Brand creation for entrepreneurs

Recently I’ve been helping more start-ups and entrepreneurs with their brand creation. My friend Klaus is working on a fitness start-up, Annabelle is working on a clothing line and my cousin Lucy has been growing her snowboarding brand. What I've found is that the challenges that you face starting your own brand as an entrepenuer are surprisingly similar to the work that I usually do rebranding a multinational company or launching a consumer electronic product.

A fashion entrepreneur faces many of the same branding challenges as a multinational company.

The elements of a successful brand are a vision, values, attributes, tagline, stories and key messages. The internal brand architecture is your little secret, but it will inform everything that you do. The communications framework is an external tool that you can pick and mix from to build websites, social media and marketing collateral.

Brand architecture
The vision for your brand needs to be framed in terms of the difference that you make in your customer’s lives. Aim for a short punchy statement about why you exist. This is not your tagline so don’t wordsmith it too much. Aim for genuine and authentic. Two slightly contrasting words are often a nice way to summarise the vision. Example: BMW’s vision is “driving excellence.”

The values of your brand are also framed in terms of the things that your tribe believes in. This means you, your future employees, distributors, customers and suppliers. Ask yourself what values you wouldn’t go without. But only include ones that are different from your competitors; integrity, innovation and teamwork are just feel-good values. Example: Waitrose cares about ”calm, refined ambience.”

The attributes of your brand are more practical than the values and focus on things that will make your product better than your competitors. Look for attributes that work as a promise to your customers. Example: Uniqlo products promise you “understated value.”

The brand pyramid of vision, values and attributes is your secret. It would be a bit weird to walk up to someone at a party and say “My life purpose is to spread joy in the world.” Likewise, your brand doesn’t just lead with your vision. Instead your brand architecture will provide the base for a communications framework.

Building a Brand Pyramid and Communications Framework will give your brand a solid foundation.

Communications framework
Your tagline is where the brand vision comes to life. Your tagline should convey what you do in simple enough terms that someone can instantly know whether you sell what they’re looking for. It needs to address the hidden “So What?” that every customer asks. Example: Nike’s tagline is “Just do it.”

Story telling is one of the most fundamental methods of human communication. The headlines of your brand stories will reflect your values. They will be mini-anecdotes that articulate your values in a way that resonates with your audience. For example, Icebreaker’s “no stink” reputation is built on the stories of travellers wearing their garments for weeks on end.

The key messages are the most prosaic part of your communications framework. Key messages convey your brand attributes in language that meets consumers where they are now and gently leads them to where you want them to be. For example, Apple’s iWork key messages include descriptions of documents you can create. These key messages are much less sexy than the meaning-of-life iPhone marketing but they convey a much more practical benefit to a cynical audience.

DIY branding
The best way to build a brand architecture is to work with a management consultant that understands mission, vision and values. If you’re an entrepreneur then find a life-coach that can help you get clear on what the impact is that you want to have in the world.

Then take that internal pyramid and take it to a copywriter in an advertising agency or an internet marketer that specialises in creating products. If you’re an entrepreneur then find a friend that works in marketing or design and share your vision with them and ask “How could I convey this to an audience that are entirely cynical about what I’m trying to do?”

If you really want to take a run at the above work by yourself then I’ve listed below the questions that I ask clients in branding workshops. Be warned that like a recipe from a master chef, the questions are an empty tool without the delicate care to use them. But in the interests of letting you behind the curtain, I’ve listed them below.

Entrepreneurs need a brand vision to match their business ambitions and a communications toolkit to tell their story.

Checklist for your Brand Pyramid:
Brand vision
What is the impact you want to have in the world?
How would you like to be remembered?

Values
What are the things that you wouldn’t give up?
What would an employee have to believe in for you to think they were a good fit?

Attributes
What pain do you solve for customers?
How are your products different to your competitors?

Checklist for your Communications framework:
Tagline
What would you put on the side of a truck to tell people that you sell what they need?
What words would someone google if they were looking for your type of products?

Stories
What are the anecdotes that people tell about you?
Are there any unexpected challenges that you’ve overcome?

Key messages
How do you make your offering safe for people to say yes to?
If you had to describe your products to your mum then what would you say?

Work your way through these questions imagining that you’re at a small pub in rural Ireland telling a yarn to the locals over a beer. Focus on conveying the spirit of the message in a way that resonates with the listener. Your brand is a living thing so it won’t be perfect the first time through but it will give you something to build on.

Owned, earned and paid media

In 2009 Forrester picked up on some discussions in social media circles from people such as David Armano and codified the classification of digital media into owned, earned and paid types of media. This structure makes a classification based on the nature of the media itself rather than the activity that you do on it.

A strategy model is only useful if it helps you solve real world problems.

MEC (part of WPP) see the different types of media in a sequence. First you get the message out with paid, then you feed people content in your owned media, then your story gets spread through earned media. Community management firm Temporo have a great blog post summarising the model. Nick Burcher notes that each of the types of media have an “Always On” aspect and a “Campaign” aspect.

Seductively simple
It’s a tempting classification because it allows for pretty venn diagrams and it’s simple enough to remember when the deer in the headlights moment happens in front of a client. Sometimes a client starts pummelling you over a coffee with “How do you break down the different areas of social media?” I’ve used it enough times in a tight spot.

It’s a dangerous mental model because it perpetuates the problem of perspective. Owned, Earned and Paid only work as a classification from the consultants perspective. From a client's perspective the challenge isn't "Where to spend my advertising money?" it's a business challenge of how to reach an audience and tell a compelling story.

Shifting sands
Until last week your apps and micro-sites within Facebook looked like owned media. This week they look like earned media. Soon Facebook will roll out paid advertising “in the stream” and your timeline will look like paid media. More importantly, where does customer service on Twitter fit? Or online focus groups like Starbucks’ MyStarbucks Suggestion Boxes?

I have two suggestions to fix the model. The first is to abandon it and base your background classifications instead on who the audience is and what you want them to do.

What do you want me to do?
You can classify activities and media by the ways that you want people to interact with it. There is an emerging trend that “The marketing is the experience.” So instead of watching an advertisement, people want to experience and engage with your brand in an interactive way. But not everyone wants the full experience.

Your social media activity should acknowledge that different groups want to participate in different ways.

I’ve been using the 1%, 10% and 100% classification a lot recently. Google’s researchers have found that on a YouTube video:

• 1% of people will respond with user generated content, such as a video response.
• 10% of people will do something simple such as “like” the video or tweet about it.
• The broader 100% simply watch the video.

The power of this classification is that it forces you to think through the different ways people will engage with your campaign or idea. Who are the 1% that are going to enter BMW’s competition by creating their own video? How can the 10% still engage with the competition? What hidden brand messages do the promotional material for the competition convey that still resonate with the 100%?

The 1-10-100 model isn’t entirely irreconcilable with Paid Owned Earned because each media could be a better fit for each of the audience groups. Paid media reaches the 100%, the 10% are your customers who see your owned media and the 1% of fans will give you your earned media.

Borrowed media
If you are not quite ready to abandon the Owned, Earned, Paid split then you can rescue it by adding Borrowed Media to the circles. You literally don’t own your Facebook page, it’s still owned by Facebook. You don’t Earn your Facebook page. You earn the Facebook mentions of your page by your fans but the page itself exists whether you Earn the buzz around it (or not). Lee Odden would like to think that it’s also called “Shared Media”. Not a bad term, but it confuses the fact that sharing can occur across all of the channels.

Your Facebook page is Borrowed Media. As are the Flickr photos of your product by fans that you’ve curated into a gallery. The viral YouTube videos that you are Tweeting about are borrowed. Borrowed media adds a fourth category to paid, owned and earned media.

Borrowed Media is all of the online platforms and content that you use but don't own, earn or create.

Ad agencies, design firms and PR firms would all like to contribute to your strategy for owned, earned and paid media. Creative advertising agencies (and their media agency bedfellows) are the masters of paid media. The PR firms know how to get you Earned coverage with influencers such as journalists, bloggers and analysts. The design firms can make your owned media website and micro sites sparkle. But who will build conversations on borrowed media?

The new breed of specialist social media agencies like We Are Social would love to be the total answer to the question of borrowed media. But ultimately the answer is you, the client. You are going to need to respond to the customer service tweets yourself. Only your internal R&D team care what videos your community are watching. Only your internal marketing team know whether it’s really ok to retweet your competitors cool new whitepaper because every one of your customers are also tweeting about it.

McKinsey had a run at adding Hijacked and Sold media as extra channels, but both of these are reactive not proactive so don’t probably add much planning value to the model. The real test for a model of media is whether it helps you make decisions and create a better strategy.

Next steps
You can use the 1-10-100 model even if you continue to talk about Paid Owned and Earned. Just keep in mind that the fun is happening in the overlap between channels. To your audience, every type of media is just an invisible part of their overall impression of your brand.

In search of the New New Zealand Man

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how we curate our identities with brands. Menswear is a particularly interesting area of branding because so many men want to entirely avoid the issue of dressing, yet it conveys so much to others and to ourselves. The worst challenge for most modern men is Causal Fridays. As my dear friend Brian Richards says, men are left in limbo on Fridays, unsure of how to dress when deprived of both their jeans and their suit. Although personally, I’ve found that a smart velvet sports coat can cover a multitude of sins.

There is a lot that we can learn from the designers and entrepreneurs who have managed to capture the zeitgeist of menswear while strongly conveying their own take on what is means to be a man. To build a menswear business requires an interesting blend of confidence and inquisitiveness.

Crane Brothers founder, Murray Crane in London.

Murray Crane has built several successful menswear brands and the Crane Brothers business that bears his name is going from strength to strength. I caught up with Murray for a coffee in London during one of his research and buying trips to Milan, Paris, London and New York.

The New New Zealand Man
Somewhere hidden in the Crane Brothers story is a trace of a new New Zealand man. Beyond boat shoes, polo shirts and pacifica prints. It’s subtle and evolving, but it’s definitely there. Living in London has prompted me to start seeking out the essence of this new modern man. Luckily, Murray has an idea what might make New Zealand men so unique.

Because he travels so much, Murray has spotted that if you live in Paris, New York or London then the latest trends are all around you, all the time, so you become indifferent to them. You stop looking for new ideas, new experiences and new stories. You close down.

We have no such luxury in New Zealand, so we stay hungry. Murray confessed that (even though he started out as a technology cynic) his lust for information has drawn him to all the latest gadgets from a Macbook Air to an iPhone. With over a hundred blog subscriptions on his Google Reader and airfreight subscriptions to the latest magazines, Murray has a true lust for information.

Little Brother Creative Director, Isaac Hindin Miller somehow blends trend setting and trend spotting.

GQ, New York Times and Hugo Boss stylist (and Creative Director of Little Brother), Isaac Hindin Miller is a Kiwi now based in New York. Isaac is typical of the New Zealand lust for information. His blog is fuelled by wonder at the world and an eye for trends that can only come from having to hunt them out.

I’m increasingly convinced that this hunger is exactly what makes New Zealand entrepreneurs so successful. In my street photography, I’ve found that the photographers that I admire the most are often aliens to the cities they photograph. This gives them the eye for the miracle in the mundane. What Tim Brown from Ideo calls a beginner’s mind. The globally successful brands that New Zealand has built have a sense of freshness, wonder and newness that the tired and weary world finds appealing. Across industrial machinery, healthcare software, fashion or architecture I've found that the world is surprisingly hungry for a New Zealand take on things.

Tyler Brule from Monocle Magazine recently wrote in the Financial Times about his trip to New Zealand. Brule commented on the natural beauty, but was really taken by the modern and fresh approach to design. This freshness is because New Zealanders are information omnivores.

If there is a new New Zealand man, then he is open, aware and un-wearily worldly. He is happily connected through travel, friendships and reading to the rest of the world.

Modern Pedant
If the new New Zealand man is about openness, then the Murray Crane Man is about holding yourself to high standards in everything. Murray’s help wanted ads are notorious because they describe the high standards that he hold himself and those around him to.

The Crane Brothers suits are meticulously finished and they are coveted by those who care about details. The stores, the website and the staff all need to conform to a pedantic but beautiful standard of care.

Oscar Wilde might have found the Crane Brothers suits a little dark, but the fundamental idea of quality in the details would have attracted him. Like Wilde, Murray seems to find modern life a little too scruffy in dress, thinking and behaviour. From grammar to manners, Murray has spotted that we may have lost something at the core of civilisation.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the protagonist is searching for a larger concept of perfection that he loosely calls quality. Through mechanics he is looking for the small slice of perfection that we can create when we do something carefully. Murray brings this search for perfection to everything he does, from the cut of a suit to the pen you write with or the laptop you carry.

In a time when being called pedantic is one of the ultimate insults, Murray reminded me that caring about the details isn’t a crime. It’s a calling.

Gary Vaynerchuk on Social Media

Gary Vaynerchuk explodes off the screen on YouTube the Wine Guy.

I specialise in social media for brands and business, but Gary Vaynerchuk is the master of social media for individual entrepreneurs. He started as a baseball card collector and grew a multi million dollar wine business.

Gary's presentation in 2008 at Web Expo 2.0 was a turning point in the discussion of social media in business. There are lots of other people who can give you advice about 'how' to use social media, but no one but Gary can tell you so forcefully 'why' to use social media.



If you have a colleague, boss or client that is resisting social media then send them a link to this video. In his presentation, Gary is like a human social media grenade. I've always believed in the power of presentations and story telling. Gary reminds us that a presentation can be compelling just because of the sheer force of personality that comes through on stage.

His new stuff, since the presentation in 2008 is even more applicable to a business context. He's recently been working with big-boy brands like Pepsi and Blue Mountain Coffee. You can find some of his more up to date presentations on YouTube. But the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo is still the benchmark. I drew out a couple of key points from the presentation:

One to one marketing
Both Gary and I believe that your grandma knows more about how to succeed at social media than you do. This is because she grew up when business was done one-on-one. The corner store, the local shoemaker, the neighbourhood bakery. Your grandma knew them individually by name.

Word of mouth
She also knew about word-of-mouth. If she liked something she told people, and they listened. Gary shares my belief in the coming humanisation of business. As I wrote about in relation to Icebreaker, you can have word-of-mouth around a product. If you want to drive word of mouth around an entrepreneurial idea then you also need to be part of that word of mouth yourself.

Hustle
Most people treat social media like a singles pick-up bar. Trying to close on the first date. They forget that social media relationships are like real-world relationships. They take time and effort to nurture. Gary calls this effort 'hustle'. It's a slightly New Yorker phrase for the way that small actions and effort every day create momentum. Rappers, salespeople and bar tenders all have to hustle in New York to survive. Hustle is the millions of tiny pushes that you need to make to be successful. It's the blog posts you write, the conferences you attend, the industry events you speak at, and the YouTube videos you make.

The book
Gary put the best of his presentations and advice into a short book called Crush It! (2009, Harper Studio). There is also an excellent Audiobook version on iTunes. His experience in the wine trade, building relationships and creating content really shines through.

Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk is all about how to bring your personality and passion into social media.

The book 'Crush It!' should really have been called 'Kill It!' or 'Hustle!', because that's what Gary wants you to do. Gary's book isn't quite as good as he in person, but it's a practical set of steps that help you put his energy into action in your life. It's a nice talisman on the bookshelf to remind you to 'kick ass' every time you log on to Twitter, YouTube or your blog.

Gary also has a new book out called the Thank You Economy. It's a more grown up approach than Crush It'! But I'd start with Crush It! because it's a classic.

Find a niche you love, start a blog today. Keep your day job, but hustle, hustle hard.

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The business of merino

What can you learn about word of mouth from a sheep?

In 1994 a high country farmer pushed a wooly shearing singlet across the table to a young Jeremy Moon. From a distance it looked like any other underlayer, but when you picked it up, it didn't itch. Jeremy suddenly saw potential. By getting the best out of the product, selling hard, hustling and getting the best out of various advisors, Jeremy has managed to grow a multi-million dollar lifestyle and sportswear brand.

13 years later I had just finished watching Jane Fulton Suri from Ideo at the Better by Design conference and a marketing manager from ANZ handed me a corporate sponsored Icebreaker top. It was a small piece of conference swag that changed my life. I had heard of Icebreaker before but had dismissed it as just another itchy woolen jumper. How wrong was I?

Now another 5 years later and I've worn that Superfine 190 top hundreds of times. It's still smart enough for a job interview and casual enough to wear to the pub. I'm a fan because merino has almost nothing in common with normal wool and instead has no itch, feels super soft, is tough in the washing machine and smells fresh even on epic plane flights, long runs or multi-day adventures. I own dozens of pieces of merino and have forced the fabric onto family, in-laws and even occasionally strangers.

Luckily, a new wave of merino manufacturers have joined the movement including Rapha, Outlier, Finsterre, Chocolate Fish, Nau and SmartWool. Each of these companies have tackled the challenge of building word of mouth in slightly different ways. There is a lot that you can learn about niche marketing and social media from these companies.

Designing the Icebreaker brand
A lot has been written about Icebreaker's success including a precocious 17 year old, Better by Design case studies and a Harvard Business School case study. Their concept stores seem to generate good buzz whenever they arrive in town, their Facebook page is well loved and bloggers rave about their products. Icebreaker is one of New Zealand's global branding success stories.

As well as my near constant wearing of the product, I know the back story behind the brand fairly well because I've worked with lots of the people that were involved in creating it.

In the early days, the Icebreaker team called on a wide range of design talent including Brian R Richards, Designworks, Billy Sushi, Origin Design, DNA and even the elusive Chris Bleakley and John Plimmer. I believe that it's the mark of a strong team to keep their centre of gravity in-house while drawing on the best of the agencies that they worked with.

Through all of this, Icebreaker seem to have prided themselves on building a multi-million dollar brand with word-of mouth alone and no above-the-line advertising. Design has been a key part of achieving this and the catalogues have become something of a collectors item over the years.

Icebreaker catalogue covers from 1994 to 2011

Recently there has been some mixed work from a variety of agencies. Including some aggressive virals from Y&R, website work from SiteSmart, store design from Viz Works and PR by Mango Communications. Even so, there is still a lot to learn about social media and word of mouth from Icebreaker and its peers.

The product is the marketing
The best word of mouth is built on robust product stories. Outlier are targeting urban cyclists, they focus unwaveringly on the robustness of the product. For these niche companies 'the product is the marketing'. People smarter than me have examined why the product is so important to building a loyal following. To build buzz, your product has to 'just work'. Finisterre built from a core of cold weather surfers but now lets the product speak for itself across a range of sports. Like Outlier they have used credibility in one niche to quietly attract other niches.

Finisterre have gradually built outwards from their core surfing community

Get fans talking to each other
Once you have the fans then it's all about getting them to communicate with each other in an environment that you have created. This is the softest sell ever. All you do is play host. Let the guests at your party talk about how good the hors d'oeuvre are. Road cycling brand Rapha have created an iPhone app called Rendezvous that lets their customers find each other and meet up for group cycle rides. The app ties fans to the brand but is focused on tying them to each other. This encourages the fans to bring their other friends along to join the club.

Rapha are all about connecting their tribe together

Lighting a fire
Smartwool used product sampling to get over the initial adoption hurdle. They actually went out on the ski slopes and challenged people to wear their merino socks for the day. Icebreaker arranged for Sir Peter Blake to wear an early prototype while sailing around the world. Some good sampling and activation are nice ways to build word of mouth, but they are dynamite for PR. You can leverage small events by building a human story that the media will pick up on. This is where niche word-of-mouth morphs back into mass consumer marketing. If your story is good enough that my mum will talk about it at her book club, then it's good enough for a blogger, TV show or Time Magazine.

Getting some merino for yourself
Researching this blog post reminded me how much I needed to get another couple of merino tops so I went hunting in London. The key to loving merino wool is finding a weave that works for you. Think of the difference between your favourite cotton t-shirt and your favorite cotton bath-towel. They are both cotton, but the weave is pretty different. For me, the drape of a good quality superfine merino wool is perfect. The fabric sits like a cotton t-shirt and is super comfy. What can you find in-store:

• The big sports brands like Helly Hansen, Kathmandu and Rohan do solid merino kit but it's almost always a clingy underlayer weave. It's ok for travelling or as an underlayer, but it's not going to win any style awards.
• The big high street brands like Uniqlo, Muji and Carhartt do great merino. It's usually a wide weave cardigan type knit that works as a smart mid-layer. But there is no way that it's going to survive the bash-them-against-themselves maelstrom inside your washing machine.
• What you'll struggle to find is the high quality, super fine merino weave that drapes like silk or cotton. For that you need to hunt out the new wave manufacturers like Rapha, Outlier, Chocolate Fish and Icebreaker.

If you're just getting started then try out an Icebreaker Tech T. They're a classic and will work for you in almost any setting. If you're already a merino fan then do check out Rapha's merino long sleeve polo. It's a go anywhere smart look.

The Icebreaker Tech-T is a design classic and a travel wardrobe staple

The marketing lesson from a weekend of wandering Covent Garden, Soho and Hackney is that, "You've got to be in it to win it". Meaning that even with the best product if you're not in-store, in-stock and in-the-full-range-of-sizes then all your hard marketing work can die on the vine.

Next steps
There are three main things that you can learn from these merino companies:
1. Niche marketing is about outstanding products
2. Loyal fans are more powerful at spreading ideas than you'd expect
3. You can build a big brand, even if you start with a small tribe

Social media for lawyers

Lawyers don't use social media well enough.

Have you ever wondered why it's so hard for lawyers to build an online reputation?

Everything is so public. There is a common fear about client confidentiality and not wanting to appear to be touting for business.

Even worse, lawyers don't want to mis-step and find their reputation in tatters. We all remember the "4 pound dry cleaning" associate from Baker and McKensie or Claire Swire from Norton Rose.

If you don't take charge and actively manage your identity online then you are just leaving your reputation to chance. I've seen too many friends who's online reputations don't live up to how good a lawyer they are. This makes me sad.

When you write an article for a trade publication, give a presentation or write a case summary for a yearly review then make the most of it. Post it on LinkedIn, Tweet it out and ask for a link to it from your firm's blog.

Social media is simply another channel for you to build your reputation as a lawyer. But technology moves so fast that if you don't participate then you may find that the account names you want are taken or like some of my closest friends, you find that:

• The highest ranking item for your name is a student debating competition from ten years ago.
• The front page of google is full of your (somewhat unimpressive) marathon times (these are often published publicly online without your permission).
• Another person with your name ranks higher than you, and that they are a bit of an unsavory character. 

Problems such as these mean that when a client wants to find you on Google, they can't.

As a lawyer your reputation is everything. Twenty years ago it was all about the old boys club. And maybe it still is, but the next generation of clients are going to want to be able to find you on LinkedIn, Twitter and most importantly on Google. The best advice I've ever read on social media for lawyers was written before social media even really existed. Trusted Advisor by Charles Green sets out a plan for building your reputation gradually by doing what you do best. Everything I've learnt about selling professional services builds on his work.

Social media strategy for lawyers
The core of your personal social media strategy within the umbrella of your law firm will be based on:

1. Who is the audience you want to reach?
2. What topics do you want to be known for?

There is some good practical advice from the General Counsels of Telsa Motors and Fuji in this video called How to earn my GC business.

LinkedIn profile
LinkedIn is the cornerstone of your professional social media presence. Many law firms are requiring their partners to sign up for LinkedIn, but that doesn't mean that people are doing it well. To succeed on LinkedIn, you should treat it the way you treat real life networking. You aren't there to tout for business, you're there to maintain relationships so that when someone does need advice they instantly think to turn to you. This means taking a softer approach to LinkedIn than most social media experts would advise. As a lawyer, you'll want to focus on:

• Having a fully complete profile including major clients, practice areas and recent wins.
• Include a link directly back to your official profile on your law firm's website. 
• Posting occasional updates about developments in new legislation, recent cases and industry news.
• Keeping an eye on groups, discussions and news from your peers.

LinkedIn is the perfect place to gradually build a public reputation in your practise area without making a big deal of it.

Facebook
You'll find that Facebook is a powerful tool, but for most lawyers, it's best to keep your professional and personal lives a little separate. Some criminal barristers find that Facebook is great for building a following online. But unless you are a public defender, then Facebook isn't really a tool for business development for lawyers. You can still keep a part of your profile public so that the basic information does pop up in Google. Check your privacy settings to enable this.

Twitter
Twitter is like a very public and simplified version of Facebook. It's great for getting to the front of Google for your own name. If you do dive into Twitter then focus on short, simple updates and managing who you follow, rather than who follows you. You'll want to very gradually build a small following of loyal and connected solicitors in your niche. Simply chasing a large following is not really a good look.

Blog
Running your own blog can be overkill for the average attorney. You only need to post once a month to keep it alive, but even that is probably too much for most senior associates. Instead, make sure that you are writing an article or two for your firm's blog occasionally.

YouTube
Google loves video content. A new video on YouTube will often rank on the first page of Google search results almost immediately. Your firm probably has a couple of recruiting videos from 1997 that you used to use at campus careers fares. As naff as the videos probably are, they are alot better than being entirely absent from YouTube. Talk to your marketing department about uploading as much video content as possible onto YouTube. If you do present at a conference then try and get a copy of the video and upload it onto YouTube.

Next steps
There are some things that you can do immediately to improve your reputation online:

1. Update your LinkedIn profile with more information on awards, major transactions and press coverage. These are all already public so you have nothing to fear. 
2. Google yourself and make a note of what you see on the first page of results. If you're happy then, diarise to re-check again in 6 months.
3. If you're not happy with what you see on Google then start creating content that will displace your current competition with things that you do want to see.
4. Set up an editorial calender with a plan for articles you will write, conferences you'll attend and events that you want to go to.
5. Keep your profiles and accounts up to date because Google (and your clients) love fresh content.

Zen at work

Your approach to life impacts your approach to business.

Reading the Steve Jobs Biography has made me realise how important his spiritual and philosophical inquires were to his business.

I’ve made a point of keeping my beliefs to myself in my work, and on this blog. But Steve’s example is forcing me to confront the fact that the attitude you bring to life really does inform the attitude that you bring to business.

Recently, several bloggers that I respect such as Olivier Blanchard and Seth Godin have been sharing more about how their beliefs inform their work. Thus, I’d like to share my own brief explorations with Zen and some practical things that I’ve learnt.

Bring yourself to your work
There is a very real challenge of how to bring more of your personality to work. Especially when it comes to beliefs, ideas and philosophy. HR and sales training have traditionally been safe places to start a conversation about 'Why are we in business?' and 'What do we want to achieve?' but they are not enough. To bring more of your own beliefs about people, life and the universe into your work try the following:

1. Breathe more (like right now), breathing is a classic zen technique for centring. The resulting inner calm will infuse those around you.
2. Start your next meeting with a "What do we want to get out of this meeting?" conversation. It's easier to focus when you know why you are playing the game.
3. Sit on the rock. You need to figure out what kind of dent in the universe you want to make. Don't spend too much time on this. Just pick something that you want to see more of or less of in the world and commit to that. Then adjust as you go along.

Steve Jobs bought Zen practice into his business life.

The Zen of Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs was influenced by Zen teachers Shunryu Suzuki and Kobun Chino Otogawa. There are some really interesting critiques of Steve’s evolving interest in Zen during his career. There is even a comic book about Steve’s relationship with Kobun Chino Otogawa called The Zen of Steve Jobs. Steve bought Zen practise into his business and the confident minimalism of zen is obvious in the best of Apple’s products. Shunryu Suzuki was one of the first Zen masters to eschew the sudden flash of enlightenment in favour of pursuing every-day little improvements. Steve adopted one of Suzuki's phrases for the early Macintosh team; "The journey is the reward." This seems kind of obvious, but it's hard to keep it in mind when you are washing dishes or stuck in traffic.

My story
As a teenager, I came across The Monk who Sold his Ferrari and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance but couldn’t really get Zen to work for me on a day-to-day basis. I largely forgot about it until a friend suggested that I do the Landmark Forum in 2011. I did the weekend course and it prompted me to take action on a range of things that I’d been putting off, from my photography, to the move to London and even my relationship with my family.

The Landmark Forum is a weekend training course run in large cities in the UK, USA, New Zealand and Australia (amongst others). Graduates include the author of Fight Club, the directors of The Matrix and creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul, Jack Canfield. Around one and a half million people have done the course.

Landmark changes the the format of Zen training by having a large group, for a long period of time, in a big room, with a presenter at the front. The result is that you get a more intense exposure to the content. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I'm really pleased that I did it.

Landmark was influenced by the EST training created by Werner Erhard. Like Steve Jobs, Erhard was heavily influenced by Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki. Erhard was also influenced by Dale Carnegie and Napoleon Hill. EST was created in the 1970s and about 500,000 people took the training including Cher, John Denver, Dr Phil, Douglas Engelbart (who invented the computer mouse) and Arianna Huffington (founder of the Huffington Post). It took Zen and added a bit of ruthless compassion. Meaning that, the trainer was pretty tough on people when needed. Like a football coach with the occasional bout of shouting at the players.

Finding your own guru
Recently I’ve been experimenting with how to keep all of this alive in day-to-day practice. I’ve come across a much older Zen thinker that provides really good food for thought. Jiddu Krishnamuti is the real thing. An Indian guru who quit and gave up being a guru saying; “Be your own guru.” Recordings of all of his talks are available online for free. His main point was not to over-think things.

Next steps
So, how to apply all this in your life? And in business?

1. Find a copy of Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind on iTunes. It’s a soft introduction to Zen but you’ll soon be finding the divinity in the mundane and being more mindful of the present moment.
2. Listen to as much J Krishnamurti as you can find on YouTube, Audiobooks or iTunes. If it’s too hard core for you then Deepak Chopra is a passable substitute.
3. Ask around your friends and find someone who has done the Landmark Forum. Talk to them about the weekend course and then sign up for it. It’s full on, but it will be one of the most powerful things you do in your life.

Confessions of an Angry Ad Man: Strategists

This month we have another guest post from an advertising creative. He's a Cannes Lion winning copywriter who has worked for Saatchi & Saatchi, Y&R, TBWA, Leo Burnett and Ogilvy. As you'll surmise from the guest post, he's a very angry ad man. I don't agree with everything in the post but I've decided to publish it as a coherent whole.

Bloody Poodles: The angry ad man on planners and strategists

My first comment on planners is that I'm not qualified to comment on them, because I've never really seen the output of their work. But I'm also pretty sure that no one else has either, so I'm as well placed as anyone. The so-called outputs of planners are usually documents with important sounding titles like Manifesto, Brand Architecture or Tone of Voice Guidelines. I haven't seen nearly as many of these documents as you'd think given the recent cambrian explosion of strategists, planners, researchers and other non-creative and non-suit employees in most agencies.

When creatives do get to see the output of planners, it's usually at a client meeting. The nice venn diagrams are usually there to soften up the client so they'll accept my creative ideas more readily. It feels a bit like the ariel bombardment the night before I go 'over the top' and into battle. It's nice to have, but I'm not sure that once the sh*t hits the fan, that it made any difference. Although, I once presented my ideas after a Strategy Director had woven the client such a vivid story about their target customer I'm pretty sure that I could have presented an actual piece of crap and it would have been approved. So maybe strategy can be useful if done well.

Even at its best, planning feels like Suiting 2.0 to me. It's all the customer insights, creative brief writing and copy suggestions that I've always gotten from account managers. Only now I can get from them someone wearing a velvet jacket who secretly wishes that they worked for McKinsey. This new and improved Suit isn't always a bad thing, as the quality of client servicing in most agencies does leave room for a more intellectually robust approach. I've been pissed off at planners but I've never felt that they were fundamentally too dumb to understand the big idea. I can't say the same for account men.

The future of agency life is probably to learn better from each other. For example, I always look at a new brief by asking: Who are we targeting? What do we want to say to them and what do we want them to do as a result? Apparently, this is pretty much what a planner does, so maybe we could swap notes more often. Although, strategists seem to treat these type of questions as an end unto themselves, rather than a means to an end. As depressing as it sounds, the goal of advertising isn't always to sell more products. Sometimes it's just to get the work out the door. I'm thinking in particular of a set of banner ads that took up 3 months of my life and involved 40 sets of changes.

I do have to say that an arrogant planner is a truly dangerous thing. To me, the purpose of planning is to align the thinking of the client and the agency. If the planner is arrogant they might not be able to shift the thinking of the client and they certainly won't be able to shift thinking inside the agency. Arrogance almost defies the purpose of planning and strategy. If a strategist isn't a team player then I can spend half the project reverse engineering a target market so that I've got something to base my campaign on. I then get to the meeting and find that the planner has been off in their own world duplicating the effort to create exactly the same thing. This wastes my time and theirs.

Maybe planners really are the brains of the operation, but only at the start of a project. Like someone who farts in an elevator... By the time you see the impact of a planner's work, they're long gone. Peter Thomson, the usual author of this blog, once told me that being a strategist feels like using words to reach out inside a client's brain and do a particular type of micro-neurosurgery that then makes the client say in six month's time, when the work is presented, "Yes, that feels like us."

- This guest post is part two of a series by the Angry Ad Man. You can read part one at Confessions of an Angry Ad Man Part 1

Social media in the real world

Touchscreens can bring social media out into the real world.

The cutting edge of social media is offline. Businesses have become increasingly lost and I see people forgetting two of the most important things about social media: 1. Digital experiences can still be part of the real world. 2. Social media doesn't have to be digital.

Digital outside
Social media is becoming more of a part of everyday experiences in the real world. My favourite examples range from RFID wristbands that let you "like" a ride on Facebook at an amusement park in Israel to touch screen tables that let you order Asian food a restaurant in London. My good friend Giapo Gelato has an HP touchscreen with a webcam that allows you to record a short video instore and upload it to YouTube. For a period in 2010 the Giapo Instore Channel had the most uploaded videos to YouTube of any user account in the world. This was because Giapo had made it so easy to walk up to the screen, press record and instantly be sending a message to the world about your favourite flavour of the day.

Experience design
The fact is that social media and digital communication were only ever channels for delivering an experience to another human being. It just so happened that the experience was travelling through a screen on your laptop or a phone. In the next 5 to 10 years time, that screen could be anywhere. Improvements in touch interaction, projection screens, and hardened glass mean that you are going to find digital interactions popping up in increasingly unexpected places. While these checkout kiosks, public street maps and projected artworks are an annoyance to an older generation, to Generation Z they will be normal and expected. There is a great YouTube video with the punch line “To a one year old, a magazine is an iPad that is broken.” If you don’t have an experiential and interactive element to your brand, now is the time to start.

Taking the media out of social media
So real life will become more and more digital. But I’m just as frustrated by the online social media gurus who forget that social media isn’t always digital. It's too easy to forget that your business has always had a community of people around it and that those people have always used content and media to lubricate their interactions.

Every media used to tell a human story can be social media

Five things that you might not think are social media
Cave paintings were used as backdrops and prompts for a village story-teller to recount tales of hunting and village life. Human beings have always used media to promote interactions. At our very core, we crave either individual recognition, or affinity with the group, or both. This deep seated polarity drives our behaviour on Facebook just as much as it drove beat poets in the 1950s in a smoky jazz club or Roman story-tellers in a village square. All creating, sharing and consuming media to bind people together and to mark out the tribe as separate from other groups.

1. TV show
Television has always been a social media, because of the conversations that it prompts. The water-cooler buzz in the office on the day after a big show is just as social as the live tweets about the latest X Factor. The water-cooler conversation is simply a little less efficient and asynchronous because the show is finished before the conversation starts. BBC comedian Stewart Lee has a piece (spotted by Nick Emmel) in which he comments [paraphrasing]: “Television used to be about participating in a massive shared experience, being a part of something. Now you can watch a show alone, downloaded in your own time, and be part of nothing.” Lee is noticing that TV was always a social media, just the channel for the conversation has changed.

2. Magazine
The most important business-to-business social media is a Post-it note stuck in a magazine. I’ve lost count of the newspaper clippings left on my desk and the Airline Inflight magazines with a page folded down and a note from my boss saying “New business potential...” Printed material is more social than we realise because it persists, it can be shared and it has a talismanic value when passed from one person to another.

4. Comic strip
The printed out Dilbert cartoon on the wall of your IT department is a form of social media. Once it's on the wall, the cartoon becomes a media that reinforces a particular message to the sender and communicates it to an audience. Those naff signs in the accounts department are also social media, you know, the ones that say “I can please one person a day and today is not your day.” They spread via photocopying, they carry an idea and they create a badge of identity. If you are not just as fascinated by those signs and cartoons, as by the latest social media websites, then you are missing out on the human, anthropological and psychological view of social media. My friend Hugh McLeod has built an entire career on turning printed cartoons in the workplace into "Cube Grenades".

5. Book
I’ve scribbled all over my copy of Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation. Whenever I lend my copy out to someone I encourage them to write on it as well. It’s now a bit dog eared, but that book has a life of it’s own as a shared record. It’s a shared social experience on an admittedly very small scale but it's also a very personal one. Lend one your own favourite books to a friend, discuss it with them over a beer and then come back and tell me that social media is an “online only” trend.

5. Conference or a party
Events are a full of media including the speeches, recordings and slides. Scales range from huge TED conferences to board game nights at your local pub. The more isolated that people become in their day jobs, the more they crave real human interaction after hours. There are great websites that contribute to this trend like meetup.com but there is no media more social than simply being in the room with other people. The media part is the icebreaker provided by the speaker or event theme. If you’ve ever used the line “What did you think of that last speaker?” at a conference then you’ve used a form of media to smooth a social interaction. That’s social media.

Design for the real world
For consumer brands, some of these offline social media need to be more scalable experiences like coupons, touchscreens, friend-get-friend promotions and sponsored events. Whoever your audience is, you can use social behaviour as part of almost any promotion if you think laterally. Next time you're looking for a big idea in social media... get away from your screen and look outside.

Social media for e-commerce start-ups

Social media lets you get face-to-face with your customers.

Social Media is a naked communication medium. There is no ad agency making your adverts, no journalist writing an article about you. It’s just you and your customer, staring straight into each other’s eyes. If you are growing your own e-commerce website then everything you do will be focused on increasing conversion rates, basket sizes and margins. There are lots of practical things that you can do to improve these metrics. Many of which are ordinarily covered on this blog. But what I want to discuss today is how people are attracted to your site in the first place.

Commercial social media
My background is in business strategy and finance so I take a very commercial approach to social media. Over the years, I’ve found that social media provides a solid return on investment because it allows you to communicate more directly with your target audience. This builds the volume in your sales pipeline, increases repeat purchases and allows you to build margins by commanding a price premium.

There are two things that you can do to increase traffic to your e-commerce site from social media sources. The first is building compelling content that positions you as a respected expert and the second is to engage with the community in a way that builds trust.

Content creation for e-commerce start-ups Content is a cornerstone of a good social media programme for a start-up. The goal of your content is to add real value for your audience. You can create content across four areas:

1. Text (Blog post, articles, press releases and whitepapers)
2. Images (Photography, info-graphics and diagrams)
3. Video (Creative content like ‘how to’ guides or editorial content such as interviews and web-shows)
4. Audio (Podcasts, instructional CDs and audiobooks)

You need to choose the type of content that suits your creative process and your audience. In the end you’ll want to mix the mediums but it’s best to start with a strong focus on one that you know you can do well.

Community building for e-commerce start-ups 
Direct participation in social networks like Twitter and Facebook can bring significant traffic to your e-commerce site. But if you don’t have robust and helpful content to act as the subject of conversation then you’ll be left just talking about yourself. To build community for your site, imagine that you are going to a party:

1. First you decide which party you want to attend and how to get there.
2. Then you arrive at the party and listen to what’s going on, you get a feel for the crowd.
3. You gradually start to join a couple of conversations by building on what others are already saying.
4. Once you are part of the discussion you might add a story of your own.
5. Eventually, if you like the crowd and they like you, then you might invite them to come to another party at your house on another day.

These steps collate directly to building your community in social media. You need to choose an audience, listen to the buzz, comment on existing blogs, create your own content and eventually bring visitors into your new site.

Authentic voice for a start-up
To bring content creation and community building together you need to have an authentic voice. This requires a single editorial voice, whether it is your CEO, a spokesperson, or you. Practical ways that I use to tell when an e-commerce site has a real and authentic voice:

• Your generic corporate twitter account is paired with a public profile of an actual person.
• You have a mix of your own content and links to other people’s content. This shows that you are not operating in your own little vacuum.
• You host or attend real-life events, then post about them.

Summary
Social media is a naked and direct way of bringing traffic to your e-commerce site. You need to add real value to your community with ‘how to’ guides, tips, tricks and articles that they can learn from. You also need to let them get to know the real you. In the end, we all want to buy from people who we respect and trust. Social media allows you to build that respect and trust directly with your customer.

- This post originally appeared as a guest post at the 39 Shops blog. 39 Shops are an ecommerce platform for start-ups. You can view the original post and read more articles at: http://blog.39shops.com/social-media-for-e-commerce-start-ups

The relationship age

Technology changes are raising customer expectations.

Why humanising business is the next revolution.
We are in the middle of one the biggest economic shifts since the Industrial Revolution. The Information Age is rapidly being replaced with a new era grounded in technology but focused on people. And it's happening too fast for anyone to see. I call this new era, the Relationship Age because we will see businesses that nurture their relationships thrive and those that don’t die off. What look like changes in technology today are actually changes in human behaviour.

Once you have everything, you want to stand for something
We have been building our businesses to supply better products more cheaply. This has been largely achieved with cheap consumer products now widely available. But we’ve forgotten what consumers wanted all along. To matter. As Guy Kawasaki and Hugh Mcleod have each said in their own ways: There is an almost infinite demand for meaning. At the end of this recession, the new growth will come from hand-crafted, relationship-based, businesses that can think like a small company and still move resources like a large company.

Efficiency is no longer enough
The next big driver of progress won’t be scale-based efficiency. It will be a return to human values and relationships. In a business sense, this will mean customer service (in all its forms) will become the biggest differentiator. This new school of service will look more like after-sales support, installation, training and online peer communities. People won’t just buy a product , they’ll buy into a series of interactions with you.If you’ve ever bought something from a small local store instead of a chain store then you know what this trend looks like.

Standardised customisation
Automated manufacturing, 3D printing and rapid customisation are going to create manufacturing businesses re-born as service businesses. Computer controlled manufacturing has streamlined mass production to a point where were the output no longer needs to look like it was mass produced. Toyota now makes dozens of colours, models and variations on the same production line so that, as a customer, you can customise your car uniquely for about the same cost price as if it was built standard. I worked with a clothing manufacturer in New Zealand that can make a custom measured suit for the same price as an off-the-rack one because every part is laser cut one at a time using a computer.

More efficient manufacturing allows for easier customisation.

Efficiency will set us free, but to what end?
Ever wondered what all those people made redundant by robots and computerisation are going to do? The answer is service. And not the crappy, indifferent service that you're currently used to from an airline, hospital or bank. Competition will weed that crap out faster and faster. Every one of these industries have had such indifferent service because they had to standardise you as a customer and standardise their employees to chase efficiencies. CRM databases are reaching a level where they can allow for service to be personalised without loosing efficiencies. These new technologies are now liberating and empowering employees to act like humans again, and to treat you as a customer like a human being again. The commoditisation of customers is coming to an end, fast.

Hunger for the human touch
Whatever product you think you sell, it was never really a product, it was always an experience, and a service. But now people will start to realise that it's a service. How many times have you visited the ‘About us’ page of a company's website before the product page? The fact is that you are looking for people, for other warm-bodied human beings. We do this because people don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care.

Personalised service at scale
The more electronic people’s lives become, the more they crave real human contact. It's the "Checked by Quality Control ID12345" stamp that retailer Lush Cosmetics have now reinvented as a sticker with a cute cartoon face of a particular employee saying: "This product was hand-crafted by Janet."  You need to use video customer support and every tool that you can get your hands on to put genuine human emotion back into your customer service.

People want to know the story behind the products they buy.

Invisible service
When a system become truly efficient, it becomes invisible. The pay-to-jump the queue security systems in America and the biometric chips in New Zealand passports are clues to the ways that technology can streamline a system until it’s almost invisible. The automated checkout robot at your grocery store is pretty crappy today. But give it enough time (and maybe RFID barcodes mashed up with near field payments) and you’ll forget that it’s even there. I've also noticed that in stores with lots of self-service kiosks the staff are friendlier because they have time to spend actually helping a customer find something.  These systems will increase people’s expectations of smooth, fast and easy service from every organisation.

Accelerating competition
If you provide a bad product or service, there is almost nowhere left for you to hide. If you don't surprise and delight your customers with every interaction, then two guys in a garage are coming for you. Technology changes are lowering the barriers to entry in almost every industry.

Next steps
Four things that you can do to embrace the Relationship Age:

1. Streamline everything. Make your web checkout process seamless. Make finding things in your store effortless. Make your social media presences instantly responsive.
2. Use standardisation to create customisation. Once you have a template for your business, allow your customer to choose the parts that matter to them. Use a clean and fast CRM to remember everything about them and use that information to the benefit of the client (not just you).
3. Give your front line employees back the control, freedom and respect that they need to be able to deliver great customer service.
4. Make every customer feel like they matter. Remember, you don’t sell a widget, you sell the benefits of owning your widget, and you sell the experience of purchasing, using and maintaining it. You sell meaning.

Bad service
I want you to get angry when you experience bad service and when your company gives it. I want you to start thinking about every choice you make in terms of the meaning you want to create in the world. Every job you take, every website you make, ask yourself: Is this making things better, one person at a time. Ask yourself: Who am I really serving? Am I building a relationship?

What is a Strategist?

Over the years I've periodically ended up with a job title that included the word 'Strategist'. It's almost always applied as an adjective as in Brand Strategist, Design Strategist, Social Media Strategist or Plumbing Strategist.

Great strategic thinking is a team sport. You need a mix of disciplines and backgrounds, but eventually someone has to go away after the brainstorm and turn the ideas into something that can be communicated and executed. That person is a strategist.

Recently I've been thinking about what makes a Strategist different to an Account Manager, a Copywriter or a Planner. I wanted to focus in on the role of a person who is referred to as a Strategist, rather than the larger question of "What is strategy?"

What is a strategist?
My mum still occasionally asks me "So, what is it that you actually do?" In search of a better answer, I thought I'd ask a few friends what it means to be a "Strategist", their answers included:

A strategist develops opinions on the future direction of a company and its brand, based on existing and predicted conditions, other known variables, intuition and research.
- David Lyall, Creative Strategist

A strategist uses big-picture thinking, storytelling, insights, criteria development tools and synthesis in the development of agreed-upon end-goals.
- Randy Deutsch, Design Strategist

A strategist takes a range of new media techniques and tools and combines them into an integrated approach best suited to the client's needs.
- Wil Benton, Digital & Social Strategist

A strategist analyses complex environments or problems and designs practical pathways and business solutions to achieve organisational objectives.
- Kaye Glamuzina, Head of Strategy

A strategist is someone who has the ability to see beyond the near term.
- Richard Mander, Product Management Leader

A strategist is concerned with establishing the long-term direction of a business.
- Anas, Strategy Consultant

A strategist is responsible for conceptually and holistically thinking of a future direction based on incomplete information.
- Rui Martins, Director

A strategist looks at all inputs that will be important to a business and distills them into the right solution for future success.
- Stephen Gibbs, Director

A strategist identifies choices, evaluates them and recommends the best course of action to realise the client's objective.
- Jake Pearce, Consultant

A strategist makes decisions based on a future goal, and connects the present to that future-state so that the path is perceived to be achievable by others.
- Greg Ellis, Coach and Mentor

A strategist is the thinker that informs the course of a project.
- Josh Levine, Culture Consultant

A strategist figures out how the various cogs and wheels fit together so that the whole machine hums.
- Meena Kadri, Communications Strategist

What makes a good strategist?
Being people who think about improving things for a living, my friends also pitched in with what they think makes a good strategist. Their comments included:

A good strategist is marked out by their ability to use two words: "No" and "Why".
- David Lyall

A good strategist sees problems through other's perspectives.
- Randy Deutsch

A good strategist can take control and fix something that someone else has f_cked up.
- Kaye Glamuzina

A good strategist requires a higher level view, that often comes with experience.
- Richard Mander

A good strategist can see the wood for the trees.
- Stephen Gibbs

A good strategist provides a "winning game plan which proves to be a winner".
- Jake Pearce

A good strategist creates a path that is perceived to be achievable by others. If others can't follow the path, then it is not a strategy, but only a dream.
- Greg Ellis

A good strategist has two core skills; critical thinking and writing; and if they are really good, pattern seeking.
- Josh Levine

Last words:
Overall, the themes seem to be all about future thinking and problem solving. Something else that I've noticed when I work with other strategists is that they love to have the last word. So some of my friends offered a parting shot:

Strategists are prepared to defend their strategy; frequently stridently - until contradictory or better information arises; or conditions change. Similarly to the military sense, a strategist is expected to come up with a recommendation within a certain timeframe, regardless of the quality and amount of information at hand. Just like design, there is no such thing as "no strategy", only "bad strategy".
- David Lyall

A client may ask for strategies that will assure a more profitable or a more sustainable future. A strategist may point out that these are not mutually exclusive goals and can co-exist. Strategy provides a lens through which to see projects in a certain light, one that (because it provides a wide-angle view or rationale) engages and motivates.
- Randy Deutsch

Strategy is about a bigger view point. It's about having a roadmap of products rather than working on a single product. I.e. where are we going over time? It's often about making an investment in developing a technology platform rather than just cobbling a product together. - Seeing a product as part of a solution. It's also about thinking about what order to do things in. From a business or marketing point of view, where do we focus and when.
- Richard Mander

Strategist is an overworked word like 'nice'.
- Jake Pearce

When i first flew with Singapore Airlines in September 1998 I asked one of the flight attendants why they flew a 747 from Singapore to Johannesburg and then onto Durban to pick up about 60 passengers when that seemed to be a huge expense for little return? "Ah" he said, "Old Chinese proverb: He who does not cast his net, cannot catch fish." Look how Singapore Airlines has gone on to grow and create hubs on an international scale. Likewise, President JFK had no clue how to get to the moon and back, and nor did anyone else, but he set in motion the brain power of thousands to achieve a milestone for mankind.
- Greg Ellis

I once heard that if a client is looking for a strategist, they really just mean someone who can think. In my experience, Planners tend to roost in the advertising world, while Strategists are generally in design businesses. Of course, that distinction doesn't mean much anymore now that agencies are mixing and matching their capabilities. In any case, they're essentially the same thing (with perhaps different experience sets).
- Josh Levine

Conclusion
There is a common complaint that if your bathtub is leaking you don't call a Plumbing Strategist, you call a Plumber. Even so, there is a great anecdote about a Plumber who is called to fix a leaky hot water cylinder. He quickly spots the problem, tightens a small valve and hands the homeowner a bill for $100. The homeowner demands a breakdown of the invoice, protesting "But, you've only been here for 5 minutes." The Plumber re-issues the invoice stating:
- Fee for tightening valve: $5
- Fee for knowing which valve to tighten: $95

So, whatever you call it, the ability to think before you act is still valuable in almost any context.

Five myths of B2B social media

Time for some honest home truths about B2B social media

There is too much waffle in social media consulting. As a result, B2B businesses aren't taking enough responsibility for their own social media presences.

I've spotted five myths that have got to change if social media is going to become a credible part of B2B companies. It's time to start treating social media with the same commercial discipline that every other part of your business faces.

1. Social media is part of the marketing function
People seem to persist in leaving social media to the marketing team. This is the most dangerous myth I've come across. Social media impacts on customer service, public relations, recruitment and even procurement. Firewalling social media inside the marketing department is a bit like reserving email for use only by the IT department.

Decisive action: Give your customer support team the password to your Twitter account, today.

2. You can outsource social media
You can outsource particular functions like social media monitoring, copywriting for the web or video editing. But wholesale outsourcing your social media is like outsourcing sex. You can do it, but it's not a long term sustainable solution.

Decisive action: Make social media one (internal) person's responsibility and let them act as a pivot point for the internal and external stakeholders so they have oversight.

3. Social media is free
Everything takes time. Every minute you invest in Facebook is a minute that you are not investing in product development or direct sales. That doesn't mean you should be afraid of the investment. Just that you need to optimise your time.

Decisive action: Start measuring how long you and your team spend online. Your companies Facebook page may look like fun, but it's work. Treat it that way.

4. You need a consistent voice across all channels
Your LinkedIn audience is probably made up of your peers and professional contacts, your Twitter followers might be developers or designers and on Facebook you are having a conversation with University Graduates or potential new hires. Each of these communities do need some visual brand consistency, but you wouldn't talk to your Grandma in the same voice that you'd use at the pub.

Decisive action: If you are automatically cross-posting the exact same content from Twitter to LinkedIn and Facebook using Hootsuite or Tweetdeck then stop. Now.

5. Social media needs more metrics
When you start with something, you need a way to know if you are winning. You need to create feedback loops. But as soon as you are up and running with social media then chasing the almighty 'follow' will incentivise the wrong behaviour. A small, tight-knit tribe that believe in the same things you do and are willing to recommend your products to their friends is much more valuable than a landgrab for extra followers. You need better (not more) metrics.

Decisive action: Change your metrics from 'growth' metrics like followers and fans, and start measuring 'engagement' metrics such as retweets or reshares. Or even better, start tracking sales attributed to digital channels.