Latest posts from Danny Brown

Enjoy the latest posts from Danny Brown, and feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments after the post.

Why the Human Story Will Always Beat Brand Storytelling

There’s a large movement currently for brands to “tell their story”, to enable them to be more approachable to customers.

Communications pro Gini Dietrich does a great job of showing the strengths of storytelling for brands on her leading Spin Sucks blog.

There are some great examples of brands that win when they insert a more story-like feel to their ad or marketing campaigns. Take Apple and Google, for instance, as highlighted by the two videos below:

http://youtu.be/nhwhnEe7CjE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4vkVHijdQk

Yet, as good as they are (and both gave me a chill when I originally saw each one), they’re still clearly promotional pieces for technology (even though that technology does a great job of bringing people together).

Because of that, they can never quite live up to the same kind of emotion a real human story evokes.

The Simple Power of Love

Two stories came into my radar in the last couple of days, and – for me – show exactly why natural human stories trump brand storytelling.

The first is about two twins in Akron, Ohio, who suffered a rare condition called “monoamniotic birth”, which meant they shared an amniotic sac and placenta while in their mother’s womb.

This is a dangerous condition that could see the twins become entangled in each other’s umbilical cords, starving them of oxygen and leading to major complications.

However, the twins – Jillian and Jenna Thistlethwaite – were born without any major problems last Friday, May 9. And the truly amazing part – they were holding each other’s hands when delivered.

There may be many reasons for this to have happened – but for me, the twins knew the challenges they had to overcome just to survive, and gave each other the strength to do so, and continue to do so outside the warmth of their mother’s body.

As the mother Sarah said:

They’re already best friends. I can’t believe they were holding hands. That’s amazing.

The second story, shared by my friend Justin Kozuch, is about a mother who showed the love for her 18-month old son far outstripped concerns for her own safety when she saved them both from a fire in the apartment where they lived.

Christina Simoes was lying in bed with her son Cameron when she saw flames in the building. The speed of the flames trapped the pair, and the only thing left to do was jump out of the window.

Knowing the fall could be dangerous, Christina wrapped her son tightly to her chest, hugged him and told him she loved him, and then leapt from the building. The fall broke a bone in her back, which may lead to complications and limit Christina’s ability to walk. Cameron escaped with just a bruise on his head.

When asked about her heroism, Christina brushed off the term and simply said:

I didn’t think about it. All I was thinking about was getting him out of there. He mattered way more than I did.

Human Stories, Human Emotions, Human Connections

We, as marketers, talk a lot about connecting emotionally with our audience. Roger Dooley, a consultant and author based in Austin, Texas, has a fascinating blog (and books) on the topic over at Neuromarketing. It’s well worth your time and subscription.

It’s something my co-author Sam Fiorella and I also look at in Chapter 2 of the Influence Marketing book, and how the human psyche controls a lot of our decision-making process when it comes to taking an action.

However, the “problem”, for want of a better word, with emotional marketing is it treads a very fine line between being authentic, and being a slickly-produced video or narrative for a new product. Get this part wrong and the connection you’re looking for is broken.

A real human story, on the other hand, doesn’t suffer from this – because we know it’s real, and that’s where the power comes from.

Brand storytelling is a useful tactic when it comes to awareness and acquisition/retention – but it still plays second fiddle to real human stories (just look at the success of the Humans of New York project).

And as long as people can see the difference between a brand and a human vision, that gap will remain. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing…

There’s currently a fund-raising initiative for Christina Simoes over at gofundme, to help pay medical bills and replace the stuff she lost in the fire. Its aim is to raise $30,000 and presently it sits at $26,027. If you’d like to donate or support, click here for more details.

image: ashabot

The Question of Context in Meaningless Data

One of the things marketers and brands alike are excited about at the moment is the potential of Big Data. This excitement is understandable – the ability to tap into previously unheard of sources of information about our customers is a very big thing indeed.

Whether the excitement being generated is fully warranted is another thing, though, especially given the fact that Big Data more than lives up to its name when it comes to the reality of using it effectively.

At a conference earlier this year, one of the speakers – from a data analysis company – spoke of the craziness of trying to make sense of the amount of data we have access to. By her reckoning, it would take 1,000 data analysts working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, more than 300 years to sift through everything currently available to us.

And that’s just with today’s data. As more users come online and begin to share their own information and preferences, the numbers continue to escape the folks trying to make sense of it.

Even with that, though, Big Data is, and continues to be, a valuable resource when used in the right context. However, there’s another opportunity just waiting for us – that of finding context in the meaningless data we discard.

Big Data – Beyond the Obvious

For most companies mining data, the goal is to find the nugget of gold that can help them with a variety of business goals – lead generation, customer acquisition, customer retention, crisis prevention, brand reputation, HR head-hunting and more.

All good stuff; all the kinds of the things businesses should be looking for, and all the kinds of questions that Big Data can answer. Yet while this kind of approach has been proven to yield results, the opportunities when we go beyond the obvious is where it gets really exciting.

For instance, a typical data mine might look like this:

Identify keywords, topics, and user groups/personas;
Start indexing search matches;
Use natural language processing (NLP) to identify sentiment, context, etc.;
Weight keywords against each other based on importance, relevance and frequency;
Create user groups of results for the relevant business team to take over;
Rinse and repeat.

Given, that’s a pretty basic overview of what a typical social search/data mine comprises of – but it does show you how the data can be found, filtered and used.

However, this is going after specific pre-defined targets – keywords and groups based on the business goal. So, it’s fair to say that the results achieved are only meeting the immediate targets set.

But what would happen if we stepped outside the immediate target area and started thinking beyond the obvious?

Out of Context Data, In Context Opportunities

One of the biggest challenges facing monitoring platforms, even with today’s technology, is they’re still (mostly) relying on scripted conversations to glean data from.

Sure, NLP and text analytics can help filter out certain emotions and sentiment around a conversation to give us the kind of data we need to make decisions – but the human mind is a far more complex beast than the flow of conversation traditionally used for monitoring reports, especially when complemented by Artificial Intelligence (AI).

It’s this complexity and the way it adapts on the fly while continuing the same conversation – or even taking an action based on a non-targeted conversation – that offers the greatest opportunity for analytics, monitoring and data companies to build for.

Example A – The Social Graph Data

Let’s say Mary is the target audience of a business that sells shoes. They might set up certain searches around how she decides what shoes to buy, and when – historical purchases, brands she follows, age group and similar consumer follows, seasonal choices (back to school, new job, etc.)

Based on these searches, any time Mary takes an action that involves the specified keyword(s) – a Like on Facebook, sharing a video on YouTube, an extended conversation on Google+, participating in a fashion chat on Twitter, etc. – will pop up as an opportunity for that brand to engage with her, either directly (a tweet, a blog comment) or indirectly (banner ad, Sponsored Story).

However, let’s take it a little bit further. Undetected by the search algorithm, Mary occasionally uses a hashtag on some of her updates. The hashtags don’t seem related – they’re innocuous, random, and spread across multiple networks.

While the automated search is ignoring them, though, a behavioural analyst or an AI program decides that there is a pattern to the hashtags, no matter how infrequent and haphazard they seem.

This leads to the discovery that the hashtag refers to Mary’s crowning moment at high school, when she beat the high jump record. The hashtag – say, #WIWYAF – stands for “When I was young and fit”, and is a reminder of Mary’s youth that she’d love to get back, hence her love for certain sports shoes.

Sending a new search spider out connects her social graph together and uncovers multiple conversations and images around her reminiscing.

This little nugget allows the brand to reach out and say, “Hi, Mary, wouldn’t it be great to revisit the summer of school sports ’85? Well guess what – our new Running Shoe X is built from the memories that made that year so great.”

Instant connection. Instant relevance. High on context and memories and direct to Mary.

Example B – The Alternative Thinking Data

Another way to look at is is by thinking of alternatives to what we believe we’re being told by public updates.

John is in Vancouver, and posts an update to his networks that he hates the cold. Being Canadian, this could mean that John hates the winters in Vancouver, and wishes he was elsewhere.

A vacation company monitoring opportunities could see this update, and perhaps reach out with a special offer valid for the next 48 hours. The time-sensitive offer, and the likelihood that John is in that company’s target audience, could see a sale and a new customer.

Then there’s the thinking beyond that.

Does John hate the cold because he can’t afford his heating bills?
Does John hate the cold because he has a hole in his window?
Does John hate the cold because he has seasonal allergies?
Does John hate the cold because his roof isn’t insulated properly and letting heat escape?
Does John hate the cold because it usually means Christmas and crappy family dinners he hates attending?

One simple statement has now opened up a myriad of possibilities that, if we dig deep enough, could offer several opportunities to meet John’s need.

His bank could reach out discreetly to see if they can help;
A glazier could offer a low-cost emergency repair to his window;
A consumer advice group could offer tips on better roof insulation and heat preservation.

Each opportunities; each resolving a need. All that’s needed is the hidden context of an unremarkable update.

The Permission Factor of Data

Now, given, this assumes a lot of permission marketing and public acceptance of how data is used. Then again, who says data needs to be the sole domain of the marketer?

Think of identifying and activating new donors or activists for a non-profit or cause. Think about helping people in danger – depression, loneliness, abuse – by proactively digging beyond what may be a limited call for help but goes much deeper. Think about law enforcement spotting dangerous new drug avenues before they hit the streets.

The data we monitor today can often be hiding the real data we can use tomorrow. It’s going to take experimentation and respecting, as well as garnering the respect of, the people we’re monitoring to start the process.

However, as a starting point in truly meeting the needs of the people we say we want to help, it’s not a bad goal to be thinking of now.

Is it?

image: kris krug
image:?Francis Rowland

The Value and Meaning of Community In Marketing

This is a guest post from Tinu Abayomi-Paul.

When you hear the word ?community?, even in the present context of social media and marketing, what comes to your mind?

Do you see faces of people you know, admire? People with common interests that you share? Or do you see nothing? Perhaps a faceless blob of usernames?

In the colloquial sense of the word, I belong to many communities, some of them overlapping. Yet it?s starting to worry me, this context of community when framed by the language of marketing.

Particularly in the case where companies identify a demographic and someone at the top executive level mandates that the company needs to ?own? that market, via a sort of hi-jacking of that community.

I Belong to Communities

They can?t really be ?hijacked? or ?infiltrated?. However, they can be led, and their loyalties can be won, but this has to happen as a natural result of a kind of partnership with them.

How well this task is carried out has direct bearing upon whether these communities develop into rabid fan bases (see Apple) or just a group of people you?re tracking who barely move the cash needle (see any company that competes on the basis of price instead of value).

They are made up of people I go out of my way to advise, assist, appreciate and attend to when I can ? not just when it?s required by the community manager/leader hat I have on that day. And I worry about this concept because there?s this false impression that a community is an entity that can be owned.

Like a thing.

Instead of a gathered group of humans.

This is a special problem of people who are asked to be community managers or leaders. More often than not, we rise through the community to come to lead it, even if it happens to also be a job title.

And as such, we have a sense of belonging to it ? it?s what makes us ideal candidates, the rare individuals that had already started to lead the community before someone realized that giving them some monetary incentive could benefit them.

Parties of Trust

Whenever I?m asked to assume these duties, I make it clear that I can see both the side of the company that needs a return on its investment, and the community, that has certain needs and desires that must be fulfilled. And that these two things don?t need to be at odds if both parties are willing to trust me.

Yet at the same time, I notice that at some point, we?re also expected to have a standoffish, doctor-patient type of relationship with the people we may call peers, acquaintances, even friends. Not just by the companies, but by the community ? for example, when settling disputes between members.

It can suddenly become an uncomfortable spot to be in, given that it?s only a matter of time before you are asked by the corporate body that funds the extra fun of the collective, to do something you believe to be against the best interests of the community.

Block a user from talking instead of letting controversial discussions play out.
Take a beloved resource you collectively built for years away from the people who made it successful.
Act on some marketing initiative before enough trust has been built for it to take proper hold.

Especially in social media, the way communities are increasingly treated as commodities is a step backwards. What is the point of social media? On the community level, isn?t part of it to create relationships? Of course there?s no illusion that a brand is going to be BFFs with its adopted collective.

But a community manager can often leverage a fledgling connection on Twitter into an alliance between two companies. Anyone in sales will tell you that buying is about relationships. It always has been ? social media certainly didn?t invent this, but it highlights it. So much is based on that.

And so many incredible, profitable partnerships can result from them.

Something as simple as a retweet can lead to a guest post by a respected thought leader. The smart ones will then willingly bring their community to where their work was published.

One simple example ? but try letting your community champion repeat that process once a week for a year, and track how much the additional exposure leads to sales from that new audience.

The Patience of Community

Here?s the catch: that can only happen if your company can develop the patience to let whoever coordinates with your group of enthused, active people plant the seeds that result in those successes and let them grow. No one digs up an acorn every few weeks to see if it has become a mighty oak yet.

It has increasingly become my experience that it?s not that social can?t be effective for attracting new clients, or retaining the existing ones. It?s really that we business owners lack the patience it takes to truly grow and create a business rather than a series of one-off sales.

If we can?t measure a success 2.1 seconds after an action, it?s seen as useless and thrown away.

And yet, when I was in sales, it was routine for me to attend company-sponsored parties, and attend sporting events with prospects, not clients, to have lunch, meetings, phone calls for months before a sale was ever made.

In this instant gratification age, we need to remember that we have the unique ability to shift the investment that used to be wasted building relationships that never come to fruition into systems that work better and faster if we will simply resist the urge to snap to judgement, and wait for them to mature and ripen.

So my question to you is this: what can us successful community managers do to move the idea of community as commodity to a more realistic picture that reflects how community alliances can be a win for everyone involved?

Thought leadership and setting better expectations are two things that come to mind. But those assume you?re working with people who ?get it?. What if our peers are not? What advice can you offer?

Or perhaps you disagree with me. Can we shift this idea? Should we?

The comments are yours.

About the author: Tinu Abayomi-Paul is CEO of Leveraged Promotion, the first Hot Mommas Project Women’s Leadership Fellow, and a member of Network Solutions Social Web Advisory Board.

You can read more from Tinu at the Leveraged Promotion blog, or connect with her?on Twitter.

image: Gwendal Uguen