UPDATE: this post has been kindly featured on BtoB Magazine’s ‘Blogs of the Week’. (Thanks guys!)

I’ve been mulling on this one for a while: how does Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, blogging, and every other web 2.0 BlaBla service change what we need to be doing in marketing, and what are the concepts that matter?

Well, an aborted journey around the M25 in the rain today provided a little thinking time. Here’s my conclusion…

Firstly, a Disclaimer - Reports of Death are Usually Exaggerated

I’m not a doomsayer. The internet does not spell the end for traditional marketing. In fact, the best of it seems to be getting more and more engaging and creative. In fact it has to be by virtue of the environment I’m about to describe…

Fact: The Media/Marketing Environment has Changed for Good

We have all this new Facebook-ish stuff which didn’t exist yesterday - and most of it is great entertainment. Predominantly, it’s all ‘me-media’ - the services themselves don’t provide content, but their users do.

This in itself is exciting: as a publisher I can create whatever I want to, whatever my interest is; as a consumer I can read/view/access an infinitely richer set of content than I could a few years ago. I can also now connect with folks and share stuff in easy, fun and exciting new ways (Facebook, Flickr, etc).

An Introduction to Pico-Branding

These new things are both a threat and an opportunity for marketers…

Threat: unless everyone’s playing hooky at work on Facebook, then we have fewer opportunities to engage with them in traditional ways because less and less time and attention is devoted to things like TV, newspapers, email or web sites. (Proof: yesterday I was really dedicated to being a couch potato; today - whilst a Sopranos binge on the couch will continue to be highly desirable - I also tend to devote a bit of time to reading blogs in the evenings.)

Opportunity: we have a mass of new ways of connecting with people.

So if you’re a marketing agency, you need to think about acquiring some new skill sets to compliment your standard work (and to safeguard your fees). And, if you have a brand to manage, it’s time to think about how to capitalize on all of these new-fangled destinations.

When thinking about how to engage with the market, we need to bring two different strategies into play:

Mega-branding: press, posters, big web sites, mass email campaigns, TV, etc.

Pico-branding: Facebook, YouTube, blogs, Google AdWords, Twitter, Flickr.

Mega-branding is an exercise in ‘gorilla marketing’ - it has a large footprint; it reaches many people; lives a long life; and it can be (hairily) expensive.

Pico-branding is an exercise in ‘guerilla marketing’ - it has a small footprint; it’s opportunistic and targeted; it’s fleeting; and it’s (relatively) cheap. Importantly, because it’s delivered via the web, Pico-branding is also extremely measurable in a way that Mega-branding can’t always be - and so ‘cheap’ can also be very cost-effective.

How to Get With the Pico-Program

Most importantly, Pico-branding requires us to think in new ways…

Pico-branding is not about building grand audience destinations (like the mega-bucks web site of yesteryear), because if you spend lots of time and money building it there’s no longer a guarantee that they’ll come (there’s every chance they’ll be polishing their Facebook profile instead).

No, Pico-branding is all about building smaller, more discrete stopping points across all of these new online outlets, with the aim of capturing your audience’s attention and either complimenting (and informing) what they’re doing or diverting their interest towards a destination that you do own (ie, something from your Mega-brand bucket of work).

A good analogy is with the board game Monopoly. Everyone knows it’s a bad strategy to invest in only one area of the board. Too random and not enough traffic. A better way to generate cash is to buy lots of smaller properties at all of the places that people visit regularly, as well as investing in the big stuff: so, collectively, a bunch of houses on Whitechapel and the Old Kent Road can add a great deal of strategic, money-making value to those expensive hotels on Park Lane.

In Pico-branding terms, this translates as:

Reaching out to the blogs that your audiences read and engaging in valuable discussions with them

Publishing your own blog in a focused way that adds value to (and interacts with) the discussions surrounding your marketplace

Using tools like Twitter to broadcast snippets of information that you own and other people care about

Posting engaging videos on YouTube that show you and your wares in a new light

Creating Facebook (et al) groups or applications that either provide users with content services that they couldn’t get elsewhere or add value to their experience of your brand by helping them connect with like-minded people

…and so on.

Conclusion: Go Small

Pico-branding is all about accepting that your audiences spend as much time on a varied bunch of web-based media, forums and services as they do in their armchair in front of their TV…. and making whole hearted attempts to engage with them in new ways that add value to these online experiences.

So here’s the new rules for marketing…

1. Go ‘Pico.’ Build more small things than big things
2. Do this in all the places that your audiences are to be found
3. Don’t spend less or more - just spread budgets across a wider variety of stuff

Footnote: next up from Velocity….a ‘how to’ guide for finding your audiences online.

Today’s ‘Widgety Goodness’ conference in Brighton brought together some in-the-know folks and some much-needed clarity to the hoopla that is social media and widgets.

Organised by the good folk at Snipperoo (the widget platform people), it cleared a lot of excess fluff from my head. Top of the agenda was a BIG question…. what are widgets and what are they good for?

Well, I have a good handle on this now, so if you need to know, then read on…

From a practical perspective, Alex Bard of youminis, gave the best explanation of widgets that I’ve heard to date.

According to Alex (and I’d agree strongly), widgets are used by people EITHER as:

‘Stickers’

or

‘Utilities’

A ‘sticker’ is the kind of thing that you slap on your Facebook or MySpace profile in order to look cool - like a widget for your fave band. It sits there for everyone to see and says ‘Hey look! I reeeeally dig this thing!’

A ‘utility’ is more useful. It’s something you use in order to get something of value. For example, a widget for iGoogle or Netvibes that gives you feeds on the news or sports stories that you care about. Or, another example that we’re all probably more familar with might be a plug-in for the Firefox browser that enables you to control your iTunes.

To make a broad, reductive statement, sticker widgets tend to be used a lot by teenagers and dumped quickly when the next big thing comes along… whilst utility widgets tend to be used by folks who have a specific need or interest. Utility widgets also tend to have a longer shelf life (because they’re more useful).

Further, sticker widgets tend to live on social networking platforms (ie, my Facebook profile page), whilst utility widgets tend to be embedded in the applications we use day-to-day (eg, my Mac operating system interface, Windows, my browser, etc - in other words in places where I live / work).

Interestingly, as social networking platforms begin to take a stronger hold of our lives, we see utility widgets popping up here too. As people spend more and more time ‘living’ in Facebook (that’ll be me then), they also see value in embedding helpful things in it - so that they don’t have to leave one app to get a piece of info from another.

I’m paraphrasing Alex on all this, but I think this definition is useful. (Thanks Alex, great speech!)

As I’m a consultant, I thought I’d turn it into a special on-the-fly Velocity ‘Stan-o- Gram’ (Stan, my business partner sees the world in these types of charts, and we know they really help everyone to ‘get it’ quicker ).

Here it is:

So, what’s the point of all this stuff and why should we care as marketers?

Well, if you’re selling sugar water or Spice Girl lunchboxes, then you really ought to get in on the action with ‘Sticker’ widgets. This side of the chart is very viral. So, find a 14 year old influential sneezer-user, encourage them to attach your widget to his/her social network profile and just stand back. If your brand and your widget rocks, then their friends will probably be bowled over by how cool they are and go copy them. Bingo - a new meme is born. The impressive Ori Soen from Musestorm had some interesting case studies on how his tech platform has helped brands do this kind of thing.

If you’re not selling sugar water, and are in the more sober business of B2B, then think about how you can use all this widgety stuff to become a utility.

To my mind, this is a big big opportunity for smart companies to pick apart the value of their products and services and get them to people in new ways. For example, if you’re a firm that needs to relay time sensitive, high value info to business customers, then build a Facebook or iGoogle widget and go give it to your most important users…. they’ll then pass it on to their friends, and hey presto, you have a new outlet for your brand/services/information. On the other hand, don’t even try to build a sticker style widget because the chances are your customers don’t think you’re THAT cool. (Think about it, if you hand out free badges at trade shows do you think people wear them when they get home!?).

So…

‘Sticker’ widgets are fab in B2C where the budgets and the bets are big, the trends fast, and the payoffs large.

‘Utility’ widgets are great in B2B (and B2C) where the value of your content is high and your users are (probably) niche but extremely engaged and energized… because your stuff helps them do their jobs/live their life better and they’ll be grateful to get their hands on it and pass it on.

In other words, sticker widgets may work for you if you can establish a ‘cool’ factor. Utility widgets will only work for you if you can establish a real value in your content.

Either way, lazy marketers need not apply because it takes some figuring out. Whatever you do, IBM will never be cool, and I’ll never expect to get ‘utility’ style content from Coca-Cola.

Anyways, that’s my view (thanks to Alex). What do you think?

(Meantime, next up will be a post on what we as marketers need to do in order to make this stuff work effectively… inspired by another slam-dunk pitch from our friend Will McInnes of NixonMcInnes. Watch this space…)

Every few years, they come back.

The ad campaigns that depict the advertiser’s customers (or their own staff) as lovable morons.

IBM is doing it now in the UK with its gormless IT staff doing cartoony things.

Barclays Bank is doing it with their UK retail banking campaign showing it’s bumbling staff coming up with idiot/savant ideas (£100 cash back with every car loan!) between bouts of trashing the offices.

There was a big wave of this kind of thing in the US when I was a young ad pup and still under the influence of David Ogilvy (”The consumer is not a moron, she’s your wife.”). A TV director called Joe Sedelmaier got rich and famous with ads that showed each advertiser’s customers as cretins (remember ‘Where’s the Beef?‘ for Wendy’s?).

I guess I’m still under David Ogilvy’s influence — I’m just not comfortable with ads that belittle the target audience. Rules are made to be broken, but I’m not sure the upside in the recent examples outweighs the rather obvious downside.

As far as portraying one’s own staff as idiots, well, it can be entertaining. And as a Barclays customer, I can attest to its accuracy. But remind me: why would anyone want to give their business to morons?