After the Battle of Big Thinking a couple of weeks back, I've been doing some pondering on the nature of 'brand', and why (in some cases at least) this notion of 'brand' is now more of a hinderance than a help.
(For a quick recap, you can read & hear the presentation here)
i) A brief history...
I keep coming back to the fact that 'brand' was developed as a device for another age.
Interesting, complex, diverse organisations had to compress all of the interesting information into a 'statement of best fit' that would travel through the mass media system.
'Brand' of course could be many things; at it's simplest, it's a mark of consistent quality, a guarantee of a product inside that was as good as the last time you bought it...
...and at it's most complex, it's a 'transformational' device which lent the product intangible value when someone was drinking it because they believed in the 'brand', not just the product inside.
Which is why Coca-Cola always beat Pepsi in taste comparisons when you could see the brand, and Pepsi won out when the brands were hidden in the blind taste 'Pepsi Challenge'...
(If you don't know about the disaster that was 'New Coke' that came about because of the Pepsi Challenge, read about it here)
By and large, Paul Feldwick's description of brands as...
'a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer'
...held true.
People learned about brands through advertising in between the mass media entertainment they watched, read and listened to.
That 'collection of perceptions', if you skipped from person to person, would be largely the same.
Which is the principle we built our industry upon...
ii) Compress & Repeat
Advertising, Media, PR, even Digital to some extent... we all still are bound in by this construct of 'brand'.
We get together in rooms with and for our clients, and make the best sense of it we can, so that we can compress things down, and create and disseminate endless repeats of that simplification.
Which is when we get to places like this...
"...we are currently in a brand anchoring process where a brand cube will be formulated"
(something Ben overheard and put in his twitter stream today)
What the fuck does that even mean? We should step back and listen to ourselves sometimes...
Anyway, here's the thing... we create these brand pyramids and onions and cubes and so on like everyone is still holding the same set of perceptions as everyone else in their heads.
The brand cube probably worked enough when everyone thought the same three things about a brand, and it let agencies get on and do stuff.
But nowadays I fear that trying to compress and repeat leads to us discounting and throwing away great ideas that would deliver value, just because it doesn't precisely match the rest of the luggage.
We're still missing the fact that people are not as homogenous as they once were.
iii) The jar of marbles
Where once people were all exposed to a limited set of information largely via mass media, nowadays we have so many different sources of information about companies and products (not least each other), that the notion of 'a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer' is redundant.
Imagine the 'collection of perceptions' in your head for a brand were like marbles in a jar.
When the different kinds of marbles that existed were limited (and companies & agencies were in control of what the marbles looked like), then you could go around every marble jar in the land, and find a limited number of variations on a theme.
Now, Jeremy Bullmore said in a 2001 lecture that 'no two people, however similar, hold precisely the same view of the same brand'. So maybe we always knew that, as an industry...
...but in the mass media landscape, the variations were limited enough that creating a central 'brand' based on five marbles was good enough... people were likely to have at least three of those marbles in their jar.
Nowadays, there are ever-increasing numbers of marbles about your 'brand' that people can collect and store. Only a minority of them are designed by you, or distributed by you. The rest come from Amazon reviews, facebook updates, mumsnet posts, videojug instructions...
...the list goes on, but what it adds up to is a jar of a lot more (and a lot more varying) marbles in everybody's head.
Which means that trying to create a brand campaign that has 'five marbles' to it is increasingly unlikley to resonate in as many heads.
So what do we do now?
I don't think that the first part of Feldwick's notion of the brand as a 'collection of perceptions' is the 'hindrance' nowadays.
Instead, it's the phrasing of the back half... "in the mind of the consumer".
In the past, we assumed all consumers were they same. So we assumed the perceptions across their minds were the same.
Which meant we built 'five marble brands'... everything conformed to this 'matching luggage' theory.
It's not 'brand' that's the hindrance.
It's the way agencies and marketers think about (and produce marbles for) brands.
v) Some solutions
There are lots of thinks I think you could suggest doing to break this institutional thinking up I think.
...give separate teams across a company a marketing budget, rather than having it all held by a small team of 'brand guardians'.
...break the budget into 'calendar months', where you have twelve distinct and interesting projects running through the year.
...create an marketing 'dragons den', where every quarter anyone from across the company and appointed agencies can picth to a panel of CEO, MD, FD & Marketing Director for cash support for their idea.
Really though, I think it comes down to to things;
i) realising that the world has changed, and a lot of the things your boss told you when you started don't hold true any more
ii) having the confidence to say 'well, if that doesn't work as well as it used to, let's try something different...'
What do you think?
The musician's lot is not a happy one. We know this, we've seen plenty of evidence, but here's another piece (via Dan) that just might give a sense of just how futile the act of making money from music is becoming...
Over on TorrentFreak (a blog covering all things around bittorrent
technology), there's a report on how much money Lady Gaga made from
Spotify for a million plays of her songs...
How much do you think? Go on, guess. A MILLION plays.
How about $167?
Or, if you prefer, 0.017 cents per play, or to bring it back to real money, 0.01p per play.
Now, you maybe don't know if that's a lot or a little, compared to what musicians may be used to receiving for plays of their songs.
Well, not so long ago in 2003, if a song of yours was played on Radio 1, you'd receive a massive £18.44. PER MINUTE (though of course the amount was less if you were on regional or local stations).
But still, one 3 minute play of a Lady Gaga song would make her £55.32.
Or indeed a THIRD of the totally amount of money she's receiving for a million plays on Spotify.
Much as I love Spotify, I really can't see how it's going to continue if the people who're making the content for it only receive such paltry rewards for their efforts. It's barely better than piracy...
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UPDATE...
So, the ever-on-the-pulse Dave Stone points me in the direction of this on Music Ally... a rebuttal, of a kind...
“Firstly, any payment to STIM would only represent a fraction of the payments rights holders receive and only for music played in one country (in this case Sweden) as we pay not only collecting societies, but also publishers and the record company to play their music,” says a spokesperson.
“Secondly, the figure (unrepresentative as it is) is from a short period just after our launch last year, way before we’d established ourselves as a music service and built up a large user base. Specific payments are of course confidential, but this is certainly wide of the mark.”
There's obviously more to this than meets the eye. Yet until someone clarifies how 'wide of the mark' it is, we'll never know whether artists are getting a good deal or not. I wonder if anyone will come out with some real figures..?
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ANOTHER UPDATE
So, Mat has found this... from Steve Lawson's blog, who's also done some quick maths on this, but using some sources suggestion that the real figures are ten times this (as the $167 is just a royalty payment... there are other things to include).
So maybe the decimal point needs to come forward a place... 0.1p per play.
And it points out that's she's also had 20 million paid downloads...
...but that this is a TOTAL figure across every platform, not attributable to Spotify, but rather to the promotional effort as a whole. She's not done badly, either way.
My point on the whole affair remains this though; compared to what they used to receive from listens to a song, there's another whole chunk of musician income that's disappeared.
What are your thoughts on the social bonfire/advertising fireworks principle of ‘not either/or, but both…’? A long term proposition, or just a step along the road to something else…
To be honest, I think that you're right about the need for both, but given human nature I also suspect that there'll always be more of a need to encourage businesses to do the hard yards of continuous daily interaction.
"Fireworks" seems so much more appealing if you're in the corner - as does magic, generally - but the real value comes from the daily commitment to the "bonfire" work. To being open and responsive to the people-what-buy-your-stuff
Equally, I think this plays to the thoughts in my chum John Winsor's latest book: "Baked In". We've allowed ourselves to believe that somehow the magic of communication can overcome mediocre product and service delivery.
Just get the right ad, the right campaign architecture, optimise the spend etc etc... and it'll be sorted.
The truth is - and always has been, I suspect - that excellent communication can make the best of a bad job but the real value comes from making the job better.
Tesco is a great example here - while advertising has played a role and the strategy is good (though identical to the one that one Safeway received plaudits for in the 90s) the real value is created more in the way they keep on going - working out ways to make things better for the customer.
Bonfire communication enables this kind of approach to business - more two-way, more responsive, more human but much more hard work. By contrast, fireworks communication tends to be prone to the outbound dialling and pointless display!
You speak to a wide variety of folks around the world… who gets it, and who needs to get there quicker?
It's hard to generalise, but I think in the client community the biggest discriminator is probably those who see making communications as a factory function and those who don't.
By this I mean those who by dint of volume have had to professionalise and develop processes for communications development. This tends to embed really unhelpful practices and ideas in the business (like "what's our message?") and make it harder to envision other kinds of communication.
It's also really hard to unpick the vested interests when budgets are huge - large amounts of money makes marketers conservative; they feel the need to not be seen to be p****** it up the wall.
For those who haven't professionalised communication as a core function of the business, it's easier to show how the bonfires approach can be embraced without entering the world of sharp suits and flower-arranging.
Smaller, more entrepreneurial businesses tend to fall into this camp.
I guess the agency model we've ended up with doesn't always help. I kind of see the purpose of a media agency like PHD being reframed as 'connecting companies with people', however that best happens. It often involves talking to other people in organisations beyond marketing departments though (HR, IT, sales and so on...).
Is it inevitable that marketing (and agencies) must break out of the 'mass communications silo' to take a much more company-wide role?
I suspect you're right here. Part of the problem for all marketing services businesses is that their ability to create value is often limited by the clients they have - by the marketing clients in particular.
It's not just creative agencies who come across as florists and astrologers: marketing people are often seen this way by other business functions.
It's interesting, isn't it: while marketing's big ideas are now everywhere (brand, consumer etc), in most organisations marketing is no closer to real leading the company's activities than it was back in the 1950s and 60s.
One of the central things you talk about in ‘Herd’ is the need to ‘light many fires and see which one(s) take(s)’...
..how’ve you found selling that into marketers who’re used to lighting fast working fireworks? Any tips?
Boring answer: the place to start is probably by understanding where the marketers are coming from - what the other issues and conversations they are party to which are shaping the context to this particular issue.
Sometimes there's already a willingness to accept the relative ineffectiveness of past firework activity; sometimes not. Sometimes there's a willingness to accept the world is complex and inherently unpredictable so you'd better; other times this just scares the bejeezus out of clients.
Find out this kind of stuff and adjust your pitch accordingly.
HERD answer: seeing what other companies are doing always helps. Particularly successful ones.
Finally, what do you foresee in the future for the bonfires and fireworks?
I rather suspect that the future for fireworks advertising is going to be rather less rosy than many imagine.
Of course, we'll need these gunpowder-fuelled punctuation marks (and shows of corporate virility) but increasingly a combination of the bonfires model and the Baked-In idea (making things better and making better things) are going to prevail.
Less glamorous but rather more valuable to our clients - and for those agencies who do it well, too.
Ain't this the truth?
(Via Zoe P)
Huge, almost feverish anticipation swept the internet when Google wave was announced. The reality some weeks later is that people seem to be:
i) waiting for an invite
ii) have an invite, but haven't had the time or inclination to stop what they're doing and 'wave'...
iii) have an invitation, have tried it, but found no-one they want to wave with for any real purpose, so stopped using it
Why? Well, I don't think it's a 'product' thing...
What is Google Wave?
Ok, a quick recap and opinion on what Google Wave is... having tried it (I'm part of iii above), it's clearly going to be a useful improvement on email.
Going back to my third year physics, conventional email is essentially a series circuit. If one bulb goes, the whole circuit stops working.
(pics from here)
In terms of email, to maximise collaboration between 4 folk you'd send it to someone, who forwards it to someone else, who then sends it to someone else, and it arrives back in your inbox with input from everybody. Then everyone's input is included.
If someone doesn't send it on, the circuit breaks, and nothing happens... until, like Christmas lights, the bulb is replaced.
In comparison, parallel circuits don't need every bulb to work in order for the others to keep working. The others keep on working until you eventually replace the dud bulb.
If you attempt to make traditional email systems a 'parallel circuit' (usually by including everyone in the email all at once), then you undoubtedly end up with a disparate set of people's input strewn across different emails...
You get multiple iterations of the email, sometime simultaneously, which isn't really all that collaborative... and more often than not, he who shouts first shouts loudest in email chains...
Anyway, it's clear that Google Wave has been created to get over this problem, and it's clear we could do with something to help us over it... but why hasn't it taken off?
A fairly rubbish launch strategy
Google have launched things very successfully before using the 'limited invites' method... just think how precious Gmail invites were, and the great word-of-mouth that the service received from those who had it.
But why is it not yielding similar success for Wave?
Well, of course, it needs everyone to change system. If you were on Gmail, you could still talk to people in with work, hotmail, yahoo or other email accounts. Gmail spoke the same 'universal language' as the other systems, so still let people connect.
Wave's not like that. It demands that everyone signs up to Wave in order to do stuff together.
And here's the problem... if you have a limited invite system in place, but need everyone in any group that want to 'Wave' together to have an invite in order to make it work properly, then there's going to be an issue...
...essentially you've designed a beautiful parallel circuit, but you're only letting one bulb use it at a time...
Fixing the problem
So, how can they rectify this issue? Obviously they don't want everyone testing it at once... I'm sure there's all sorts of load testing issues and refinement stuff they're up to.
But perhaps they should change the way they distribute invites, or change the language they use to do it?
Ask people something like 'want to collaborate with others on Google Wave? Then write a quick outline of the project, give us the emails of the peopel you want to collaborate with, and we'll invite them for you...'
Rather than inviting people as individuals, invites teams of people as 'projects'.
And then all of those people will be able to see what Wave can really do for them...
I had a thought a couple of weeks ago about the Bonfires & Fireworks analogy...
If, as I believe, it's going to be through cross-disciplinary effort that we build successful, conversational communications between people and companies, we should get all sorts of different perspectives from across the board on the principle of bonfire building.
So, to that end, I decided to start asking a few folk whose opinion and work I think highly of about the principle, and their perspective on it.
First up, I'm delighted to say we've got Jake McKee, of Ant's Eye View, Community Guy and Lego fame...
Let’s start with something social… tell us about yourself…
I'm Jake McKee, co-founder and Chief Ant Wrangler at Ant's Eye View (www.antseyeview.com). I've spent my entire career on and around the Web trying to help businesses use new tech, people, and processes to improve the way that customers interact with the company.
At AEV, our focus is the same: helping clients improve customer experience and drive customer engagement by building strategies that tap into those new technologies, as well as age old improvements in people and process to truly improve the bottom line.
Outside of work, I'm an amateur photography, infrequent mountain biker, and a proud dad of an insane smart and funny 3 year old.
How did you get started in bonfire building?
I actually went to college for traditional 3D product design. Even in high school I was fascinated by the idea that people got paid to think about how people used things and to design products accordingly. I graduated about the time the Web started taking off and brought that product design thinking to Web development.
When I joined the LEGO Company in 2000, I lucked into working for a boss who encouraged me to own the relationship between LEGO and the adult LEGO enthusiasts. That led to a full-time gig at LEGO doing community work, helping to form the community development team, speaking about community work, and blogging at CommunityGuy.com.
How do you persuade others of the need to build social bonfires alongside setting off advertising fireworks?
The answer to this question is a bit different if you’re talking about being an employee of a company working inside the enterprise towards change versus working as a consultant helping those folks see change through to completion.
Looking at the work that needs to be done inside the organization (since that's where the buck stops), I've always talked about the strategy of "Success by 1000 paper cuts". Start with the smallest element you can effectively do with minimal budget, little managerial approval, and minor legal team approval.
Nothing breeds acceptance like success. Even tiny successes excite people to see more. Succeed, expand your efforts a little, succeed again, rinse and repeat. Before you know it, you'll be launching huge programs but with far more support than if you tried to launch a big program straight away.
Where do you see the balance between the bonfires & fireworks at this point in time?
Well, there's probably not much of a "balance" at this point! I think largely we're still seeing a vast majority of the social efforts being funnelled through the traditional marketing/advertising lens. With a sadly rare exception, most business people are struggling to get past their own training - we're all programmed to believe that protectionism is a huge business value.
That mindset was passed along in school, and backed up by nearly every business dealing we've had in our careers. Getting past that mental training is going to some time and some serious effort, but it will happen. With an entire generation being raised to expect a direct connect relationship with the companies they do business with, it's seriously only a matter of time.
That said, I don't think we'll ever get away from seeing fireworks. In fact, I hope we don't. Fireworks can be a lot of fun, and can do lots of great things... IF they are a component of a larger, social-infused strategy.
Finally, what do you foresee in the future for the bonfires and fireworks?
It's not terribly exciting, but I think we're going to continue to see the same progression we've been on for the last few years, just with an increasingly accelerated pace.
Companies and consultants alike are certainly still struggling to get to a more social-minded place, but the pace at which things are moving is picking up speed.
Success is leading to success, and we'll be seeing a lot smarter, bigger, more successful campaigns over time...
...success by 1000 paper cuts.
Thanks Jake :)
Yes indeed, lest we forget it's Bonfire night, and given the history of the Bonfire & Fireworks analogy on Feeding the Puppy, it would have been remiss of me not to post the latest thoughts I've been having on this more fitting of days...
(As a brief reprise, for those who haven't seen or have forgotten it, skip through this again...)
So, what now?
After the IPA Social Event (which I first started writing about Bonfires for), we all thought it'd be a good idea to keep the momentum behind the project going... build on the success, keep the bonfire burning as it were.
After all, it was just the end of the beginning.
Rather than a formal evening organised event, though, we wondered if holding three concurrent conversations over coffee, somewhere in London, would mean that people could spend half a morning dipping in and out of different conversations... sharing experiences, results, case studies and the like.
How best to make it happen?
It's not just an 'advertising' issue
Largely every type of agency and communications company going are all looking at this area, whether they're involved in advertising, PR, corporate comms, internal etc.
The shift in the way the world communicates has affected many industries, not just the one that you or I happen to find ourselves working in.
At its simplest, I think everyone can take the graph below, look at their own industry as say 'yep, that's happening to us, and we're not totally sure how to deal with it /create it / measure it / value it / charge for it yet.
So we'd love to see folks from across as wide a spectrum as possible... the sharing of results & case studies is something that the Measurement Camp guys have been doing a great job every month, so we'd love to see them down there.
Then there's all the folks interested in making businesses internally social too... Enterprise 2.0, or Social Business Design. I found the Corporate Social Networking Forum earlier this year a fascinating insight into how other industries are harnessing the available tools to add significant value to their businesses.
And I'm quite sure that I'm missing out folk too... so in order to make an 'easy to manage' list of folk to tell about it, I've made my first twitter list...Making a list, checking it twice...
We'll get on with confirming a date, thinking a bit more about the format & subject matter... just generally firming things up a little more.
And you?
Well, if you think you'd be up for meeting up one morning for a couple of hours in early December and sharing some social insights over coffee, then just add your twitter name TO THIS LIST HERE*.
Happy bonfire night... see you all soon I'm sure.
(*fingers crossed that I've got the list thing working OK...)
Well hello there.
I've been off, as you may know. I've returned to 413 emails, and many more items to read in my RSS reader...
Did you know, by the way, that when you accumulate more than one thousand items in your Google reader it gives up telling you exactly how many things you've got to read, and just says '1000?+'...
...it might as well say 'more items than you'll ever get through, idiot.' Just because of that, I'm going to read every single one.
But until I get through all of those, I thought I'd just make a note of the things that are the first things I've got a sense of that went on...
There was obviously a huge hoopla around Google Wave's release, and it seems that some folks out there would have (and maybe did) put their grannies on eBay for an invite...
...and on that, I'd like to thank Graham and Simon for both getting me one...
Now, I've not honestly had the chance to use it 'in anger' yet, as it were. So I'm really only going on what a wide variety of other people have been saying...
By and large, the sense that I get is one of frustration, bemusement, annoyance... people are having a bit of a hard time coming to terms with what it is, what it can do, why it's different etc. Why? Maybe two things contributed...
i) Lack of Patience - it was never going to be something that worked for everyone immediately, but maybe folk are just too used to finding 'the next big thing' online that you just 'get' in about 5 minutes.
ii) Crap Launch Strategy - dropping it in the laps of lots of people all at once isn't helpful... instead of giving people invites to the equivalent of the first telephone (hello? anyone there? HELLO..?), maybe it should have been an invite to a few folk join a wave that existed already...
However, everyone's still talking about it, so maybe that was the goal... I'm going to try out some specific projects on it, and see how using it properly pans out.
If you're still unsure what it is, This video I found via Fiona will give you a simple overview...
I've been quite excited about Foursquare for a while. In their own words, Foursquare is "all about helping you find new ways to explore the city. We'll help you meet up with your friends and let you earn points and unlock badges for discovering new places, doing new things and meeting new people."
Basically, when you go to a bar/restaurant/coffee shop etc, you 'check in' using Foursquare. You get points for checking in, and you can achieve different badges for checking in for all sorts of different reasons... see the list here.
You can compete with your friends to earn points, get rare and better badges and so on. So, on the face of it, it's a fun local game you play with your friends...
All well and good, a simple GPS enabled game. But where I think it gets interesting is that once they know where players are, what badges they earn, the points they collect and so on, they can serve them up special rewards and offers...
It's this sort of thing that I think means Foursquare could have a big, big future... advertisers have spent years trying to think of different ways to encourage people to visit their shops, restaurants, venues. This offers a way not only to find out how many people visit, but to create ways that encourage them to do so more often, and reward them for being the most frequent visitors too. It certainly gives us an insight into how GPS might be used in future.
iii) IPA Social was... very social indeed
After spending six months working on the project, it was a bit of a shame to miss the event, but the IPA Social event on the 6th October went off very well indeed it seems... some quotes from a few things people posted afterwards...
"Every strategist and brand owner needs to understand social, and what role it should play in building their brand. A social strategy should be an integral part of a brand and comms strategy, and should sit across every discipline within an organisation – it can’t just be the responsibility of the social media manager. That’s not to say there isn’t a role for social specialists. Implementing a social strategy requires a robust understanding of how to behave in the social space, and experience in these craft skills counts for a lot. Specialist practitioners implement media planning and buying, advertising creation, packaging design, PR, POS, call centre operations, and pretty much every aspect of implementing a brand strategy you can think of. Social’s no different – specialist implementation is both valuable and necessary."
"It seems that the term
social media itself is counter productive - a fundamental change in how
people are able to communicate with each other will naturally have
knock-on effects to all businesses that deal with communications. But
it will affect each differently. So 'social media' means something
different to an ad agency than to a PR agency because it impacts what
they have traditionally done in different ways. So the advice that
clients get from their roster is that 'social media' means a range of
different things."
"In the future, I'd predict only seeing agencies getting involved in
campaign activity, with the ongoing rumble of conversation being
handled purely client-side. All it requires is an understanding of how
to use the various platforms appropriately; no specialist skills are
required to participate to the full. In the beginning, agencies will be
needed to help out educating their clients on how to use the platforms
with case studies and such, but that should be the extent of it."
So, what next for IPA Social? Well, if you want to find out, and get ivolved, maybe you should join in the conversation here on the IPA Social facebook group...
Meanwhile, I'll get on with reading 1000+ articles... or maybe I'll just hit 'mark all as read'... :)
"Social Media is a conversation. That seems to be one thing that we can all agree
on.
But given that Social Media is a rather noisy and opinionated
conversation, what value do we think we will have by adding our voices to
it?
We are not Social Media gurus. In face we are rather sceptical of
people who claim they are. We are simply 10 people from across a wide range of
communications disciplines in the UK and the US who would like to share some
thoughts. Thoughts that have either been bugging us or inspiring us, thoughts
that we believe could form some of the building blocks for successful Social
campaigns. We came together to respond to and add our voices to some work that
the IPA had done earlier in the year.
We have each defined a Principle
which we feel is important in this Social world. You will find each principle up
here but they are also on our individual blogs where we will be curating the
conversation which we hope they will generate. Please do get involved, maybe you
think these principles don't apply, are there better ones? Are there changes
that you would like to make? Are there examples that you could add to help
illustrate them? The only thing that we ask is that as part of the advertising
and communications community that you become part of the conversation. After all
the more opinions that are being shared and built on, the more interesting and
stronger the outcome. At least that's what we are hoping.
Thank you in
advance."
You'll no doubt remember all the bonfires and fireworks posts from before... well, this is the project that it's been for (which I'm delighted to be a part of)...
It's well worth reading the brilliant summary of The Big Picture by Mark Earls first, and you can see the list of all ten principles here.
As for the principle I'm babysitting, at the moment it's as follows:
IPA social principle 03: Continuous conversation, not campaigning
If advertising is a firework, social media is a bonfire; slow to start, collaborative to build, then gets bigger and brighter...
The traditional advertising approach to campaigning is like setting off fireworks.
Great fireworks are attention grabbing beacons on steroids; they make crowds gasp in delight, and draw an audience from many miles around.
Yet while advertising burns very brightly, it dies very quickly. Fireworks are an expensive way to keep a crowd happy all night.
Social media isn't like setting off a firework; it's like building a bonfire.
It takes time to start. There's careful initial construction, a gentle blow here and there, and the gradual addition of more wood.
Then a couple of other folk gather around. Some of them will even help you build the fire; break some wood up, throw more on, poke around in the embers to make sure the fire doesn't go out.
As more people gather, and help the fire grow bigger, the more it will attract yet more people... with attention and dedication, as everyone fuels the bonfire it will only ever burn brighter.
If you want to start a social bonfire, or want to help other people make their bonfires bigger, you're going to have to commit some time, effort, ingenuity and resource.
Because it's not just about the bonfire; it's about building it together.
"If you are going to engage, you have to have a plan and make sure that resources are available. Because you can't gracefully exit - once you're in, you're in. The days of walking away from a campaign are over – once we engage, we have to commit to it."
Denise Morrissey, Online Community Manager, Toyota
(Source: http://www.engagementdb.com/)
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So, what's next?
These ten principles are just a starting point; provokers of conversation, thought, ideas... an invitation to you (yes, YOU) to join in.
Why? Our aim with this project is to move the debate beyond simply the theoretical, and into the practical; examples of approaches that have worked, and which have not. What does success look like? What do you need to do first?
We believe that by sharing information and case studies around 'social communications' we will all, from the largest agency to the nimblest freelancer, from the most traditional client to the youngest start-up, benefit from this open source of knowledge.
So please, join the debate below...
(NB: I may take a while to respond, given circumstances, but some of the other guys in the group are going to weigh in too...)
