F-Commerce & The Implications Of Arbitrary For Brands

There has been more than one large Fortune 500 company who has casually mentioned to me in passing that their commerce team is considering how to utilize Facebook for a future sign-in method for their Corporate site.

The marketing power of getting earned media messages from your owned property to influence others inside the gated walls of Facebook is something large brands can't afford to not consider.

However, when i read posts like Mathew's here and Jillian York's of the Electric Freedom Foundation here it gives me pause.

Facebook may have a "right" to take down whatever pages it wants for whatever reason it wants (and I'm sure there are a lot of people who believe that), but what are the implications of that on your business? What is the cost of a disconnected Facebook sign-in for an hour or two while they figure out if they've made a "mistake" or not?

F-commerce and Facebook Connect may seem like the best marketing idea but until Facebook comes clean as to how these "mishaps" keep happening, if i were you Corporate IT and e-Commerce departements looking towards the social commerce future, I would seriously consider the ever changing Terms of Service at Facebook and the Implications of what arbitrary could mean for your brand.

The Business Of Brand & The Challenge Of Transmedia

I've been following the blurring of the line between Brands and filmmakers for a while now. l love the idea. I love what Gunther Sonnenfeld and others have to say and agree with many of the fundamental tenets as I've worked with brands my entire career to create content and narratives.

Where I stumble - particularly with brands creating (meaning leading the process, having approvals, going through legal etc.) deeper narratives with cultural impacts, is in the fact that brands often have very narrow platforms for the creation and building of value/s.

In the work that we do at Gravity, we have processes to expand brands to wider platforms in order to better operationalize them and in fact I've been using that process for over ten years. However, powerful narratives are often based on complexity. It's about characters or situations that could be morally ambiguous or are filled with the complexity of a range of our human characters both good and bad.

Brands, even great ones, will never be able to encompass that level of complexity because it ultimately goes against the principles of building great brands in the minds of customers in order to sell products. Having worked on a number of projects now that are films looking for brands or brands looking for films, the conversation inevitably goes towards approvals, control and a discussion on what are the impacts to the brand if the content goes off course from the values of what the brand stands for.

The business of storytelling and the art of it might be blurring, but they are NOT the same thing.

I fear as a brand marketer and innovation driver that many companies and agencies are going to go down wrong minded paths. It wasn't so long ago that many Agencies sold their clients large scale multimillion dollar websites for pet lovers and now they are doing the same for communities of interest (come tell YOUR story about OUR product and WIN as if that's interesting to anyone). What's next?

I believe there is a significant role that brands can play in this so called Transmedia world. I'm working on a number of projects as we speak. But it sees the role of brands often as investor, empowerer, enabler and participator vs. controller and creator. I think there is a big difference and I think we should all give a great deal more thought to how this could play itself out or we will end up not only wasting a lot of brand dollars but we will damage a market that is clearly ripe for change.

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

People Love Cool Sh*t

One of the great things about what i do is that i get to be involved with many Social projects that involve research and listening. While i think it is probably stating the obvious, I think it's amazing how much positive sentiment can be created for Brands if they just do cool sh*t.

Maybe it's an iphone app.
Maybe you've done a customer service innovation worth talking about.
Maybe you just have something original to say or something creative we haven't thought about.

Regardless what it is, if it's cool we will care and your brand will be the receptors of our appreciation for it.

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.

Story Ecosystems (A Thought In Progress)

Been struggling with the entire story telling metaphor. Partially it's because I've always seen the dynamics of online spaces mirror closer to ecosystems (being networks and all) than linear models.


Maybe there are some ways to merge the two. The truth is as marketers we do create the nucleus of stories (whether that be the creation of a brand, expanded brand, actual communications or even capitalizing on a story that exists and extending that to our brand). The key is to allow for emergence and focus not on managing that story but understanding that we are actually alongside everyone else, we are part of it.


Anyhoodle, don't know where it's going but any thoughts anyone else has would love to hear 'em. :)