimetoshout.com

Follow us on Twitter at
www.twitter.com/itstimeoshout

Check out her video blog on Chatelaine.com
http://blog.en.chatelaine.com/category/time-to-shout/

And for Clay Shirky’s new book check it out on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Surplus-Creativity-Generosity-Connected/dp/1594202532

We May Be Stupid, But We Are Also Your Users

Mathew retweeted a comment by @jeffsonderman that I thought hit the nail on the head when it comes to the decision by Google to drop Wave:

"My lesson of Google Wave: Innovate by evolving from users' existing habits, not throwing them a whole new, weird thing"

I have to say, I tried Wave for about a day. Holy crap. Atta way to make me feel stupid. I had no idea what the hell was going on. I'm sure it was innovative but really who cares? If i can't use it because it's too complicated to figure out, what's the point?

It was a constant issue when I was working on my own start-up, Oponia. Some of our tech team would get really frustrated when I got the feedback from people using the product. The phrase, 'what are they stupid' used to come up a lot.

It's a serious lesson whether you are a start up, a big company coming out with a new product or taking a look at making relevant marketing communications.

Never over or under estimate your customer because you may think we are stupid, but at the end of the day, we are also your users (whether you like it or not).

photo credit: http://www.obey.com.pl

Keeping Culture Alive Or Building A Living Culture

@designthinkers twittered the question: can we keep a culture alive when business, processes, every day reality takes over?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. What does it take to build a great work culture? In my industry, marketing and advertising, creative culture is at the heart of what makes our products and services stand out to clients. Without a creative culture, we fail. So as my bubie used to say, how can we afford not to buy?

We build customer experiences all the time for our clients, but how much thought goes into building experiences for ourselves? From the first interview to the first day on the job...

Building brands and brand experiences starts with us.

It isn't a matter of money, or about other priorities getting in the way.

It's a matter of choices.

Every day, every moment choices.

For me that changes the question from how you keep a culture alive to instead how you need to build a living culture.

It should be how you think and it needs to become part of your DNA, not your business strategy.

Our workplaces are ecosystem and ensuring the health and sustainability of them, should be one of our first and most important priorities.

ps. slideshare presentation to come in the next two weeks - have had an idea of the ROI of building a creative culture and now i really must get to it.


photo credit: http://psixp.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/creativity.jpg

Stories & Finding The Heart in Social Media

I've been thinking about storytelling quite a bit lately. It seems to be the new buzz. The new positioning. The new way old companies are trying to sell what they do in a networked way.

And let's be clear. I love storytelling. I love the idea of storytelling. I love the role that storytelling plays in our culture. I believe that storytelling has an important role within the context of an overall strategy for digital marketing.

But I don't think storytelling can be the heart of a Social Media approach. Why? I found this quote from the Head of ZeusJones that I love...

The web isn’t just a communications medium, it is a medium for interacting with people. Storytelling is inherently one-way, in fact, the main use for stories in the history of humans has been to teach. Using the Web for teaching and one-way dissemination of information are a waste its talents

And he is right.

Storytelling Is Us Talking To You About Us In An Entertaining Way

It can't be any other way because that's why storytelling is:

- Stories are narratives
- Stories are used for education, preservation of culture, to instill moral values and to elicit and disseminate information and knowledge

There are times we need to tell a story. Long form video (with a great Social bent), content in the form of audio, text, photos all contribute to tell a great story. But it's still all about us. How do we become about something more? Something that maybe involves YOU?

From Stories To Memes To Movements

It's not enough to tell a story. Entertaining people online is TABLE STAKES. If you want to stay relevant you have to be more, take a stand, risk with your customers.

Igniting Movements

To create deeper meaning, we have to stop being about need states and start connecting to a deeper core.

Four Elements To Any Movement according to Paul McEnany who has been working on this framework for a while include:

CONNECTION TO YOUR PUBLIC
- Connecting to something fundamental which lies at the core belief system of customers

A DIFFERENTIATED STORY
- Take that insights and tie it back to your Brand. Connect to something deeper and make it meaningful through storytelling (see storytelling has a role)

A CULTURAL CONTEXT
- Find the shared ideal (what some call in injustice frame) that is a collection of ideas and symbols that illustrate the significance of the challenge and how you can collectively come together to alleviate it

A CHARISMATIC LEADER
- People don't follow or join Brands that don't matter. You need the credible, authentic knowledgeable leader who is believable, honest, creative and fallible

Tying those elements together are what are going to make something more than a story. More than just entertainment. But about something bigger and greater that is co-created between a brand and their customers. And that's what I think we should all be striving for.

I'm Just Not That Into You!

Do you ever get the feeling that brands get all hot and heavy setting up their community and engagement strategies only to turn around and say just a few months later, "I"m just not that into you"?

It goes something like this. Like most relationships, it all starts off wonderful and exciting. The honeymoon phase. The press release comes out. Community engagement! Supportive tools to empower our customers! @twitter customer service!

Amazing. Who knew? I sign up. I follow you. I get right into it. I start to expand our relationship and feel like we are going some where together.

But then...after a while it just seems like, you're not calling. You're not writing. No response to my emails. Waiting on hold for what seems like hours. The promises of brilliant new functionality to support my needs never happens.

What was a fabulous start to a great relationship somewhere along the line just seemed to go away. When did i stop being your priority? And after all that personalized information i gave to you? You asked for my commitment and engagement, what about you?

I've heard from a bunch of people lately that they would prefer not to get into the social media game if they aren't going to do it well.

I couldn't agree with them more. Community engagement has to be a long term and sustainable proposition. You can't just start a community and then abandon it. Turning around after a year or two and saying, "I'm just not that into you" simply isn't an option.

omg You're Like Such A Loser: Competition & Curating Your Community

I love Tumblr. Maybe it's because I work in a creative field where visual design is so integral, but discovering the tumblr community has been a blast. To some extent, it's my own personal image/txt/video repository. A snap shot of things I have found and loved. I actually think if someone wants to get to know me without meeting me on a more emotional level, my Tumblr site is the place to go.

A few weeks ago, Tumblr introduced something they called Tumblarity. Tumblarity, simlar to popularity, is a rating system that tells you where you are in relationship to other Tumblr logs as far as how many followers you have, how many people have reblogged or liked your Tumblr posts. etc.



Ok. I get it. They want us to use it more. They want us to start getting all competitive and trying to get our Tumblr site higher up on the top 100 list. But here's my problem. Competition has nothing to do with Tumblr. In fact, I would say it's more of a sharing community.

The Yahoo pattern library (h/t to Craphammer) on community says it like this:

"When a new or existing community requires a reputation system, the designer must pay careful consideration to the degree of competitiveness the community ought to exhibit. Haphazardly introducing competitive incentives into non-competitive contexts can create problems and may cause a schism within the community."



When competition is introduced into a sharing community what you are trying to achieve may have the opposite affect. In the case of Tumblr, I've noticed people are reblogging less and I sometimes just feel like a loser when my Tumblarity goes from 100 to 10 over night. This hasn't added to my experience at all and I for my part just try to ignore it.

The lesson? Know the dynamics of the community you are curating. And create features and functionality that will support it vs. distract from it.

The Community Is The Service

I used to love friendfeed. Essentially friendfeed is what I thought of one of the first 'lifestreaming' services. In their words they call their service one that

"enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends."

For a while there, friendfeed was a daily habit. Really it was becoming more of an obsession than anything else. I had discovered lots of interesting new people. My own network was starting to use it. And, the discussions there seemed to be more thoughtful and provoking than ones i had seen other places.

Until...

Something weird changed. I don't know if it was the type of community that landed there. But, firstly, people went from really interesting to the banal. And I"m not talking Twitter banal. I'm talking whole conversations on people saying, good morning. Hello. Hi. How are you. On and on it went.

The other thing was that I found, no one on friendfeed was ever commenting on my links or blogposts. Maybe i'm just boring. I can accept that. However, in my other communities, like Twitter and Facebook, I consistently get feedback, comments and have interactions that enrich the experience.

Friendfeed just seemed to get really cliquey. There actually seemed to me to be a cool crowd and the rest of us just weren't invited. There was very little reaching out. Very little interaction outside of a core group. And over time, I just got plain bored. I checked in with a few friends and they all seemed to have a similar experience as i did.

I still go from time to time. Check out to see if anythings changed. But it hasn't.

Mike Arrington over at Techcrunch thinks the service might be too complicated and that's what's limiting its growth.

I don't think that's what the problem is. To me it's the community that makes the service not the other way around. And it's the community that's the problem with friendfeed. And no feature set is going to be able to fix that. Coolest app or not.

Building Community From The 'Outside In'

In the new connected digital age, corporations are looking to employ social tools to their business.

Go no further I say, then to see how start-ups are redefining the relationship between brands and their customers/users.

Meet the community manager. What used to be a not so important role within an organization, for start-ups it's often a hire that happens even before the chief marketing officer.

Why?

Everyone says word of mouth is key. But traditional thinking has you giving your agency a schwack of dough in order to create a fabulous WOM or dare i say it, VIRAL campaign. But that's only about brand awareness and maybe if done right, perception. However, influence and engagement are about much more. How do users of your products/services become advocates?

For start-ups with little or no advertising budgets, community isn't a nice to have, it's everything. And they're aggressive about it. That means not waiting and hoping that their community finds them, it means going out and finding their community in what I'll call an 'Outside In" approach.

What do I mean?

Well if you're a user of twitter do this test. If you are annoyed with the way a product or service works, twitter it and be sure to mention the company. Chances are the most response back you are going is from your followers agreeing or disagreeing with your point.

However, if you happen to be using a new start up product and mention something about them, chances are you will not only hear back from their community manager (e.g. Here Leigh try this link...or great suggestion Leigh I'll forward that to the team) but they will likely start following you as well.

I didn't need to find them. I didn't need to search for a phone number to a real person on the website. I didn't need to be on hold at a call centre costing both the company and me valuable time and money.

Instead they found me. And they find me every where they can. My blog. Twitter. FriendFeed. Wherever I am, they are right beside me.

Now, I'm sure you're thinking that's fine for start-ups but there's no way a large corporation can do that....Well think again. Dell has been doing it for a while now and according to various articles, they've seen positive ROI on a consistent basis.

The trick of course is to get beyond those smaller interchanges to fostering and empowering that community into something larger.

Outside In. I think it's the wave of the future.

Socially Connected Search

Mark Ury put a link on Twitter that poses an interesting theory about email as the social network. Om Malik also referred to this in his post a year back asking the question, is email the ultimate social network?

Leaving aside the fact that the younger generation is using email less as a means of communication, I have to wonder as we become more ingrained in network culture, if the notion of email as the platform is completely missing the mark?

While our address books are certainly reflective of who we know, email is for the most part a means of communication with our strong ties. One of the advantages of social networks are its ability to leverage the connections of our weak ties as we all acknowledge that in real life, managing 250 'friends' would be a pretty difficult task.

So I'm not buying what Om says in his post:

"The only way for Yahoo or Google to challenge the social networking incumbents like Facebook [is] to leverage their email infrastructure ..."

Why? Because to me, Google in particular has another infrastructure that seems much more relevant - their search infrastructure. While everyone focuses on serving more relevant and 'personalized' ads, I have to wonder why they aren't also putting equal focusing on connecting people who search for like minded information? After all, if they did that, then as I developed those connections over time, I could then start to search like those individuals I'm connected to or see what content they thought was most relevant based on their searches - and even discover new searches that might be of interest to me?

I've touched on this type of search before. So in my mind it won't be email as a socially connected platform, it will be search.

(This blog post was written with a baby in my arms so excuse any mistakes or fumbled grammar :)

The Blurring Of Fictional & Real

Image via Wikipedia I was followed today on Twitter by Betty Draper. For those of you who don't know, Betty is the wife of Don Draper, a fictional Advertising Creative Director on the show MadMen.

Now, I do not follow any of the MadMen characters on Twitter so I was a little surprised she found me. I went to see her Twitter stream and found this interchange between Betty and a friend of mine Dondy...


What I find so interesting about this is the on-going blurring of the lines between fictional and real that digital is facilitating. Some say content is king, others community, but IMO it is connection that will be reigning supreme.

A while back, I met someone from the social network Bebo who was in town from London for their NA launch, and she told me that one of the most successful parts of their site (and what they consider a key point of differentiation) is their exclusive webisodic videos. The video viewing numbers she gave me were impressive but more importantly than that were the top 15% of fans who were not only joining in on blogs and other UGC but choosing to interact with the characters of the shows as well.

How this will impact content creation going forward and what it could mean for brands ongoing remains to be seen although it will certainly be an interesting trend to watch.

Wanted: A Social Network Tagging System To Reinvent Search

This idea started for me a while back. At oponia, we had the idea of creating a new way of organizing and searching a document system through tags (that we never got funding for *sigh*). I wrote about it in my post tag and flow: connecting the end points.

And then Fraser and I started a conversation about hierarchies and friendships that has continued over at the Adaptive Blue blog.

The concept is relatively simple. I have this ever growing network of social connections, both implicit and explicit. But as with everything in life, people have different meaning to me and if I get really utilitarian about it, they also have different value.

My friend David Chant as an example, owner of the Electric Company. You might go to Dave's site and think, Dave is a motion graphics expert based on his company. But because I personally know Dave, I know him as the gadget guy. You want to buy a new tech toy? David is the guy to talk to. And if I was going to "search" through a search engine about a new gadget, I wouldn't want to search like Leigh (because I wouldn't know the first thing about new tech gadgets, bc I just go ask Dave), I would want to search like Dave.

...What if I could somehow connect my search to Dave? What if I could tag to explicitly define our relationship - Dave as 'friend' and also tag what I think he's an expert in - in this case, 'technology' 'gadget'? It would allow me to potentially then use Dave's search intelligence for my own.

Well, that's great. But what if it could then get even more interesting and we could connect Dave to all the other people who have been tagged as experts in 'technology' and 'gadgets'? Wouldn't I theoretically be able to have a socially created vertically brilliant search engine?

Ok, I don't have time now to do this start up (other than continued oponia activities, I have a doll company i want to start which will never get or require VC money), but I think someone else should get to it because I need a new and better search engine.

Communities of the Moment & The Role of Place

As we continue in our UCaPP world, digital experiences are becoming less solitary and much more about our interconnection with others - our collective experiences.

Collective consciousness isn't anything new and yet we have only begun to explore what its implications could mean for the creation of networked communications.

One idea that's been milling around in my head is the notion of communities of the moment. Groups that come together around an idea, subject or place but only for a short period of time.

Let me give an offline example that I started thinking about after I bumped into Bob Jacobson's book in progress referencing exemplary cases of experience design.

I went to the Viet Nam memorial for the first time on a Mother's day. If you haven't been there, next to the Yad Vashem in Israel, it was probably the most powerful memorial I have ever experienced. Seeing it in pictures cannot capture the experience of walking down the path and slowly having the wall with the names of the dead increase until you are practically drowning heads below them. Even more, the five minutes of the walk connects you not only to those names, but also to the individuals who are there with you - the hands on the wall, the mother day's cards and flowers, the veterans in their army garb.

What struck me in particular, was how connected I felt to all those other people, none of whom i knew, simply because they had been at the same place at the same time as me. For those five minutes, we were all having some sort of collective immersive experience.

I can't quite think of any digital experiences that have captured that. I realize probably comparing very emotional memorials is a bit of an unfair comparison, but still I wonder is something to the notion of creating communities of the moment?


*Mark if you have a direct link to a definition send it to me and I'll repost directly to you....

Update: link updated and Mark has given some great exerts in the comments...

Money Can't Buy You Community: Lesssons From Yahoo

I have complained for a long time now about what i call "Yahoothanization". What is it? It's what Yahoo does to perfectly good companies that they buy. They Yahoothanize them. Meaning, they attempt to force a whole bunch of Yahoo rules (the first of which starts with the old 'you must get a Yahoo ID') onto whatever community they have purchased.

And there in lies the problem. Yahoo thinks they have actually have purchased those communities.

These non-networked businesses who continue to have a top down command and control business approaches will keep running into the same issue until they get it. We only have to look at the transition of myspaces to Rupert's spaces to watch the phenomenon in action (Facebook anyone?)

Jeff Jarvis has a great post on the Yahoo subject and an even better quote:

"We debated for decades whether content or distribution was kind but it turns out that neither is. The community is the Kingdom."

So there you go. The only thing that is getting Yahoothanized these days is Yahoo but there is an important lesson here:

Technologies can be bought and sold, but communities can't.

PERIOD.

The Digital Search For Self

The old world says that our identity is about our passports. The new world via ReMarkk.com says something quite different:

"The Search for Identity.

We are in search of ourselves, and we find possible answers to our search for self through our interaction in community with others, through both our similarities and our distinctiveness. We are increasingly aware of the complex and multidimensional nature of identity in the modern world. We are much more than the roles and demographic slices that our companies, families and mass media would want to trap us in. We belong to many tribes simultaneously.

We are multi-dimensional beings engaged in the process of becoming."

The Web takes the notion of "finding yourself" to a whole new level. Don't miss reading the full article that was about open creative communities found here.