Volkswagen Super Bowl 2011 Ad: “The Force”

The Super Bowl is a quintessential American ritual every year. It is a gigantic nationwide get-together of family and friends. For many, the actual outcome of the game is of lesser importance. But most will at least attend to the advertising, and there is much talk about it afterwards. The Super Bowl is only half a football game; the other half is an advertising festival. Read More »

Vivaldi Partners CEO Erich Joachimsthaler

I was asked to speak at the Corporate Image and Branding Conference yesterday about “Strategic Brand Management: Reaching your Stakeholders with a Comprehensive Strategy.” I thought about what it is that an audience of CMOs would want to hear about, and so I asked myself what is it that every CMO is asked to achieve. CMOs are often tasked with driving top line growth and market share while better defining the brand and value proposition and optimizing the marketing process in order to maximize business performance.  Read More »

Mark Mulcahey from Vivaldi Partners speaking at the Corporate Image and Branding Conference.

“Can we afford to ignore social media?”
“The answer to that is Syria.”

This is how Mark Mulcahey from Vivaldi Partners, speaker at the Corporate Image and Branding Conference, answered an executive worried about how social media affects business strategy. Read More »

With only 16 days until the Corporate Image and Branding Conference on January 26 & 27 in NYC, here are Erich Joachimsthaler’s don’t-miss articles on social business, branding and marketing from last week.

1 / Worst social media metrics:

http://socialmediatoday.com/fixcourse/424806/3-worst-social-media-metrics-and-what-you-should-measure-instead

2 / Insane customer expectations get even more insane:

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2015-digital-marketing-rule-book/

3 / Why people post on branded sites:

http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/4410b7b6-3320-4eb9-9625-df25907f4277.aspx

4 / What comes after social media?

http://socialmediatoday.com/rohnjaymiller/423732/welcome-web-30-contextual-web

5 / On brands in 2012:

http://www.business2community.com/branding/top-ten-new-years-resolutions-for-brands-0114198

We’re back, with only 23 days until the Corporate Image and Branding Conference on January 26 & 27 in NYC. Here are Erich Joachimsthaler’s don’t-miss articles on social business, branding and marketing from last week.

1/ A fairly comprehensive description of what Dell does in the Social space.

http://fastgush.com/marketing/how-dell-gets-its-social-media-strategy-right.html

2/ Top 10 articles in McKinsey Quarterly, always a useful read (Particularly No. 1 and No. 3)

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/newsletters/topten/2011_Q4.html

3/ A CMO Council survey on social

http://www.simplyzesty.com/social-media/68-of-brands-struggle-to-integrate-social-media-into-marketing-strategies/

4/ Insightful numbers on Asia

http://thenextweb.com/asia/2011/12/28/take-a-look-at-asia-900m-internet-users-and-2-7b-mobile-phones/

And this week, to welcome in the new year, here are some predictions that are worth a read:

5/ http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/28/cloud-trends-2012/

6/ http://mashable.com/2011/12/27/5-tech-trends-to-watch-in-2012/

7/ http://www.fastcompany.com/1802809/what-will-your-business-look-like-in-2012

8/ http://www.inc.com/john-brandon/top-5-tech-predictions-for-2025.html

Over the last eight months, Fifth Season, a Vivaldi Partners company, set out to collect the best social media initiatives from around the world and score them on the six dimensions of social currency. We call this the Social Currency 100+. In this series we use examples from that database, as well as our Social Currency Studies, to demonstrate how brands create social currency – and why it matters. We begin with the dimension: AFFILIATION.

First of all, what is affiliation? Or what do we mean by affiliation in the context of brands building social currency? In short, a brand scores higher on affiliation if they:

• Create a sense of community

… by providing an opportunity to get to know interesting people.

Take for example, eBay. According to our survey of customers in the US in 2010, eBay got a score of 49 while Amazon got a score of 27. eBay does a much better job on this dimension than Amazon. eBay likely scored so high because they provide a way to meet others while collecting or bartering collectibles, for example. Yet, Amazon has significant potential to create value by improving their score on affiliation.

As far as initiatives go, first up is Nike+. Nike, in collaboration with Apple, did a stellar job in creating affiliation. There are so many truly social features on this initiative. It is an app used not only by runners who buy and wear Nike gear, but also runners in all sort of other shoe brands. Running itself can be quite lonely but through Nike+ it is possible to compare running scores with those of others. You can challenge a friend on who will finish the first 100 miles. You can learn from other runners about how to deal with injury or get training advice.  Overall, this one really is a community building App, and as a result, a great brand builder.

Second up is My Starbucks Idea. This one is a great crowdsourcing initiative from Starbucks. You share, vote, discuss, and see new ideas around coffee and coffee consumption. You can see the ideas of other people and build on them. Don’t mistake this initiative as a modern digital version of the good old suggestion box that companies used to have somewhere. This is a suggestion box and much more. Who would you think engages mostly in My Starbucks Idea? Well, yes, those who care the most: customers. Those customers are passionate about coffee and about their Starbucks and they spend a lot of time engaging with other customers on My Starbucks Idea. It puts innovation in the hands of the community. And for The Starbucks Company, it is source of [free] ideas on innovation! We toast to that one.

These are just two examples but they point to ways in which companies can build their affiliation score and create social currency that builds brands.

Knowing where to create value through affiliation is just one thing, though. The other important question is to ask what should brands do to increase their overall social currency. There are of course no easy answers to this question but there are ways to get some directions.

Why would having the right social media initiatives be so important for brands?

Consider this: a consumer survey called The Social Break-up by marketing firm Exact Target found that 55% of FB users reported liking the brand and later decided they no longer wish to see the company’s post. 50% of fans say that they really aren’t even fans as they don’t visit the page or website after the “Like.”

What’s more disturbing is that consumers really don’t seem to engage with brands on social networks. The top two reasons consumers interact with companies in social networks were to receive discounts (61%) and to make purchases (55%). This means that marketers must work harder than originally thought to engage consumers around brands. They need to build their affiliation scores, or else, their efforts merely result in their best customers (who buy the brand anyway at a regular price) to get accustomed to discounts.

What do you think? Do you agree with our definition of affiliation in the context of brands building social currency? Let us know in the comments. And what other initiatives do you know of that build social currency through affiliation? If so, submit an initiative to be added to the Social Currency 100+.

In the countdown to the Corporate Image and Branding Conference on January 26 & 27 in NYC…here are Erich Joachimsthaler’s don’t-miss articles on social business, branding and marketing from last week. Enjoy!

1/ An infographic of the top 50 most valuable brands and social media
http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/12/08/how-the-worlds-50-most-valuable-brands-are-faring-in-social-media-infographic/

2/ This might be a really fun game
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665593/can-you-identify-these-brands-without-seeing-their-names-or-logos

3/ Twitter strategies – three success stories
http://on.wsj.com/vfBoqX

4/ The next frontier in innovation from McKinsey Global Institute http://shar.es/oFqKZ

5/ According to Pew’s latest study, the internet is a complete waste of time
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/apparently_the_internet_is_a_complete_waste_of_tim.php

About 20 years ago, companies realized that the biggest value creation was to identify, nurture and protect the intangible asset value of the firm. Then, there was a recognition that this intangible asset value was not only important, it was growing faster than tangible assets. Back then companies and executives put their focus on management of the intangible assets, even though many of them could not be shown on the balance sheets in some countries, due to accounting regulations.

I took this as a cue to begin studying how to manage better brands, which for many companies was the biggest intangible asset value. Back then, branding was a tactical discipline within marketing. Brand managers were junior employees who made tactical decisions for the brand. This all changed when a British consulting firm developed a valuation of a large consumer goods brand as part of a mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity. The valuation of the company’s brands far exceeded the value of the firm as it was assessed otherwise (book value).

From that year on, every executive I met told me that they were looking to build a brand. Not just brands for products that you could put on the shelf but also corporate brands, range brands and ingredient brands. Branding became one of the most significant value creation opportunities for two decades.

Today, I see a new way that companies create value and it reminds of 20 years ago. The new form of value creation is also focused on leveraging and managing intangible assets. But the assets are different now. Take a look at this chart.

It describes the Internet evolution in two dimensions. One dimension is the connection between information and the other is the connection between people. Taken together, I call these two connections something like collective intelligence.

If you were to put your fingers on the biggest value creation opportunities for companies today, it is the identifying, nurturing and leveraging of collective intelligence. I am not sure about the predictions inside this chart and how they explain the evolution of the web. Web 2.0 is here and we are now entering Web 3.0. Whatever is inside the chart is actually less interesting than the dimensions themselves (the x and y axis), because the dimensions describe the journey we are on, of ever-faster speed and acceleration.

I predict we will see enormous acceleration in 2012 as various technologies become increasingly available. David Reed, one of the early thought leaders of the Internet, groups these technologies into three clouds, the connectivity cloud that facilitates the transfer of information. There are a host of applications in this group – from networking technologies such as global broad adoption and penetration – to the device proliferation and availability of smart phones. Then there is the resource cloud, which includes the ability to store massive amounts of data at very low costs. And finally there is the social cloud, which includes the networking and collaboration technologies that currently appear like wildfire.

I think it is this latter set of technologies — the social media applications, social technologies, and networks that were the missing piece so far to fully leverage the Internet. Through these technologies, value creation shifts from merely leveraging the connections between information, as Google has done, to value creation from leveraging the connection between people. This new form of value creation leads to entirely new business models, new ways of leveraging the Internet (the social media model), and new ways of building strong brands.

As far as branding is concerned at Vivaldi Partners, we have a name for this form of value creation: the building of social currency. Building social currency involves managing the collective intelligence (the connection of information and the connection of people), and social currency is the extent to which people share the brand or information about the brand with others as part of their social lives.

My advice? Understand the connections between people as they share a brand and information about a brand. This will be one of the biggest opportunities in value creation for companies in the years to come.

In the countdown to the Corporate Image and Branding Conference, here are Erich Joachimsthaler’s don’t-miss articles on social business, branding and marketing from last week. Enjoy!

1/ Marketing is everywhere!! Remember, just because you can, does not mean you should. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15923438

2/ Top prediction for technology next year
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1862714

3/ Collaboration is the new buzz word in social media, so here are some reasons why it is so hard
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/12/eight_dangers_of_collaboration.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date

4/Adaptive does very good mapping
http://adaptivepath.com/ideas/the-anatomy-of-an-experience-map

5/ The New Co:sumer
http://www.fastcompany.com/1798568/cosumer-uprising-how-brands-need-to-prepare

In the countdown to the Corporate Image and Branding Conference, here are Erich Joachimsthaler’s don’t-miss articles on social business, branding and marketing from last week. Enjoy!

1 / First an infographic on social and brands of course: “Socializing Your Brand”

http://www.mindjumpers.com/blog/2011/11/socializingbrand-infographic/

2 / Second, seeing something in plain sight of course: “Seeing What Doesn’t Seem to Be There”

http://www.ideachampions.com/weblogs/archives/2011/11/can_you_read_th.shtml

3 / Third, something I am absolutely convinced of: “The Great Data Boom is the Innovation Story of Our Time”

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/the-big-data-boom-is-the-innovation-story-of-our-time/248215/

4 / Fourth, some facts: “3 Facts That Will Shape the Future of Branding, Marketing and Social Media”

http://www.business2community.com/branding/3-facts-that-will-shape-the-future-of-branding-marketing-and-social-media-095659

5 / Finally, money and the future. No surprise, but interesting: “PayPal predicts the future of money: No wallets required in the UK by 2016″

http://thenextweb.com/uk/2011/11/24/paypal-predicts-the-future-of-money-no-wallets-required-in-the-uk-by-2016/