As continue to talk about social strategies and how to integrate our brands further into the lifestyle of our customers, we talk routinely about improving brand loyalty and advocacy. Why don’t we take it a step further?
With the levels of loyalty and advocacy we can create with these social personal conversations, shouldn’t we be discussing brand passion instead?
After all, a passionate person is a force to be reckoned with. Imagine if we had handfuls of extremely passionate individuals leading our cause and communicating our message through vast social networks.
Just imagine…
Through social media we have an opportunity to have conversations with real people, in real time, on a personal level. These conversations increase trust. This trust builds loyalty. That loyalty turns to advocacy. Finally advocacy turns into passion.
Well 2010 is now here… Lot’s of changes, lots of excitement, with many opportunities in front of us all. I wanted to challenge, not only myself, but all of you to make 2010 The Year of The Social.
With this, I challenge all of us to push what is possible with communications… Take marketing from a pushing, intrusive act to a meaningful relationship between trusted friends. Create brands that are malleable to allow consumers to take only the information they want a need and provide real-time branding through relevant, targeted conversations. Interact with our consumers in a way that was never thought possible. Use technologies and content to reach our customers where they are…
Take time everyday to push the social envelope.
Victories.
With every challenge, there will be victories… I want to shout these victories from the mountain tops. If you or someone you knows creates a social phenomenon, please send it my way so I can publish it’s results. Let’s all work together to make 2010 The Year of The Social.
2010 is going to be the “Year of the Social.” With that being said, I am starting a “This Week in Social” video series where I will talk about the changes in our industry, the successes and failures of companies in the space, and just continue the excitement of what we are seeing on a weekly basis. Please come back every week and play along.
Over the past couple months, I’ve had the tremendous opportunity to meet and work with John Winsor, author of Baked In and former Executive Creative Director at Crispin Porter + Bogusky. He is a tremendous mind that explores the vast reaches of crowdsourcing and co-creation abilities as they relate to product design, message creation, and brand building. A few weeks ago, John informed me that he was going to leave CP+B and start a new venture (with more information to come). Well… today is that day.
Along with another CP+B alum Evan Fry and Claudia Batten, formerly of Massive, Winsor has taken crowdsourcing to the weathered ad agency model and formed Victors and Spoils. This new Boulder, CO agency had a great article written this morning in the New York Times explaining the tremendous shift in consumer sentiment… The very shift that will allow for crowdsourcing ideas to become an extension of the Victors and Spoils creative department. The article states:
“The goal of his new agency is to “get more people involved in the creative process,” Mr. Winsor said, but “not winner-take-all and not free labor,” citing two common complaints about crowdsourcing competitions.”
What an amazing idea, one that I hope to be able to watch and learn from. It’s an amazing world in which we marketers live. We should take a page out of John Winsor’s book and rise above the ever increasing fears of the ad industry and shoot for something great. This is the type of action I wanted to see from my post a few days ago. This action will prove to be inspiration for us all.
Good Luck to you John and all your team at Victors and Spoils!
We, as marketers, have become experts in building our brand. We have spent years on defining what our brand is and how we communicate it through colors, images, wording, emotions, etc. We have built some strong emotional and relational contacts with our customers that have created some of the strongest loyalty we have ever seen.
All this was created through understanding our customer base and communicating our brand message effectively and efficiently. Isn’t this what social media is? Effectively and efficiently communicating?
The influx and hype of social media has knocked many of us on our ass and made us start questioning our brand. We have all run back to the drawing boards, trying to reinvent our brands for the social world. This is the opposite of what we should do. We have a powerful brand; we have spent thousands of hours and millions of dollars creating it. Don’t go running back to the drawing board. Instead of thinking what is our new “social brand” think about how would our brand communicate in the social sphere.
