Today’s hot tools are tomorrow’s obvious must-haves and next week’s obsolete strategies.

…because “social media” is not a strategy or program in itself. At the least, what we consider social media strategy ties in with ALL your online initiatives…at best, it ties into all your marketing initiatives, period (remember how great social is for localization – use it when you do events).

Have been so busy with clients that I have neglected blogging, but not microblogging, so I’ll throw in a couple Tweets that aren’t in the feed to the right.

It seems to me the nature of collaborative “new” media is such that art is able to continually evolve, & thus may never be finished

5:11 PM Jun 1st from web

still convinced that if the late George Carlin had made it to “social media” mania days, there would be nine dirty words

6:09 PM May 27th from TweetDeck

At the core of social media today is relatively new consumer behavior in terms of not just a willingness to share content, personal information, and so on- but a downright passion for doing so. The nature of the Web begets sharing, for sure- but the first widespread activity requiring sharing of information not usually publicly exposed may very well have been peer-to-peer music filesharing.

A regret of mine is that we weren’t able to use the information Napster users exposed on their hard drives to create “tribes” or “collectives”, or to connect our users in other ways. Our “Someone Like Me” feature allowed users to search for others with similar music in their collections. This enabled better trading and music discovery, of course, but we always thought it was the beginning of a social network as well. (Not to mention a GREAT dating service….) “Someone Like Me” was disabled through most of Napster’s existence for legal reasons.

We loved the sharing concept and it was at the core of the Napster tagline I created: “Thanks for sharing.”

Someone who really wants to make a difference in the branding world could work on making giant Post-It’s stick to walls better…11:57 AM Apr 29th from TweetDeck

It’s accepted wisdom by now that newsprint as it has existed for centuries is headed towards extinction. The Web is more immediate; TV seems more personal. But stepping away from the newsroom towards the cultural beat, here’s a lifestyle example of why printed matter cannot compete with the Internet. .
This article, about the vast world of Dead recordings and the band’s living legacy, is a great story and we enjoyed reading it in our Sunday NYT. A few days later, our friend Channon brought up the article to us. A great story, yes, he said – but the best part? The best part to him was the hundreds of reader photos of Dead shows over the years that had since been submitted to the Times online.
This user-generated photo collection, which amounts to a very personal history of the Dead, gives context, community, and excitement to the original story. The Times has also made available online audio excerpts and a link to a Dead roundtable moderated by the NYT.
Really, this says it all. The online piece is interactive and multimedia. It is alive, evolves and grows via user interaction. The print piece can only live in its moment, and quickly becomes irrelevant.

Just finished lunch with Marc Gobé, friend, mentor, and the man behind Emotional Branding (where I’m an advisor):
emotionalbranding.com
The topic of conversation was largely…conversations. The conversations brands have with their customers, the conversations customers have with and around brands, and how to aggregate the conversation in a way that makes sense. For instance, I’m working my way through and testing the available Twitter tools so that I can ask a question both here and on Twitter, and bring the various comments and discussions back here in one place, making the discussion more immediate and vibrant.

The conversation idea is of course not new. It’s the tools we have to engage it which are multiplying. But does every brand need a conversation? If I’m P&G and a majority of my brands improve various areas of the home experience, I’m going to build something successful like homemadesimple.com . This is an ongoing engagement with my customer and although my brands are present throughout, it’s not blatantly brandcentric nor intrusive, and in fact it’s possible to completely miss the branding (this is a good thing). So, P&G and Tide, Cascade, Dawn, Swiffer, Mr. Clean, Febreze, etcetera, definitely benefit from having this conversation and so do their consumers.

Marc and I wondered, though: does a company which makes, say, galvanized pipe for irrigation need a brand conversation? What attributes does pipe need to have besides being strong, not leaking,  and being well-priced in its market? It would seem ridiculous to have social actions for a pipe manufacturer, right? Well, yes, and no.
For the sake of galvanized pipe discussion, I looked at Morrill Industries . Turns out there are an awful lot of attributes to galvanized irrigation pipe, none of which are probably fascinating to brand people- but they definitely justify a conversation about “Couplers, Tees, Crosses, 90° Ells, 45° Ells, Hex Bushings, Bell Reducers, Reducing Tees, Street Ells……..” – in the right venue.
Facebook’s the wrong place for this, as is any broad-based social application which is difficult to shrink to a specialization- but an aggregated Twitter discussion group could definitely work. Morrill could have the only hex bushing for particular situations, and its audience would never know that if it were not engaged in the conversation. (I have absolutely no idea what a hex bushing is, btw.)

Moral of the story: yes, Dorothy, you can engage social media, but not in a paint-by-numbers way. Find the right destination; don’t just toss darts at Twitter and Flickr; and if what you do/sell is specialized, corral that community even if you do so within a larger social context .

My friend Derek Sivers, someone I am very fortunate to know and occasionally break bread with (should be more often) wrote an ebook for musicians on how to get music noticed- how to rise above the noise. He should know- Derek founded CD Baby, possibly the most successful independent music aggregator/manufacturer/digital distributor ever, and indubitably the nicest and easiest to do biz with. One of the most beautiful things about Derek is his generosity of spirit, and he makes this ebook available for anyone, free, from sivers.org. You can also download it here:

http://derek.s3.amazonaws.com/DerekSivers.pdf

Derek wants you to spread it around- just please, credit Derek Sivers and link to sivers.org. That’s all.

I was committed to never using the term “social media” on my website, but I’m afraid it’s going to be unavoidable in my blog. With the prevailing marketing chatter over the last 48 hours or so about the new skittles.com , there’s really no other term to employ.

To put it in its simplest terms, Skittles has removed a traditional home page from its website; instead, you hit the Skittles Twitter home page and an overlaid nav which will take you to: the Skittles Facebook home, the Skittles YouTube brand channel, a Skittles Flickr page, and yes, information about the (limited but tasty) Skittles product line.

I saw a tweet fly by about how this was an incredibly brave move and that courageous brand managers should sit up and take note.

Well…it’s still fairly cool for a mass-market brand to be active on Twitter (that’ll last about another four days). And I am happy that the Skittles team are together enough to have their, um, social media pieces sorted.Today it would be a bit sad, ok, unheard of, to not have one’s Facebook brand page and so forth set up.

But may I ask what all of this does for Skittles?

What exactly will Skittles-centric Twittering do to increase candy awareness and consumption? Is this where the Skittles core audience is to be found? To judge from Skittles-Twitter-Homeland, all Skittles has done is bait the Twitterverse into snarky comments. That doesn’t matter, it’s still discussion- but how is this discussion going to drive sales? Maybe one or two hungry Twitterers will develop a sudden craving upon the reminder of Skittle deliciousness, but it hardly seems that Twitter should be the Skittles focus area. I applaud the willingness to have unfiltered content displayed around the brand (the Flickr page is a random search)- it’s brave and could lead to some cool usergen content – but again, exactly how does this move candy?

Facebook and YouTube make a little more sense, as engaging a community around a brand is always a good move. However, again, the aggressive social stunt has only brought activity to these pages which is negative. It would seem the campaign is not reaching Skittles fans en masse, nor engaging discovery of Skittles.

There are exactly 3 videos on the Skittles YouTube brand channel at this moment. Wouldn’t it be far more productive to pour some of this energy into having more and better brand-related content? Or, if the point is to drive more Skittle conversation, why not center it around a new development or some really cool event Skittles is supporting?

If the Twitterverse were discussing how Skittles had just planted forests in deforested areas, or built houses in disaster-struck areas, the brand conversation would be a lot more positive, and a lot more interesting. They could even be rainbow-colored forests and rainbow-colored houses – but at least they’d be on point.

I can’t wait to see what this does for Skittles in the actual marketplace. Very curious.