Listening is golden.

Mass media will have to change significantly as a result of many converging factors, which isn’t news to most of us. Namely, the prevailing truths in the attention economy, more new digital media art forms than we’ve ever seen in the history of the world and the cleansing effects of a contracted economy.

Attention is meaning
First of all, where am I spending my time, what am I looking at—what am I allowing to demand my eyeballs? Everyone has 24 hours in a day, so time is not a variable in that sense. The factor is actually relevance, and to a greater degree, meaning. Does an idea, product, brand or cause relate to me, fit my life, complete me or some dimension of my existence so well that it facilitates ownership? Is there an experience with a product or brand that is so visceral and personal that I go through the Kubler-Ross stages of grief when something does go wrong or it gets changed? Remember the New Coke?

Somewhere along the line, the people who developed these ideas, products and services struck a cord with me and made meaning in my life. If they made meaning in enough lives, they created a category killer, hopefully made life better and maybe changed the world.

Interaction is conversation
At the heart of an effective plan for negotiating the huge shift taking place in mass media and the social Web is the ability to enable, listen to and contribute to conversations. The second big theme here is really listening and not just scratching the surface, but seeking to deeply understand the emotions of people in their lives in the real world.

Traditionally, feedback, surveys and focus groups filled this need, flawed as they were. Ask me what I think about something in the vacuum setting of a focus group and its not likely I’ll be able to tell the intern asking the questions anything of real value. Compare that to the review I actually wrote on Amazon or the video I shot and uploaded to YouTube showing and telling about my experience, and there is no comparison. Not to mention, most of the new category killers we’ve seen in the last decade would never have seen the light of day after a focus group.

Now brands, products, services, ideas and causes all have the ability to listen in real time and take action. There is a new industry dawning on the Web specifically for that purpose. If you’re not carefully listening with these new tools, no matter what business you’re in, your power to make meaning in the future may be limited.

Hulu is less, and less is more
Its not a new concept. The third theme here has to do with the contraction of the economy and the convergent synergy with the first two themes. Its more effective to leverage people’s emotions where they are, based upon what they are already thinking then it is to try to force them to do something or tell them what to think. People pay attention to the ideas and meaning that they can relate to. Interaction technologies make it possible for people to dynamically tune in where and when they want, to search and sort out what they don’t want or can’t relate to and to find meaning.

Furthermore, the ability to engage niches online makes the economic case for interaction media even stronger. Broadcasting ideas, products, brands or causes through mass media is giving way to the economics of marketing to those who satisfy their passionate pursuits through the social Web. Through peer-to-peer collaboration and by the ‘collective’ behavior of groups and fans who tag everything in sight, good or bad, it simply costs less to go that way, and its proving to be more effective albeit harder to ‘control.’

Since Hulu, TiVo and DVRs are enabling TV entertainment without the intrusive, overt advertising, and advertisers are moving megabucks over to the digital channels on the Web because of the economies of the niche effect, conversations and collaboration, its safe to say that this overall trend is likely to continue to accelerate, driven ultimately by what people want, not by a marketing strategy.

My conclusion is this: to thrive in this world of the social Web and contracted economy, I must observe ‘collectives’. Understand passions. Find a niche. Enable conversations. Be relevant. Make meaning. And then repeat. Often.

TV… who’s paying attention?

In the attention economy, TV doesn’t have our attention like it used to. Other interactions are much more compelling and relevant to real life.

The age of contrived entertainment is certainly shifting. The sources people trust for information are shifting, too. We’re more likely to seek peer-to-peer sources than polished, institutional broadcasts. This is due to the perceived (right or wrong) manipulation of the information in mainstream media, not to mention political bias.

We’re inclined, now more than ever, to align who and what we watch and listen to with the ‘collective’ we hang out with, based on shared values. Technology is enabling this, good or bad.

Mass media has always been predicated on a boiled-down message so that a broad, diverse audience can relate to it. The Web allows niches to thrive—specific interests for collectives and ‘tribes’.

The TV is now a multi-source display in the family room where many information and entertainment sources are being displayed. Along with mass media and movies, the game console is now front and center. The Web is on 24/7 with software, interactive digital media and platforms the likes of which TV has never delivered.

We will only continue to turn our attention to what we find value in, where our media choices are collaborative, flexible, personal, and relevant. Mass media TV must find a way to relate to a whole new ad-blind generation that doesn’t listen to overt advertising, no matter how creative it is.

So, not only will struggling advertisers continue to pull back and negatively impact traditional TV during this current down-turn, the Web will continue to erode the value people put on the mass media paradigm. Advertisers are already migrating huge budgets to digital because they are seeing the needle move in the interaction paradigm of the Web.

Those in mass media TV who jump out and blaze ahead on that trail could lead and survive. They will likely have to be fundamentally different enterprises at their core to do so, and there will be casualties. Those who fail to understand the magnitude of this media shift and continue to try and force-fit these new interaction media forms into the old mass media won’t make it.

Live Brand thinking

Ultimately, we move general consumers through a journey, to use a baseball analogy: from spectators to fans to players. The idea is that from people who may have experienced something in the world, we convert them to deeper believers in that idea, product, service or brand; they become fans. This is possible because we have helped ensure that our client is doing a much better job of listening and hearing what people are really saying. And once people have become believers, we help our clients provide these believers with ways to celebrate and share their experiences with others in their networks; they become players.

Communities and movements. The idea is that marketing and advertising as we have known them for 50 years are shifting. Consumers are controlling a lot more where and when they pay attention. Consumers now have a lot more choices for getting information, news and entertainment, and much of it is now from each other. Instead of depending on institutions and corporations, people are turning to friends, people in their network and even strangers. Its more about the relationships as things grow. The internet, software and social media are the enabling technology, and more utilities and functions are added to the sandbox every day. The relationships are developing around shared interests, causes people are passionate about and of course favorite products, services and brands. Around all of these, communities are developing and movements are starting. We look at what makes certain groups of people tick and observe what opportunities exist for further energizing those people who are already fans of our clients.

Branded content. Whether it is content generated by our clients around their ideas, products, services and causes, or it is user-generated content as they publish their own Web 2.0 content, we find ways to link it. The role of the marketing department in institutions, corporations and companies has changed. They need to shift to be the chief listening function of their enterprise. Listening to what people are saying about them in the blogosphere, track the ratings and tags people are putting on their products, watch the videos, find the photos. Once we help them to see and hear everything that’s out there, then we can help them figure out what they need to be saying or doing to change if change is necessary, and keep up as their best customers tell them what they are thinking, expecting and desiring next from them. We help our clients formulate who they really are based upon what their consumers and audiences say they are, and provide a guideline for developing great content and a compelling value exchange with customers and general consumers.

Interaction Design. Design, by definition, is a process, a journey. Not a product, or a style. A design is the process of moving from a current situation (or problem) to a preferred situation or solution. Its also not window dressing added to something that is ugly and smelly at its core to make it seem useful, usable and desirable (surely, at least one product comes to mind). Interaction, by definition, is a reciprocal action, and classic cause and effect applies. Even choosing to ignore something is an interaction. There is no mention here of online, offline or inline. I doesn’t matter what the medium or channel is. What matters is relevance, ease of use, ease of engagement, extremely flat learning curve and clear expectations. So, when we think about this part of our thinking, what we’re doing is making things that are the best of the best from these two disciplines. And we use the best minds and talents with these ideas in mind to create real items that people can use as part of the experience or online software utilities and functions that drive an enhanced experience while it connects people and things in the real world.

From this basic philosophy, we break out into an ecosystem of products and services. First we deploy research and listening functions that allow us to better understand our client and their existing customers and potential audiences. We examine companies and consumers from the standpoint of experiences, strong relationships, people’s passions and community connections. Then we help them adopt and embrace a refined brand approach, one that reflects what their now hearing with the new listening functions in place. We help our clients make decisions about the best technologies to deploy for the desired objectives. We help them develop desirable, usable and useful utilities, along with highly valuable content. And finally, with careful planning and successful implementation, we are able to anticipate a return on investment for our clients, and actually allow them to track where the metrics are moving.

Classic sales & marketing metrics give way to experience metrics

There is an inverse relationship within the classic intrusive marketing model: the more a company creates intrusive marketing for short-term gain, the more they put long-term effectiveness at risk. It’s a matter of trust, more than ever before because of the economic situation we are in globally.

Moving product is absolutely one of the important metrics that the Live Brand Ecosystem can inform, however, there is such a significant shift happening in the market now, that it demands new ways of measuring what is happening.

Not only are there new connections being made between consumers or customers and product/services and companies, there are new ways of measuring that are now also enabled. The classic techniques of one-way, monologue marketing and promotion are quickly giving way to a conversational model, with peer-to-peer sharing being a huge influence.

Also, classic media are loosing the attention they once held in our culture, ushering in the interactive media that are revolutionizing whole industries and allowing us, consumers and customers to tune in where and when we want. Interactive channels are multi-directional, requiring and enabling a new suite of metrics for measuring the conversation.

The brand space is no longer defined exclusively by the brand manager. It is truly ‘the consumer owns the brand’ now, and what is in the mind of the consumer is ‘the brand’. It’s now a matter of creating ways for your best customers to experience ideas, products, services or causes in a more holistic manner; to become even more engaged with what the brand means in their life or business. And then measuring that experience; both the good and the bad. The essential metrics of product design apply here and collide with the established development phases for direct marketing. Desirability, usability and usefulness coordinate with marketplace insights, big ideas and creative, conceptual expressions to define ‘experiences.’

This is the new dashboard, one that listens to the conversation taking place in the market and displays the trends that matter. Brand managers and marketing departments are now in the business of creating platforms for conversation, listening and then acting on what they hear.

Success in this new digital economy is determined by how successful companies are at this new art, not how clever their short-term campaign happens to be. That model is broken.

How does the Live Brand move people?

Think of your favorite band… why are you a fan? Think of your favorite anything… what is there about that thing that it holds your attention—even demands your attention? What about a best friend… chances are, your closest relationships are with people who are different from you—they complete the way you deal with the world; see things from a slightly different angle and round out your perspective.

Now consider each of those components of your life… what do you see and hear in your mind’s eyes and ears? What feelings and emotions are triggered when you think about the richest experiences and other people in your life? Each collection of thoughts, feelings, opinions and imagery is ‘the brand’ for that favorite experience, person or item in your life. Think of them all as being so connected with you and relevant to what you enjoy in life, that it is literally burned into your brain.

Let us not forget, that one of the original uses for the word ‘brand’ was to describe the process of taking a uniquely-shaped, red-hot branding iron and literally burning that shape into the hind-quarter flesh of a rancher’s cattle. That process of branding is a great way of simplifying what has become a confusing case of marketing-speak. The brands that companies manage are nothing more than a collection of ideas and emotions on our minds. Companies have varying degrees of influence over those ideas and emotions, yet the true brand is what we see burned into our brain from our experiences.

Now consider what people have burned into their brains about an idea, product, service or cause that you are responsible for managing. Are your best advocates, consumers or customers saying what you think they are saying when you’re not around? Are they saying basically the same thing in their own words? Or not? Are your biggest fans telling the people in their network something you’re not aware of?

Not that you have complete control, but if you feed them information on topics that interest them anyway, you energize those conversations–create knowledge ambassadors. Ambassadors are your best sales force and maintaining valuable lines of communication is also the best customer retention program, all at the same time. Give your best customers a voice, a stake in how your brand gets defined, shaped and ultimately evolves. Energize what people are saying about you, your product, service or cause, already. If you don’t engage them in meaningful conversation and even provide some dialog, they’ll make it up. Your brand is only as good or great as what people see and hear in their head.

The Live Brand platforms energize peoples’ experiences, optimizes the conversion of believers and puts in place relevant, useful and desirable utilities for ambassadors to not only live the brand more fully, but to celebrate their beliefs and passions with the others in their lives. This is how the Live Brand moves you forward.

What is the Live Brand?

The landscape for advertising agencies, design firms and branded marketing communications has shifted. There is a conversation taking place in the market spaces between brands and consumers that wasn’t there a few years ago. There is also a conversation happening between consumers, and even between businesses and customers in the B2B space. We’ve moved from one-way, intrusive communications and brand monologues to engaged, multi-directional dialogues.

Company leadership, product management and service delivery organizations need to provide branded platforms for an on-going conversation with their consumers and customers. There is also the need for branded platforms that enable consumers to interact with other consumers in meaningful ways. Along with these new channels of engagement, there is the need to keep up with these conversations in on-going, relevant ways; to listen to what is being said and to ultimately take action where it is required, and desired.

Marketing has changed, from being the voice of a business, product or service to being a company’s chief listening function. The focus in advertising creative and design has shifted to development of desirable, usable and useful functions along with highly valuable content.

The new channels in the digital economy are shaping the way we, as companies, brands, products, services and causes, connect with people in their lives. These vast new opportunities have changed the way I now see my role as a creative director, designer and brand builder. The brand programs that I build now are in a constant state of movement, refinement and evolution. The conversation is on. People are talking, connecting and engaging.

The Brand now needs to be the Live Brand.

Hold on. Loosely…

Marketing for the past 50 years had everything to do with how marketers controlled the message; more recently to a fault with a nasty backlash from consumers who are DVR-savvy and banner-blind. The days of intrusive one-way marketing are clearly fading fast, if not gone already.

The marketplace is a ‘conversation’, right now. The new order of marketing consists of a monumental shift of control. We (as consumers) are controlling the conversation, and I have to keep reminding myself to think that way; to throw out all of the old conventions about media, messages, interactions and content.

As Ian Schafer said in a recent article at AdAge, ‘most advertisers have been late to a party that consumers have been hosting for quite some time.’ I’ve concluded that this shift has a lot more to do with visceral functionality and salient content. The new tools that have been coming alive in the hands and minds of consumers trump any overt control of the messages or even the channel where they access it.

For instance, in enjoying a Starbucks Latte; what matters most about that transaction is that I’m enjoying it as part of my life, where I want it, when I want it. Starbucks wisely figured out (hypothetically) that my persona would be more inclined to enjoy drinking my latte while I shop, or while I read at B&N, and I would be less inclined to drive or walk to a Starbucks store and then drive or walk back to B&N.

In that scenario, Starbucks not only gets my $4.00 more often because of my lifestyle, they also reap more mindshare and, in fact, enthusiastic brand ‘ownership’ because I feel that they ‘get me’, and will likely say so or at least advocate for going there more often with my friends.

Starbucks also has to let go a little in this scenario, but there is a much more meaningful relationship established in the process. Consider another variation of this: aggregator sites like YouTube, where people access branded content and even utilities and online functions. Then ask the question, does it really matter whether a marketer has a powerful ‘channel’ of their own to reach its ideal persona? That is another example of having to let go, something we’re really going to have to get used to as marketers, and quickly.

As Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message, and what we really need to move away from are the old ways of thinking; that marketers can control the message. That cat is out of the bag… consumers control the message and marketers just need to enable the conversation, and then listen and act. We need to be comfortable in allowing a passionate Web 2.0 public to write the story line, and then adjust to meet expectations and aspirations. To shift to a live brand.

And we’re so not used to doing that to the degree it requires, are we? The Prozac is in the marketing departments’ water coolers, and the CMOs are guzzling. That’s probably the biggest paradigm shift of all; getting CMOs to become CLOs (Chief Listening Officers). Not to mention getting a self-absorbed, creative-for-creative-sake, ‘look at my cool Flash navigation site’ industry to actually listen.

This is such a huge time of opportunity for our industry. I think I’m actually genuinely excited about marketing for the first in my 20-year career, with a little looser grip.

Digital marketing and social media come into focus

I’m focused on developing a suite of digital direct marketing products and services that can be used in any economy, to help individuals, business owners and companies with products and services to enable and maintain deeper, more relevant relationships with consumers, as well as between customers with shared life interests and passions.

Our digital marketing suite will be a secure, branded web environment that puts the power of shared brand experiences and enabled consumer brand engagement to work for under-served, small- to medium-sized retail and service sector businesses.

These companies will benefit from the conversation that they enable and through these relationships better understand what their customers are really thinking about their products and services. They can make adjustments in how they not only deliver, but also delight those customers.

These services do take time to fully develop and take effect, but the companies that are enabling these community effects and the ‘conversations’ to take place around their brands, products and services are going to be the winners in what is now the digital economy.

A lot of the traditional media (TV, radio, newspaper, magazines, etc…) are becoming less relevant as consumers access the information they want, when they want it, and where they want it, through digital media. Direct marketing and advertising at large are shifting in response to this trend, slowly, but surely.

The businesses we’re talking about don’t have the personnel, nor the resources for starting their own social media component. So we come in and provide the appropriate mashup of strategic assessment, creative development and technical expertise to build a complete solution.

Additionally, by seeking first to understand each individual business and their most loyal, enthusiastic brand ambassadors, we’re able to create a highly relevant, branded experience through content and functionality, prompting the conversation with their existing customer base–the 20% of their customers who drive 80% of their sales.

Finally, through our partner network, these companies also gain the intelligence they need to anticipate what their best customers may expect, need or want next. Now, their brands are live.

Digital media and the web are not ‘out of the box’. There simply is no box.

I was talking with a good friend today, and the topic of the common practice by major newspaper Web sites of scrapping smaller news sites for their content and including it on their own pages.

He showed me an article that tells of one particular news outlet now suing a larger outlet, stating that they didn’t ask permission to use the content, and that the bigger news outlet had no right to place the content on their site, including the advertising.

Not to mention that the entire web is predicated on this practice, it struck me that this was a perfect example of the methods for success in the digital economy clashing with the old paradigms and conventions that are the basis for the news media business model.

The assumption is that those paradigms and conventions can be applied to the Web. Think of those paradigms and conventions as ‘the box’ or ‘the way we’ve always done it’.

When you take a look at the Web through a true Web 2.0 lens, the old conventions don’t work on the Web at all. Therefore, as I said, there simply is no ‘box’ to think outside of because the Web 2.0 models are entirely new; we’ve never seen these models in the history of man. In the words of Marshall McLuhan, we can’t successfully fit these new developing ‘extensions of man’ into the existing media categories, or the old ‘extensions’. To do so would be to remove their new power, fresh functionality and revolutionary usefulness.

The kicker in this whole convoluted law suit is that by this practice of scrapping content, along with the advertising I might add, the larger news entity is actually increasing the number of impressions for the smaller outlet, thereby making them a much more valuable resource for their content developers and their advertisers. Not to mention that under normal circumstances, few people would ever actually find the smaller news site in the first place.

So this all begs the question; is there a downside to the practice for the smaller firm bringing the suit? And if not, what are they thinking?

Digital will change your marketing—for good.

The current digital channels are enabling communities to flourish based upon a shared passion, not geography. As participants in these communities, many of us actually make efforts to meet each other in real life or just connect digitally.

Brands do potentially have opportunities to act as enablers in these channels, but they have to be willing to start with a bit if research and then ask themselves if they are really willing to do what it takes to start and maintain such a community. And brands need to recognize that communities that thrive often evolve, and evolve often, to meet the needs of the users.

Of course, the best part about this channel is that with the shared passion comes shared ideas and content. Shared passions and ideas create the story line of the community. The brand may start the ball rolling, but it takes on a life of it’s own, as it should. The founders of YouTube started out with the tactical goal of a better way to deliver video on the Web. They ended up igniting one of the most compelling social networks we’ve seen yet. Not because that was what they set out to do, but because that’s how the members used it.

This breed of marketing channel can be scary for traditional brand managers. The idea of becoming totally transparent with the users of their brand and allowing them to truly own it is akin to baseball getting off steroids. Suddenly, what is said of the brand is the reality of the brand. We’ve said all along that the consumer owns the brand because a brand is what is in the mind of the consumer. Well, watch out. In a digital world, it’s out.

But just as in theory it is good to ‘clean up’ baseball, marketing managers need to reboot and see how refreshing it can be to ‘clean up’ their marketing. They can stop creating fantasy brand promises and invented value propositions and really engage consumers, facilitate meaningful dialog with the brand, and ignite real, passionate story lines about their brands as they really live. Once brands are allowed to connect emotionally on that level in a community setting, it’s only a matter of keeping up and maintaining relevance.