Astonish Your Customer(s)

Talk isn't cheap

Talk isn't cheap when it comes from a 3rd party, in this case a customer. 

Pro or Con, customer talk is valuable and formidable. 

Moreover, expenditures of time, imagination, resources and maybe even money isn't cheap in the pursuit of creating a product that will so delight your customer she will sing (i.e. talk) your praises.

So, the next time someone says that talk is cheap, give him a refresher course. 

O.D.O.o.O.D.B. 

 

Name one more & two you've done yourself

A few years ago, when I was working on Coppertone and social media marketing (different from social media) was dawning, the brand team wanted to understand how this new tool/medium worked and if it could be a viable method to build the brand.

We invited a number agencies in to hear their take.

When I asked for an example as it relates to success with a consumer brand, they all, and I mean all, said "BK's Subservient Chicken" and "Shake it - Polaroid Picture". 

After the first two agencies, I amended my request. I told the agencies I'd like to hear about examples other than Chicken and Polaroid and I'd also like to have them give a deeper recitation of programs their agency had executed and general ideas about how they might foresee a social media campaign working for Coppertone. Crickets. 

More, different and better examples (that are directly relatable to your brand) plus examples of your own work. Good questions/requests to surface when you are being sold the new shiny tools.

O.D.O.o.O.D.B.

"It was like a fever, everyone wanted in"

I just read an article in The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell that contrasted the personal, disciplined and accountable social networking that organized and empowered the civil rights movement with the impersonal and ephemeral nature of the social networks popularized by the shinny new tools like Twitter. 

I like the following statement as a definition of a true viral or people-powered phenomenon, as retold by a reporter that spoke to one the kids that challenged the color line by staging a sit-in at a lunch counter. 

I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ”

 Does the social network you are trying to create or elevate feel like "a fever" that everyone wants in on?

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell#ixzz11lmfVKht

O.D.O.o.O.D.B. 

Is social media a fad?

The video by the same name has been been viewed 500,000+ times, so you may have seen it.

Watch it, you won't forget it, or maybe I should say that you shouldn't forget it.

Many brands will lament: I don't really understand it, or I don't know how to take advantage of it, or we don't have a social media strategy, or, my CEO isn't into it.

Here's are two ways to take advantage of it. 

1. Do something - create a product, sponsor a cause - that meets the dream of your customer
2. Make an audacious promise and over-deliver. 

 If you do that, the people will find you and they will use social networks to tell their friends. 

O.D.O.o.O.D.B.