.

This U.K. car leasing site is ugly. It's like taking a brutal time trip to 1998. Flashing animations, banners, crazy fonts and headings… but it works! How well? The little business that Ling Valentine, a Chinese immigrant, started with her husband leases around £35 million worth of cars each year. Ling gets commission on each one, but she gets more than that. Her business gets reactions and loyalty from her customers: check out these letters.

Ling's Cars embodies the best advice anyone could take in creating a remarkable word-of-mouth business: whatever else you do, don't be boring. The whole site is driven by Ling's manic personality and sense of humor. Her business is a classic example of Seth Godin's purple cow – the distinctive, compelling business that is just different.

How many other ecommerce sites let you play hangman with car model names? Or let customers contribute their car lease-related poetry? Ling is a born self-publicist and knows how to make things fun for her customers. My favorite thing on the site is the hilarious build guide for the "Nuclear Missile Truck" that she created to advertise her site.

Under it all, of course, is a rock-solid business: the site boasts of quick response to customers and an efficient order handling process, all driven by software that Ling designed herself.

Can you imagine wanting to visit, much less talk about and share, a car leasing site? Me neither… but somehow Ling makes it work!

For more information or to register, go here. The dinner is $20 in advance, $30 at the door. Hope you can make it!

Find Your Social Brand

In this time of change, companies are questioning almost everything about how they find and reach customers. As they shift their marketing plan, budget, and priorities towards social media, however, they often overlook the most critical element of all: the brand itself.

Why are so few companies and brands remarkable? What does it mean to have a truly social brand? Please join us for a compelling discussion of ideas for improving your brand and social media efforts. I'll cover the following:

• The most common branding mistake
• How to adapt your traditional branding for social spaces
• Why so many brands have lost their voice (and how to get it back)
• The 3 attributes of a social brand
• How to create conversations around your brand
• The right way to measure online brand performance.

We love predictions. There's something about the transition from one year to another that makes us all want to try our hand at telling the future.

We're not very good at this business of predicting what's going to happen… And we're particularly bad about understanding how technology will change our world. When we predict the future, we don't imagine the next disruptive thing, we think about what we have today, just faster and better. We don't foresee the Internet; we imagine pneumatic tubes that go really, really fast.

Some great examples of smart people making spectacularly off-the-mark predictions on new technology:

Radio has no future.
-Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, 1897

Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?
-H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
-Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943

640K ought to be enough for anybody.
-Bill Gates, 1981

Today, our culture and industry are clearly changing at record speed. As social technologies and new forms of communication become more popular, they are affecting how how interact and reach our audiences in fundamental ways. Chances are, however, our efforts to predict these long-term impacts are no better than those of the experts who came before us.

Now that I got that out of the way… here are my thoughts on the top trends I think will influence our business over the next five years.

1. Customers revolt over privacy

I see this trend gaining momentum and forcing us to change the way we work. Almost everything we've done here as brands and companies has been relatively superficial; offering opt-in vs. opt-out, for example, or changing the way we manage and secure customer data. Compared to the challenges ahead, however, we have simply been playing at the edges of what will be a much bigger set of challenges. The issue of privacy in the Google age goes far deeper and quickly leads to thorny issues.

Who owns information and data about a customer? Under what circumstances can it be shared? If inaccurate or damaging information is shared on a website or social network controlled by a company, what are its responsibilities? Can businesses make hiring decisions based on what they find online about an individual? Companies simply aren't prepared for the cultural, legal and technological challenges they will face in the years to come. I look for customers to demand increased accountability from the brands and services they interact with, and for that challenge to shape the way we reach and market to customers.

2. Marketers learn to manage complexity

Marketing has never been simple, but the core challenges underlying it – find, reach, and persuade customers – have always been straightforward. Certainly, as new technology and media offered us more possibilities for reaching and interacting with customers, our work has become more complex. I believe we are now, however, at a critical tipping point in terms of complexity.

Think about what is involved in having even the smallest product and business today. You still need everything you've always needed – a great product or service, a compelling message, a good understanding of your customers. But now you need a whole new set of things, all of which matter. A great website. A social presence that fits your customers. A content plan to keep them interested in your business. The ability to show up in search engines, so they can find you. Diligent tracking of your brand and reputation online, and the ability and resources to enter into conversations where necessary.

Can one person carry the load of marketing a small usiness on their own anymore? In some cases, even a small team might not be enough. We're entering the age of specialization, as even small companies turn to SEO experts, content people, web design folks, outreach marketing experts, and so on.

The challenge over the years ahead will be to manage that complexity without fragmenting resources and losing the unifying thread of customer experience.

3. Focusing on the 95%

Think of your customers as falling on a bell curve of technology and social media adoption. Companies today face overwhelming temptation to serve the top 5% of passionate, engaged, responsive customers. Over the years to come, marketers will have to learn to serve the other 95%.

The argument for serving the 5% goes something like this. After decades of wondering what our customers think of us, and paying market research experts to help us find out, we suddenly have access to the unfiltered, honest perspective of real customers. We need to do everything to understand them, and adapt our product, message and activities to suit them.

The problem: for most brands, particularly non-technology brands, that 5% is not representative of the great mass of your customers. The people who are most active on your blog, or Twitter feed, or who talk the most about you, may not behave at all like the ones who are driving your sales. But because you don't have the same access to those customers, you make it all about the 5%, and push through major changes to your brand and service to accommodate them.

Here' s a lesson we all need to learn, in this age of increased customer feedback: you can't please everyone. A while back, to prove this point, I did a few searches online that began with the words, "I hate ___." "I hate the Salvation Army" pulls up 87,000 hits; "I hate the Red Cross" 166,000. Even "I hate puppies" returns over 230,000 hits. 

Successful brands will have to figure out how to temper the feedback they get online and focus on the needs of their core customers. This will be a key challenge for our business in the years to come.

Check out the other panelists:

• Meredith L. Eaton, Blog Panel – Part 3: Public Relations Past 2010
• Frank Strong, Blog Panel Part III: Outlook for PR Beyond 2010
• John Sidline, link coming soon
  

This post is part of a blog panel discussion I'm having with Meredith Eaton, John Sidline, and Frank Strong.  All four of us are blogging on the same topics on the same day.  My first post was on the biggest lesson of 2009; this post focuses on how I see marketers reacting to that challenge in 2010.

If 2009 was the year when marketers saw their audiences slip out of their control, 2010 will be the year they begin to reengage them. How? Smart companies will start finding ways to take their brands into social spaces effectively… using the following approaches:

1. Target wisely

In my ongoing effort to make marketing sound as much like bad country music (is there any other kind?), I call this the Love the Ones Who Love You Back Rule. Instead of starting from the traditional marketing premise – “Whom do we most want to reach?” – companies will learn to ask, “Who cares about us today?”

Social media is fueled by passion and value. It is so much easier to start with a community that already feels some degree of connection with your brand, and then nurture and expand that passion outwards to other audiences, than it is to try to go straight to your highest-value audience. Be realistic about your brand -  who really has an interest in you today? What can you do to get them to care and interact more? What is it they value, and how can you give them more of it?

2. Enter the right conversations

In 2009, companies discovered how critical it was that they begin to play in social spaces. Typically they stayed pretty close to home, engaging in core-brand (product blogs, executive comms blogs, product-focused viral media, etc.) that tie back closely to current perceptions of their company and brand. And we’ll see much more of this in 2010, as companies get more comfortable and effective in social spaces.

More interesting, however, will be the trend towards engaging in brand-adjacent conversations. This means engaging audiences who might have no interest in your core brand, but who care about a social issue or topic in which your company has both credibility and the ability to contribute. As an example, many tech companies, including Microsoft, have active online communities focused on their work in emerging markets to help improve access to technology and education. This expands their brand concept to a new, broader audience. The key is to pick something that is related in some way to your brand and to offer real contributions – not self-serving PR or marketing content.

3. Understand what's really "social" about your brand

In 2010, I think companies will realize how limited their traditional expressions of brand have been, and start sharing the real, more compellingly social aspects of their company.

Here’s what your brand isn’t: your logo, taglines, brand statement, corporate boilerplate, product positioning, or anything with the words “framework,” “guideline,” or “policy” in it. Here’s what your brand is: your people, ideas, innovations, contributions, and motivations. Chances are, none of those are expressed in your current brand concept… or at least not expressed well.

The hardest thing for companies will be understanding that this brand shift isn't like those of the past – it can't be engineered in a conference room by your brand experts. It is more about discovering the real personality and value of your company, and figuring out how to communicate  through non-intrusive interaction with your audiences. On the most fundamental level, companies are about ideas, products and people. The challenge of 2010, indeed of the next decade, will be for marketers to design and manage social experiences that express this more complex brand identity.

4. Unlock the gate

And leave it unlocked. In fact, it's time to take this gate completely off of its hinges. This is the gate that you are carefully shutting on your customers every time they interact with your company.

Take a quick pass through a few corporate blogs, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages. Count the number of times you see:

• Links to sites and social networks outside of the company's control
• Mention of the ideas and products of other companies and ideas
• Acknowledgment and discussion of anything negative or challenging about the company.

We're still a lot better about paying lip service to the need to interact honestly with our customers, than we are at actually doing it. Most corporate social presences are carefully controlled and filtered, and they suffer for it.

To change this, we'll have to get past two mental blocks. First, the idea in PR and marketing that you spin away from negatives, rather than either challenge them head-on or acknowledge and apologize for them. Second, the notion that the customers who visit our emerging social presences might desert us if we discuss and link to other ideas and resources – even those of our competitors.

The gate's not working. It's not holding back our customers from discovering what we would rather ignore, and it's certainly not helping us build valuable social presences by thinking of our "user communities" as private fiefdoms.

Check out the other panelists:

• Meredith L. Eaton, Blog Panel – Part 2: How Social Media Will Shape 2010
• Frank Strong, Blog Panel Part II: How Adaptation Will Shape PR Thinking in 2010
• John Sidline, link coming soon
  

I believe we'll remember 2009 as the year marketers lost control. The idea of control – that you can engineer a brand and message, and make people accept that brand and message – is at the heart of most people's definition of marketing. If that idea isn't dead already, it's clearly not long for this world.

How much influence did we ever really have? Maybe less than we thought. Years ago I worked for a market research company that put on focus groups. I would sit with the clients on the other side of the one-way mirror as they listened to the customers and the moderator. The focus group audiences were recruited to fit cleanly into a certain type – Young Suburban Moms, Small Business Decision Makers, or whatever. The clients were product managers or brand managers in big companies. They would sit in small, eager clusters, reacting to what they heard either with satisfaction or frustration. Mostly frustration.

"That concept is SIMPLY NOT resonating."  "Let's dial up the first message in the next group."  And sometimes: "Did you see what that last woman was wearing? Were those sweatpants?"

The guiding philosophy of the marketing focus group could be summed up as, We Need to Find What Works With These Damn People. If we could find just the right message – the magic brand statement, or product tagline – and deliver it in just the right way, we win the customer. This idea puts the marketer firmly in control, and it's one we've been living with for a long time. Ever since the concept of brand first surfaced in the fifties, if you were in the business of persuading customers to care about your product or company, you had to:

• find the right target customers
• deliver a compelling message
• repeat to build brand equity.

These simple-sounding tasks, of course, have never been simple. From the rudimentary beginnings of advertising and branding in the fifties and sixties, we progressed all the way to the current age of database marketing, one-on-one marketing, and sophisticated mega-brands. Branding and marketing became equal parts art and science, using advanced quantitative measures to track and measure customer perceptions. But as far as we'd come, the game was still: find them, tell them, tell them again.

In 2009, this stopped being enough. This was the year two related trends finally collided: customers' increased ability to interact and exchange information, and diminished tolerance for traditional push marketing. These have combined to drive a massive, and in my opinion permanent, shift in influence away from paid media and towards earned media. Technologies and social spaces will change and evolve, but this shift will endure, because it satisfies something fundamental to human beings: a craving for connection and authenticity.

You can think of paid media as what we say about ourselves, and earned media as what others say about us. A good measure of how far the balance has swung towards towards earned media: just in terms of sheer volume online, brand-generated content is now dwarfed by data feeds and social feeds about our brands… by a ratio of a least 500:1. The voice of the marketer has been drowned out by the voice of the community.

Where do we go from here? The truth is that most brands simply don't have much to say that is compelling in this new, more social age. Traditional marketing has betrayed us – our carefully crafted messaging statements and brand concepts are exactly the wrong thing here. Most brands today are flat and two-dimensional, bereft of any real personality or human interest. Even worse, many companies have entire teams – the so-called "brand cops" – dedicated to keeping these brands as sterile and uninteresting as possible.

What's ahead for us all: to be effective in social spaces, companies will have to change completely the way they think not just about their brand, but about the very act of persuasion and influence that underlies the entire marketing concept. And it will start by recognizing the obvious: we are no longer in control.

Check out the other panelists:

• Meredith L. Eaton, Blog Panel – Part 1: 2009’s Biggest PR Lessons Learned
• Frank Strong, Blog Panel Part I: Biggest Lesson of 2009
• John Sidline, Back to Basics: The PR Biggest Lesson Learned During a Tumultuous 2009

I had a great time presenting at the International Association of Business Communicators' Silicon Valley chapter… what a smart, engaged audience! You can check out my slides here:

I presented with Chris Boudreaux of Socialmediagovernance.com and Accenture. Chris focused on the tension between empowerment and control that companies confront as they try to organize and manage social media. Many want to empower employees but they also have to put rules and policies around these new social spaces.

I focused on a related, but largely ignored tension within the brand itself. How much do companies keep of their traditional brand? How much needs to be replaced or expanded, to accommodate this new more social age?

I really think we're seeing the end of the classic brand era, which we've been living with in some form since the concept of brand really hit in the 1950s. The classic marketing mission used to be:

• Find your customer
• Tell them about your brand
• Build brand equity through constant repetition.

The problem is that customers are no longer listening to marketers. They are listening to each other, and tuning out the two-dimensional brand messages thrown their way. As a customer with so many options for information, why should I care what a brand has to say? Particularly when it is simply repeating the same old narrow, one-way messages?

Brands have become boring and closed-off, so tightly controlled by their owners that they invite no human interest or interaction. In my talk, I explore why brands are in this situation, and how they can:

• Move away from their emphasis on brand control
• Embrace the people, ideas and causes behind their companies and brands
• Find new ways to interact in social spaces that fit their target audiences and brand personality.

Thoughts? Comments?

Krim

Presenting: a marketing fantasy in three parts…

WORK LIFE

Several young, attractive, well-dressed men and women of various ethnic backgrounds are gathered around a conference table. A slightly older, distinguished-looking man is addressing them, a thoughtful expression on his face.

BOSS

…So as you see from this chart we have just over two months left of cash flow, and diminishing customer orders. Any suggestions?

FIRST MAN

Well, I found this website for a vendor that says their software can solve all of our problems.

BOSS, whips off his glasses:

ALL of them? Wait, how do they support this claim?

FIRST MAN

Well, they have a mission statement on their home page that says that their software is "industry-leading." And I downloaded a white paper that is… oh… 27 pages in tiny font. Also – and I think this is what convinced me – they have a Flash product demo.

WOMAN

Does it explain how the product works, what it costs, and how it would impact a business like us?

FIRST MAN

No, but it has some nice animation and features really cute little people icons.

BOSS

I'm convinced! Sign us up!

Everyone nods happily.

HOME LIFE

The setting: it's morning in the Brown household. BRAD, SHEILA, and ADORABLE CHILD are gathered around the breakfast table. The soft light of the morning sun is filtering through the window.

BRAD:

I am really liking this orange juice. It's more orange-y than regular orange juice… It's got this super orange kick to it.

SHEILA

Let me try. Oh my gosh – you can definitely taste the orange in there. I feel like I'm actually in an orange grove right now. I'm running through the trees, I can feel their leaves touching my skin now. It feels amazing.

BRAD

It feels like it's a hot day, and I'm diving into a cold, pure pool of orange juice. It feels so right, like I'm going home.

ADORABLE CHILD

I wanna twy da owanj joooz!

Everyone laughs. SHEILA wipes away a single tear of pure joy.

SHEILA

I forgive you for the affair.

TEEN LIFE

Setting: a high school. Two pretty girls are chatting in the hallway as students come and go around them.

FIRST GIRL

OH MY GOSH you have got to see some of these super-cool interactive brand assets that Brian sent me last night.

SECOND GIRL

Really? I was also interacting with some totally engaging social media brand presences last night. Did you Facebook-friend those new digital brand assets that he sent you? They sound SO fierce!

FIRST GIRL

I really like it when companies try to create edgy, teen-savvy content and rich, interactive web experiences. I feel like most brands just get me.

SECOND GIRL

Me too!!!!

They giggle and high-five for no apparent reason.

Also – and I’m not sure about this – I believe there may be a phone involved somehow.

After a few times seeing this ad I was ready to throw something at the screen. This whole episode led me to two questions:

• Is this some sort of little-known jobs program by the Chinese government to find post-Olympics employment for the gymnasts from the Beijing opening ceremonies?
• If you have a compelling product (and they do – I played with one recently, it’s great) why not feature it more prominently?

Sometimes marketers can outsmart themselves. Highly abstract advertising definitely has a place, but it’s been done better elsewhere and is not the best choice for Palm. Ultimately they do very little in these ads to address why the Pre is better than the two main competitors: the iPhone or Blackberry.

This overproduced, strident advertising has attracted plenty of attention and even spoofs. There is a school of thought that any buzz is good; but for a product in Palm’s position, in a clear trailing position behind two dominant market leaders, this isn’t good enough. They’ve done their brand a disservice by dialing up the abstract, lifestyle-statement aspect of the campaign at the expense of any tangible demonstration of the product.
 

Brand Transformation: Banana Republic from Patrick Doherty on Vimeo.