Every brand? I wasn’t so sure. Don’t get me wrong, I love ‘love brands’. I’m typing this post on my beloved MacBook. I have a protective case and an InvisibleShield screen protector for my iPhone. I find Porter Airlines and the Toronto Island Airport (Yes I know it’s officially called Billy Bishop Airport) experience absolutely lovely. I think I’m falling in love with this (new to my neighbourhood) frozen yogurt chain from California called Menchies. As a professional marketer, I love to work on ‘love brands’. And yet, there’s a ton of no-so-loved brands that do perfectly fine if not thrive in the marketplace. Take a look at the top 10 companies in the 2011 Fortune Global 500…only one of them, Toyota, still going strong despite its massive recall in 2009 and the Tsunami, has some ‘love brands’ in its roster.

1. Wal-Mart Stores
2. Royal Dutch Shell
3. Exxon Mobil
4. BP
5. Sinopec Group
6. China National Petroleum
7. State Grid
8. Toyota Motor
9. Japan Post Holdings
10. Chevron

You see what I mean. While I’m uncomfortable to say it, the evidence suggests that you don’t have to be loved to be successful. So that got me thinking…maybe love and not-so-loved brands can co-exist in the same marketplace. While being loved can be a competitive advantage, there must be other ways to gain competitive advantage and maybe being loved is something a marketer can choose a brand to be or not to be.

Enter Advertising Age’s ad critic Bob Garfield, someone not known for jumping on the latest marketing bandwagons. In what I think will become a landmark cover story, Garfield writes, “Say goodbye to positioning, preemption and unique selling position. This is about turning everything you understood about marketing upside down so that you can land right side up. This is about tapping into the Human Element. [bold face added]“

Notice that branding was not in his goodbye list. That’s because branding and brand building is more important than ever before. “…you are being evaluated 24/7 in countless conversations that have zero to do with your ad slogan. On the contrary, they are about your brand’s essential self–which behooves you to think very hard about your essential self.”

“Your essential self.” In other words, we judge brands pretty much like we judge other people. We dislike insincere brands in the same way we dislike insincere people. We love those that we connect with emotionally and who we trust. Why do we tell brands to be authentic? It’s the same thing we tell people before their date…”Be yourself!”

Authentic, trustworthy, brands with whom we emotionally connect have staying power. The others do too…but they won’t get our love. Imc2′s “Brand Sustainability Map” charts out this brand universe where the love and not-so-loved brands co-exist.

At the top-right are the familiar “love” brands but next to them and below them are brands that have enough to keep them going for a while. Emotional relationship brands aren’t maximizing that connection to its full potential or are missing something. In the bottom left are the reluctant relationship brands. These brands have traditional competitive advantages like high switching costs, high barriers to entry from competitors, patents, etc. which might explain why there’s a phone and cable company in that quadrant.

I think we’re out of the gee-whiz-isn’t-this-cool phase of digital marketing and social media. The social media/web 2.0 whatever you want to call it revolution is beyond the new normal, it’s just plain normal. We’ve crossed Geoffrey Moore’s chasm into the early majority phase. Instead of chasing shiny new objects, we’re into  more sober topics…like how to operationalize social media communications into business processes…and what to do with all that data?

Joe Fernandez‘ influence rating service, Klout, sparks mixed feelings among many but his appearance at Mesh disarmed a lot of cynicism. He doesn’t want to recreate high school popularity contests, he’s just trying to show that a lot of people have more clout (with a “c”) then people recognize and he’s trying to do it with 20 terrabytes of data a day! And seeing him in a panel with the inventor of Watson, Rod Smith, was amazing to see.

But the show stealer of the day was Marcus Sheridan. If you need proof that digital in part of the DNA of everyman, read his blog and watch his videos. The Sales Lion injected some straight talking street smarts to a conversation dominated by geekspeak. Finally someone makes it clear that SEO is still immensely important and that digital and social serve to generate leads and sales. Sandra Gornall has an excellent summary of his solo talk here and I can’t wait to link to the video.

A big thank you to the @meshcon organizers and volunteers for a great event.

1. The Apocalyptic: Facebook is taking over the world! Say goodbye to privacy forever!

2. The Neo-Luddite: Why is Facebook doing such a drastic change, I love Facebook as it is and I don’t want to have to learn something new. I’m also suspicious of all software updates.

3. The Pundit: Facebook’s new timeline and what it means for [insert career-group and/or field of study]

4. The Self-Help Post: So Facebook has this new timeline feature. Here’s how to use it…and protect yourself.

5. The Fan Boy: All hail the Zuck! Look how cool Facebook is! G-

6. The Pissed off Google Plus Fan Boy: Wow, Facebook is running out of ideas. They’re just stealing from Google Plus. BTW, I worship at the Church of Google.

7. The Pop-Culture Nut: “Likes” the Andy Samberg opening video.

8. The Mashup Artist: If Don Draper had Facebook Timeline

9. The Clueless Sharer: Your non-techie friend who knows nothing about Timeline but posted the Don Draper Facebook Timeline video because it was the beloved Mad Men Carousel scene.

10. The Social Media Curmudgeon: I told you Face-whatever was a waste of time

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
BusinessWeek interview, May 1998

It’s very similar to something Henry Ford allegedly said, “”If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

I’m a digital and social media marketer. I don’t do focus groups. I do a somewhat digital equivalent. I do conversation audits. Rather than take a panel of a few supposedly randomly chosen people, pay them roughly $50 and ask them a bunch of questions about a product, I look at what people are saying online “in the field” so to speak and derive insights that can inform a client strategy or guide the big idea for a digital campaign. In one respect you could say that I’m trying to figure out what people want and in the Jobsian sense that might mean I’m crowding out the ability to come up with a truly creative or innovative campaign.

Except, when I look at conversations online, I’m not trying to figure out what people want. The conversations that people have online reflect an in-the-moment thought (Twitter, Facebook status updates) or an introspective thought (blogs, tumblr). They’re not answers to leading questions, they’re ‘real’ thoughts. I’m looking for patterns. Patterns in random conversations that will inspire a eureka moment, an insight, so named because you cannot see it until you dive in. If done right, it shouldn’t lead to an incremental improvement. Incremental improvements are somewhat obvious. It should lead to a discovery that sparks something innovative.

As we grow up and attend different schools or expanding our horizons with other activities: sports leagues, camp, music, part-time jobs, full-time work, moving to a different city, town, or country our friend network expands but also compartmentalizes itself into circles of friends. While you the individual deftly floats between your circles, the friends in each circle rarely meet each other. This is most noticeable at weddings where the different tables at the reception often reflect the different circles of friends and relatives for the bride and groom.

And there’s another thing tends to happen when we expand our social network. Individuals start falling on a friendship spectrum. On one side are your true friend, your BFFs, your confidantes, the people who know you really, really well. On the other side are your acquaintances, people you know in passing, whom you might stop in the street to say hi but the conversation almost never veers beyond small talk. Then there’s those in between. “Work friends” whom you see every day who know a fair bit about your personal life but you still feel the need to keep some professional distance. “Co-mingled friends” people who you met through someone else and love to hang out with them but you never get together except with that someone else. “Family friends”, the relatives of your friends or the friends of your relatives. “Old friends” who you don’t see as often as you used to but still maintain ties.  And a whole slew of others.

Then Facebook came along and acquaintances, work friends, old friends, family friends, co-mingled friends, old friends all got mashed up together in the same news feed. It was both refreshing and complicated. The lines got blurred. Stuff you’d share with one circle of friends would be seen and commented by others and vice versa. On one hand, you got to know those on the weaker side of the friend spectrum a bit better and they got to know you a bit better. On the other hand, you got to know those on the weaker side of the friend spectrum a bit better and they got to know you a bit better Eli Pariser can fret all he wants about filter bubbles but in some way Facebook opened us up by getting to (sort of) know our spectrum of friends better.

And now, here comes Google+ asking us to choose our friends and put them back into their circles. I understand the zeitgeist that inspired these circles. The voyeur aspect of Facebook was interesting at first but now that we’ve tested our limits with public-ness, we want to regain some control over who sees what. But now we’re faced with a rather awkward conundrum. The spectrum of friends, the degree of friendedness was heretofore a pretty much unconscious classification. It wasn’t something we’d say out loud and we didn’t really think too much about it. Now, here they are, staring us in the face. Our pre-frontal cortex, responsible for reasoning, is now given the unfamiliar task of classifying our friends, of pigeon-holing them into labelled groups. If algorithms created the first wave of online filter bubbles, the next wave might be created by us.

But then a thought came to me. Maybe when we hear the word “popular” we think of the popular kids in high school and the superficiality of that whole scene and therefore the word leaves a bad taste in our mouths. But isn’t popularity a component of influence? I Googled “define: popularity” and Google’s definition was “The state or condition of being liked, admired, or supported by many people” Wictionary goes even further, “The quality or state of being popular; especially, the state of being esteemed by, or of being in favor with, the people at large; good will or favor proceeding from the people;”

“The state of being esteemed by, or of being in favor with…good will or favor proceeding from the people” Why, that sounds almost noble…almost….influential?

Here’s a “Yes, but…” answer. There’s two caveats.

1. Influence, like fame, might not last forever

2. Context + Influence matters even more

There’s a lot of similarities between influencer marketing and celebrity endorsements, the key difference being that the influencer doesn’t usually get paid (apart from free product and/or perks but it pales in comparison to what the celebrity gets). And celebrity endorsements only work, as Laura Ries put it “when the consumer has a credible belief that the celebrity would be interested in buying and using your product or service despite being paid to do so.”

So…

1. Context first

2. Popularity within context is an important element of influence

I lived in Vancouver for five years and have a great affinity to the city and it’s friendly people. It’s a shame that few bad apples have tarred the image of the city that, last year, hosted the world in the biggest winter show on earth. I’d like to think that this wouldn’t have happened had Team Canada lost the gold medal game.

Fortunately,  I’m heartened by the way the city has gotten together to make amends both in the clean up and in bringing the perpetrators to justice. And I’m intrigued by the method in which they’ve done this.

The clean-up was self-organized through several Facebook Pages .

And catching the perpetrators? There’s a Tumblelog collecting riot pictures and shocking ‘confessions’ (and by confessions I mean idiots bragging about what they did) on Facebook and Twitter. There’s also a Facebook Page to do the same. Those who can identify the faces can email the police at robbery@vpd.ca .

So mob mentality has given way to crowdsourced crime fighting. The question I have is whether the criminal justice system is ready for this. I’m no lawyer but I’ve watched enough Law and Order to know that there of rules of evidence and admissibility, and due process. Are existing laws adequate to cover the evidence gathering activities of our crime fighting citizenry? Are there any technicalities we lay people haven’t thought of that defense lawyers might use to help their clients? I’m asking because I want the perpetrators to answer for their crimes and I don’t want our efforts turned against us. Would love to hear from any legal experts.

I had a conversation about this with a colleague (who goes by his real name on twitter) and his theory was: If you’re going to be tweeting actively and often and you have a clever name, go with that memorable pseudonym. When you rock the twitterverse with your 140 character wit, the pseudonym adds a new dimension, maybe a level of mystique, to your personal brand. On the other hand, you know your real name, others know your real name, it’s your name why not use it? I suppose authors with pen names and actors/musicians with stage names go through a similar thought process…adding more fuel to my long-held belief that social media turns us all into public figures.

Avinash Kaushik

We don’t like throwing around the G-word that often but Avinash is a true guru when it comes to web and social analytics. His blog Occam’s Razor, is a staple on many an analyst’s RSS reading list and he is an impassioned speaker that didn’t pull any punches. Fortunately, none of the companies that he pointed out needing improvements were Edelman clients J. Here were some key points from his talk:

• The greatest thing about digital is that so much of it is measurable. The problem with digital is that a lot of the metrics we use are “glorious data puke”
• We focus too much on the “what” of metrics (visitors, visits) and not enough on the “how” and “why” and “what else”
• Separate the quality visits from the fly-by-night visits so separate out the behaviour of people who see 3 pages or more from the people who see
  less. Now among the quality visitors, how did they get to your site (top referring sites, top referring keywords by number of quality visits).
• For the “why” look for mismatches between what people are visiting (why they’re there) and what you’re offering them.
• For the “what else”, of course, look at conversions but look also at the visits that didn’t convert. What did they do? What were they interested in. This gives you an indication of what else you can offer.
• On social analytics: Who cares how many followers you have, how many times were you listed since that means someone is sectioning you off for special attention (though there are a fair number of people who create lists and ignore them). Or number of retweets per 1,000 followers since that shows how engaged your twitter audience is.
• At the end of the day it comes down to what interactions adds economic value…those interactions that have a clear line of site to net income. And what variables are those? Avinash then pointed to a slide by Queen’s University Professor Ken Wong.
• There are four things every analyst should have in their heads at all times: Price, Cost, Market Share, and Market Size. Now map each metric you report to these four variables

Favourite Lines

“Why do I blog? Because I like irrational adoration.”

“To bloggers, RSS readers are relationships. Visitors are one-night stands.”

“Most web sites suck because Hippos created them.” (HIPPOS = Highest Paid Person’s Opinion)

“HITS: How Idiots Track Success”

“Bounce rate = “I came, I puked, I left”

Gary Vaynerchuk

• Gary Vee is the Tony Robbins of business speakers; a high energy, mile a minute, tour-de-force presence who isn’t afraid to drop an f-bomb to accentuate his point. And here were some of his stronger points:
• The future of business is that what was old is now new again. The small-town store where the owner knew your name and knew about your life, and might have started making your regular order just as you walked in? Social media allows that caring to scale
• The technology is such that big marketers can do 1 to 1 marketing.
• More content is created in 48 hours than in the entire human history from cave paintings to 2003 and you can tell a lot about a person’s preferences from that content. So imagine you were a chain of eateries and you got to know your loyal customers based on their loyalty card information. And you scanned their Amazon wish lists and bought them their favourite book on their birthday and shipped it to them. Wouldn’t that surprise and delight those customers? Wouldn’t they be praising you on every social channel they have? In Vaynerchuk’s vision of the future brands are going to have to act like sports teams and cultivate raving fans…and they’ll be doing it one customer at a time.

Favourite Lines

“Everyone in social acts like a 19 year old dude. They try to close to early”

“People who win in business are the ones that see what’s coming…More horses were bought before the car was invented. Guess who won?”

“Social media is scaled caring.”

“What is the ROI of your mother?”

Jeffrey Hayzlett

Jeff Hayzlett dropped almost as many f-bombs as Gary Vee. I think he was trying to one-up him on the volume. Hayzlett was hired as the CMO of Kodak to turn around the company whose bread and butter product had been rendered virtually obsolete by digital technology. He ended up turning the company from a B2C, to a B2B company. Kodak technology is still a big part of the captured images we see today. A passionate speaker Hayzlett had these thoughts centered on how to bring an “old school” organization into a “new school” way of thinking about marketing. Some talking points:

• Kodak thought its main product was film and that their customers were interested in taking pictures. It wasn’t. People didn’t take pictures, they capture moments.
• What Kodak needed to do was go back to its core. Kodak wasn’t a film company. It was a company that made emotional technology.
• Tell your brand’s story. The first thing that people would take when they ran into their burning house…they’re pictures. They don’t want to lose their memories. That’s a powerful story about a powerful product.
• Marketing used to be about eyeballs and ears. Get your message seen and heard by as many people as possible. Now it’s about hearts and minds. See above point.

Favourite Lines

“If legal says no, ask, ‘What’s the fine?’”

“HR and Legal’s job isn’t to drag you back. They’re job is to keep you from falling down”

“What’s ROI on social? I don’t know tell me what ROI is on IGNORING”

Sheena Iyengar

Dr. Sheena Iyengar has been devoting a good part of her academic career to studying how we make choices. It was a dense and fascinating talk and the following bullet points probably won’t do it justice. After reading this post, click here to see her talk at TED Global.

• North Americans are acculturated to having lots of choices and are drawn to more choices. Paradoxically, the more choices we have the harder it is to make a choice. This results in less commitment, poorer decision quality, and lower satisfaction with our choice.
• The exception to the above rule is experts. Experts have no problem with lots choice because they have the knowledge to understand and  spot the differences between choices. They set their criteria, categorize options, cut the categories that don’t apply to them and end up choosing among fewer options than given.
• In North America, we often choose based on what we think that choice says about ourselves. And what we usually want to say is, “I’m unique, but relatable. I’m pretty much the same as you…just a little different.”
• There are three ways for individuals to choose better. Marketers take note because you can use this to help your customers and consumers:
  • Cut the number of choices. Eliminate the options, flavours, models, that aren’t that different from the rest
  • Categorize the choices. Our brains can process more categories than choice
  • Condition your customers for complexity. For example, one of her experiments found that when car company that offered fewer choices per option category at the start and more choices per option category at the end (e.g. pick among 3 interior colours, now pick among 10 exterior colours) people would make more conscious choices. If given the more complex decisions first, they reverted to the default option more often.

Favourite Lines
“We’re born with an desire to choose but without the knowledge of how to choose”

“Despite the flavor explosion in ice cream, 50% of sales is still chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry”

“People may say what they want is more choices but what they really want is more control”

Guy Kawasaki

Guy’s new book is called Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. Enchantment goes beyond persuasion. is not about manipulating people. It transforms situations and relationships. It converts hostility into civility and civility into affinity. It changes the skeptics and cynics into the believers and the undecided into the loyal. Enchantment can happen during a retail transaction, a high-level corporate negotiation, or a Facebook update. And when done right, it’s more powerful than traditional persuasion, influence, or marketing techniques. Some highlights:

3 steps to being likeable

Step 1: Smile. Genuine smiles can be seen in the eyes and the mouth.

Step 2: Dress for a ‘tie’…not so down (lack of respect), not so up (too intimidating, says, “I’m better than you.”)

Step 3: Have a perfect handshake

• Trust is a two-way street but the order goes one way. Trust others first. How? Be a baker, not an eater. An eater figures there’s only one pie and takes as much as possible. A baker knows he/she can bake another pie.
• Great products are deep, intelligent, complete, empowering, and elegant.
• Tell a story, the best stories are short, sweet, and swallowable
• “The best answer to ‘Thank you’ isn’t ‘You’re welcome’. It’s ‘I know you’d do the same’” it accomplishes two things. It says, “I trust that you’re a good person who does good deeds” and it also seeds the idea of, “And I might need that favour reciprocated sometime in the future”

• Presentation tips: Customize the introduction, aim for 10 slides in 20 minutes, and use at least 30 point font.

Favorite Lines

“A good speaker never goes off track. A great speaker goes off track and later shows you why the off-track part was relevant”

“Apple Computers were originally designed to do spreadsheets and word processing. It turned out that they were great at desktop publishing. What made Apple was…Aldus Pagemaker”

“The best answer to ‘Thank you’ isn’t ‘You’re welcome’. It’s ‘I know you’d do the same’”

In some circles, this “social viewing” habit might be the savior of TV. Some people believe this second screen is the savior of event-based television programming creating a virtual living room and restoring the old shared experience that once was a staple of TV viewing habits everywhere. Well, like most virtual things…it’s not exactly the same thing. When it comes to things like Superbowl parties and Oscar parties…I go mostly to socialize, the event provides an excuse to get together and a theme for the party. The twitter takes one element from that…the snarky heckles we do to the TV as we’re watching. That’s it. It’s one big virtual peanut gallery each person trying to out-snark the last comment in the #oscars stream.

It’s funny. It’s a nice accessory to the Oscar viewing experience…but it’s not social viewing.