Influential Marketing Blog

2012 Edition: 15 Marketing and Business Trends That Matter

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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 ...

If you would like to get a downloadable version of this presentation, you can find it on my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/rohitmarketingauthor.

Audubon Society Promotes Happy Bird Watching, Not Angry Bird Tossing

Imagine you're the marketing team at the Audubon Society, a group that has been around for nearly a century and your mission for that time has been to promote better man-bird relations -- how would you respond to a internationally addictive game which has been downloaded more than 400 million times that portrays your heroes as "angry" and encourages people to toss them into stuff for prizes?

The question probably isn't a fair one, as I imagine the Audubon Society probably hasn't lost much sleep over how the wildly popular Angry Birds mobile game has portrayed birds ... but it does bring birds and the pasttime of "birding" some long overdue attention.

Birding, as I once learned from one of my professors of English who was addicted to the activity, usually involves heading out to the forest and looking through binoculars and cameras with zoom lenses for different types of birds. Once seen, a bird is typically logged into a birding journal or documented via a photograph, and birders spend their time collecting long lists of exotic or rare birds that they have seen (the rarest of which are called "life birds") and compare lists with one another. 

Earlier this month, The Audubon Society launched what is quickly becoming another addictive bird-focused game online called "Birding The Net." Tying into the upcoming Hollywood movie release of The Big Year - an upcoming Hollywood film featuring Steve Martin and Jack Black where characters compete to see the most North American birds in one year - the game is built on Facebook and offers a virtual version of bird watching where participants are challenged to find birds spread across the Internet and collect the most in order to win prizes.  

As David Yarnold, President and CEO of Audubon describes, “birds are the best possible ambassadors for the environment, and this will help people see them in a whole new way. This is about fun – but it’s also about getting more people involved in taking action to protect birds and the planet we share with them. And with this unprecedented use of social media and the web, we’re also making it clear that this is not your grandmother’s Audubon.”

The game, which you can get a taste of on this blog for a week by clicking one of the birds above, will run through November 7th and I predict it will succeed brilliantly as a marketing strategy for Audubon Society. Spending some time looking, it offers at least five good lessons for marketers:

1. Timing/Hollywood Tie-in - With the link to the upcoming Hollywood film, the Audubon Society will get infinitely more eyeballs to this campaign and lots more funding and support. Chances are the beautiful visual design of this campaign was due in no small part to 20th Century Fox’s ability to fund the agency (Goodby, Silverstein & Partners) behind this.
2. Recreates A Real Life Experience - The act of surfing online to various sites and hoping to see birds perfectly recreates what the experience of birding in real life is. You never know what you'll see, you are sometimes disappointed, but you get that flash of excitement when you do see a bird and it's one you haven't seen before.
3. Uses Behavioural Economics - When you first register, you have a clean slate of grayed out cards ... which you immediately want to start collecting. "Earning" the first several are easy - you get one just for starting and there are another 3 or 4 easily available on obvious sites like www.audubonguides.com, but then it gets tougher. Once you have started, though, you can't help wanting to collect more.
4. Engagement Through Design - Though this would be hard to prove, my bet is that they will get much higher engagement with this effort as a result of a very strong creative execution. Put simply, the app and individual bird cards are beautifully designed. Looking at them online, you almost wish they would produce them in print too just so you could hold them in your hands. 
5. Built-in Shareability - There is lots of great shareability built into this campaign, from the ability to embed your own birdhouse on your blog or website to leaderboards and sharing through Facebook. The campaign has a strong understanding of why and how people share at its heart and makes it easy to do so. 
6. Bird Personality - A visit to the Twitter account for one of the birds, the Rufous Hummingbird (@RufHummingbird) yields this bio: "Tireless traveler and flower enthusiast on a mission of nectar discovery." All the other bird Twitter accounts feature similar personality and a bit of good natured rivalry between them. It makes it fun to engage with the birds and adds an important element of, well, humanity to the campaign.
7. Curiosity and Discovery - Perhaps the most important element that makes this fun is the fact that you need to make new discoveries of where the birds are, and they have engaged your curiosity to see where they turn up next. It is an essential element of gaming, and one that Angry Birds (coincidentally) makes excellent use of. 

Ultimately, Birding The Net stands is one of the most original uses of social media and gaming I've seen lately to achieve the dual purpose of promoting an upcoming movie as well as reminding people that a pasttime which has been around for centuries can still offer a thrill not only in the virtual world ... but if you shut off the technology and head out into the real world as well. 

Video Introduction To Birding The Net:

Facebook, Cauliflower And How Liking Anything Just Became Important Again

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.

By rethinking the Like button, Facebook has finally made liking anything as important as it used to be. 

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 ...

Facebook Bankruptcy: How (And Why) To Convert Your Personal Profile To A Facebook Page

FINAL UPDATE: This process did not go as expected for me and there are several downsides to converting your profile to a page.  Read my update at the end of this post for why you may NOT want to do this before you make a decision - it includes some things I wish I knew before starting this process.

For more than a year now, I have had a problem with Facebook. When I first joined the social network several years ago, I intended to be completely open.  I accepted every friend request and posted whatever I wanted. Over time, as my friend circle on Facebook started to grow, I found that I was less personally connected to the people who I was "friends" with on Facebook. Now, several years later, my Facebook page is a mashup of people who I am connected with for different reasons. As of today, I have 2434 friends on my personal profile and hundreds of friend invites which are sitting in my queue unapproved because I don't really know what to do with them. Sound familiar?

This is a problem that I know many others have, and one that Burger King brilliantly brought to life back in 2009 with their "Whopper Sacrifice" campaign which infamously called upon Facebook users to defriend people in exchange for a free whopper and had more than 234,000 people choose to defriend 10 people each. As the reasoning went, anyone you would trade in for a whopper couldn't have been that good of a friend, right?  In case you were wondering, I didn't dump anyone for a free burger.  Still, my problem of losing the separation between personal and business contacts on Facebook continued. This weekend I am finally going to fix that problem by declaring "Facebook bankruptcy."

"Facebook Bankruptcy" is the extreme act of either closing an account altogether or migrating it to a different type of account in an effort to reduce or better organize your friends. 

5 Good Reasons To Convert Your Personal Profile To A Page

This weekend, I will convert my personal profile into a Facebook Page, something that I read about doing some time ago in a Mashable post.  For me, I think this is going to be useful 5 reasons:

1. Leverage your best URL: I can start to use www.facebook.com/rohitbhargava as my official Facebook page URL instead of my personal profile URL, which is what it is now. This is a BIG motivator for me to make this change because I really want to be able to use a better and more logical URL at events (my current Facebook Author Page URL is www.facebook.com/rohitmarketingauthor). 
2. More effectively segment people by relationships: It will be easier to separate my work colleagues and acquaintances from my closer friends and family who I know in person (and have generally met!)
3. Handle pending friend requests: It will give me a solution for how to handle all the backlog of pending friend requests that I have. I am going to approve everyone over the weekend and then convert the page. 
4. Allow relationships to scale: I will no longer be limited by the 5000 friend maximum that a personal profile has, which means my page will be able to scale over time. 
5. Enable better privacy control + Share better content: One reason I don't share too much about my family and kids is because I don't have a more personal way to do it. After this, I can share more personal thoughts and images with my smaller circle of friends - something that I have wanted to be able to do for a long time.

What Are The Risks?

There are a few big risks that I have been considering related to this, as well as how I might be able to handle them:

1. Multiple Facebook Pages: Given that I already have an Author page for myself, converting my personal profile will give me two pages for myself. This is not a problem that I have found a great solution for yet (so please let me know if you have one!).  There is a page on Facebook about how to merge two pages, but otherwise I may try to contact Facebook directly to find a way to do this and combine the fans.
2. Losing past content and conversations: The help page for migrating a page clearly says that all your profile photos will remain, but the other content such as wall posts and messages will be lost - so you need to download them before converting. For some people this may be a big problem, but I never tended to use Facebook messages a lot, and my wall posts are about moments in time so while I would love to have access to them, I am ok with losing them because the benefits of migrating my profile to a page are higher. 
3. Annoying friends by trying to turn them into "fans": This is probably my biggest concern, because of the inherent rudeness of turning someone who wants to be your "friend" into what is essentially a "fan" even though Facebook doesn't use that term anymore. Part of my method for dealing with it is to write this post and publicize WHY I am doing this so people who already follow me understand my reasons. The other better reason is because I think that the content I am able to share with people will improve because I can share what they ACTUALLY care about. Having a Facebook Page helps me to separate my more marketing related thoughts and ideas which MOST of my friends who are not in marketing don't really care about.

So, taking those pieces together - I have decided it's time to finally do it. In case you happen to be following me on any of these places, thanks and I hope you continue to stay there. If this change makes you angry or somehow otherwise unhappy, I'm truly sorry. And for those who just want to see how the experience goes, here are a few links to my existing Facebook pages:

http://www.facebook.com/rohitbhargava (Currently my personal profile)

http://www.facebook.com/rohitmarketingauthor (Currently my Facebook Author Page)

NOTE: I will likely come back to this post after several weeks and share an update on how the experience went - in case anyone is considering doing the same thing in the future. 

Update: Why NOT To Update Your Personal Profile Into A Facebook Page

Let's just say I wish I had done a bit more research on this process before taking the plunge to migrate my profile.  After having a few issues, I read these two posts which I highly recommend you follow the links to read right now:

• http://mashable.com/2011/03/31/facebook-profile-migration-warning/
• http://www.zeldman.com/2011/03/05/migrating-from-a-conventional-facebook-account-to-a-public-figure-fan-page-%E2%80%93-a-report-from-the-trenches/

For my own experience, there were a few things that I wish I had considered before which might have impacted my decision to migrate my page.

1. Facebook URLs don't transfer - One of the main reasons I wanted to change my profile to my page was so that I could use the URL I had registered as my public facing URL. When you convert your page, you lose the URL - a strange policy since anyone who has a profile and wants to migrate to page would probably want to keep any URL they have.
2. The "Facebook Suicide Moment" is painful - When you first migrate your account and it shows up, your profile is gone right away, but your new page has 0 likes. The immediate result is that you think you just killed yourself on Facebook and lost all your friends. Eventually after a couple of hours your friends come back as likes, but it's a traumatic experience - be warned!
3. Profiles can't be added to pages - Once you convert your account, if you then want to create a separate personal profile (as I did) then you will need to create a SEPARATE account in order to do that.  I wanted to keep all my accounts under one umbrella, and though I could create a new profile and then make that an admin on all my pages to control it centrally, it is still a unwanted extra step.
4. Friends can't be easily re-added to a profile - Perhaps the toughest thing about this migration, as Christina Warren shared in her post linked above is that you can't add all the friends that you want to because Facebook thinks that you are spamming people even though you actually know them.

So I am going to try and find a Facebook connection who can help me migrate my page back into my profile (I already submitted an online request).  After that, I will likely take the manual step of trying to reduce my friends on my personal profile to only family, friends and those whom I have met in person.  Wish me luck.

Final Update: How My Experience Ended Up (11/11/11)

After trying unsuccessfully to get my page converted back, I have moved ahead with my original plan.  So now the fans on my official Page have doubled and that is now going to be my page moving forward.  I created a separate personal profile and now have made that mostly private and am only accepting friend invitations there from family and people that I know in real life or have an actual personal connection to (rather than just a shared interest in marketing, for example).  Here are a few things I've finally learned about this process, as well as a few ongoing sources of frustration:

1. Page name is lost - I have officially lost my original URL that I had associated with my personal profile when that profile was converted to a page.  I am working through a Facebook connection to get it back, but in case you are very attached to the URL you currently have for your personal page, you may want to reconsider converting that profile into a page because you will lose that URL.
2. Friend network is tough to rebuild - You can add your friends based on Facebook's suggestion tool to your new personal profile, but after adding a few - you will continually be blocked because Facebook assumes that you are spamming.  The end result is that you may have to wait months to add people who you legitimately know because you can't send them invites and they don't realize that you are no longer friends and have converted them into "likers" of your page instead.  There seems to be no way around this. 
3. The "Admin" Hack - One workaround that you will figure out quickly is due to the fact that your profile that you now converted into a page will only let you log into the page and not add your personal profile to the same account.  That means you will now have two accounts, but the hack to get around this is to add your new account and profile as an adminstrator of any pages that you manage.  Then you can manage all your pages from your new personal account directly.

Ultimately, the entire experience of doing this was useful to get all my fans onto a single page, but has exposed some serious usability problems with Facebook when it comes to doing a more complex task like this.  That coupled with the near impossiblity of using Facebook to accomplish a simple task (such as letting any of your friends or family who live in NY know that you will be there next weekend) makes Facebook a major pain to use as a primary social network.  It is not surprising several people I respect like Chris Brogan are actively moving away from Facebook to Google+. One bottom line result of this entire experience is that I will likely start to do the same myself.