It’s an exciting time to be in the communications business.  It’s not just that there are so many new ways to reach people.  It’s also that we get to watch as each of these new media gropes for its place in the communications ecosystem.

Text messaging started as a side channel for mobile network engineers to communicate with each other. No one — least of all the operators themselves — ever imagined that it would become the lingua franca of the teenager or a new marketing ‘touch point’ or the perfect way to send alerts (including machine-to-machine updates).

Blogging just seemed like a self-indulgent personal diary opened up to the world.  Some would say it still is — but it’s also become something much greater, carving a place for itself somewhere between journalism, gossip and private musing; giving companies a new, less formal way to express themselves; giving the opinionated the audiences they never could have found; creating online meeting places for ad hoc communities.

Social media came from nowhere to claim a significant chunk of the waking hours of millions of people. My 14-year-old daughter spends far more time on Facebook than she spends in front of the TV.  Some business colleagues have thousands of contacts on LinkedIn and really know how to work the medium.  And I can now touch bases with lots of people I had lost touch with (a painfully high number since I moved to the UK 19 years ago).

Twitter was a curiosity for geeks and people with too much time on their hands. Now it’s a juggernaut, giving millions of people the illusion of being heard; giving celebrities the constant attention they crave; giving celebrity-watchers their tiny slices of famous flesh; giving life’s natural networkers and community-builders fertile soil…

It’s fascinating to watch these new media emerge and either establish themselves or die off.  Will Twitter be bigger than Facebook or go the way of  the CB radio?  How will YouTube evolve? How will the mobile web differ from the desktop web?

But as interested as I am in all of this, it does remind me that the medium is still just the medium.   And that the idea and the story are still — maybe more than ever — the real engines powering all these phenomena.  That’s somehow comforting to someone who’s in the idea and story business.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: , B2B, B2B marketing, Content Marketing, Social Media, social media marketing, tech marketing, Technology Marketing, Twitter

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The reason I keep Fallon in sight is that they’re a pretty smart bunch and the company behind many top-notch, super-creative ad campaigns here in the UK, like the Cadbury’s Gorilla, the latest Eyebrows work, as well as the truly great Sony TV campaign (though Laurence would always say that great work comes from having great clients). And they aren’t just big budget only TV-oriented Mad Men: they’re really exploring the range of social media techniques and applying them to consumer branding and promotion. For example, they took advantage of a a clamour from consumers on Facebook for the return of the Cadbury’s Wispa chocolate bar with a clever FaceBook group, website and ads.

Here’s one of the really interesting examples of that. Fallon’s Aki Spicer has done a great presentation on a social media experiment conducted by one of his colleagues. In September 2008, Fallon’s Executive Creative director, Al Kelly, posted a video to YouTube called ‘Kittens Inspired by Kittens’.

Within five months, the video had had 4.8 million views on YouTube, 95,000 references on blogs around the world, 64,000 Tweets and 1.5 million Google searches (and had inspired 28 traditional media stories). Aki’s presentation identifies five lessons we can all learn from this feline story when developing conversational ideas for brands. The thought process is obviously aimed at consumer brands (you don’t really get those numbers in B2B), but the five lessons nevertheless feel important:

• Never underestimate the power of networks
• You never know where the social network fire may get lit, so be generous with the matches – allow people to steal liberally
• Social media groundswells tend to bubble up in the fringes, among nerds, geeks and weirdos, before spreading to the mainstream (and then back again)
• Don’t be bland or grey – embrace your creativity and prepare to be outrageous
• Broadcast-level style and glossy production values simply won’t cut it.

Lots of our clients are asking us to get involved in viral marketing now and this Fallon learning is instructive. What’s cool about the video is the spontaneity  of the little girl (she’s so fluent, but can you script someone so young?) combined with the hand-flung, but sophisticated camera work. A hard act to follow.

Check out the presentation…

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B branding, B2B marketing, B2B social media, B2B social media marketing, B2B technology marketing, social media marketing, Technology Marketing

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