Marketing (&) Mischief

Fact #1: Social media has radically changed and continues to change the way people behave and consume.

Fact #2: This fundamentally changes not just how companies approach marketing but how they need to restructure their organization and operate to be relevant in this “Facebook Era”.

The Big Question: How can you drive and accelerate that change?

Answer: Find your Life Hackers.

Who, what?

Life Hackers are the passionate open minded individuals hiding in various parts of your organization that are always questioning the norm and trying to do things differently. They are the ones who just won’t do things the way things have always been done. They optimistically embrace new technology and apply those advances to make their work more productive, efficient and god forbid a lot more fun.

To enable true change you have to go out and identify these people. You have to listen to them and take that scary leap of fate by trusting them and giving them the power and means to be the agents of change in your organization even if all your senses are screaming against it.

And if you are really brave bring them together for added effect and enjoy the ride.

P.s. Really looking forward to Charlene Li’s new book Open Leadership that should touch on this thought as well. Recommended!

Imagine you live in a village sometime in the end of the 19th century.

You buy your bread from the village baker every day. You know it to be good, tasty and healthy and you know he won’t overcharge you for it. Why? Because you are close to him. You know him. His reputation in the community is linked to the quality of his bread. And if he would try to make a better profit by cutting back on the quality of his ingredients and raising his prizes while still claiming that his bread is “the best in the village” the community would call his bluff immediately and he would be out of business (and out of friends).

Enter the age of mass production and mass communications. Suddenly the baker can make more bread and sell it to more people than ever before. He also realizes It’s no longer his reputation that is on the line. It’s the brand, the company that gives the promise of good quality bread to it’s customers. Not him.

The baker also realizes that in is new global village the people can’t share experiences as they did in that small village where everyone knew each other. Instead what he says in his advertisements passes for the truth.

This is when greed (some also call it human nature) takes over and the baker cuts back on the quality of his ingredients in the hope of better profit.

And so it goes that it works (really well actually) and the baker makes it big with the help of his friend mass media and an industry of creatives and artists helping him craft his new truth. This goes on for quite a while and they get really good at it. They get so good at it that everyone actually forgets what it was like to live in that little village.

But then…along comes a thing called the Internet.

At first the baker and his friends try their best to ignore it. Then they try to use it as just another means for distributing their truth. And while the baker and his merry men are busy trying to exploit the Internet the villagers start using it to connect and share the real truth about the bakers bread….just like they did back in the day.

And before the baker can say “oh shit guys, I think we’re f**ked” the village is back. And it’s back with a vengeance.

So what is the lesson of my story, you ask?

For the bakers:
It’s time to focus all your energy to listening to your villagers, being a part of your community and baking the best bread possible. You can’t fake it anymore, sorry.

For the villagers:
Make you voice heard. You have the tools and the right to do it. Don’t settle for ok.

For the bakers merry men:
Figure out how you can help your baker embrace the Village Values. Help him listen, react, learn and develop his bread. And then help him get the real truth out.

This almost brings a tear to my eye :)

Check out this really nice recap presentation of the thinking that has been happening in and around the Nokia Digital Marketing team during the past few years. I’ve been fortunate enough to work closely with this brilliant group of thinkers and advocates of change and I gotta say I miss those days. Not to say that this is the end of the collaboration – maybe more an end of an era.

Anyhow…check it out and let me know what you think!

A friend of mine (props to Misko Iho) created a small Christmas miracle during his surfing trip to Africa. By using just Facebook, email and SMS’s he rallied his friends (and their friends) to donate a small amount each to help get backbags, pens, rulers and other basic school equipment for the kids of the local school. Result: 8384 items packed into 470 backpacks ready for school = 470 lives changed.

What Misko and his friends did got me thinking. Why aren’t the big charities more active in social media?

I’ve worked with some of the biggest charity organizations on the planet. We’ve talked about social media and it’s impact on what they do and tried to figure out ways for them to embrace this clearly potent new way of sharing information more efficiently and also recruiting more people to their “cause”.

The interesting thing is that they do see the obvious potential but are for some reason unable to embrace it.

Let’s take Unicef for example. They are the biggest and the most powerful. They do a lot of good BUT admit that they are having trouble convincing their beneficiaries that their money is indeed used in the most efficient and beneficial way all around the globe.

How to do this then when armed with Social Media? Should be pretty self-evident: Let your audience choose where their money is spent and show the concrete results of the work (like Misko did by posting pictures on Facebook) = Give them a social object that they can share with their friends (“this is the village I’m supporting”) and the tools to share the message easily all throughout the web.

Simple, eh? Not for Unicef.

Their argument is that they need to be able to direct the flow of support / funds themselves as they know best where the help is needed. I see the point but I’d argue it will also be a fundamental issue for them in the future if they indeed want to engage a broader more internet-savvy audience that is used to being actively involved and is not content by buying the Unicef desk calendar for Xmas.

The change needed will not be easy as it means rethinking some of the fundamentals of how the big charities work but it is inevitable as people want more control and will therefore flock to smaller grass-roots charities that operate more transparently, are more agile and thrive on user involvement.

They will flock to look for alternatives in the Long Tail of Charity. That’s where I found Misko’s project. And I have yet to buy a Unicef desk calendar.

This storefront stopped me dead on my tracks while walking around downtown San Francisco. It’s a great example of simple disruption at work. How to make something as boring as a hardware store stand out? Cole Fox Hardware in San Francisco did it by turning their storefront into an art exhibit and surprise surprise – people stop, pay attention, memorize your brand and walk in even though buying a hammer is not exactly #1 on their agenda.

Thinking outside the box and adding a human touch to what you do by simply having a little fun works. We all should do it much much more. Being too serious sucks and won’t get you fans. And today you need fans more than just customers.