Open letter to a Portland novelist tempted to quit Facebook

NOTE: No name-dropping, but among my numerous acquaintances publishing stories and novels out of Portland’s vibrant contemporary fiction scene there’s one novelist in particular who expressed an urge to delete her Facebook account a few months ago. There’s a national news story gaining traction the past couple of weeks that compelled me to revisit our email exchange on the topic. 

That news story is the Occupy Wall Street movement. As you’ve no doubt observed by now, Occupy is building considerable momentum — not just in Manhattan; not just in the national news. Occupy showed up last week in San Francisco and here in Portland. This week, Occupy is organizing in small towns in rural Oregon, including Brookings-Harbor — population 12,000. 

Now, I’m not professing any personal political views, anti-corporate convictions or involvement with the Occupy movement. My interest is in its use of emerging media for group-forming, event-organizing, and communication from the masses to the power structure. 

When a Wall Street protest sparks activism from coast to coast in a matter of a couple weeks, it’s impossible to downplay the rising significance of digital media in our society. In the context of the Occupy movement, how have your outreach efforts grown your cause or customer base? How well have they mobilized your audience? Here’s the content of the email mentioned above: 

March 8, 2011

MD,

Social media in general, and Facebook in particular, are here to stay. The younger the demographic, the more crucial Facebook is to reaching people. In marketing your books, for example.

The younger the audience, the higher the resistance to conventional mass messaging. People under 40 are less influenced by a TV ad or a sales pitch than they are by peer credibility and peer emulation. People under 20 are exponentially more resistant to proactive, corporate messages.

Point being, whether it’s you with a book trailer and a Facebook event for your next reading … or Vitaminwater with a new flavor … or Ford with a new car … people under 40 are statistically more responsive to the passive endorsement of a friend “liking” something on Facebook than to most multi-million dollar ad campaigns proactively selling products.

William O’Barr did a study in 1996 that found 50 percent of kindergarten students had been convinced, by experiencing the gap between high video production values and low product quality, that any advertisement is a lie. The kids O’Barr studied, they’re in high school and college now. They see a classmate wearing Jordans or playing Angry Birds on an iPhone, and that’s how they judge if it’s worth wanting. They see a friend connect to something on Facebook, and that’s how they judge if it’s worth “liking”. Not from loud, glossy, expensive ad placement.

So, Facebook is here to stay. Each of us will need it on some level in order to succeed in our endeavors. The bright side is how quick, easy and cheap it is for you or I to have a Facebook event or group or fan page to inform and mobilize groups of people. And the sad truth of all that power and potential freedom in the face of all the injustice in our society is a gesture right back to the point Orwell nailed two generations ago:

“But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet —–!”

China has experience with its 4 billion people on social media overflowing the government’s ability to control that population and its interaction with the rest of the world. Egypt just experienced a revolution won by the sheer number of everyday people willing to stand against the status quo. Egypt, by the way, has the highest per capita rate of unemployed college graduates in the world, and 70 percent of its population is under 25. Young, educated and motivated to make a stand … only middle class complacency stands between us and them. Just a few points of difference in the spectrum of quality of life.

With cell phones and social media, we could make so much happen. IF we could just conceive of banding together and bothering to try. And whether we do or not, someday, somebody somewhere will. Iran has a young population quietly seething against oppressive tradition by day, and living an underground western lifestyle by night. Not unlike the silent tension in Egypt until a few weeks ago. … Isreal and Palestine … young Saudis and the notion of a sustainable society once the oil’s gone … undocumented border-crossers here in the U.S. …

Whether we do or not, someday, somebody somewhere will. And the world we now live in is such that they’ll use social media and cell phones when they make their move. The infrastructure is in place, it’s all right there waiting.

* * *

–CD

Thanks and so long, Steve Jobs

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

UPDATE: Brand ownership post featured on BrandMambo

My recent post Brand Ownership in this Digital Age was featured over the weekend by New York branding blogger, Alex Cespedes.

Look for the link to my post in the reading list with his Food For Thought post at BrandMambo — and while you’re there, check out Alex’s insights on brand management.

Thanks for the plug, Alex!

* * *

–CD

 

Brand ownership in this digital age

Even the old guard can agree that the meaning of brand has changed in this Facebooked era. But there’s a catch — typically that realization is stubbornly rooted in an old school perspective: Who owns brand, the old guard asks, consumer or provider? Who owns brand. It’s an equation heavy on two outdated notions:

1. 

   The days of a passive, receptive audience are long gone in the wired world of this digital age.

   Once upon a time, providers owned the only bullhorn in town. They owned a nearly exclusive, mass media voice in setting the public identity of their brands.

2. Consumer or provider — us vs. them, it’s just not a viable stance to take in an age when the consumer audience now has access to a deep, diverse array of networking platforms designed for sharing ideas and opinions with the world.

Back in the golden age of corporate greed, the zenith of Wall Street excess and hopefully the worst collective sense of mainstream style I’ll ever have the misfortune to witness, the stakes for a given provider were far more simple than today. Avoid the pitfalls of product recalls, oil spills or negligence that led to consumer ingestion of unintended toxic contaminants and your brand avoided bad press. Avoid alienating market segments who had alternative choices, and you’d avoid driving customers to your competitors.

If you fly Delta, the baggage fees win.

These days, it doesn’t take an oil spill and it doesn’t take a story in the national news media to derail months or even years of promotional work.

Consider the online backlash in spring of 2011 when Delta airlines charged baggage fees to a group of soldiers for a domestic flight during their return from a deployment in Iraq. The extra fees were reportedly charged for the soldiers’ combat equipment.

The soldiers had a complaint video uploaded to Youtube by the time their flight took off, and the video had gone viral on Facebook by the time they landed. Faster than a reporter could have set up an interview with the soldiers. Faster than a news story could have been written and published. Faster than Delta’s public affairs staff could have reacted to mounting public criticism. Word spread that fast — distributed by the audience, from Delta’s target consumers to Delta’s target consumers.

The classic Gap logo (left), and the brand refresh that was scrapped after a social media uproar. Some pointed out that if you look close enough, the new logo spells "crap" with the R reversed.

Delta’s not alone in struggling to manage its brand as the realities of doing so effectively have essentially left its public affairs team bewildered at the sudden inadequacy of its outdated playbook. Remember how consumer social media backlash shot down Gap’s logo refresh in fall 2010? Or BP’s absolute flogging in the court of public opinion during the Gulf oil spill?

Keep in mind — big brand, small brand — nobody in any line of business is immune to a relentless audience/consumer flogging in social media. The same things that happened to Delta, Gap and BP could happen again, to a public figure, a big brand or a mom & pop operation. And it could happen rightnowtoday.

Long story short, asking who owns your brand is a waste of time. Whoever happens to be talking about you, posting about you or blogging about you and your brand — possession being nine-tenths of the law, that’s who owns a stake in your brand. And here’s the kicker: No matter who you are; no matter what line of work you’re in — you’re outnumbered by a networked audience with an array of global platforms to choose from.

True, we’re only a few years into the social media era, but your audience already takes for granted its opportunities to participate in your brand identity. And there’s nothing you could do to stop them anyway — short of a China or Libya move for a nationwide internet blackout. But in western society, engineering such a blackout would mean you’d have to take down cell phone service too. Not all that viable as strategies go.

All of which is a long way of saying, exclusive ownership of brand identity is no longer a realistic expectation. Your brand identity is profoundly and directly linked to the public perceptions generated by the quality of service you provide and the level of sustainability in your business practices.

That old us vs. them mentality makes for missed opportunities when consumers favor your brand. It’s a readymade PR disaster when they don’t.

Blatantly and genuinely burn a consumer in this digital age, and you can bet the rest of the world will hear about it by morning.

* * *

–CD

Why social media is the card you want to be playing

So, here’s the thing about marketing in the age of social media: The frontier before us can’t possibly be viewed clearly through a lens of old school business logic, decades-old brand management wisdom, or pre-millenium agency routines.

Vietnam-era, Army issue glasses, photo courtesy of vintageglasses.com

Not to call those white-knuckle adherants to what worked 20 years ago predictable for their reluctance to fully accomodate the realization that the wheels of change are long ago in motion, but that’s really what it is. On every level. Predictable.

There lies the trouble for all things conventional in marketing — none of the autopilot wisdom honed to foolproof, corner office habit ever has nor ever will reconcile the profound unpredictability of the meaning of brand in a marketplace where audience has become content producer. The general public’s fresh, new power to organize, instantly communicate to the masses around them, villify or canonize any public entity — any person, place or thing known beyond a 12-foot radius of itself — like it or not, that’s a game-changer.

Yet those of an outmoded mindset are still out there, many of them still in the game and sinking into desperation over the dwindling returns of that trusty, old playbook from those acid-washed denim glory days. In this Facebooked world, same-old same-old just won’t fly.

A glossy black-framed holdover from those acid-washed denim glory days.

To those who view social media as childsplay through those 80s-colored lenses, bear in mind: the Facebook generation — those kids who’ve always had email and never sent a fax, those kids who’ve always had a cell phone and never had a landline or used a rotary dial phone — they’re old enough now that they’re taking graduate marketing classes, finishing their MBAs and starting careers. It’s not tough to predict which direction the fastest climbers of the Facebook generation will take things when the post-war waves of the Baby Boomers retire in wholesale numbers this year, next year and the years after. This whole “new-media thing” — condescending air-quotes and all — it’s happening. It’s happening right now, best come to peace with it.

To those who view this brave new world of marketing and social media strategy through the same lenses they read the morning newspaper (remember those smudgy, gray old things?); to those who view mastering new media as anything less than absolutely necessary, consider this:

• Facebook alone has more than 750 million members and its CEO is the youngest billionaire in history.
• Mobile phones are manufactured with social media apps pre-installed.
• Google (trading today at $530/share, more than Apple and more than double IBM or Amazon) is waist-deep in adding its Google+ platform to the social media landscape.

Billionaire. Born, 1984.

None of these facts are coincidence. Believing otherwise is the hallmark of entrenchment in outmoded, outdated logic. The hallmark of a misguided belief that an Old Spice campaign from 1977 could compete for one second in today’s media sphere with the 2010 Old Spice branding and positioning. That what worked for Esprit could work again for Juicy. That what worked for Jordache could work again for True Religion.

But it won’t.

Unless your name is Michael Jordan, every line of your 1990 Marketing Plan is dead on its feet. Keep those 1968 Playtex campaign files to yourself, or better yet burn them. Marketing ideals from the age of velcro shoes and Swatch? Child please.

This isn’t an era when print media buys matter in any publication with a circulation smaller than Rolling Stone. It’s not an era of buying air time during the news hour. It’s not even an era of banner ads and sponsored links any more. SEO was king before social media. Consumers in the 40-and-under demographic see through every bit of your “tried and true” model, they tune it out and move right past.

In today’s marketing environment, social media is the card you want to be playing. If letting go of marketing tools, theories and practices older than virtually everyone in your audience is anything less than top priority, I can assure you that the public release of Google+ later this year, and 800 million currently active Facebook members will leave you behind in the next five years. And they’re taking the marketplace with them.

* * *

–CD