Influential Marketing Blog

2009 Predictions from The Pros At PSFK

Tired of 2009 predictions yet? I've had no less than a dozen requests to contribute to compilations of predictions for the next year and have participated in a few. So, clearly I'm part of the problem if you're up to your ears in predictions from bloggers about what the next year will hold. Sometimes in the frenzy for all of us to put together our own predictions, we can lose sight of the fact that there are people who's entire jobs it is to pay attention to the trends happening around us and to put them in context. There are several sites devoted to this, and PSFK (one of my favourites) just released a book well worth picking up. 

Your first reaction will probably include sticker shock (the softcover version is $50) - but once you delve into the ideas there, you'll likely consider it a bargain when priced against much longer reports from industry analysts about what trends to pay attention to in the future. Not only will the 9 "good ideas" shared in the book get you thinking, but you'll also get introduced to lots of sites you've never even heard of, including:

www.minkangdesign.com
www.tikitag.com
www.innocentdrinks.co.uk (Disclosure: Innocent Drinks are also mentioned in my book.)
www.twones.com
www.longnow.org

Just about the only complaint I had about the preview copy that the good folks at PSFK sent over was that the printing execution done through Blurb clearly must have driven their art directors crazy as it cut off words and images in several places and lacked the sort of high quality design experience overall that anyone familiar with PSFK will have come to expect. Still, despite the print version shortcomings, the ideas in this book will inspire your thinking into the new year in a way that no blog posts (no matter how well written) will do. For that alone, it's worth a look.

Taj Hotel Reopens And Welcomes Travellers Home

I have had the good fortune to stay at the Taj Hotel in Mumbai twice in my life and both visits were amazing experiences. As you may recall, the Taj was involved in the recent terrorist attacks and had closed for a period of time. Well, the Taj is reopening tomorrow and using outbound email to former patrons like myself to spread the word. Here's what they say:

We are delighted to announce that The Taj Mahal Tower will reopen on December 21, 2008 at 7:00 pm. Mumbai will rediscover its nesting place and play host to the world again.

We're bringing back the clink of champagne flutes, even pile carpets that muffle the footfall of commerce and the perfect sea view. You will feel the buzz of business as usual and experience hospitality that is quintessentially Taj.

To commemorate the special occasion we have introduced exclusive services at The Taj Mahal Tower. Presenting the private world of The Taj Club, impeccable butler service, luxury Jaguar transfers and splendid suites.

Feel at home once again at The Zodiac Grill, Souk, Masala Kraft, Shamiana and Starboard. Reawaken your life force at our Jiva Spa and experience the priceless luxury of an expansive retail emporia.

And very soon, expect to discover the inspiration, romance and intrigue of the legendary Palace Wing.

Welcome Back.

If I had an upcoming trip to India, I would certainly stay there and highly recommend the experience for anyone else making a trip to the region. Now more than ever, a stay at the Taj sends a statement to the terrorists that they can't disrupt our lives and things will go on. Not to mention, it's still one of the best hotels in the world.

Trust me, I stay at a lot of them.

9 Ways To Make Twitter More Useful For You

Yesterday I wrote a post about the "5 Stages Of Twitter Acceptance." Part joke, part insight - I was trying to focus on the evolving way that people are uncovering their own personal usefulness out of the site. Several hundred retweets later the post seems still to be travelling around the web and I hit a rhythm of a few hundred new followers on Twitter yesterday and likely will have the same today. But aside from getting all this conversation, the more interesting point of view that several commenters to my original post shared was that they are making their way through the stages and finding the one that is most useful for them. So for today's post, I thought I focus on nine ways that Twitter can be more useful for you. It's still not a tool for everybody (I don't really believe any tool can be). But hopefully these tips offer you some ideas on using the site well, regardless of what stage you happen to be in. =

1. Listen to conversations real time. This is the easiest thing to do. Just go to http://search.twitter.com and type in your brand or company name, a subject area, or even your own name. Within seconds you'll start to get an idea of people's perceptions, trending discussions and who some influencers are.
2. Track emotion moments. At any given time, you may need to email someone to ask for something or tell them about something. Sometimes, it's a journalist or blogger you want to talk about you. Other times it's a colleague. Looking at their latest status on Twitter can give you a wealth of insight about timing your message. If they're on holiday in Jamaica, you might want to wait till next week. If they just talked about how much they hate sales emails - maybe you should think about calling. If they happen to be travelling to your city, invite them to coffee. The uses are almost endless.
3. Get link love. There are times when you may want to get the word out about a piece of content or something that you are doing online. To get bloggers to do a post about it is a time commitment that many times may not be possible. Getting a mention on someone's Twitter stream, however, can reach an equal number of people and can be easier to get, as long as what you're asking for is still relevant.
4. Reach unreachable people. Sure, you could use Twitter to send a message to Robert Scoble and he would likely see it, but in recent news, now even Shaq has his own Twitter account, as does Lance Armstrong. Do you think either of those guys picks up their own phone or reads their own emails? Probably not, but as more high influence unreachable people start to use Twitter, this alone might create it's ultimate usefulness.
5. See what's popular/important. If you wanted to, you could probably use Twitter as your single source of news information. Trending topics often mirror the big news stories of the day, and in cases of tragedy such as the recent Mumbai bombings, Twitter could offer a more direct lens into real recaps and news on location than any traditional media site.
6. Introduce more people to your personal brand. Before I shared a link to my own post about the 5 stages of Twitter yesterday, I tweeted that my word of the day was "sarchasm" (the gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it). My aim was to create a few different reasons for people to pay attention to my Twitter stream in the same shorter timespan. The result was hundreds of people sharing either thought, or both, within an hour of posting and more than 250 new followers within 12 hours. Those people now know my name (at the very least) and at most they may have been introduced to my blog and my book.
7. Get quick answers. People on Twitter love to share answers to questions and things they have learned. When I wanted to know how to get a new logo designed for my blog, I got an answer on Twitter. The community there has also helped me find apps for my Blackberry, solve issues with Typepad, find examples of companies with personality, decide whether joining a particular social network or organization is worth it, and translate pieces of content in languages I don't speak. All usually within minutes of posting a request.
8. Optimize your event attendance. Of course, it depends on the type of event you're going to, but just about every business related conference or gathering these days (no matter how traditional) will likely have some attendees twittering about it. And paying attention to those conversations can give you vital inside information about an event, such as what sessions to attend, where the parties will be, what the key trends or topics of discussion happen to be, and who the influencers at that particular event are. Typically, a "hash tag" emerges for any event (such as #sxsw08 for the SXSW show in Austin this year). Once you have this, you can also easily aggregate all the conversations about a particular event as well.
9. Read instant feedback. If you launch a new service or product, or speak at a conference, or do a new blog post ... you can get instant feedback on the effort through Twitter. Often it will be thoughts that people don't visit your site or email you directly to share, but do post publicly to their networks.

Any other tips to share on how else you've found Twitter to be most useful?

The 5 Stages Of Twitter Acceptance

Anyone who works with fast moving technology knows that there is always a new shiny tool that gets all the attention. It tends to change every few months and anytime you start to use a new tool, you do secretly wonder if it will be around all that long. By any measure, Twitter has passed these boundaries. It has been around for several years. Every day more and more people discover it and it's usefulness in their personal lives. New stories of the business potential of the tool are also coming out, such as Dell's recent report that they have made more than $1 million dollars through their DellOutlet Twitter account. Small business superstars like Gary Vaynerchuck (@garyvee) declare it the #1 most useful promotional tool in their arsenal. Clearly, Twitter isn't just the new shiny tool on the block anymore.

Yet many of the people who declare themselves "converted" and have opened Twitter accounts aren't getting the best benefit. Until recently, I was one of them. I started thinking about this after getting some feedback to my recent blog survey that people were not finding my Twitter feed (@rohitbhargava) very useful or interesting. Until that point, I had been using it as a place to write all the things that I didn't consider important enough to blog about. I hadn't yet accepted it's true influence. So now I'm trying to revise the way that I use the tool. I retweet other's posts more often. I share links to things that I didn't write, but found interesting. I have been experimenting with playful posts like a "word of the day" feature. All this is to try and find a better rhythm so that I am approaching what I would call a Level 5 stage of acceptance with Twitter. Here's a graphic I created to describe how I see those stages:

Feel free to link to this image, grab it for use in your own presentations or blog (click to see a bigger version that you can download).

UPDATE 2: Check out my follow up post, "9 Ways To Make Twitter More Useful For You."

UPDATE: Thanks to those that pointed out I didn't share my Twitter name in this post. It's @rohitbhargava.

A Compilation of 2009 Social Media Predictions Worth Reading

It started with a simple email from Peter. An invitation to contribute some thoughts to a collaborative blog post talking about the future. It's a good topic on this 15th day of the last month of the year, a mere two weeks until we welcome 2009. Which may explain why when Peter Kim from Forrester Research sent his email, 13 other highly popular bloggers and (dare I say) social media "personalities" took him up on his offer and each contributed a some thoughts to a single collaborative post.

Thankfully, you won't have to wait until 2009 to see all those thoughts - just a few minutes ago, Peter published the full post on his blog and you can download the PDF as well. Now I'm keenly aware that much of the social media world is collaborative back scratching (or "blog scratching" as some bloggers call it - but this is where the beauty of numbers comes in. Me publishing my own post on my thoughts for 2009 would be a much more self indulgent effort ... though, of course, that has certainly not stopped me in the past.

But as the list of contributors in Peter's post should prove, if you can get enough smart people together to talk about the same issue, you're bound to end up with more useful ideas and thinking. So download the PDF or visit any of the contributing blogger's sites and introduce yourself to their content and ideas. I'll bet you find at least one thought that helps you plan for 2009 amongst these contributions.

GET THE PDF WITH 14 EXPERTS TALKING ABOUT TRENDS IN SOCIAL MEDIA >>

Also, you can read the document below:

Social Media 2009

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Management Business social media 2009

Forrester Finds Consumers Think 84% Of Corporate Blogs Suck

Consider this piece of data that leads a new Forrester Research report (free registration required in order to download report): only one in six consumers (just 16%) trust company blogs. For believers in the power of social media, this just doesn't seem right. After all, using a blog to put a more human face on any business should be the most trusted form of communication, right? It turns out that many businesses who are launching blogs are doing so solely to promote their latest marketing messages. As the report points out, "companies that selfishly blog about their products [are reinforcing] the idea that blogs can't be trusted." In other words, 84% of corporate blogs today probably suck.

What's driving this prevailing consumer distrust? It can be many things, from pressure within an organization to make sure that a blog is "branded" enough in what it talks about, to inexperience of a random member of the marketing team charged with launching a blog but without a strategy in mind for how to make it something compelling. Usually, the deficiency comes down to content. Launching a blog with nothing to say is like paying for a blank magazine ad ... sure you own the space, but you've done nothing with it.

So what's the solution? As Forrester's report argues, part of it is to make sure that blogging is part of a larger social media strategy. Intel is a good example. They have launched several corporate blogs - but more than that, they have an innovative program to bring social media influencers behind the scenes at Intel, they have many employees who have their own personal blogs, and just yesterday Intel publicly launched their official Social Media Guidelines which demonstrate to employees and the world exactly what their commitment to social media is within the organization.

The biggest lesson in all this is one of commitment. Launching a corporate blog or deciding to engage with social media is something you need to commit resources and attention to. The cost is one of human labor, not hard cash. And in a recession, the one thing you should be willing to commit more readily to than anything else your time and the time of your employees to something that can have a big impact if done right. Should you be worried that only 16% of people trust corporate blogs? Not at all. The thing you should worry about is whether or not your customers trust your blog.

*Disclosure - Intel is a current client of Ogilvy PR and I have worked on their business and advised them on social media in the past (but I did not work on the social media guidelines mentioned in this post).

ImageStorming: How To Brainstorm Alone (When You Have To)

Brainstorms are fun. Usually they involve getting a group of people into a room together, using some kind of white board or collaborative location to take notes and inviting participants to shout out their best ideas. Unfortunately, sometimes you're faced with a creative challenge and can't pull together a team of people to help you develop ideas. You're on your own to solve it.

So, what can you do in this situation? Use images - or more specifically, use image search online. When I was in a similar situation trying to brainstorm concepts for the cover of my book last year, it was the combination of two images that led to the inspiration for the eventual award winning cover design. Searching for imagery works for most creative challenges, from a design oriented one like I had with my book cover, to a more executional brainstorm where you are trying to come up with marketing campaign ideas.

Here are four great tools that I use often:

1. iStockPhoto - This site has a wealth of photos, and most of them are available in a small size for just $1 in licensing fee. So not only can you use the collection of images, icons and graphics to get inspired, but if you happen to find one that you want to use for something, it won't eat your entire budget.
2. Google Images - The most obvious and standard tool, Google Images can be good or bad for what you are looking for, and is rarely in between. Due to the huge collection of images that Google will return for just about any search, you are bound to find images that don't match to your search very well. Sometimes this is good as it leads you in different directions, but other times the noise can win and the tool loses its usefulness.
3. Moodstream - A relatively new site from GettyImages, this is a very addictive online tool that lets you select particular moods based on several keywords and it will show you a stream of images to match that mood. If you are brainstorming based on emotions or more human terms, this could be the perfect tool to use.
4. Flickr - By far the largest photo sharing community on the web, I go straight to Flickr when I'm looking for more images of real life and real people as opposed to stock photography. You can often find more branded photos as well, which is really useful if you are trying to develop campaign ideas for a particular company or product.

Any other image search tools that you find really inspiring? Share them in a comment here and I'll add them to the list.

4 Easy Steps To Piss Off A Wall Street Analyst

Costco CEO and cofounder Jim Sinegal is not your ordinary CEO, unfortunately for all of us. Even though his company is America's fourth largest retailer, you seldom hear much about Costco in comparison to all the press that Walmart or Target seem to get. Yet Sinegal has quietly been leading Costco to continual profit, same store sales that were up 9% in August, and (most importantly) a huge base of happy customers AND employees. What's his secret? As a recent Q&A session with Sinegal published in last month's issue of Fast Company shows, it's a combination of common sense business, honesty and authenticity, and a willingness to piss off Wall Street analysts and investors.

The problem with many large publicly held corporations is that their number one priority becomes satisfying those stakeholders. That's a bit like buying a new car every month for a spoiled teenager because they think the old one isn't new anymore. Yet the analysts and investors are the ones with the money and so many brands are afraid to cross them. The results of not doing so, however, can be disastrous. The recent BusinessWeek story about the demise of Mervyns is a perfect example of this. Every company is beholden to their investors to some degree, but it doesn't have to prevent you from doing what you know is best for your business. Here are a few lessons you can take from Costco on how pissing off your investors (and the Wall Street analysts) may be the best move you can make to help your business survive the recession.

1. Spend money on your employees. Costco pays workers an average of $17 per hour, has a great benefits package and generally focuses on their employees so much that the Fast Company piece notes "Wall Street grumbles that Costco cares more about its customers and empoyees than its shareholders." In any list of prioritized stakeholders, Costco puts their investors exactly where they belong ... after their employees and customers.
2. Make decent (but not unbelievable) returns. Despite not making investors their top priority, Costco has achieved 70% revenue growth over the past five years and its stock has doubled. Returns are important and at the end of the day, you need to make money in order to even have investors. But why focus on making double digit or even triple digit returns at the expense of everything else? Make a profit, beat the industry average, and consider yourself ahead of the game.
3. Avoid exploiting customers or partners. A recent Simpsons episode ridiculed Apple's supposedly "unofficial" policy of overcharging for accessories by having Lisa try to buy a pair of $40 headphones. Though parody, it's not that far from the truth for anyone who's tried to shop for such things at an Apple store. Costco, instead, has a policy of not marking any product up more than 15%. It's a fair and consistent policy that wins them partners, better price negotiation and happier customers.
4. Focus on the long term. Wall Street, by its nature, has a short term outlook. It's why CMO's lose their jobs every 18 months and why profits and revenue are measured every quarter. Most businesspeople agree that this is exactly the wrong way to measure a business ... as sometimes you need to have a bad quarter or two before seeing big success.

Savvy Aunties And Your Underappreciated Customers

Every good marketing plan I have ever seen has the same piece of critical information to answer the biggest question of all: who is our target market? This is not about creating useless age demographics to segment an audience by what you think you can measure. It is about painting an idea of who the main person is that you want to reach about your product. Let's say it's a mom of a five year old boy. Once you highlight this main customer, your marketing focuses on how to reach them. That's the traditional model.

What if you could, instead, focus on your most underappreciated customer target? The one that none of your customers are chasing. The one that is open to what you're selling, and would love to hear about it, but no one is focused on telling them. For that same five year old boy, let's assume that person is his favourite aunt. The one he loves to see and idolizes. The one without kids who has plenty of money to spend on him, and loves to see him as well.

Thankfully, there is now a site called Savvy Aunties for all those aunties out there, which offers something to the forgotten demographic of women who love kids and have them in their life, but aren't moms. That's an example of focusing on an underappreciated demographic. Of course, their whole site is about these women ... but it does raise an interesting question for you to consider. Who are your savvy aunties, and are you doing enough to reach them?

How Flip Video Is Using Personalization To Stand Out

I've been a fan of the iconic Flip camera for some time now. In my own experience, the device has single handedly unlocked the immediate power of creating video for me because it has made it a simple process. It has always been a great product. But now there are other products that offer similar features. Their groundbreaking idea of a compact video camera with popup USB connection is no longer the differentiator it once was. To take it's place, they've done something very smart with their most recent product, the Flip Mino (and Mino HD). It's one of the first mainstream consumer electronics products that you can customize with your own design. Using an appropriate partnership with Cafepress, a leader in offering customers the ability to personalize products and sell them, you can now customize the front of your Flip Mino camera. Here is how Flip Video is using it to help them drive sales in the all important holiday season:

1. Smart Partnership. Recognizing that users of Cafepress are already familiar with customizing their products, they chose to fulfill this feature with the right partner instead of trying to recreate everyone alone.
2. Designer Models. Some people may want their new Flip Camera to have a personality, but not be into uploading their own image or doing a lot of work to get it. For them, Flip has partnered with several designers to offer ready made unique designs that you can choose from.
3. Personalization. Of course, there are a large number of people who DO want to have their own look to their camera, and for them the ability to upload and use their own image is a big deal.
4. Flat pricing. The final element to the strategy is not charging people a huge premium to do this. All the designs cost the same as a regular camera - so people are far more likely to do it.

These choices point to an important side benefit that Flip will likely get from this personalization effort which will take place over time. Anyone who pulls out a customized video camera from Flip at their family gathering, amongst a group of friends, or even on the street is likely to turn some heads. More importantly, they will talk about their new camera that they were able to customize. The word of mouth from that alone should help Flip Video to go beyond having a successful holiday season of sales, and make this a must have product well into next year. Using personalization well can do that.