Brands aren’t grown in labs

CHANGI AIRPORT, SINGAPORE – It’s said that the best tightrope walkers refuse to use a safety harness. This is because they insist on knowing that they, and only they themselves, can be relied upon to save them in a fall. The device itself is counter-productive; and, in fact, it can fail.

Great creative work is similar. It exists in that indefinable area between the Humanities and Science. For the scientific method, if not Science, will always seek to deliver predictable, reproducible results. Good if you want to boil a kettle of water, but a lot less so if you want to create something truly remarkable. The scientific method by its nature eliminates variables, systematically. This control is fine in the laboratory, but can be self-defeating if the objective is to generate something extraordinary, revolutionary or, by definition, evolutionary in a creative sense. .

This is where the Humanities and Liberal Arts, with all their imprecision, find their wings and infuse spirit into ideas. The intersection between science and the humanities is where good truly becomes great, and great becomes inspired. The introduction of variables, sometimes random, is what results in variation and evolution that gives us the most remarkable things in creation. Variables separate us from primordial ooze. And it’s therefore harder. Less certain. Intuition has no atomic weight, no equation, no definable process (though many have tried, and failed, to try to give it one).

So the pursuit of something more – great, not good; breakthrough quality, not mediocre goodness – requires a surrendering of all (well, much) of what is scientific and predictable. The ability to get to a place where 2+2 = purple, not 2+2=5. Five is safe. But purple is magnificent. And it tastes a hell of a lot better when you look at it from a distance, later.

And one thing the scientists don’t want you to know: the ability to predict the reproducibility of results doesn’t guarantee a goddamn thing. Maybe worse; the confidence it provides is a phantasm: nothing is certain. Even the best algorithm in the universe chewing big data won’t guarantee you a penny in the bank. A pseudo-scientific method putting process as an end, not a means that yields the same creative result time and again will not yield the answer that got you to ask the question in the first place.

Four types of social media participation

LONDON – Although there are several models out there, it’s easy to observe clear typologies of social media participants – and a person can fit in any category at any given time:

1.  Creators – Those who generate content – ideally quality content, which is harder to find.

2.  Commenters – Those who comment on content created or shared by others.

3.  Sharers – Those who share content generated by others,

4.  Connectors – or integrators – those who take created, commented and/or shared content and turn it into something new; a hybrid of 1,2, and 3.

 

For my purposes, its the 4s who add the most value, although the whole mix can only function if all the roles are covered…

 

Meet me on LinkedIn.

Another corker from Jim Clifton at Gallup

LONDON – I tend to refer to Gallup Management Journal a fair bit to find data and thinking that supports advice I give to clients and to inform my thinking about the world of Brand & Talent.

In his post “Good to Great? Or Lousy to Good?” he makes a brilliant point about organisations who hit the numbers through selling (and losing) customers based on price alone.

Company leaders talk a good game about growth at state-of-the-company speeches. But then they go right back to their offices and continue okaying new contract lows to hold customers or win replacement business. They do this largely because Wall Street has not really caught onto the deep implications of organic growth and how to spot it, even though it remains the best single metric to predict sustainable growth, sustainable profit, and share growth. If someone said to me, “In your 30 years of studying customer data, what is the indicator or single metric that is the key to buying or selling stock?” My answer would be, “Same-customer sales.“

Have a look here…

And … note this article is more than 5 years old.

Meet me on LinkedIn.

London Sunday Telegraph supplement on employee engagement

Good gaggle of articles circling Macleod … including one by yours truly.  Interesting to see the different “tones of voice” taken with some of the authors … some speaking to the C-suite, others talking to their peers in the industry it seems … Sunday Telegraph Business Reporter 

Vanity commenting

We’ve all seen it:  a blog posting or a LinkedIn Group discussion amongst a community of interest, and in the middle of the discussion comes a comment – usually from an agency / consultancy to be fair – that is more for the benefit of self-promotion than contributing to the discussion.

To be fair, all of us are now in the business of managing and building our personal brands, particularly in the social media space – and part of that includes participating in the conversation economy.  I’m sure I’m guilty of “ego commenting” myself.

But I’d argue that if the “ego posters” aren’t careful, just as with any other brand and marketing communications, their attempts could be counter productive.

Some examples: Bob responds to a post about X with a tenuous link opening door to a monologue about his experience as a general manager in the defence industry – a thinly veiled attempt to demonstrate high level trusted advisor status.  Janet sends a hilarious email to several people who know Bob and his (ahem) propensity for self-aggrandisement – “Good thing we have Bob around so we can all sleep at night.”  Just like with a business or consumer brand, your brand exists in the minds of your audience.  Everything you say or do has an effect, sometimes not the intended one.

Another example:  A client (Davina) gets a glowing write-up in the trade press spurring a discussion about the way she’s dealt with a challenge. The discussion is by and large about the technique at hand and exploring the idea – but of course there are a couple of posts from Niall (and the group is well aware of Niall’s combination of sanctimonious lecturing coupled with delusions of competence) that seem more interested in (a) subtly knocking down Davina and (b) implying that if Niall had been in charge, things would have been done a lot better and more effectively.  Once again, the emails do the rounds and Niall’s brand is further damaged.

On the other hand, there are examples where someone shares a really insightful personal story.  For example, the discussion on topic X is heading in one direction when Gary puts forth a simple and quite touching remark redirecting the conversation into totally new territory.  Gary’s brand equity rises exponentially with a single, sharp intervention.

Now these might be a slightly apocryphal, but that’s how communities communicate and social communication happens.

What are your comments and posts like?  I’ve got it wrong plenty of times (no shortage of self promotion, vanity, or ego here I’m afraid).  But I do now strive to think – Is this comment for them, or is it for me?

Nokia memo: two learnings

See here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12403466

Learning 1 - sometimes a leak is just a leak. This is different.  This is a frank and honest leadership communication to employees that, make no mistake, was released on the assumption it would go external.  So it adds credence to the dissolving internal/external silo mentality CommScrummers bang on about.  This was distributed to all staff.

Learning 2 - it fits the emerging zeitgeist that old-world spin is no longer a valid approach to leadership communication.  This memo is a call to action.  It’s not a fluffy engagement campaign attached to an annual survey aiming to measure a 1% improvement in discretionary effort of employees.  The proverbial burning platform that might just galvanise behaviours in a way no tribal social media campaign or town hall meeting with worksheets ever could (not that those might be good follow us…) 

It would be good to see more like it.  Interesting to see how it progresses … watch this space.

2011 Predictions

Dateline Bayswater, London, UK — 2010 was a healthily schizophrenic year. 

A remarkable amount of fragmentation ran alongside consolidation in the world of communication and technology.  An identifiable chasm began to open between the “old world” and “new world”, with many “old worlders” taking a look left and right and saying “Bugger this!” and making the leap across.  Many didn’t. 

The chasm widened. 

Those on the other side seem content that they’d dodged the change, that it was all a bunch of hyperbole and we can now return to originally scheduled programming.  Oh, wait … where are they?  Those specks in the distance?  I can barely hear them now, faint voices on the wind …

What lies ahead?

1)  The concept of the ‘segmented audience’ will die – long live tribes!  In more than a semantic sense, (i.e., not just the emperor’s new clothes) decade-old tribal theory will come to fruition.  Some have been there for a while … in a consumer marketing and branding sense …  but this will cross over into employee communications and even corporate branding and communication.   (Yeah, I ‘got it’ when it came out … only now I think we can believe it.)

2) People will wake up that “social media” that isn’t … isn’t.  Taking my cues from sources ranging from Mike Klein’s upcoming 55-Minute Guide; to Fortune and Fast Company; forgetting Wired and technology rags … and to-remain-unnamed “gurus” … now that the smoke is clearing companies and their “social media” leaders will realise that if it’s about a specific platform or technology, it isn’t technically social media.  The technology is an enabler.  It’s more important to get it to work to deliver the social side that matters.  Which leads to …

3) … a return to short, sharp, interruptive ‘campaigns’.  My colleagues at SAS will debate this with me, but I think given a world where “tribes” are the centre of focus and media must be social … there’s still presence and content to be considered, on which community and dialogue are built.  Tribes (which are a new and improved kind of audience, right?) want to be communicated with on their terms.  I’m not saying 30 second spots or internal branding initiatives.  I’m saying focussed and issue-driven “365 micro-campaigns across platforms aimed at the base-jumping billionaire spelunker” set.  (Thanks Batman)… and yet …

4) Big ideas will still matter.  In utter contradiction to points 2 and 3 in particular, and against the zeitgeist of the brand literati, organisations (and potentially Tribes too) will still hunger for the bigger, unifying idea.  It might be at the END of the conversation as an outcome we are led to – a destination rather than a vision – but we’ll still need it.  we’ll hunger for it.  And that big meaning will need to be authentic.  Hmmn.  Watch this space.

5) Sell your shares in big employee survey companies.  Invest the proceeds in analytics.  The data machines of yesteryear will have to give up the ghost and breathe spirit into shorter, sharper, smarter (and much, much more complicated – while at lower cost and higher speed) solutions.  The 24-7 conversation economy waits for no annual employee opinion survey.  Buh-bye!

6) HR process outsourcing will continue apace.  A no-brainer, perhaps, but the outsourcing pendulum (scythe?) continues its swing in this particular discipline.  But … and it’s a big but … HR (having morphed into Talent Acquisition and Management) will get its hands firmly back around Employer Brand and EVP as a strategic, joined-up business process.  Cue Employer Brand 2.0… which leads to …

7) … an (potentially misguided) emphasis on the ‘EVP inside’.  The message has been received: Employer Brand is not just about external reputation and Talent Attraction.  The risk: leave unfinished as “too hard” cracking the external manifestation of the EVP and instead put all of your energy into making sure it is working internally with your existing employees.  It’s both!!! 

8)  Smartphone apps applied to internal communication.  No brainer, but you saw it here first.  I hope.  So that smart-arse who just beat you on a pitch by waving around an iPhone … might have had a point. It’s the tribe, stupid.  See 2 & 3 above…

9) More face to face.  Leave your Smartphone at the door.  Good old-fashioned a-talkin’.  Leader and managers in particular will be required to invest the premium effort and time required to face to face communication (conversation, not broadcasting, and including listening and intelligent responses), and they will need support.

10) External channels for internal communications . Perhaps a no-brainer, but using YouTube for internal comms is already well underway (I’ve just done it with a big, arguably “old world” organisation … let’s see how it works …) but why invest in platforms when they already exist?  It’s the tribe, stupid.

Thanks to Mary Boone, Mike Williams, Geoff Barbaro, Adam Hibbert, Indy Neogy, Dan Gray, Soli Townsend, and especially Mike Klein for inspiring me this year – even if they don’t realise they have.

2010 Predictions assessed

From last year – self-assessment of my predictions for 2010.  Short assessment: my worst year for predictions.

1)  Employee engagement spend, recruitment spend will increase. SCORE: 50%.  Compared to 2009, the tap opened again.  As usual, my prediction was ahead of itself as Q4 and Q1 really took off.

2) Free content will (really) begin to replace over-priced Intellectual Property such as specialist publishers in non-traditional channels (for example, Forrester, Melcrum, IABC, etc.).   SCORE: 50%.  Well … sort of.  With the big exception of Rupert Murdoch’s experiment, which seems like it might succeed and change the game for traditional online publishing.  On the other hand, LinkedIn Groups are having a positive impact on users particularly around professional associations – perhaps less positively for the publishers.

3) Small and exclusive will replace big, blingy and mass market, big time.   SCORE:  50%.  American Express campaign is a good indicator, “secret gigs” have become as much a must have as O2 arena tickets.  But we have some way to go.

5) People will finally “get” PTT (Push To Talk) – and wonder why they didn’t use it 5 years ago when it was available on most handsets.  SCORE: 0%, at least in my world. 

6) Concentrated, tactical, ephemeral “microbranding” will begin to dislodge cumbersome and time consuming branding approaches – both corporate and consumer.  SCORE:  25%.  Starting to see some evidence.  But not a lot.

7) The business book press will slowly begin to realise that people will pay for insightful brevity.  We’ll see more 50-100 page books like Zag, The Brand Gap, The Talent Journey, Live Long and Prosper, etc. entering publishing schedules toward the end of the year and fewer pseudo-academic tomes of more than 200 pages.  SCORE:  50%.  Yes there is evidence but hard to gauge against blogs, internet sites etc.

8. ) Google will stumble and lose its way (they may then recover, we’ll see). SCORE:  25%.  Sort of but not in a big way.

9)  Powered by the wonderful success of Avatar, interactive experiences will begin to also gain traction in the corporate setting as well as in consumer home theatre and gaming. Invest now in 3D display companies… SCORE:  25%.  3D consumer TVs are out now … but 2011 might be the year.

10)  Connecting internal comms to employer brand will gain mainstream acceptance, for example, internal comms about HR actually looking like and saying similar things to recruitment media.  SCORE:  50%.  Many of our clients are really taking a more holistic and inside out approach, or at least starting to and realising the turf challenges this presents.

Has it all been said already?

I suspect it has and the debate is mostly about semantics and definition of terms.

Reshaping organisations to fit reality

LONDON – I’ve had several intriguing conversations recently with fellow CommScrummer Dan Gray as well as some high-profile people in the innovation and sustainability areas. Adam Hibbert and I also traded comments on a recent CommScrum post.

The gist of it has been that the reason we form companies/organisations is that putting different skills together is theoretically a better way to do things thatn operating independently.  This idea is so core to commerce that Adam Smith’s quote about the division of labour in pin manufacturing adorns the £20 note.

But a lot of us are beginning to believe that organisational silos – with deep irony – are presenting a robust challenge to this whole assumption.  Insourcing, outsouring, rightsourcing - the pendulum is always swinging back and forth as businesses struggle to get the mix right.  But at the same time they don’t ever actually challenge their own fundamental structures.  Some companies (GORE TEX, Patagonia and doubtless others) have started thinking differently with some success.

Elizabeth Ross Kantor (see blog comment here) has a new book out, which I haven’t bought or read (ahem) but it has been summarised as follows:

1. An enterprise has to be defined in terms of how it serves society; it must integrate all employees and stakeholders around this purpose.

2. Innovation is both the way you make money and how you serve society. The more you innovate to solve social problems, the more profitable and sustainable you will be. This is your innovation advantage.

3. The ecosystem around a company is key to its success. This is what Kanter calls the partnership advantage. No company can succeed without being part of a network of other companies and organizations.

4. The last point, according to Kanter, is,  in fact, the first one: It’s about people. A key dimension of the social and business changes we see today concerns the value shift.

So the question is – can a different organisational structure be developed?  One where juvenile turf protection (by not so juvenile 40-something Directors seeking to fatten their positions, not to mention pensions) is minimised and a more stakeholder-centred, issue-centred, and dare I say sustainability-centred model is at play?  One where Brand won’t “block” a Human Resource initiative on the principle that they “own” brand?

While I have a deep belief that we need to solve the world’s sustainability issues at a very deep and human level, I also am pragmatic enough (or maybe read too much John Locke) to believe that appealing to people’s better nature won’t do it, particularly when trying to influence those with influence – e.g. CEOs and political leaders etc.  Given the choice between saving a hummingbird species or pocketing an extra £1 million I wouldn’t bank on the humming bird, I am saddened to say.  But at the same time, “good” sustainability thinking – that is, seeing sustainability as far more than just “green” stuff, and seeing it as a way to eliminate waste in the system (from supply chain to environmental impact to carbon footprint to talent), is all about plain good business.

Perhaps this would be a good session to consider for CommScrum’s live event planned for January 2011.  If so, dibs.