PIXEL MAVERICK

I stumbled across a very cool new social sharing site the other day called Piccsy and thought I would share it. 

Piccsy is sort of like Flickr’s cooler & much sexier little sister who isn’t afraid to say out loud what everyone is already thinking quietly.

At first glance I might have just thought “YAWN …another image photo sharing platform where you can vote stuff up or down.” However, since my first glance of Piccsy included a semi-nude beautiful woman in pose + Hitler riding a magic carpet (see below for proof of this combo of awesomeness), there was definitely no yawning and it was clear that this was not your average photo sharing site.

Piccsy is a new social sharing platform that is trying to carve out its own content niche that focuses on the combination of beautiful photography of all kinds, interesting print & still art and random pop-culture imagery that people connect with.  Other than the unique slant on the type of content, Piccsy is a lot like most social bookmarking  and sharing platforms that we have become accustomed to in the last several years:

• User finds an image that is so cool it must be shared
• User tags it with the Piccsy tool
• User shares it to the site with meta data
• Crowd ranks the shared content by voting up favorites
• The end result is a community cultivated & prioritized gallery of Sexy-Coolness

Similar to other social sharing sites, as a member you have a profile and a profile page that is public.  After a few days worth of looking at Piccsy content and selecting various pieces that you vote up, your “My Pics” page begins to become an really cool expression of your personality.  A story about what you are interested in, …what motivates you, …how you see yourself or maybe what you wish you were all communicated via beautiful photography, art, posters and other visual statements.

Piccsy is in beta right now, but with 10,000 high quality images already in the community hopper and a large group of passionate beta members I think it will find a place for itself in the creative/ photo sharing space.  Hopefully the community (and the site/ company founders) will ensure that Piccsy stays on the right side of that fine line between classy, cool, inspiring, different and wierd beauty …and a booby pic sharing site.

Go check it out.  I bet you spend at least 5 – 6 minutes glued to it and flipping next, next next through the amazing imagery.

As you know from my previous post, I had the privilege to attend a workshop at Boulder Digital Works last week.  The topic was “Making Digital Work” and it was setup in a workshop session style with a series of fantastic speakers & leaders of the advertising industry setting the tone with their presentations.  All of the presentations will be made available online and when they are I will post them.  In addition, the entire workshop was taped and can be viewed on UStream.

I went to the workshop with fellow Martinite, Kevin Rothermel, and between the two of us we tried our best to create a Twitter Fail Whale from the massive amount of tweets coming from @edubble_u and @KevinRothermel with a #digiwork hashtag.  We tweeted the notable quotes and pics from the workshop throughout the two days as they were occuring and based on the ReTweets and comments it looks like several people were following.

I have a newfound respect for professional bloggers and journalists who manage to Live Blog and Tweet from these types of workshops and conferences all day, and then still find the energy later that evening to pound out a blog post recap on the key takeaways of the day.  Seeing as it is 1 week since the workshop and I am just now getting my blog post recap published …my hat is off to the pros.

Yes, I can confirm that it actually is this gorgeous in Boulder…

This blog post is a recap of all of the speaker action from Day 1 of the workshop.  The reason for not combining Day 1 and Day 2 recap into one blog post should be evident by the coma inducing length of this blog post.  Enjoy!

Day 1 Kickoff/ Intro – Matt Howell, CIO @ Modernista

“What can we as individuals do to move our agencies forward?”

Matt Howell, CIO at Modernista, kicked off the workshop and served as one of the primary leaders throughout the 2-day event.  He focused his intro presentation on giving everyone a good base of knowledge about the current state of advertising to use as a foundation to work/ think from.  The gist of the presentation can be summed up as …How did we get here (A Brief History of Interwebs & Advertising)?; What things have changed (Mass Media 1-way Yelling is Dead, Consumer has Controls)?; and What challenges do agencies face due to the changes (Agencies Must Change Model and Process or Die)?

Now that you get the basic idea of Matt’s workshop kickoff speech, here are the notable quotes that I thought were great:

• “The structures and processes that guided our industry for the past 25+ years has begun to fail.  It is not working now, and something needs to change.  The old structures are actually becoming liabilities to the business.”
• “83% of the Mad Men viewers fast-forward through TV commercials (..we don’t even watch our own commercials!)”
• “TV and Print are not going away, nothing is DEAD but…growth will NOT come from traditional channels anymore.”
• Tobbaccowalla quote “it is much better to have a smaller share of an exploding industry verses a growing share in a dying one”
• “Be uncomfortably unsentimental about the old days.  Rip off the bandaid already!”
• “We have a lot of money invested in people who are no longer capable (or willing) of contributing.”

The New Digital Landscape – Alastair Green, Digital ECD @ Team One

“Ideas are now more important and powerful than ever.  The big idea is not dead, but it definitely has changed.”

Alastair Green gave a presentation that provided a quick overview of the “new digital landscape”.  Since Matt Howell had just kicked off the workshop with a solid foundation on a similar topic, the bulk of his presentation was really more of a roll call of various new things (new companies, new apps, campaigns, etc) that are happening with digital advertising and communications today.  Alastair is clearly very knowledgeable about the space, and to me he actually seemed more like a developer than what I am used to for a creative director (…he had a StickyBits t-shirt on, that seems pretty KPow-ish to me).  The main points to take from his presentation is very similar to Matt Howell’s, with the notable addition that he places a TON of importance on the role that User Experience (UX) will play in digital advertising and communications going forward.

The sound-bite quotes that I took from Alastair’s presentation are the following (read them with an English accent to get the full effect):

• “User Experience (UX) is one of the most important disciplines to emerge in the new digital landscape.”
• He recommended checking out WeePlaces.com for a cool FourSquare visualizer.
• Brands who “Get It” today — Nike, Gap, Levi’s, Bravo, BestBuy, Starbucks, Old Spice (well Weiden really but OS gets some credit)
• Where are we headed — More mobile, More socialized layers and Location-Based Contextual Awareness (messaging relevant to where you are at the time)
• Some important new roles in advertising – Creative Technologist, Technical Strategist, UX Designer, UX Planner
• “If you are going to play in this space, its about commitments not about campaigns.  The conversation does not stop when the campaign does.”
• “It is ok to not know the answer.  There are a lot of geeky helpful people + the interwebs.  Just ask.”
• “Try and fail.  Fail and learn.  Failure is part of the DNA, get comfortable with it.”

Defining an Audience – Kim Laama, CD @ AKQA

“A demographic profile does not cut it.  Who are your users?  What is their story?”

Kim Laama is a Creative Director at AKQA San Francisco, and is leading the charge there for using persona development as a means to identify and segment the audience over the typical demographic profile.  Kim comes from a software design background before joining AKQA which I thought it was really interesting.  I think some type of mashup of the software design process & the advertising creative process is a good place to start when thinking about how agencies need to change.  That being said, Kim’s presentation was not about fixing the agency process — it was about a better way to identify the audience specifically for designing & developing online experiences (digital advertising, websites, etc).

Although she seemed a little nervous in the presentation delivery, Kim definitely has a mastery of using persona’s to inform how something should be designed/ developed.  She presented her topic by looking at three case studies.  I thought that the connection from case-study to UX/ Persona power was weak in parts (nerves), but in the end she made a very good case for using persona’s to really dig into the emotions, behaviors and actions of each of the user group and how to use that to inform the information architecture/ messaging/ and design of whatever it is you are creating.  I had an opportunity to chat with Kim after her presentation, and she is delightful and super-smart and someone you would want to partner with on a project to learn from.

I captured the following takeaways from her presentation:

• “Consumers today have more control over the experiences they choose to have.  The best way to reach them is to understand them & understand where they are thinking/ coming from.”
• “Personas should be driven by quantitative and qualitative research.”
• “Personas should never be anonymous.  Give him/her a name.”
• “You need to be able to map the online personas back to the demographic profiles/ segments that media is probably using as their guide.”
• “Figure out ways to make your research output be visually descriptive.  If you have the time partner a creative with your planner to reach some visually explanatory outcomes of the persona work.”
• “To me the Team Trifecta = Art Designer, Interaction Designer, Engagement Planner.”
• Two book recommendations 1) Designing for the Digital Age, Kim Goodwin; 2) Storytelling for User Experience, Whitney Quesenbery

Creative Briefs in the Post Digital World – Gareth Kay, Director of Brand Strategy @ Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

“The piece of paper is far less important than the journey.  This is NOT a baton race.”

I think Gareth was probably my favorite speaker of the group.  This is partially because I had been following him before the workshop ever since hearing of the first surfacing of his “New Brief” proposal, but also because he is a skilled presenter and has a humorous way of delivering his message with nuggets of wonderful wisdom folded right into the laughs.  As the title of his presentation indicates, the focus of Gareth’s presentation was on the fact that advertising has changed so much over the years (…well the world has changed & advertising changed with it) but for some reason the creative brief has not changed with it.  Bottom line, he thinks this is WRONG and his presentation tells you why it is wrong and what he would propose as the new brief for today.

My list of bulleted quotes is not going to do this thinking the justice it deserves.  I would recommend you click on the link and go read the presentation & his POV on the matter to get the full understanding.  Gareth was full of quotable material throughout his presentation, but the ones that resonated with me included the following:

• “This is NOT about digital.  This is about digital as a type of idea, not a channel.  This is about the long, slow channel …culture.  Advertising is in the culture business.”
• Gareth got into advertising after his band broke up in 1992.  No strategic importance in this bullet, just thought it was funny.
• “Culture has moved on — but planning has not kept up.”
• “We live in the age of ideas that DO.”
• “Customers don’t own brands …but they do want to participate.”
• “The bigger a brand gets, the smaller it should act. (PSFK reference)”
• “5% of ideas will thrive over time, but since you cannot tell which ones those are you need to try a ton of them.”
• “Doing and then learning is a much better strategy these days VS Learning and then doing.”
• “The modern ad agency should live on Madison Valley (Madison Avenue + Silicon Valley)”
• “If all else fails, go to www.whatthefuckismysocialmediastrategy.com”

How it All Comes Together – Dave Schiff + Alex Burnard, VP/ GCDs @ Crispin, Porter + Bogusky

“…Um sort of by accident, but with a hellovalotta passion and commitment dude!”

Let me start by saying that Dave Schiff and Alex Burnard are the reason “don’t judge a book by its’ cover” is accurate.  They don’t look like your average creative director, and I am pretty sure that they could kick your average creative director’s ass or at least scare the bejezzus out of him/her. While the ass kicking and scaring might be one of their skills, what Dave and Alex do for a living and do very well is to serve as Creative Directors at CP+B.  Their presentation was to tell the group how to take an innovative, progressive and no-precedent type of idea for a client and figure out how to get it done.  Oh yeah, and how to get it done on a budget that is next to nothing.

The vehicle that Dave and Alex used for covering this topic was to tell us about a groundbreaking project/ campaign that was their brainchild – Shocking Barack.  The concept was for one of their clients, Brammo Motercycles, and essentially the idea was to go on a roadtrip along the same route that the Auto-Execs took in their excessive travel to get to Washington, D.C. to get their government bailouts.  They documented the entire trip, came up with a lightning-fast process for editing/ legal/ community-management, and learned that what they had initially planned for the project turned out to be absolutely NOTHING like what the end product ended up being.  The key is that they started out with something small, and then got that out to the audience to begin building a following — and then took the community feedback to inform what their next moves were (literally if you want to look at the map).

I think the best way to gain knowledge from this presentation is truly to watch the video on UStream + to go check out the Shocking Barack site to see how things ended up.  The key takeaway for me was that the ability to build and shift and optimize on-the-fly was the key to their success, as opposed to the traditional approach of a HUGE campaign creation & single massive launch.  Here are the key takeaways that I got from their presentation:

• Previous to this campaign neither of them had any “real-time advertising” experience.  They figured it out as they went along guided by the community.
• “People began following us and our journey, but it was clear that they were holding their cards (participation, advocacy) close to the vest until they knew we were not just a silly ad campaign – until they knew we were for real.”
• They developed relationships with the PR/ Media/ Journalists who picked this up early on in the trip.  They collaborated and shared inside info with them constantly along the way which led to better stories written >> which led to more following >> which led to more stories >> and so on.
• They had a 24 hour cycle that they developed for all video, blog-posts, etc.  That cycle included several typical touchpoints along the way including …client approval and legal.  In addition they included the media team in the loop on this cycle so they could optimize based on what was coming up.

If you are still reading this, I am shocked.  This is by far the longest freaking blog post I have ever written.

If you are still reading this, then check back tomorrow for the Day 2 recap.

Hopefully the recap provided some additional value or context to the slides that will ultimately be made available for all the presentations or from just watching UStream.

If you work in advertising or any role where you are consulting with companies about some aspect of their ongoing relationship with customers — you may have come across the challenge of figuring out your client’s “Social Voice”.  Essentially it is the same thing as a brand voice & it refers to the type of personality and communication style your client’s brand has when engaging with customers.

You might think that Social Voice is a totally new thing attributed to the recent impact of social media, but that would be incorrect.  Successful brands have had a social voice for as long as there have been companies that sell goods and services to customers.  What social media has done, is shift the power to the customer and as a result the spotlight is now beaming down on a brand’s ability to engage with customers as a key success metric these days.

Initially most people who think about brand strategy all day thought that Social Voice should be some type of straight personification of the brand.  “If my brand were a person what type of person would he/she be …fun, serious, quirky, brash?  What does a quirky person talk like anyway?  Why would someone want to be friends with my brand?”.  I think this is the right direction, but this approach is not applicable for ALL brands.  I think this type of social voice works well for companies that have a strong and highly visible individual that regularly represents the brand — a CEO or primary spokesperson that is front and center in all marketing efforts or perhaps a small business where the owner IS the brand.  In these cases, I think having a single social voice that comes from the person at the center of the brand is the right way to go.  Clearly this person who represents your brand has an engaging personality that people like and think of when they think of your company (or you have bigger problems) so thier voice is the right social voice.

For the majority of companies, however, I do not think a single prescribed social voice is the right approach.  Most companies do not have a single person or spokesperson that exclusively represents the brand to the world.  In most situations, a company’s brand is represented by the hundreds or thousands of employees that engage with the customers on a daily basis.  In fact, even with companies that have a strong individual representative …the employees still are the most important aspect of the company delivering on it’s promises.  These employees ARE the brand.  In these cases, a single prescribed social voice would come off as totally fake and customers would punish the company for that.

(Imagine having a casual conversation with someone at a party …but whenever they spoke they were reading from a script.  Fun party.)

When the employees ARE the brand, the best approach for developing a social voice is to make sure the employees can be themselves.  I am not proposing a free-for-all with no brand direction, but rather a loose range that allows individual personalities to shine within.  I think the approach to develop this type of social voice range for a brand includes the following steps:

1. Do the whole brand personification exercise and figure out what type of person your brand is & how they would act/ talk/ behave
2. Once you have that single voice for your brand consider that your center point
3. Take the center point as the bulls-eye and establish an acceptable range of personality types and behavior that circles around it
4. Look for employees that have personalities that authentically live within this acceptable range
5. Let them be themselves, and directly represent the brand with their own style

This approach is definitely described at a high level, but I think it covers the main steps that should be taken to figure out what type of social voice range would be successful for a brand.  At the end of the day, people do not want to be talked to with no opportunity for two-way dialogue …nor do they want to hold a conversation with a person who clearly is faking it and not being themselves.  So, it is better to let the people that work directly with the customers be themselves than to give them scripts or worse to muzzle them.

What other approaches for brand voice and social voice do you know of?

One of my favorite blogs, Fresh Networks, has a recent post with a great video of Matt Rhodes presenting his thoughts on how to approach social media in Europe.  His overall point is that a multinational brand should not attempt to create one single global social media strategy and apply that to all countries.

I agree with Mr. Rhodes that you cannot take a single social media strategy and apply it globally with success.  Each country has it’s own mix of culture, social activity preferences, and social landscape — therefore each country should have it’s own social media strategy.

While I do agree with him that each country should develop an approach that is optimal to it’s mix, I do NOT think that means that a multinational brand should approach social media without some form of unified strategy.

Keeping Mr. Rhodes’ valid points in mind, I propose that a global brand should take a rational Fixed/ Flexible approach to developing their global social strategy.

Fixed (Global):

• Policies (What you can & cannot say, PR issue escalation, etc)
• Operation Protocols (Centralized CRM acquisition, Analytics, Naming conventions, etc)
• Social Voice (My approach to this is to personify the brand as a center point and create a halo range from that — various individual and country authentic personalities can live within that range)

Flexible (Per Country):

• Environments (FB, Twitter, YouTube, Ning, etc)
• Engagement Strategy (Q&As for Germany, Blogs for France, etc)
• Social CRM (Flex business rules for evolving relationships)

Finding the right Fixed/ Flexible ratio would take time and would constantly need to be monitored and revised to remain optimal, but I think if a multinational brand were to take this approach it would be successful.  They would be able to maximize their social media efforts per country while still ensuring that each country’s individual efforts was contributing to the brand and business goals for the global company.

What do you think?

What global brands are doing something like this (or a better model) well today?

Google has a funny and smart twist on their habit of changing up the “G-O-O-G-L-E” that is above the search bar on their main search page.

This little Rube Golbergesque animation is a visual reference to their recent interactive video that advertises how fast Google Chrome is.

I found a great Slideshare presentation today from Luckie that provides a nice look at how retail is using social by presenting 8 case study examples + some review commentary on each.

One of the strategist at Luckie, David Griner is the author of a blog called Social Path that is excellent.  It is one of my favorites in my blogroll and if you do not already follow it, I suggest you start.

I am a little behind the 8-ball on this post, but I just discovered the “follow company” button and figured I would weigh in.  Better late than never.

So, LinkedIn took a page from Facebook and Twitter and implemented a “follow” feature that allows users to follow a company that they are interested in.

Since LinkedIn has become a proverbial hunting grounds for recruiters/ headhunters for all industries, I would assume that this button pisses them off a little bit.  A big part of their value to a company that would hire them has just been eliminated …finding talent that is interested in the company they are recruiting for.

Now much of that same talent pool will be bypassing the headhunter and their LinkedIn profile is already sitting in front of the HR Director at these companies.  Granted, HR Directors are still going to need someone to sift through all the followers and find the right talent from that group, but that sounds very similar to having to sift through all the “prospects/ resumes” that a headhunter sends to an HR Director anyway.

I think this will have the following positive impacts:

1. Weed out all the of lazy recruiters/ headhunters that just push resumes leaving just the great ones that offer real consulting value to companies.
2. Reduce the overall cost of recruitment for HR/ talent search.  I would think this reduces the need for spending as much money on job boards as well as potentially lowering the finders fee % that headhunters charge for a placement.
3. Increase the quality of the match.  If candidates (passive or active) are pre-selecting companies by following them, the company at least already knows that the candidate is aware of the company any is interested in joining before they waste any effort wooing them.

I would love to hear some different opinions on this.

If you follow my blog you know that I am a huge believer in the power of customer reviews as part of the sales funnel/ decision-making-process.  When it comes to experience purchases like a hotel or a restaurant, a customer review is the most influential information available in my opinion.

“Housekeeping!! …You want me come fruff pirrow?

So, it should come as no surprise that I relied heavily on customer reviews during a recent hotel search for an upcoming Disneyworld trip with the family.

Comfortable bed – CHECK. Hourly shuttles to Disneyworld – CHECK.  Nickelodeon themed rooms were a big hit with the kiddos – CHECK.  Impeccable housekeeping other than the terd – CHE…wait, what the??

I think it is safe to say, we will not be staying at this hotel.

Google recently introduced a new search tool that leverages the open API from Twitter to allow you to find Tweeps that have similar interests.  You type in your @ Twitter handle and it returns a search results page that offers up a list of recommended users that have similar areas of interest to you.

A little creepy that Twitter knows so much about me, but it was pretty accurate.

All of the friends that it recommended are related to advertising, and if you were to look back at 99% of my tweets you would probably find that they are all about advertising or some other form of Ad Geekness.

As for this being useful, not really.  Up to this point I have been fairly diligent about only following people who are somehow associated with advertising in order to keep my Twitter stream relevant to my interests.  So, while I am happy to report that Google’s friend finder search tool is accurate …it accurately produced a list of people that I already follow.

How did I miss this awesome Dwight Schrute find on LinkedIn until now?

“How would I describe myself? Three words: hard working, alpha male, jackhammer, merciless, insatiable.” – Dwight Schrute

I doubt that this LinkedIn profile is authored and managed by Rainn Wilson considering he uses a twitter handle that is not Schrutenized.  So, this must have been setup by a motivated fan of Dwight and the show.

According to a quick search, there are quite a few Assistants to the Regional Manager/ Professional Beet Farmers in LinkedIn.

…Now that I think about it, the real Dwight Schrute probably would not ever use LinkedIn since that would indicate that he needed connections with other humans to further his career.

That is silly since it is common knowledge that all Schrute men have an extremely rare genetic pattern that is similar to that of the mighty lone wolf.

Yes, I did request a LinkedIn connection with Dwight and will be happy to have him as a professional connection.

(update to my original post)

Successful connection to Dwight.  My career success is practically gauranteed now.