Well, Simon from Who Gives a Crap gives a crap.
For mine I love that this meets the three Cs of what I’m now inventing – Social Capitalism (I may not be inventing that, I’m just too lazy to see if anyone else already has): cause, case (as in business case) and cheek. See what I did there.
Seriously, go watch the video, then click on the link to the site and do your bit. No pun intended. Here’s the link again to Who Gives a Crap.
And thanks to Lou Pardi for the tip.
This post is re-published from Edelman Australia’s blog.
As June wound to a close Edelman was fortunate to partner with the North Melbourne Football Club and World Vision Australia to present a breakfast panel discussion on the topic of the power of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in sport (#csrsport for the Twitterati).
AFL CEO, Andrew Demetriou, speaks at North Melbourne’s “The Power of CSR in Sport” breakfast. Source: North Melbourne Football Club.
Fundamental to the question of the value of CSR to a corporation is the debate about the commercial reality of fulfilling a CSR program. As anyone working in marketing will tell you, good marketing costs money, but great marketing makes it. Actually, not everyone working in marketing will tell you that, until they’ve read this post.
With a panel featuring the CEO of the AFL, Andrew Demetriou, CEO of World Vision Australia, Tim Costello, and KPMG Australia Chairman, Peter Nash, we were treated to possibly the most high-powered discussion of its type this year.
Regardless of background, each of the panelists pointed consistently to three key themes throughout the morning:
This last point is arguably the most important for Australian businesses to take note of. According to Mr Costello, Australian businesses lag those based in the US or UK when it comes to understanding the importance of a holistic CSR strategy integrated with the vision and values of the business.
Someone has to blink first. The thing about being a leader is it has to be you – no-one can follow you if you don’t take the first step. An opportunity exists for a handful of local business heroes to set the agenda for others to follow. Whether or not that commitment is commercially viable is a major issue for many companies that find themselves in this position. Doing any CSR, whether it’s good or not, will cost money. But like great marketing, a great CSR strategy will help you make it.
CSR strategies, when aligned with corporate objectives, improve employee engagement. They deliver meaningful, measurable outcomes to those associated with the programs, whether that’s through an increase in carbon sequestration by tree planting programs, or improved literacy and numeracy through initiatives like North Melbourne’s The Huddle. Regardless of the form it takes, CSR will only work if it’s accepted by the community as a valuable proposition, and if it delivers some kind of strategic value to the company trying to deliver on it.
As we know from this year’s goodpurpose research, the Australian consumer of 2012 expects businesses to align profits with purpose. Strategic CSR is the key to meeting that demand.
Link to North Melbourne Football Club media release
Link to World Vision Australia media release
Link to The Huddle on Facebook
No.
Now, if you’re not convinced, let me tell you about Hudsons Coffee.
Hudsons is an anomaly. It’s a coffee chain that actually seems to succeed in Melbourne. We could debate for hours the “why” of that statement – I’m just going to point out that unlike some coffee chains I’ve encountered around the world, when I order a flat white at Hudsons, it tastes like a flat white. And when I ask for a large version, I don’t get a lot of grief about how flat whites only come in one size (small), and that what I’m really after is a tall (or large or ultra), extra-strong no-foam latte.
So actually, what *might* make Hudsons successful is the combination of a quality product that I’m prepared to pay for, delivered with old-fashioned customer service.
As a business, I like Hudsons for the steps the company takes to socialise its customer relationships. A few months ago it held an internal competition for its baristas. Baristae? Coffee makers. Jack and Sheree from my local store came third – I have no idea who they are or how big the competition pool was, but I feel happy for them that they did well.
This time around, the competition is slightly more sophisticated in terms of bringing customers along for the ride:
There’s nothing better than getting to know your barista. Unless of course you count your barista not smiling too widely. Awkward.
Each take-away cup (or a card if you drink it in-store) has your barista’s name on it, so you can log onto the Hudsons website (by clicking that link just back there to your left) and rate your coffee for the chance to win a thousand free coffees of your own.
All of the marketing extensions are opt-in, rather than opt-out, so straight away I feel quite chuffed that I can do the thing I came to do and not worry about exposing myself to push marketing. #winning.
The only catch as I could see is that you have to keep proof of purchase. This is problematic for me as I have no interest in hanging onto a used take-away cup in breathless anticipation of it being magically refilled a thousand times.
Back to the question of socialising your business: this is a great, relatively simple way of forming more human-to-human connections between your staff and your customers. If we think about the relative value of “social business” in the first place, it’s largely this; sure we could argue about the value of a relationship with an employee versus a senior executive, but ultimately what a social business should be doing is embedding greater customer loyalty through mutual benefit…wait a minute…surely that’s not one of those PR things?
I’d be fascinated to know how many customers actually participate in this promotion. It makes for a nice change, not having to Like yet another Facebook page that I’m only going to delete again in a week’s time.
And good luck to the Elizabeth Street team.
We live in a period of unprecedented technological advancement, and the way humans now consume information has never been seen before.
This is the premise on which all modern marketing is founded, and can probably be found somewhere on most marketing services firms’ websites (or the blogs of so-minded commentators). My contention: populist trend-surfing content marketing is its own worst enemy and we’re pre-programmed to ignore it and disengage at the first possible opportunity. Go get a coffee or a beer and let’s discuss.
It’s easy to understand why we are where we are. Marketers buy new. Everyone wants to lead, innovation is one of the most important words that can be used inside an organisation, and therefore when the buyers of marketing services go to market, newness is always the new black. Ergo, the rise in social media marketing specialisms.
Unfortunately, this market-driven demand has the blinkers on.
I wouldn’t mind so much if these things were rose-coloured… Source: My Equestrian World
The latest trend in digital marketing is remembering that the Likes, Pins, Re-Tweets and other shares are all the result of real people performing some kind of measurable behavior. Oh, well done us. But regardless of the collective light bulb going on, a deeper issue remains, and it’s this:
Despite the shift in the way content propagates, the physiology of the end user has not.
Why is this important? Well, a couple of reasons. Firstly, desire is an emotional state, and our emotions are regulated by a complex array of neurochemicals coursing throughout our bodies. To over-simplify, our brain and adrenal cortex are very keen to have a say in how much we want something. It makes not a jot of difference where the idea about wanting something comes from – the ability to stimulate a neurotransmitter is channel neutral. This is why you can still buy porn in print form.
Secondly, humans are complex organisms that take years of study to even begin to understand. In a former life I did a bit of that, although I certainly haven’t written any textbooks on the topic.
What I did find fascinating though is the eternal struggle between our DNA and our physiology. To massively over-simplify in a way that would lose you marks on papers, DNA is primarily interested with replicating itself. It’s how we grow – cells divide and divide and divide, and we get bigger. Its double-helix design is fundamental to its ability to divide and replicate. Physiology, on the other hand, happens at a much higher level of functionality. You effectively have to develop specialised organs in order for physiology to happen, and when it happens, physiology is about maintaining homeostasis. Literally “staying in the same state”, although the process is a dynamic one.
An example of this is your ability to metabolise alcohol – your body breaks down the chemical compound, turning it into calories that are either used or stored, and due to alcohol’s effect on anti-diuretic hormone, compounded by how much heat you generate getting rid of the stuff, you dehydrate and end up with a hangover.
Not only didn’t I wake up with Bradley Cooper, I think I forgot to enter my footy tips… Source: getfityou.com
The only remedy is rehydration, which has to come from outside the body in order to help restore proper balance.
The fundamental truth is that our bodies default back to a position of acclimatised comfort at every possible opportunity, and as we grow, so we absorb the changes our surroundings present to us. Every stunt for an adrenaline junkie is more extreme than the last, because that’s how they get the next high. Jumping motorbikes over busses isn’t seen as a precursor for knitting scarves for a reason.
This digression is important when we think about the world of marketing in an increasingly frantic world of communication inputs.
Great marketing is disruptive. I know this for a fact, because everyone I ever have a meeting with tells me so. Except for subliminal marketing, which is creepy and weird but fun for lots of other reasons.
This image of Brad Pitt from the movie Fight Club is guaranteed to increase both your likelihood of learning about subliminal marketing, and improve the traffic to this blog post.
The problem with disruptive marketing is that your entire physical being is built/designed/evolved to neutralise the disruption as quickly as possible, and return your physical self to a state of normalcy. That’s your physiology working. Spike the adrenaline, increase your heart rate, breathe a bit faster, get a head rush, metabolise the neurotransmitter, take a few deep breaths, reduce your heart rate, see Katie walk past the water cooler, get distracted and forget all about the amazeballs new video your friend just shared on Facebook. At this point the only difference between a share or a Like, and not doing that, is whether something more interesting happens in the seconds immediately after your experience of the marketing.
And if you don’t believe me, look yourself in the eyes and tell yourself about the time you forgot to Like something on Facebook, and spent three hours trawling back through your newsfeed just so you could go back and do it.
No. This is not a neurotransmitter.
So how does this all interlink?
Think about the concept of screening – basically, developing an increasingly sophisticated ability to ignore things you’re not interested in. This is one of the reasons behind the need for marketing to be disruptive in the first place. Screening is essentially a form of mental homeostasis. With each disruptive experience, we go through the process of being interested, excited, engaged…and then we move on. As we move on, our brains adapt to each of these experiences, expanding our mental library of experiences and recalibrating “normal” as it applies to us.
Here’s the rub. Screening has been around for as long as we have been able to consciously believe or disbelieve information we receive second-hand. Even older than that is our ability to chase positive stimuli, and avoid negative stimuli. Such as fire, pain, or paying taxes to Prince John.
The upshot of this is really simple. In order for disruptive marketing to continue to work, the disruption must be increasingly powerful in order to break through the now-increased tolerance of any given individual. It must also be increasingly pleasurable in order to qualify as a positive reward. Think how long video games now play for – the intensity of play escalates the longer you play, and the barrier to entry is barely low enough so as not to dissuade you from continuing after your first try or two. This is why the marketing industry now focuses on the internet – its newness means it’s easier to surprise and delight someone online than it is with a TVC.
Further to this, the volume shift of marketing activity online means that as an industry we’re power-loading the internet with ever-increasing content volumes. We’re actually making a rod for our own backs in doing so, because from a physiological perspective all we’re really doing is training people to ignore ever-more-clever marketing techniques. While content always was, still is, and always will be more important than the channel, we’re making it harder to develop “good content”, on the basis that every time someone neutralises themselves against a given campaign (note this is not necessarily a conscious thing, but a physiological response to increasing exposure to campaigning), then it makes coming up with the next cool thing even more challenging.
What’s more important though is that, as Steve Rubel says, while content is infinite, time and attention are not, and this is the really important implication of this post (so stay with me, I know it’s a long one).
As the average consumer is exposed to an increasing volume of content, that consumer’s ability to screen out unwanted content will increase. It’s what our physiology is hardwired to do. And as each of us does that, we will increasingly self-select the content we do want to be exposed to – based on what stimulates a significant enough emotional response that the brain chemicals start squirting about.
The end result of what is scientifically known as having your brain chemicals squirting about.
Think about how many of your friends you have hidden on Facebook – you don’t want them to know you hate all their irrelevant posts about baby’s first bowel motion, so you don’t de-friend them, but you screen out the content by hiding their updates. With increasing content, increasing screening will follow, and those platforms that don’t moderate the amount of chaff amongst their content will find users disengaging from them entirely. We are engineered to seek comfort with occasional stimulation, not stimulation with occasional comfort.
Because of this fundamental truth in how our bodies work, any innovation in communication technology will drive one universal behaviour: information consumers will increasingly self-select their content for that which is personally relevant or interesting, regardless of trend. The trend we witness from the sidelines will be the result of this biological behaviour – Facebook is only big because a lot of people got onto it. It didn’t attract a billion users by being big in the first place.
Let me be clear, this new form of channel surfing played out by the marketing industries will offer content of value. But because the industry follows the channels, content pushed out into these channels will be perceived to be of lower intrinsic value to the user than content they seek out for themselves.
Having now made it to San Jose I’ll be returning to a keyboard blogging effort in the immediate future, but wanted to share another pic from the streets of San Francisco first:
What I like from this banner is the statement that doing well (performing) and doing good (giving, in some capacity) are not an either/or situation, but rather, increasingly important to both today’s consumers and students, as well as tomorrow’s labour force.
The trend toward profit with purpose has been moving more slowly than the turning circle on the Titanic, but it is happening.
Having been to university twice, I’m not convinced an immediate-term applicant makes the decision to fork over a wad of cash (or enter into another protracted debt scenario) on the basis of some clever ads. What I do believe is that intrinsically the consumers of education – students – make their selections according to pre-determined biases. For example, whether a school is Ivy League, artistic or vocational.
Attracting students is a long-term strategy, just like the uptake or formal corporate responsibility into large corporations. It’s not new, it’s no longer sexy, but growing disposable income and the internet will continue to put pressure on companies to align with consumer expectations. I see this in my daily work with local and global clients, and the recent Edelman goodpurpose research has a load of stats I could quote you if I had it to hand.
This is a great play by Golden Gate University to call on one of the most idealistic, influential and noble demographics out there. Teens.
In California for work (more on that later) and a short holiday, finds me on the streets of one of my favourite cities in the world.
While out hunting for some respectable Mexican food (NB: so far not to be found in the financial district where I’m staying), I came across this nice piece of work by the people at Coke:
Since I’m new to mobile blogging I don’t know how to caption that.
What I love about this is, while it’s clearly a brand campaign, there’s no product. There’s no “beverage occasion”, there’s not even a suggestion that Coke is waiting at the end of the run…it’s just about parks.
From Golden Gate Park to The Presidio, to Alcatraz Island, San Francisco is a city committed to its parks. This is a great way of tapping into that part of the city without trying desperately to flog a product at the same time. Many Australian brands could learn from such a simple execution.
**MASSIVE CAVEAT: I haven’t yet visited the website from the poster so don’t get on your high horses until after I’ve written the follow-up. The free wi-fi in this city only lasts for a certain number of coffees when the nice man wants to close up at five on a Friday…
This is a longish post as it includes several screen shots to illustrate what I’m talking about as I go. Mostly so I don’t have to write it all in words. Also…caveat: this was achieved playing off a very low base. I should also point out that my score has risen significantly higher since the 24 hours in question, but I suspect that’s predominantly as a result of some of the following activities having some time to bed in.
As I mentioned in this post several weeks ago, upon discovering that my Klout score was a lowly 30, I set out to see what I could do to give it a bit of a kick-start.
No-one's saying that a rise from 30 to 36 is earth-shattering, but there are some things we can learn about the way online tools process information about the world.
From a pretty low base, I was able to increase my Klout ranking by 20 percent literally overnight, and up to 33 percent over a three-day period. Here’s how.
Firstly, I opened an account. That might seem like a no-brainer, but one of the things many online platforms are doing is integrating your logins, so that any single piece of data can be propagated across many channels. For example, take a photo, post it to Instagram, tweet it, stick it on your Facebook profile, pin it on Pinterest.
Where I think this is important is in the access you grant Klout to your private data, i.e. if you’re much busier on Facebook than Twitter then you’ll “look” more influential with lots of Likes and Comments coming through your FB data. Even if you’re literally asking your friends to choose whether to wear the pink one or the blue.
Secondly, I gave Klout access to a much larger number of my online accounts than I would normally allow any application. For me, Facebook is private and Twitter public, so I tend to limit any public accounts to my Twitter account only.
I then posted/tweeted every one of those account connections when it gave me the option…working on the assumption that any spider will be programmed to look for its own master’s name in a crawl. I’m including a link to my LinkedIn profile here, just for link bait.
Thirdly, I created and propagated some decent content. Specifically, my post on this blog on how to get a job at Edelman Melbourne. This post achieved two Likes on my Facebook page, one comment, and was re-posted by a colleague on their Facebook page. I also had it clicked more than 40 times, received four comments on the post itself, and about 150 reads of the post in the same window of time.
None of the above is particularly insightful, and I wouldn’t claim to be an expert in Klout optimisation based on anything you’ve just read. What it did appear to show is that anything publicly available seems to be picked up within 24 hours, while Facebook lags a little bit.
What I find really interesting is that the ambient affect of the above appears to be what actually makes the difference. And I know this, because about 10 days later, I did something that generated a far bigger result. I locked myself out of my apartment building and had to spend the night at a hotel. Where a beer from the mini bar exploded all over me…
A night of misfortune culminates in an exploding beer at the Hilton South Wharf
This happened on the night of 28 March in Melbourne, and my string of ranty and frankly not really re-printable Facebook posts seemed to give me a boost hitherto not experienced on the wonderful Klout.
Around 25 comments and an equivalent number of Likes suggest undergoing some form of personal tragedy, posting it on Facebook, and then sitting back while your friends mercilessly rip the living piss out of you, is a good way of increasing your influence online.
March 30 is now officially known as “the day locking yourself out of the house became a useful exercise” day.
Based on all of the above, here are my recommendations based on personal experience, to help you boost your online “influence” (I’ll deal with that flawed premise another day) – presumably regardless of tool:
The following links are a series of posts written for Social Media Knowledge, on the mis-appropriation (mine) of the term “social regulation). You can read all about it below.
And other made-up words. Of course, if you think about it, all words are made up. Or were, once. Anyway...
Social Regulation: the outcome of consumer actionism? Leaving aside that “consumer actionism” is largely a term we use at Edelman to describe the influence of company purpose on a consumer’s purchase decision, this post looks at the rise of non-product brand attributes that increasingly shape our brand preferences as consumers.
Social Regulation and the Model T Ford. This one takes a look at the role of social media and corporate/social integration in shaping the product vision of companies. Heavily leans on quotes that Google says can be attributed to Henry Ford. In hindsight, this is probably less shouty than it could have been.
Social Regulation and the Influence of Catz. Hopefully, this one links the theory of the first post with the case study in the second to provide some context for the relevance of the internet and socialised information in a business context. And if you don’t get that from it, there are some references to the internet phenomenon of attracting bajillions of bits worth of pictures of cats. I sincerely believe that this post is the main reason Klout says I’m influential about cats.
You know you have days like this, and can never find the image when you want to send it to someone on an email
About twice a year I waste three hours of my life looking for this. Because I’m sure that happens to other people as well, I’ve posted it here for easy reference. If you happen to know who I should credit for this masterpiece please let me know and I’ll give them a plug.
Sadly I couldn’t reblog this like I did with BC’s post (below) as it’s on tumblr and I don’t have one of them.
But you can click this link to watch Scott Kilmartin from haul.com.au talking about focus. Can, and should.
Say it Different 