Every year at the start of the new year there is something that most of us do without realizing it. It is related to making new year's resolutions, but it is more about sequencing your long term goals into the order in which you want to achieve them. One example might be saying to yourself, "I want to be married and then have a kid before I turn 35." Life is full of these little promises. So full, in fact, that often we make them to ourselves without even thinking. It raises an interesting marketing question as well.
What would it take to get a customer to reevaluate the life sequence they have already set for themselves?
It becomes a particularly important question when you consider a brand selling a product that is all about fitting into the right stage in life. A product, for example, like a car. When you consider when people buy new cars, it is very much about life's stages. Graduating from college, landing a new job, getting married or having a kid. Each of these life changes can often be triggers to consider buying a new car.
Honda's new campaign for the CRV may have found one way to solve that challenge. With their Honda LeapList campaign, they encourage consumers to go online and make their own lists of what they want to accomplish before they turn 30, or what they want to do before they get married. It is a brilliant way not only to encourage people to dream and perhaps even act on their longstanding dream to travel the world, but also to encourage them to think about how getting a new car might fit into that sequence. The underlying message is a perfect one for their consumers: why wait? You can do all the things you want to do, and you can do them on your own time. But maybe you should just think about buying that car right now instead of waiting.
Sure it's clearly a marketing message - but what they perfectly prove is something that any marketers would do well to remember. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do to sell your product is help your customers to imagine exactly when they should buy it.
The land grab is officially starting. For the first time since the popularization of the Internet, the big news today is that ICANN is opening up the ability for the creation of new suffixes that come after the dot, such as .com or .org. The open application process lets any organization apply to be the manager of a new top level domain (TLD) and applications are expected for everything from categories and industries like .ngo (for charities and nonprofits) or .city (for cities). In addition, of the over 2000 applications expected (despite the $185,000 application fee), more than 2/3rds will expected to be brands who are registering their own brand out of fear of cybersquatting.
This may not matter as much as many marketers and brands think it will. In fact, here are five big reasons why as of right now this is an overhyped development in technology:
1. History hasn't been kind to TLDs.
Wouldn't it be great if you were in the travel industry to be able to signify your site with a .travel domain name? Or for career sites to use .jobs? Or museums to use .museum? Well, all of those top level domains already exist. How often have you navigated to a site that uses any of them? New TLDs don't matter until people's behaviour starts to change for using them.
2. Any changes are years away.
The application process will be open for the next three months, and then will close. From that point, experts are predicting that it will be at least another year or two before ICANN is able to decide which of the TLDs are approved. The most obvious proof that this process will take years? There are a bunch of new consulting companies popping up as experts who can smell money to be made in the interim.
3. Categories will require a shakeout.
When tags started becoming popular to describe content online, it was seen as great news. Now you could describe content in a way that would index it automatically. The only problem is that people use different words. Some people call a retail place a shop and some call it a store. Will more people use .shop or .store? How about .bazaar or .boutique? Until there is a single word, a TLD for a category really won't matter.
4. Google is still the kingmaker.
What most people are forgetting in all the hype is that a TLD really won't matter at all unless almight Google decides to list it in search results. So which TLDs get approved matter less than which ones Google chooses to index as part of their regular search results.
5. The web is now global.
In the early days of the web, .com (short for communications) was ok because the vast majority of sites were in English. Today the web is a different place. So TLDs that are in English may not see wide adoption globally. And different countries may use different TLDs. So the truly global TLDs like .com or .org may be few and far between ... and they may not be in English at all.
Let me tell you a little secret. I look forward to putting together an annual trend report the same way that some people look forward to having Turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. I realize that may sound a bit strange, but ever since I did my first trend recap last year I was hooked. This year, the process of collecting the trends took all year. I have a folder on my desk labelled "Trends 2012" and throughout the year I would rip out articles from magazines or printout webpages to save. Last November I started actually writing my trend presentation and finally released it on Slideshare yesterday.
A few things surprised me about the trends this year. Here are a few of the most unexpected things:
Only 2 out of 15 trends are based on innovative technology (Trends #10 and #13). Given the prominence of technology in our lives and more and more digital tools, I expected that more of the trends for 2012 would be based entirely on technology innovation. That ended up not being the case as most of the trends focused more on either behaviours or the use of sites and technology that already exist and don't really require much innovation in order to keep growing.
Creativity and design are more important than ever. While it would have been too obvious to point this out as a trend on its own, many of the trends that were included in the presentation were highly dependent on encouraging more creativity and delivering great design. Measuring Life, for example, has taken off in part thanks to great product and interface designs. Pointillist Filmmaking or Social Artivism are clearly based on creativity and design. Even Retail Theater, Tagging Reality and Charitable Engagement are all trends that require creative thinking and strong ability to use design to engage people.
People actively seek opportunities to participate, collaborate or experience something. Doing something together came up as a big motivator for many of the trends this year, as Social Loneliness led people to look for more opportunities to have great experiences or be part of something worthwhile. Pointillist Filmmaking, Civic Engagement 2.0 and Retail Theater are all examples where people are seeking the chance to participate in something. Charitable Engagement ChangeSourcing and Co-Curation are other trends where people offer their time and passions to collaborate together on something.
Let me know what you think about these trends with a comment here or on Facebook, or feel free to send me an email at influentialmarketing@gmail.com. Next week I'll be starting my trend folder to gather stories for 2013 ...
I actively hate cauliflower. In marketing terms, you could call me a brand dectractor ... as I am generally pretty vocal about my dislike of the sweat-sock-smelling-mush-flavored vegetable. Hate is often extreme like that, and most of us believe passionately in what we dislike. What we "like" on the other hand, has been getting devalued for some time. Five years ago, I might have described my likes with a similar passion. Now I might click a "like" button just to download a free PDF, or get a coupon for a free drink. Facebook made the "Like" button a price of admission, and in doing so, they started the trend towards devaluing the idea of liking anything.
Last week at the f8 Developers Conference, they announced a fix that will not only change how you use Facebook - it will also change the way that we generally perceive the value of liking something as well. As Mark Zuckerberg described in his keynote, "you don't have to LIKE a book - you can just READ a book. You don't have to LIKE a movie, you can just WATCH a movie." Over the coming weeks, Facebook will launch a standard set of buttons for "watching, reading and listening" - as well as using their Open Graph to let developers create buttons of their own (follow link for source of the mock graphic list of potential Facebook buttons at right). As the AllThingsD blog from the Wall Street Journal notes, this will likely lead to an "oversharing explosion" as people can get over the barrier of not wanting to broadcast an implied endorsement for something that they may just be consuming but not really "liking."
More importantly, I think this will help us all return to the importance that we have assigned for centuries to the idea of actually liking something. Now I don't have to like something as a cost of entry, so I'm free to only declare my like for those things that I truly feel that way about. Likeability always mattered - but with Facebook's latest update it can finally return to the importance it once had.
Author's Note: I had a special connection to this topic as I'm working on a book with a working title of Likeonomics. It is not a book about Facebook, it is about the value and importance of likeability to marketing, communications and personal success. Though I am not finished writing it yet, you can bet this story and Facebook's mixed history with the "Like" button will be an important story in the book ...
Yesterday I spent the day at the Corporate Social Media Summit, a big gathering of some of the best minds in leading social media efforts on behalf of large corporate brands. The event was put on by the team at Useful Social Media - and that indeed was the theme of the day as panelists offered real case studies, answered tough questions and generally demonstrated that there is real hope for large corporate brands to actively use social media to generate real business value in multiple ways. Here are some of the biggest lessons that 10 brands featured on Day 1 of the event shared in their presentations:
1. American Express* - "Altruism has a long tail."
Uniquely qualified to talk about the impact of altruism, American Express Open Forum VP of Social Media Laura Fink went behind the scenes of the hugely successful "Small Business Saturday" campaign that American Express launched back in November of 2010 to create a day where consumers could get rewarded with a $25 statement credit for shopping at a small business location. According to Fink, the campaign engaged more than 1.2 million small businesses around the country and also helped those businesses to see a 28% sales lift on the day of the promotion. Perhaps more importantly, it showed that doing something good can generate a real business impact for customers as well as for the big brand putting on the campaign.
2. Union Pacific - "Never underestimate local communities."
One of the largest railway companies in the United States, Union Pacific has also been around for nearly 150 years. To celebrate this heritage, Senior Manager of Media Technology Tim Mcmahan shared a case study of a crowdsourced competition that Union Pacific held to get people to vote on the ideal route for one of their old steam engines to take on the "Union Pacific Great Excursion Adventure." The voting was split into several rounds, with some fierce competition from unexpected locations. Through each round, Mcmahon shared that the consistently surprising result was that smaller towns like Tuscola, IL were routinely outpacing big metro markets like Chicago. The point, he noted, was that sometimes the most passion for a campaign like this can come from smaller local communities for whom winning may be a bigger deal. Across the campaign, there were nearly 200,000 votes recorded, over 100,000 email addresses captured and the brand plans to reprise the campaign next year.
3. Coca-Cola* - "The most important number in social media is 360."
Through the brilliant video below, Coke's Director of Digital Communications Ashley Brown told the story of a big ambitious PR idea which turned into the largest social media campaign the brand had ever done. The mission was to send three lucky travelers on a journey to all 206 countries around the world where Coke was sold. The trio embarked on their journey on January 1, 2010 and anyone could choose to follow their travels and adventures on the website Expedition 206 (which sadly doesn't seem to be available online anymore). Their goal in each country was to find what made people happy - which Brown noted was perfectly on strategy for Coke to build on their existing brand platform and marketing campaign centered around the idea to "open happiness." The answers they got ranged from family to music to dancing to soccer (yes, they made it to the World Cup in South Africa). Through the lens of this beautiful social experiment disguised as marketing, the team managed to reach what may be the most profound conclusion of all ... that happiness is always simple, whatever form it takes.
4. Best Buy - "Nobody owns social media."
In one of the most eye-opening talks of the day, Gina Debogovich shared some big lessons learned from her time over the last 3-4 years building up the Best Buy customer service and social care center to what is now called the "Twelp Force. As a former customer care person herself, she talked about how Best Buy uses the overarching mission of "creating meaningful communications in the virtual world" to guide all of their efforts. They have an inner circle of about 26 team members dedicated to social media at their team, and then an extended 3000 employees who are actively encouraged to use social media and offered lots of different forms of training on how to do it. Her team is a resource that individual stores can use for advice on such tasks as how to effectively use Facebook specifically for their store. In addition, their team is the only customer care team in the world who currently has their own production studio for creating content such as their Best Buy Unboxing feature. In one case, Gina shared the unheard of stat of how they managed to reduce the volume of one "call driver" (customer service lingo for a top reason that people call a contact center) by 50% simply by producing a video to answer that question.
Disclaimer: I moderated this panel where Gina spoke.
5. Samsung - "Negative experiences are our biggest opportunity."
Samsung is a brand that has made lots of strides recently in integrating social media into their customer service, and has been very active in joining conversations about their brand online. One of the leaders of this, Jessica Kalbarczyk (@samsungjessica) shared her insights about how her small team of four colleagues manages to engage people online about Samsung, and help solve their problems. For Jessica, coming from a marketing and PR role into one more focused on customer service was a fulfilling role because every day she manages to address real problems and change consumers experiences one by one. Anyone in a marketing role who has suffered through never ending meetings about social media without a real vision or tangible outcome will easily be able to imagine how nice a feeling it much be to actually solve real problems and the sense of accomplishment that would offer on a daily basis. As part of that, she shared a point of view which is common among customer service pros ... that they would much rather find negativity and have a chance to fix it and change that consumer's perception. Marketers, on the other hand, tend to run scared in the opposite direction from any negativity. There is clearly a lesson here about the necessity of integrating marketing and customer service more closely.
Disclaimer: I moderated this panel where Jessica spoke.
6. Dell - "Forget ROI and focus more broadly on business value."
At the top of most analyst's lists of brands that have managed to integrate social media into their operations in a real and tangible way would likely be computer maker Dell. During his talk, Richard Binhammer from Dell shared a historical perspective of how social media became integrated into the organization, and one of the most powerful points in his presentation was where he shared the six business areas which have fully embraced social media for different business reasons - marketing, product development, sales, online presence, customer service and communications. While other brands focus on one of these at a time, Dell has reached a point where they can "inhale and exhale at the same time" as Richard shared in his talk. Ultimately, his biggest point is that "ROI" is such a restricting term when it comes to describing what social media can offer and there is a much stronger way to describe the real value behind it that we need to think about including in more of our discussions.
Disclaimer: I moderated this panel where Richard spoke.
7. Southwest - "Have fun and be human."
Fun and airline are not two words that anyone would typically use in the same sentence, yet Social Media Manager from Southwest Airlines Alice Wilson devoted a good part of her talk about how Southwest creates a more human brand by using an irreverant voice. The questions that keep many other large brands up at night in terms of making sure they have backup for employees who are running social media channels, or mapping everything back to some specific campaign or column on a spreadsheet don't seem to matter as much for Southwest. They have guiding principles around their social voice, yet Alice shares that most people who speak out for the brand "just get the hang of it." Without that formalized training or overly bureaucratic approach to managing every aspect of Southwest, the brand succeeds because they have such a strong culture that people start to take it on as their own from day one and this translates into social media.
Disclaimer: I moderated this panel where Alice spoke.
8. Kodak - "Real time listening pays off."
Kodak is a brand that has won a lot of respect for how forward thinking they have been in moving into social media over the past several years, even publishing a guidebook which was available for the attendees on how to use social media and what they had learned. In his talk Tom Hoen, the Kodak Director of Interactive Marketing, shared a number of examples demonstrating the power of listening. In one example, the brand awoke to a barrage of negativity from fans of a Nickelodeon TV show called Degrassi because there was a rumor that the brand had pulled all their advertising due to the show's sometimes adult themes. Fairly rapidly, they were able to use social media to diffuse the rumor (it was actually just a natural pause in flighting for their ads) and engage those angry voices - leading one person to share on Twitter "Now I feel bad. I told the Kodak people to eff themselves sideways, and they sent me a tweet being all nice." Aside from the newly found good feelings, Degrassi and Nickelodeon offered up 2 free spots to Kodak during their season premiere. Not a bad ROI for engaging a few irate teens.
9. New York Life - "Brands need to trust their people."
An unexpected voice at the event came from Gregory Weiss, the AVP of Social Media for New York Life. He started with an entertaining look at the hypcritical nature of business, and how many large brands are afraid of what their employees might do with social media even though they let those same employees have phones and use fax machines and talk to people outside of the company. His main point was that if you can't trust your employees to do the right things and make the right choices, then maybe you need to hire better people. He offered several real tips for using social media in a corporate environment, including supporting your existing sales force, getting on the agenda of new hire initiations so you can tell them about social media, and even simple things like encouraging people to add your social media properties to the end of their email signatures. A point I took away as well, though he didn't mention it was about the importance of picking your battles. Apparently, New York Life also has a vetting process they use internally before any social media property can link to an outside website. That might seem like overkill for many brands, but Greg manages to work around it without making it a big issue.
10. Pepsi - "Reward people for everyday behaviour."
The last presentation of the day came from Josh Karpf, who focuses on an area that more brands should consider having as part of their marketing efforts ... digital research and development. His group runs many forward thinking experiments on how to use social media to engage consumers, and he shared some real examples and hard data from a few of their efforts around trying to offer couponing as a layer on top of geolocation and encouraging people to check in. For one campaign with Hess convenience stores, they found that using a Foursquare promotion in a particular location offered a 47% boost in volume of purchase over previous weeks where the campaign was not running - a great result for the retailer. On the Pepsi side, they interesting learned that coupon redemptions were much higher when offered to people as a reward for some type of behaviour, which seems to offer the logical conclusion that people are more likely to follow through a claim the discount or product from a coupon if they feel they had to "earn" that coupon in some way such as by checking into the gym for 10 days in a month.
*NOTE: Several of the brands mentioned in this post are current or previous Ogilvy clients. In particular, Coca-Cola and American Express are both clients and some Ogilvy team members may have worked on both of the campaigns mentioned. In both cases, I did not work in either campaign and also have not been compensated or encouraged in any way to write about these two brands or these campaigns. I am also a contributor to the American Express Open Forum website.
What if you could join your favourite band in studio to record their next single? For many, this is just a moment to dream of - but last month Coca-Cola partnered with the rock band Maroon 5 to do exactly that in a social experiment to create a new song in 24 hours. Fans could watch a live stream of the band working on a new song in the studio and contribute to the brainstorming process in real time via a Twitter screen that was broadcast live to the band. Check out the recap video below:
The end result was a single called "Is There Anybody Out There?" that is available for a free download from Coke. Aside from being an amazingly creative campaign idea, this could spark more brands to consider a new form of co-creation where consumers are invited not to create content themselves, but to be the spark for professionals to create content. In a sense, this is no different than real life where artists often take their inspiration from their fans.
Though Coke's efforts have cause some to raise valid criticism about whether the campaign can be considered all that successful since the views and audience seems small by Coke standards, sometimes the most forward thinking ideas aren't the ones which go viral right away. To me, the real power of this campaign is that it imagines a world where brands can help connect people with the artists they love in a way that empowers them to contribute to what the artists are creating.
Inspiration as a form of co-creation is not just a great marketing concept, but one which offers musicians and even filmmakers a new way to engage their audience on a deeper level and also get better ideas and inspiration to make their work better. The only downside is that it leaves a lot of people to thank from the Grammy/Oscars stage ...
Curation has always been an underrated form of creation. The Getty Center in Los Angeles is one of the most frequently visited museums in America - and started as a private art collection from one man (J. Paul Getty) who had a passion for art. Aside from a few well known examples like this one, however, the term curation has rarely been used outside of the world of art ... until now.
One of the hottest trends in social media right now is content curation - thanks in no small part to the leading efforts of several thought leaders actively promoting the idea. Joe Pulizzi is a "content marketing evangelist" who speaks and writes often about content marketing publishes a list of the best content marketing blogs across the web. Steve Rosenbaum just published a book called Curation Nation looking at the rise of content curation in the business world - and a recent post on the Psychology Today blog even declared that "content curation is the new black."
What Is Content Curation?
Back in 2009 I published a blog post called the "Manifesto For The Content Curator" which predicted that this role would be one of the fastest growing and most important jobs of the future. I would stand by this prediction today, but also in the post I shared one potential definition for content curation:
Content Curation is a term that describes the act of finding, grouping, organizing or sharing the best and most relevant content on a specific issue.
It is such a powerful idea because curation does NOT focus on adding more content/noise to the chaotic information overload of social media, and instead focuses on helping any one of us to make sense of this information by bringing together what is most important.
The 5 Models Of Content Curation
Over time, the idea of content curation has felt like more and more of a catchphrase that is really encompassing many smaller activities that are adding structure and insight to the cacophony of information being published online. What if we could define not just content curation as a macro activity, but look at how curation might be applied in very specific situations? The rest of this post shares 5 potential models for content curation as a starting point for discussion:
Aggregation - There is a flood of information online and Google can only give you a best guess at the most relevant, but there are millions and millions of pages returned for any search result. Aggregation is the act of curating the most relevant information about a particular topic into a single location.Often taking the form of catalog style blog posts which list "27 Great Resources For Small Business" (or similar aggregations), this is the most common form of content curation. Volume is not typically an issue when it comes to aggregation, so in this case you still may have hundreds of pieces of source material - but just the fact that it is in a single location and not millions of pieces of information has a high value for people interested in a particular topic.
Distillation - The idea behind distillation is that adding a layer of simplicity is one of the most valuable activities that someone can undertake. Distillation is the act of curating information into a more simplistic format where only the most important or relevant ideas are shared. As a result, there may be quite a bit of additional content that is lost for the sake of simplicity - however the value comes from the fact that anyone digesting this content no longer has to contend with a high volume of content and can instead consume a more focused view of information.
Elevation - The smaller ideas that are often shared online in 140 character bursts or pithy mobile phone images may point to a larger societal trend or shift. Elevation refers to curation with a mission of identifying a larger trend or insight from smaller daily musings posted online. Encompassing much of what many trend-focused websites do, this can be one of the hardest forms of content curation because it requires more expertise and analytical ability on the part of the person or organization during the curating. The benefit is that it can also be the most powerful in terms of sharing new ideas as well.
Mashup - A term often used in the context of music to describe the growing trend of taking two or more pieces of music and fusing them together - there is a wider implication for mashups in relation to information. Mashups are unique curated justapositions where merging existing content is used to create a new point of view. Taking multiple points of view on a particular issue and sharing it in a single location would be one example of this type of behaviour - and could be used to describe the sort of activity that takes place every day on Wikipedia. More broadly, mashups can offer a way of creating something new while still using content curation as a basis for it because you are building on existing content.
Chronology - One of the most interesting ways of looking at the evolution of information is over time - and how concepts or our understanding of topics has changed over time. Creating a Chronology is a form of curation that brings together historical information organized based on time to show an evolving understanding of a particular topic. Most useful when it comes to topics where understanding has shifted over time, this can be a powerful way of retelling history through informational artifacts that exist over time to prove how experiences and understandings have changed.
Content curation is certainly an emerging space and one where more and more thought leaders will continue to share their voices. This is simply a contribution to the curated universe of discussion on this topic - as well as an option invitation to others who have thought deeply about content curation to share their own visions for what the future may look like.
I'll look forward to eventually reading the "Chronological Curation" of this discussion one day in the future where this post may be included among many others to spark a longer and deeper conversation about a topic that has the potential to transform how each of us sees the world around us.
The morning after the Academy Awards celebrated everything about movies, the one underappreciated ingredient that every winning film had was a champion that helped that film to get made. Usually that person is the producer, who could easily be described as as a cheerleader with vision. The producer is the one who needs to believe in a film and be willing to put their reputation on the line to help it get made. Peter Guber is one of the most well known producers in Hollywood and the former Head of Sony Pictures. The first time I met Peter Guber was over breakfast in Beverly Hills. The legendary producer of iconic films like Gorillas in the Mist and Rainman shared with me the philosophy that carried him to success during his unusually long career in Hollywood (a place notorious for encouraging short-lived careers). It was one of the most enlightening conversations I've had, and it was not because of filmmaking but rather because of Peter's belief that the power of storytelling is the secret at the heart of his success.
Peter has spent his lifetime actually becoming a master marketer, which is why I am thrilled that his first book called Tell To Win is coming out tomorrow. He was kind enough to share an advance copy, and here are just a few of the marketing lessons that I took from spending a short hour talking with him and having the chance to read his book (which I will review in my Influential Marketing Book List for March):
Arouse Your Listener's Curiosity. One of my favourite science fiction movies is the film Contact with Jodie Foster. It turns out the first moment when Carl Sagan sold the movie rights to that book happened before he even wrote it. At a backyard lunch session, he described the vision for a story where an alien race made contact with humans and sent a message with instructions on how to build something that might enable more direct contact. The story of what would be built, and who would get to take the one seat it contained was the story of Contact - but the way Sagan sold the idea was by planting the seed of the story and asking Peter whether he would want to know what happened next. Of course he would, as we all would - and the movie was sold on the spot and made into an award winning film.
Make Your Customer The Hero. In 2005, entrepreneur Richard Rosenblatt sold his company Intermix Media, the parent of MySpace.com, to Rupert Murdoch and News Corp for $580 million. It was one of the largest deals at the time for an online media company, and speaking to students at UCLA, Rosenblatt shared that he had made the sale in just 20 minutes. How did he do it? When he talked to Murdoch, he had done a masterful job of painting him as the hero of the story. He shared how Murdoch had been forward thinking in every other aspect of media except for the Internet and that he was overdue for making a big statement on the web. Buying Intermix could be that statement, and at the close of the meeting Rosenblatt shared an almost impossible prediction: "One year from today you will be on the cover of WIRED magazine." One year later, Murdoch was indeed on the cover and sent an autographed copy to Rosenblatt.
Know Where The Drama Is. Iconic music legend Michael Jackson may well have been one of the greatest entertainers who ever lived, but in 1991 when Peter described meeting him - he had only one thing on his mind ... getting into movies and television. His philosophy that he shared with Peter that day was all about drama, and he brought it to life by showing Peter the massive glass terrarium in his home where he kept a huge snake. He placed a mouse inside and talked about how he needed to feed "Muscles" live mice because the snake enjoyed the game of catching the mouse. "What will happen next?" Michael asked. The drama was in watching the game unfold and understanding that dramatic tension as much as the power of his music or the fluidity of his dance moves made Michael Jackson the amazing performer that he was.
Visualize Your Data. There was a time back in the 70s where directors and stars for films were chosen based solely on relationships and very unscientific guesswork about who was available at a particular time. When Peter started his career, he created something that he called his "board of directors." It was literally a board that he put on the wall of his office which mapped out every recognized director, what types of films they had made, what their current project was, and when they would be available. It wasn't long before stories of this corkboard covered in pushpins and rope became a legend around Hollywood and movie execs as well as stars like Sidney Portier stopped into Peter's office to take a look. More than any other aspect of his career, Peter credits this board and his dedication to visualizing the hearsay-style data that existed around Hollywood into his "board of directors" with helping him to accelerate his career within Hollywood.
Imagine The World You Want. When Pat Riley, the legendary coach of the LA Lakers in the 1980s was coaching the Miami Heat in the 2006 Championship Game, he gave his players some rather odd instructions. Game six out of seven was at home in Miami, and the Heat had the chance to win the championship outright with a win in that sixth game. Going to seven games meant they would have to travel to Dallas, which historically meant that winning would be much tougher. So Riley told his players to pack for just one day. Not two or three, but only one change and one uniform, because the Heat would be champions after that sixth game - and it worked.
Prove Your Sincerity. David Copperfield is the most recognized magician in modern history, and also one of the most highly paid and frequently seen celebrities in Las Vegas. His mastery of magic is clear - but as Peter shares in Tell To Win, it was his ability to tell stories in a sincere way that really allowed him to connect with his audience. In one particular show, he shared the story of his grandfather and his personal quest to connect with him but inability to do it because his grandfather never understood him or the draw of magic. As he shared this personal frustration with the audience, they connect with him and his story on a human level. It wasn't about the magic alone. After the show, what most audience members talked about apart from floating cars and other amazing tricks, would be the way that Copperfield was able to bring everyone watching into the show with his personal story.
Life is good for the traveller who knows where they are going. There are dozens of great and useful sites online where you can see everything from reviews of hotels to side by side comparisons of airfares from one destination to another. Planning a trip to San Francisco was never so easy ... but what if you haven't answered the first and most important question of where you want to go? All of a sudden, life is a lot more difficult. Finding out about destinations is a labrynth of government sponsored tourism sites, linkbaiting sites promising information about a destination but only delivering a long list of pay-per-click links, and individual attractions within a destination.
For a traveler still trying to decide where to go, life isn't so simple ... but curation can help.
A hot topic among those who work in social media is the idea of curation and how individuals can share their knowledge and passion on any subject not only by creating original content about it, but also by scouring the web and curating the best content into a single location. Back in 2009, popular travel writer Rick Steves spotted the potential of this idea early when he wrote a blog post about the "Travel writer as curator" - sharing his view of what the guidebook of the future might offer.
Today content curation is rapidly finding roots in the highly immersive world of travel as more people share their personal experiences as a way to influence others on not only where to stay and what to do ... but also where to go in the first place:
1. Jetsetter
A part of the hugely successful online luxury retailer Gilt Groupe, Jetsetter is a private online community filled with curated deals on what the site calls "the world's greatest vacations." The site features up and coming travel bloggers like "monkey connoisseur" Farryn Weiner and former hospitality industry workers to hand select travel locations and experiences which are then offered to members. You need to be invited into the network, and all deals are only offered for a limited time. (Note: the links in this post include a $25 joining incentive). Popular deal website Living Social is also offering similar curated experiences on a more local (and less costly) level at their Living Social Escapes feature.
2. Trazzler
A community built from submissions by travel writers, Trazzler now presents those experiences with a focus on those which are within driving distance of your home as opposed to exotic locations around the world. The smart model used by the site encourages people to share local experiences that they are passionate about in exchange for the chance to win local trips. You don't need to be a travel writer or prolific blogger to participate, just a person with a great story and recommendation to share. It is a curated content model at its best, because they are encouraging writing and content creation from those who have a passion but don't necessarily have a place to share it ... until they find Trazzler.
3. Offbeat Guides
A site that has been around for a few years, Offbeat Guides specializes in letting you create and print your own guides to destinations on demand. A key unique factor for these guides is that you can enter your dates that you will be travelling to a destination and where you are coming from to customize information such as the weather reports for that time period and currency conversion rates. Bringing together curated content from across the web, the guides offer a collection of information that is updated in real time and generally more reliable than travel guides which can be months or years out of date. If only the site allowed you to include multiple destinations in one travel guide (ie - London & Oslo) so you wouldn't have to carry around two guides if you are hitting two destinations, the idea is being partially duplicated now by a few other sites like Stay.com.
The Bottom Line: Curation is already transforming the way that people answer the all important question of where to go, but so far innovations are coming more from technology based startups rather than destinations themselves. In the near future, we will start to see more local, state and country tourism boards as well as convention and visitor bureaus using curation to better promote their destinations to all kinds of travelers.
Think about the best article you read last year. The hard hitting, excellently researched, insightfully written article that you just couldn't put down. Now think about how much money you spent to read it. Was it in a magazine you subscribe to? Or perhaps a website that you accessed and read for free? For every conversation anyone starts about the future of journalism, the question that seems to follow closely behind is: what does the new business model for journalism needs to be in a world where the average citizen is increasingly expecting journalism to be a service provided for free (or at least, subsidized by someone else).
Over the past few years, every time I spoke at a gathering of local newspaper professionals at the American Press Institute (API) or participated in a journalist-centric event from an organization like the South Asian Journalism Association (SAJA), the signs of worry in the industry were clear. A solution has started to emerge that is not only making waves in the field of journalism today - but also has the potential to reinvent the way that we consume and share media with one another.
Entrepreneurial Journalism describes a field of media where journalism is the underlying discipline upon which to create content-based businesses and services that can make money. Rather than the popular view of journalism as a type of objective professional public service to be provided to the citizenry of the world - entrepreneurial journalism offers the chance to think of content creation in business terms. As it gains popularity, this field also has the potential to change the way that we find and consume information, and change our world in the process. Here are a few ways it is already happening:
A New Generation Of Entrepreneurial Journalists. Predictably, the idea of entrepreneurial journalism found a rapid home among forward thinking Professors of Journalism who have started to incorporate this into their coursework at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Last year, CUNY announced the first 4-semester dedicated Entrepreneurial Journalism program as part of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism. Author and Professor Jeff Jarvis* leads that program, and also founded a wiki where other educators teaching similar programs could gather to collaborate and share curriculum or ideas. This combined with visionary educators like Columbia School of Journalism's Sree Sreenivasan who has been teaching journalism students social media skills for years will lead to a new generation of voices in journalism who are trained to think entrepreneurially and embrace social media.
New Ideas Influencing Older Media Entities To Evolve. In the middle of 2010, a brilliant experimental journalism site called True/Slant was purchased by Forbes. In his final blog post after the sale, founder Michael Roston shared that what made the site unique was the arrangement they created with 300 writers who were incentivized to create content directly for their audience instead of pandering to an editorial filter. This new editorial model thrived on the site and demonstrated to the world that there was a valid place for this type of journalism - and a place that a "traditional" media organization like Forbes saw great value in.
Startups Create Excitement And Pioneer New Forms Of Media. The Poynter Promise Prize was one of the first of what will likely be several competition style idea gathering efforts to bring some of the most pioneering ideas in entrepreneurial journalism to the attention of many. As more of these startup-style ideas enter into the discussions about the future of journalism, they will unlock new forms of content creation and new business models that the entire industry will eventually look towards.
Overlaps With Big Social Media Trends Such As Content Curation. One of the biggest trends that is already shaping the future of marketing is the focus on content curation as a way to provide value to consumers and share an expertise without necessarily creating content. Aside from creating content as parts of new stand alone organizations, more and more individuals with journalism backgrounds will be sought after by companies to create and organize content on their behalf. "Journalists-In-Residence" will become a part of large companies, opening up yet another entrepreneurial career path for those with journalism training.
This is a link to an interesting panel discussion from the Carnegie Journalism Educators Summit last year about the future of Entrepreneurial Journalism as well, for those who are seeking more context and information.
*Note: Best wishes to Jeff for a speedy recovery, as he recently shared on his blog that he is now once again fighting cancer. His work and thinking have been a big inspiration for me and many others, so I wish him the best in his new battle and am sure he'll emerge on top as he has before.
Rohit works at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, part of WPP - a world leader in advertising and marketing services. The views expressed on this blog are his personal opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of his employer or its clients.
