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Remember Obama’s 2008 campaign?

Yesterday Obama’s 2012 campaign team launched a Twitter account for Michelle Obama. A week before that the team started using Instagram. And just a few weeks ago, a Tumblr blog was launched.

It seems like the campaign team is taking the same social approach it took for the previous elections:
1. Choose or create the right platforms.
2. Make it easy to find and act.
3. Connect online and offline worlds.

A lot has been written in the past four years about Obama’s social component of the elections campaign, but I think it’s worth the time to put my thoughts down and see how the strategy changes and evolves for this year’s elections.

Choose or create the right platforms.
The campaign used only a dozen or so platforms, from the obvious ones such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to not so obvious ones such as AsianAve.com, MiGente.com and BlackPlanet.com, influential social networks for the Asian-American, Hispanic and African-American communities, and mobile, which we are still trying to figure out, four years later. The team selected the platforms based on what people were already using because there was an existing audience, it was easier for users to find the content and for the team to engage and empower users. As Scott Goodstein said, “Some people only go to MySpace. It’s where they are on all day. Some only go to LinkedIn. Our goal is to make sure each supporter online, regardless of where they are, has a connection with Obama.”

With that said, it’s important to note that the team didn’t use every existing platform under the sun, just the ones that made sense. They also realized that the right platform might not exist and had to create it, which was the case with The Great Schlep, one of the best propagation examples. Even when they created a platform, they used tools that people were familiar with, thus making participation easier. Which brings me to the second part of the approach.

Make it easy to find and act.
Using popular platforms and optimising for search definitely helped with the finding part among people who were interested. But the team empowered users to share content, thus making content find users, not just users finding content.

But it wasn’t just about sharing information. People were empowered to take action. The team understood that there’s a variety of ways for people to participate based on their engagement and provided something for everyone: following, liking, sharing, donating, advocating, attending events, organizing events, volunteering, etc. It provided opportunities for casual users to stay informed and involved and empowered super users. The team understood that different levels of participation required different levels of commitment and this lead to identifying and empowering super users by giving them the tools (videos, speeches, photos, how-to guides, etc.) to propagate and activate others.

The Great Schlep is probably the best example of how this worked. Sarah Silverman urged Jewish grandchildren to visit their grandparents in Florida and plead with them to vote for Obama. The site provided talking points, one of which to withhold further visits that year unless the condition was met, and other materials that made the users powerful advocates.

By the end of the campaign, supporters created more than 400,000 pro-Obama YouTube videos and more than 400,000 blog posts on MyBarackObama.com, not to mention the number of outside blog posts, Facebook updates, tweets, etc.

Connect online and offline worlds.
The Obama campaign team managed to turn online fans into advocates, donors, volunteers and, most importantly, voters. They managed to escape the slaktivism gap by merging the online and offline worlds and giving people very specific offline actions: go to this event, talk to your grandparents, vote today, etc. Even the most personal medium, mobile, was effectively used by allowing supporters to text questions and receive quick responses. Not to mention the incredibly smart use of data to target and segment people and customize messages. Ultimately the online presence mobilized people offline.

Obama’s 2008 campaign started early, invested in and created platforms that scaled, inspired a movement and channelled its energy to very specific activities: donating, volunteering, voting. I am looking forward to see what the campaign team does this year.

The future belongs to the curious

The Future Belongs to the Curious from Skillshare on Vimeo.

I love this video about curiosity. And it goes well with my New Year’s Resolution: Wake up stupid every day and play as if the world is a giant box of LEGO blocks.

On business, mission statements and libraries

Earlier this week the Cambridge University Library announced the digitization of Isaac Newton’s papers and notebooks. Among the digitized documents are Newton’s own annotated copy of Principia Mathematica, a notebook in which a young Newton worked out the principles of calculus, the laws of gravity and motion, a theory of light and his construction of the first reflecting telescope. I thought this was an incredible movement for libraries to become not just providers of information but also providers of knowledge. Of course, this is not the first such project. Most big libraries have vast digital libraries, but it is one thing to give access to Newton’s published and polished work, it’s another thing to give access to his thought process and unpolished ideas, thus allowing people to understand the concept not just learn the theory.

Then, I read about the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Ind. and its hackerspace inside a trailer where makers share sophisticated tools and their expertise. According to Jeff Krull, the library director, this is another way to bring the mission statement of the library to life:

“We see the library as not being in the book business, but being in the learning business and the exploration business and the expand-your-mind business. We feel this is really in that spirit, that we provide a resource to the community that individuals would not be able to have access to on their own.”

“The expand-your-mind business.” Brilliant. This puts the Allen County Public Library on a completely different level, beyond providing information and knowledge, to giving people the opportunity to explore, test and learn on their own. It puts the library in the business of helping people grow, which has always been the case, but most libraries focused on books and information, not on exploration and experience.

In an age when every business is trying to digitize its services and products, it’s inspiring to see an organization that understands people and works to benefit them regardless of the medium. It’s inspiring to see that an organization that understands it’s not in the business of selling Product X or Service Y and in the business of adding value to people’s lives. It’s inspiring to see an organization living up to its mission statement.

On Cirque du Soleil, culture, play and the future of agencies

I went to see Cirque du Soleil’s Quidam this week. The most incredible part of the whole show was the collaboration and trust between everyone on stage and behind stage on every flip, on every jump, on every stunt. The acrobats supported each other the entire time and I can only imagine how much they must trust the people behind stage.

And then I got home and read an article in Campaign titled “How Creative Minds Work.” The following paragraph was the complete opposite of what I had just experienced:

“With planners looking over their shoulders, creatives are less likely to

run off with ‘arty’ ideas. When teams are kept apart, one senior planner

explains, ‘planners always complain that creatives have an agenda of

winning awards rather than creating ads that work’.

And that mistrust works both ways, Andrew Cracknell, chairman and

executive creative director of Ammirati Puris Lintas, says: ‘Many

creatives see planners as spoilsports, getting in the way. It’s not very

nice for the creatives to be told that eight housewives in Slough just

turned down your work and you have to go and do it again.’ “

We are in the same business as Cirque du Soleil: we get paid to tell stories, create experiences, sell dreams and create magic. We also work in an incredibly complex world where a solution requires more than just a copywriter and an art director, it requires a mini Cirque du Soleil team (or teams) to dream up and execute a smart solution, yet advertising is probably the industry most plagued by mistrust and internal competition.

At the same time, everyone in the industry has been talking about the future of advertising agencies and writing blog posts on the topic (this being one of the 934785392 such posts) or going to conferences to share their opinions on team structure, functions, services offered, desired skill sets, buzz words such as innovation, etc. for the past few years. Some have even claimed that the future doesn’t need advertising agencies.

More and more agencies are hiring chief innovation officers and creating innovation/digital labs.

Some are telling us that agencies should function more like tech start-ups.

But we seem to forget that culture eats strategy for breakfast, as Peter Drucker said. Before we can even start talking about what agencies should offer or how they should function, we need to foster a culture of collaboration and trust, a culture that empowers exploration. Our capabilities in the future depend on our readiness to experiment now and the only way teams can become comfortable with experimentation (and failure for that matter) is a culture of collaboration and trust.

So how do we get there?

1. Play.

Play isn’t just an activity or participation in a game. Play is a state of mind. Play stimulates curiosity and fosters creativity and problem solving. Play helps us build teams in which members trust each other. Play encourages collaboration and experimentation. Play helps us learn and makes us smarter. Most importantly, according to Brian Sutton-Smith, the opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression. And Teresa M. Amabile’s research suggests that happy people are more creative and better at solving problems.

The following two TED talks explore the benefits and applications of play, so you don’t think I am making this up. The first one is with Stuart Brown from the National Institute for Play (yes, it is a real organization) on the benefits of play. The second one is with Tim Brown from IDEO on the relationship between creative thinking and play.

2. Play nicely with others.

Prima donas and egomanics who are concerned only with their idea “winning” and not with an actual solution are toxic. They don’t play nicely with others. They don’t collaborate. No one trusts them.

It really doesn’t matter what we call the agency of the future (agency 3.0, innovation lab, etc.). It really doesn’t matter what titles the people in the agency have. What really matters is fostering a culture of collaboration and trust that empowers us to solve problems and create brand and business value instead of marketing expense.

Want to create the agency of the future? Focus on its culture.

Kurt Vonnegut on the shapes of stories

Storytelling is innately human. Stories spark our imagination, pass the knowledge of previous generations, unite us. Storytelling is the way we most naturally communicate and engage with each other. But how many types of stories are there?

In this great video Kurt Vonnegut examines the shapes stories take and plots them on two axes. He claims there are only three types of stories.

How do we know we are there?

A while back I wrote about a statement Sean Parker made:

“You actually don’t really want people thinking your product is cool. You don’t want people using your product because it is cool ’cause then you have a fad. What you want is people using your product because it is a part of their life and they can’t stop using it.”

And it made me think about two questions:

1. Is it possible to build such products on a regular basis? Obviously there are experiences that have become a part of our lives, a significant part. Facebook being one example. But there are only so many products that we can let into our lives. We have only so much time and attention. Noah King from the Barbarian Group explains this with his brilliant graph of the human interest. He also provides an answer on how to deal with out lack of attention and commitment: “By introducing new ideas frequently and regularly, it doesn’t change human behavior to be any less fickle, but it lets the overlapping interest graphs begin to resemble a more consistent smooth line.”

Image credit: Noah King

2. How do we know we’ve built something people can’t live without? Of course, we can look at traffic and number of page views, but those are vanity metrics that a.) can be easily skewed and b.) don’t give us a picture of how or why people engage with the experience we’ve created, or even if they actually engage with the experience. Yes, traffic can be high but that doesn’t mean that we’ve built something that has become a part of people’s lives. Often when we think of engagement, we think of measuring the number of comments, likes, shares, +1s, etc. But for the most part those are one time activities. As a user, I can’t like the same experience multiple times, at least Facebook doesn’t allow me to do that. I might not have anything to share in the form of a comment, but I might really enjoy the site/platform/app and keep coming back every day. So how do we know whether we are achieving our goal or not?

It’s important to track what Scott Cook from Intuit calls ”love metrics,” or what we marketing folks call “engagement metrics”- metrics that are better indicators of “how much people love the product, how often they come back, how delighted they are.” These are the metrics that are actionable and give us information about how people use our products and experiences. The two most common love metrics, IMHO, are loyalty (how many times a user visits the site) and recency (frequency with which visitors return to your site). Why those two? Because they show us whether and how often people are coming back. They show us whether we’ve built a great experience that people are turning into a part of their lives. Obviously those numbers can be skewed if the users reset their cookies, but usually the cookie life expires before the cookie gets deleted by the user.

I am not saying that those two metrics are all we need, on the contrary, as a measurement junkie, I think we need to look at multiple metrics to grasp the bigger picture and identify trends that arise from the way people interact with the experiences and make the appropriate adjustments. However, we shouldn’t get lost in vanity metrics that might make us feel or look good in front of the media or clients and focus on metrics that are actionable and give us enough information to tweak and change the experience to make it more delightful and meaningful.

And here’s a quote from Joel Lewenstein, a product designer at Quora:

“If I had to live with just one user engagement metric, it would be Visitor Recency

Visitor Recency measure how frequently your visitors return to your site. Specifically in Google Analytics, it looks at what percentage of your visitors come back each day, every other day, each week, etc. The reason I like this metric is that it’s crucial for building a meaningful web product, and it’s almost always a positive signal. If someone comes back to your site regularly each week, or even better each day, it means you’re becoming a regular and important part of their life. The problem with any other single metric is they can be the result of positive or negatives changes to your product:

Visits & pageviews are susceptible to all sorts of external factors, like SEO, SEM, press, seasonal traffic swings, etc. Bounce rate is dependent on the type of traffic you recruit, going up with things like SEO/SEM and down with directed traffic. Time On Site and Pages/Visit are good, but will oscillate with design changes, e.g. paginating long text articles will increase Pages/Visit without being any better for your site.

Ultimately the best indicator I’ve found of creating a truly great experience is whether people want to do it again. And again. And again and again as part of their daily routine. Visitor Recency is the best way to measure that.

*A number of caveats: Of course, to get a full idea of a site’s engagement you need a battery of metrics, not just one; My answer is for sites that don’t sell products, so I’m ignoring anything like “Conversion to Purchase”; I’ve restricted my set of choices to those available in Google Analytics, so as not to give some crazy, derived, business-specific metric, though that may be right for you; I have no idea how Facebook determines campus penetration, so I won’t presume to answer that part of the question.”

Using games as a guide to building strong brands

I love games. All kinds of games: from Monopoly and Capture the Flag to Angry Birds, FarmVille and massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Not because I play all of them. I wish. Because games and play are healthy for humans; they help us practice, develop skills and learn in a way that our brains prefer. Another reason why I love games is because they can provide us with a guide to building stronger brands.

No, I am not talking about using game mechanics and even dynamics to increase participation online or offline. I am talking about using the essentials that make games so attractive and applying them to building brands.

What makes games attractive?

Games, regardless of their level of complexity, are designed with deep understanding of human nature. Game designers understand us and how we behave in various situations. They know what motivates us and what makes us happy. They understand our world and create experiences to keep us entertained and engaged every day. They give us a chance to do something new and different every day, which isn’t a part of our lives, yet our brains are wired to seek novelty. But not only do games and game designers provide engaging experiences, they provide shared experiences that build relationships and communities. Games also allow us not just to tell a story, but to participate in the creation of the story. They give us an opportunity to piece the stories together in multiple ways that appeal to us. All these aspects of games add up to their biggest advantage, well after gaining skills, they allow us to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. They allow us to participate in something epic as much or as little as we want.

How does it apply to branding?

The human aspect of this business was probably what motivated me to join an agency. I believe that we need to understand people and the cultures and co-cultures within which they live. It’s not enough to just find a single insight that can guide creative work. We need to truly understand people, their behavior, and apply this knowledge to create and build businesses and brands.

Second, we need to create experiences, online and offline, that are engaging and exciting and give people an opportunity to create shared experiences and memories, thus building communities. This is an incredible opportunity for brands to become a part of culture and a part of people’s lives. These experiences can be anything: from Google+ hangouts to web and mobile tools and utilitainments, to small events, to challenges and grand events. It just needs to bring people together and give them an opportunity to do something new, something different.

Lastly, we need to think how each experience can be used to tell a part of the larger brand story. So far we’ve been pushing brand stories into various media channels. Now we need to use each experience (online and offline) to tell pieces of the brand story and let people put together the larger story. We need to learn how to create pieces that can tell a dynamic and coherent story, instead of creating consistent and repetitive pieces.

Image credit: Martin Weigel

Why?

People rarely care about brands. People aren’t even loyal to brands. (Read Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow.) We keep insisting that people care about our clients and love our clients, but the reality is that people rarely spare cognitive power to make a decision whether they prefer Brand A or Brand B. Robert Heath says “learning about brands is generally not seen as being very important. As a result we tend to process anything to do with brands at very low attention levels, using a process called Low Involvement Processing.” Instead of expecting people to engage in a pros/cons analysis of brands, we need to build brands that understand humans and become part of our lives, not just as products, but as experiences and stories. Brands are much more than just an image and a logo. It’s about coherence between what a brand says and what a brand does. It’s about joining the dots to create experiences because brands aren’t defined by positioning anymore; they are defined by the roles they play in people’s lives. Game theory seems to achieve this much better than the war approach we’ve been using so far.

More inspiration from Patagonia on the mindful/collaborative consumption front

Patagonia and eBay announced a new partnership, Common Threads Initiative, that encourages people to reduce, repair, reuse, recycle and reimagine, which means Patagonia is asking as not to buy its items unless we need them and preferably to buy used, to repair our items instead of buying new ones, to give away or resell our unwanted items and to be responsible with our consumption. Patagonia and eBay are creating a collaborative/mindful consumption platform that asks us to pledge to reduce consumption, reuse old gear, recycle, repair what’s broken, and reimagine a world where people don’t stress the earth with purchases.

Although I have written before about the business opportunities with collaborative consumption, this is more than just an attempt to increase profits, obviously, or a promotional initiative. It is a natural fit for a company that has been committed to reducing waste and being environmentally responsible for decades. Patagonia’s mission is “Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.” This initiative is another great example of bringing that mission statement to life.

Creating a framework for operational and strategic approach to using social networks

One problem I’ve had for a while was that I couldn’t explain the big picture and the bigger details behind using social media strategically in a quick and easy way. So for about a week I worked on a chart that attempts to show the different stages of using social media for brand and business building purposes and what exactly happens in each stage and who should be involved in each stage from the agency. The chart is far from perfect or complete, but it is my best attempt to explain how the different elements fit together.

Click on image to enlarge

A few notes:

It’s a dynamic, ongoing and adaptive process. It should be our goal to build smart systems that use feedback from measurement reports to improve the the content, the platforms, the structure, the teams and even the entire approach.
We should always start with the community and content (based on the purpose) first and then find the right platforms.
We should look beyond Facebook and Twitter and, if appropriate, create own social experiences and be social online and offline.
There should be an attempt to have a community manager from the agency even if the client has five community managers in-house.
We need to measure more than just likes and RTs and look at campaign, brand and business impact and gain valuable community and platform insights.
We need to look at using social (media) holistically, not just as a marketing tool, but as a business strategy and as a part of the organizational culture.

What I still need to figure out:

How to draw attention to the importance of ongoing education and training (part of structure/management’s processes) without making the chart inconsistent in terms of levels of depth?
How can we measure the impact of internal communication via social networks on the business?