I recently found MeetTheBoss.tv – a site full of interviews with executives from organisations and brands you know, and some you don’t. It takes a bit of time to go through, and you have to sign up to see the full length videos, but it is worthwhile.

You’ve probably seen McDonalds brand transformation over the last 5 years, both in their stores and in their branding – in fact, you probably can’t miss it. Even in the middle of nowhere in Spain, there’s McDonalds – a testimony to the power that this brand wields.

This video tells the inside story of how they turned things around, which contains some pretty useful insights. Note that you will have to sign up to view the video, which does give me an affiliate rate back, however that’s just a nice perk for what is a useful resource for you, so please don’t feel obliged to lend me the pennies!

Your Leading Thoughts

• What is your number one take away from this video? How is it useable for your organisation?

We had a great discussion on yesterday’s post, where I shared a video and we debated whether or not it made you buy the product they were advertising.

Here’s the question I’d like to ask: what have you bought because of Social Media?

For example:

• have you bought books because someone on a blog recommended one?
• have you attended an event because someone tweeted about one?
• have you bought expensive goods because someone linked to them?
• have you bought a brand’s product or services because it engaged with you?
• have you attended or bought local because a local business engaged with you?

I think we can mine an incredible amount of insight if we all share our experiences – which is why I’m asking you please to not just read but comment, as well as asking you to share this article profusely so we can grow our data set.

Looking forward to discussing with you – I really do think it will help us all a lot,
Scott

More often than not, the real asset is the thing that you can’t take away. Let’s consider some business types:

For Newspapers

If a newspaper thinks its asset is the delivery of news, then what happens when someone can deliver it that faster, sooner, more individualised and as it breaks? The newspaper can try and become more technologically aware or resist it like Murdoch, or it can understand that its real asset is the ability to gather to news.

Think about it – a local newspaper knows its local community like few others do. If it wanted to pull together and network local businesses, identify and rally around a cause, gather information about a happening, it could do so easily.

Anyone competing and winning on delivery of news just can’t bet the local newspaper’s gathering of the news. In fact, it doesn’t just gather it, it sources it. (BTW, for expert reading on publishing, read Andrew Davies on the Idio Platform blog.)

For Restaurants

How about this case study by Steffan Antonas on the now famed AJ Bombers burger joint? 161 people turn up and check in on Foursquare at the same time – not for the food – but to unlock a special Swarm Badge that is only available when over 50 people simultaneously check into the same location.

Was the asset for the restaurant food? Or is the asset a geographical location where people can connect in a place that now has international attention?

For Retailers

Online retailer Threadless sells limited crowd sourced designed T-shirts. Over $30 million later, is their asset T-shirts, or is it their ability to crowd source from their community whatever designs need or could be crowd sourced?

For Brands

This post by Garrick Schmitt at the beginning of the year cleverly shows how for many brands, the asset is the integration of their products experience in everyday life – more than the products themselves. What do I mean? Google is no longer just about search. Facebook is no longer just about keeping in touch with friends. Even Twitter is no longer about “what you are doing” – it is now a realtime engine for discovering opinion, sourcing information, identifying leads. It’s a funnel.

For Professional Service Providers

Is the asset their flagship product? Or is it their deep expertise of their area that can be applied in a number of ways? Julian Summerhayes wrote some great thoughts about this recently. Especially when it comes to Twitter, first-mover advantage is still to be had – and the way to take it is by stepping up and becoming an Active Authority. If you ask anyone in Exeter what photographer to go with, what IT company to go with, what recruitment company to go with, what web design and online marketing company to go with, you’ll get unanimous answers.

One way that Professional Service Providers can be an Active Authority is to run events that reaffirm your expertise by just uniting people around a topic – much like the Charity Social Media events in Exeter. I don’t know who at this event is even involved in charity work, but that doesn’t matter – people perceive them to be so.

That type of first-mover advantage is proving really hard for others to compete against, especially when the real asset is understood.

For Like Minds

Is our asset a conference? Or is it a community? Long after the conference is over, there is a community and that is our asset that other conferences can’t compete on.

For Scott Gould

My asset isn’t really Like Minds, Aaron+Gould or this blog. My asset is the connections I’m making with all of you – that’s what gets great things done – which is why I keep on banging on about it. You can take away everything else, but that’s still there.

For You?

What I’d like to know from each of you is:

• What is your real asset? What is the thing that stays when everything else is taken away?

Exceptionally cool photo from Mike Bailey-Gates

If you can’t see the video, click here. You can see the video on YouTube.

At the moment we’re having a lot of discussions on the Like Minds LinkedIn group, and one of these discussions recently was about Facebook’s new Social Plugins and how people felt this created a new level of trust and social authority.

As you know, I did a video about this last week, in which I use lots of long words and jokes to basically point out this is move means we trust something more if we see our friends have liked it.

My friend Stuart Witts added the above video to the conversation, in which Levi’s have just used two of Facebook’s plugins to enable people to:

1. Like individual items in their catalogue
2. Invite their friends to connect to a storefront

This must’ve taken a developer no more than an hour to integrate into their site, and to be quite honest, doesn’t really do anything new: it just simply shows people what their friends like, and let’s their friends know when they like something.

Of course that in itself is very powerful. James Poulter, who I met at Like Minds Immersive in March, wrote yesterday about this new form of consumerism (what we could call ‘click-consumerism’?), and asks how this changes the purchase=self definition model that rose in the 60s and has been with us since.

My thoughts in the comments in James’ post were that this universal like button will also track what we like, as opposed to what we think we should like or say we like. Certainly, we’re seeing the early stages of Social Shopping.

How Can Local Businesses Use This?

The boast of social authority (the proof that their friends like, therefore they should like too) that this gives local businesses is huge. Seeing that 159 of my friends like Nike is no big woop – we all know of Nike and like Nike.

But seeing that 45 of my friends like that restaurant that I haven’t been to, or buy from that store that I’ve only just heard of, or are business people who use that service on the industrial estate – that has a lot of value.

Social authority is what big brands already have plenty of (they are well known), and is what local businesses are often struggling to get (they aren’t as well known), especially businesses that are off the beaten route.

The Main Point

If you’re skim reading, here’s the main point: the like button shows friends what you like. This gives that website more social authority, because if someone you know likes you, you will probably like it too.

Your Leading Thoughts

I still think that the like button is a pretty simple thing and that Facebook’s plugins aren’t feature strong – but there is certainly a lot of depth here, we just need to mine it. I value your feedback, so how about answering a question to draw the wisdom out of us?

• As a consumer, do you like things on Facebook often, and do you now like things on the web too?
• Would you ‘connect’ to a site like in the Levi’s video? If so, why?
• Scaling this up – where do you see this going? (with the tools we already have)

There’s only one problem with Apple’s model, and it’s an issue of anticipation and expectation. Namely, it is this:

Apple do such a good job of hyping and showing the new thing off, that when I get my hands on the new thing, nothing is new anymore.

You know what I mean here. I remember touching the iPhone for the first time, and as cool as it was, the demonstrations on the website had done such a good job of showing the device to me, that physically holding it had little new about it.

The Power Of New

I always say that the two most powerful things in products and the marketing of them are newness and usefulness, and the most powerful of these is new. If something is new (and marketed powerfully as new), then it can even surpass it’s own weaker usefulness. This is the story of the iPad itself. While many doubt its utility, everyone is certainly swept up in it’s newness.

The whole Social Media world is based on the power of new. If you link to your blog post, it may get retweeted. But if you announce it as a “New Blog Post”, you’ll get a lot more attention. Massive sites like TechCrunch and Mashable all function on the pulling power of new. Everyday millions of bits of information are shared on Twitter and Facebook – most of it, new. Of course this new is really nothing new in itself – it’s what journalists have known for years – hence the pressure to always break a story first, because people don’t buy old news.

Getting back to Apple, as I described above when I first held the iPhone, the problem for me was that although the device was new, when it came to holding the device, there was no longer anything new about it. This is what I expected from the iPad – for people to finally hold the thing, but have nothing new to report or review.

But this time, Apple created newness on another level by delivering surprises that no one knew about. This article from Gizmodo, “10 Essential iPad Tips and Tricks” reveals 11 new things that you can do that people didn’t know before. This is smart, because when people are now reviewing and talking about the iPad, rather than just discussing it’s usefulness (which people are debating), there is something new to discuss – the new features! And what we know about the Social Media hype machine is that it loves new.

Creating New

The reason why I’m excited about this is because back in January I wrote about Apple needing to employ this new level of new in their whole buzz experience. You can read it here. The main point I brought out was a framework to explain how Apple uses suspense to market their products, which I call the Pyramid of Expectation:

In this model (based on Pine and Gilmore’s in The Experience Economy – affiliate link), we see four levels of experience that the customer can have based on the level of their expectation.

When a consumer has an expectation, it is like a promise that the brand has made with them. The promise says that “we will deliver what you expect”, and this expectation is built on a range of things, from marketing to trusted referrals. Of course the idea is that the brand manages these expectations as best they can – but you can read more about that here.

Quite simply, according to this model,

• Sacrifice is when the expectations aren’t met
• Satisfaction is when the expectation are met
• Surprise is when the expectations are exceeded
• Suspense is the experience of anticipating an experience

Therefore, to create new, one needs to look at this model and ask themselves where their customers expectations are? In the case of the iPad, most people are in suspense mode. They are having the buzz experience of anticipating the launch – but traditionally, when they get their hands on the product they go down into satisfaction mode – their expectations were met.

What Apple did this time was rather than letting them drop into satisfaction, they instead delivered a surprise – something new that they were not expecting – and therefore exceeding expectations.

Lisa Barone wrote a great peice for Duct Tape Marketing in March this year on “How to use Surprise to Generate Word of Mouth“. In it she lists the following axioms to create surprise:

• Show Up Where They Don’t Expect
• Go Further Than You Have To
• Give Them Something Different
• Listen When They Think You’re Not
• Make The Little Things, Big Things

By just using these, you can immediately find simple and effective ways to add that element of new into what you do.

Your Experience of New

Experience happens in the senses of the beholder, and what one experiences as new and useful, another may not. Of course, correct profiling can generate target audiences, but still, with each person having different dominate senses and motivatiors within a target audience that is based on sociological information, there is a need for marketing and products to be both multi-touch and multi-sense.

I’m curious, then, because what I percieve to be new may be what you percieve to be old. So what I’d like to discuss with you is:

1. How much is new a driver for you on a daily basis?
2. How much is usefulness a driver for you on a daily basis?

Thanks for reading – and I look forward to talking with you.
Scott

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7FyBeto2HY

The question is – understanding that knowing what Spreadability is is one thing, and doing it is another – how do we create conversations around brands?

On Thursday 22nd April I’m at Like Minds Immersive in London talking about this very subject with Gemma Went.

Like Minds Immersive (LMi) is our learning platform, and it’s going really well. Last month I had great news from James Poulter of Euro RSCG that the session gave him and his team knowledge to take on new projects, which for me epitomises one of our core Like Minds values: action. What use is it if you come and learn something you can’t use?

A Few Pointers

As a little teaser, and for those of you who can’t make it, here’s where Creating Conversation Around Brands begins:

1. Conversation Around is not Conversation With. See the difference here. Once you understand this, a good place to start is to ask: what is the conversation people are having with you? This gives you a picture of the conversation people are having and will have around you.
2. How easy is it for people to have conversation around you? How easy is it for people to consume, connect, comment and curate your content?
3. Where are your existing conversations? Who are the conversation agents? Who is starting new conversations around you?
4. How can be provide a new level of usefulness? New and usefulness are two powerful things in Social Media. Combine then, and you have major conversation on your hands.
5. What ways are you providing for people to have conversation around you? How are you catering to different participation levels to provide different levels of conversation?

Begin asking yourself these questions and you’ll start finding where you don’t have answers and where you do have answers. Build from there.

At LMi we’ll also be sharing lots of case studies (I have a Delicious account full of them), so get ready to get the info and examples that will make all the theory come alive.

I hope to see you there (spaces are limited, by the way – we only have 10 spaces available, so book now if you are coming) because most of the content I’ll be sharing with Gemma is not available on this blog and will not be made available on this blog. So if you’re waiting for it to come here, you’ll be waiting for a while! (Sorry guys – but I do believe there must be a point where we separate what is free and what is paid.)

In The Mean Time

How have you successfully created conversation around a brand? What do you think it takes? And what do you think doesn’t contribute to conversation but just pours water on the fire?

Looking forward to hearing from you,
Scott