Philosophy

I love new ideas, new thoughts, new ways of looking at the world that bring out the best in us as a human race.  I believe digital communications are one of the key catalyst today for new thinking.

I believe that many of the new values driving the change in marketing practices and ultimately marketing success these days arise from the digital landscape, what it means to be successful in digital marketing equates to overall marketing success.

Core values such as Transparency, Collectivism and Collaboration are arising from the Digital landscape and driving new marketing priorities and as a consequent marketing is driving more Value to the bottom line.

I train agencies in the art and science of Digital Communications because I love to inspire people to think differently and in the process, in some small or big way, to move us all towards a more transparent, collective and collaborative world.

“The passive consumer of the analog age has been replaced by the always-on, active, connected, social consumer of the digital age.  This has forever changed how consumers make decisions about brands - all brands”

To make a statement like this these days is almost an insult to your marketing intelligence – I’m sure we all agree with this statement.

However, while we may agree, the majority of our marketing behaviour suggests that we believe otherwise. Despite the cry for change from some of our largest marketers and organizations. Jim Stengel from P&G says, “Today’s marketing model is broken. We’re applying antiquated thinking and work systems to a new world of possibilities.” And Babs Rangaiah from Unilever at the recent Sydney Ad:Tech said: “There is a big gap in the time consumers spend online, to the amount brands invest in it. There are incredible opportunities and yet we only tap into the tinniest percentage of opportunities. It’s really our time to re-write the rules.”

And they’re right, we need to change but what’s holding us back?

To understand the disconnect between the recognition of the opportunity digital provides and our marketing beliefs and behaviour we need to understand what motivates our own attitudes and actions as marketers.

VALUES (not to be confused with VALUE, yet the right VALUES do drive business VALUE) Values are at the heart of what motivates our own attitudes and actions as marketers. Worth stopping and ensuring we all understand this notion of values in the same way. “Values are traits or qualities that are considered worthwhile; they represent the highest priorities and deeply held driving forces behind our decisions and actions.”

All marketing is ‘values-based marketing’ meaning there are a set of values held by marketers and corporate culture that drive the specific kinds of decisions made and the ultimate marketing actions/solutions undertaken. Therefore, understanding our marketing/corporate values is key to understanding why we keep marketing in the same way even when we know beyond a doubt that consumers and the marketplace have changed.

I believe that many of the new values driving the change in marketing practices and ultimately marketing success these days arise from the digital landscape, what it means to be successful in digital marketing equates to overall marketing success.

Core values such as Transparency, Collectivism and Collaboration are arising from the Digital landscape and driving new marketing priorities and as a consequent marketing is driving more Value to the bottom line.

Let’s begin with Transparency.

The definition of Transparency is “All can be seen, the state of full disclosure”

When we believe in and value Transparency we are more able to accept and understand the new marketplace transparency.

What changes about out marketing practices when we value ‘Transparency’?

We build our reputation based on honesty, authenticity, and trustworthiness.

Which looks like:

-Listening and Responding in real time, in public online spaces to customer

comments and conversations

-Employees being the voices of the brand – people talking to and building relationships with people

-Stimulating advocacy amongst key influencers

Let’s explore the second core value arising from the Digital landscape and driving more Value to the bottom line. Collectivism.

The definition of Collectivism is “An orientation that emphasizes the good of the group or community over and above individual gain”.

When we believe in and value Collectivism we put our customer’s needs over and above our own. We understand that to be relevant we need to engage in a different way, to create awesome brand experiences and we need to ‘give’ before we can ‘take’. We operate from a platform of building Social Capital. Creating a Brand Ecosystem. Using the three Cs of Conversation, Community and Content.

The Brand Ecosystem is a living, breathing, organic phenomena where the role of the brand is to listen to and stimulate Conversations, add value to existing Communities, create it’s own Communities, and provide awesome Content experiences. To earn Social Capital a brand needs to participate and offer opportunities to participate. What kind of participation? A brand can use many different Participation approaches – Listening, Talking, Energising, Engaging, Supporting – to build it’s ecosystem. The key target in the brand ecosystem is the influencers. The brand ecosystem is made up of all the brand-related content and comment that is distributed throughout the web (including the mobile web). The ecosystem builds over time and unlike advertising campaigns do not disappear when the campaign finishes. The ecosystem lives on and if it is healthy and continually fed by the brand, grows and expands. The fuel is the 3Cs.

And the final core value, Collectivism.

The definition of Collaboration is “The act of working together towards common goals, visions.”

When we believe in and value Collaboration we understand the power of the Wisdom of Crowds. The central thesis of the Wisdom of Crowds is that a diverse collection of independently deciding individuals is likely to make decisions and predictions better than individuals or even experts. The concept was of course popularised in the book entitled ‘The Wisdom of Crowds’ written by James Surowiecki (pronounced SOO-roh-WIK-ee). And never before have we been able to tap into the Wisdom of Crowds in such a wide-reaching and deep way than via the Internet. Brands leverage the technology-enabled collective intelligence of crowds via crowdsourcing ideas and solutions and by creating self-supporting communities online.

We’ve explored the core values of Transparency, Collectivism and Collaboration that are arising from the Digital landscape and driving new marketing priorities and more value to the bottom line through marketing initiatives fuelled by digital. Where to from here? Perhaps it’s time to ask ourselves a few questions…

Do you value Transparency?

Listening and Responding

Are you listening? Do you have a Social Media Monitoring (SMM) system and process in place? Are you measuring the number of conversations? The sentiment of the conversations (positive, neutral, negative)? Are you trending this information over time? Against your competitors? Are you measuring your SIM (Social Influence Marketing) Score? Are you mining the data for marketing, product, customer service insights? Are you identifying the spaces in which the conversation about you typically takes place? Are you using SMM and Search to forecast sales? To determine the effectiveness of your offline campaigns?

New Brand Voices

Are you responding? Do you have a social media policy for staff? Who are the voices of the brand? Do they have guidelines? How do you monitor success?

Key Influencers

Are you identifying your key influencers online through SMM? Do you have a marketing strategy for key influencers? Do you include in your communications brief key influencer objectives and outcomes? Have you ever used a key influencer strategy as the core of your campaign?

Do you value Collectivism?

Awesome Brand Experiences

Do you stand for a context bigger than your product/service? Something big enough that people will want to participate in? Have you brought your bigger context to life through digital brand experiences? Digital social experiences? Cut through digital experiences never before possible? Are there under-serviced narrow yet deep audiences for your brand that you can market to profitably via digital channels? Are you using behavioural targeting for your online advertising? Are you running Paid Search continuously to make it easy for your customers to find what they are looking for, bridging the gap between the interest your offline communications generate and your online presence.

Conversation

Are you using pull marketing to feed the existing conversations about your category with valuable content? Are you also initiating conversations with your customers via blogs, twitter, Facebook, forums?

Community

Does a brand community make sense for your business? A community of customers, partners, influencers, niche audiences?

Content

Do you have a content strategy for your brand? What’s your investment in brand-based content? How are you distributing it? Is it easily shared and searchable? Have you ever considered a strategy where your branded digital content is the centrepiece of your campaign?

Do you value Collaboration?

Crowdsourcing

Are you leveraging your customers, your partners, your employees and their collective intelligence through crowdsourcing to improve your business, your marketing and innovate your offering? Are you using crowdsourcing to help you prioritize your ideas? Build on your ideas?

Self-Supporting Communities

Does a self-supporting community make sense for your brand? Would your customers benefit from advice and help from each other? Benefit from learning from each other?

As Clay Shirky says “A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new tools. It happens when society adopts new behaviours”. And I would add: A revolution doesn’t happen when marketing adopts new tools. It happens when marketers adopt new Values & behaviours.

We need to reboot our marketing Values to add more value to the bottom line. This blog and my work are an ongoing exploration of how we do this. I’d love to hear your opinion about the new marketing Values and your experiments and stories from putting them in action. Please comment, tweet, subscribe, email or link with me.