Digital Insanity Magazine by Bruno Amaral

Vital Relationships: Content Producers and Brands

Tue, 21 Jan 2014 09:13:09 +0000

One of the things that makes the web amazing is that anyone can create content for it. Whether it is a news video for YouTube, a blog post, a set of photos or a tutorial on how to build toys. If you can imagine anything, you can share it on the web in one of these forms.

Right now, you can even build a small work of art that anyone can print in 3D.

And then there’s social media. Those online channels where these content producers (authors, musicians, thinkers and tinkerers) share their work and even let others comment and contribute with ideas. With or without a copyright claim.

These are the people who make the web great, because they take their time and effort and accept the risk of sharing it expecting little or no compensation.

In such a trove of content, links, mixes and remixes, authorship is in serious peril of getting lost. Pinterest recognised this problem and did what was in their reach to fix it. Facebook also started giving more credit to outgoing links as a result of the changes in the Edge Rank Algorithm.

Let’s jump back for a while now. Among the web brands are trying to find their place in the dialogue, trying to be close to their stakeholders, to stay interesting and relevant in their lives.

For Brands, Facebook turned out to be the channel where this communication could take place. Soon brand and marketing managers came to realise that being a part of the web means producing content. It can range between a simple photo of your product, taken at the right setting and with a clever remark, or it can be much more elaborate as an info graphic or extensive white paper.

Building great content takes time but it’s worth it. That’s usually where some agencies step in, helping their clients set up an interesting content plan.

When the setting is right, this content plan includes searching the web for User Generated Content that is valuable and can be shared with the brand’s community of users.

But can we? Just because something is online, it doesn’t mean you can just take it as your own. If you’re just another user, someone like you and me, chances are that you can just add a small caption stating who the original author is. I do that all the time on my blog, finding photos tagged with a Creative Commons license and linking back to the photographer’s flickr account.

On the other hand, Brands need a stricter approach. It doesn’t matter if something is under a creative commons license, it is still good practice to check with the author and explain how they would like to use that image or video in their Facebook Page for example. Given Facebook’s limitations in design, it is also important to look for ways to award due ownership with a ribbon or small mention in the photo saying who the author is. This way, other users can either search for the person online or look in Google Images for the original version.

The alternative is to pick up something interesting online and publish it as if the brand itself had created that piece of content. Most often than not, brands are going to get away with it. Every once in a while however we find situations where the author sees the miss-use of their content and demands explanation, showing that the brand or community manager is speaking to the community from the top of a soap box, not really respecting them as important stakeholders.

In a nutshell, instead of nurturing a community, of building a setting where people feel motivated to work and produce content on their own for nothing else than the recognition for a good accomplishment, we set up an auditorium where people feel they have been robbed or that their peers are being treated unfairly.

A constructive approach to this problem is to develop a community outreach plan as part of your content strategy. This plan will aim to motivate the community to build content on their own and be rewarded for it in some way, not just by seeing their work shared and recognized.

The benefits to this approach are many, one of them being that Brands can reduce the amount of budget they spend on producing content on their own and, as an outtake, gain reach within a user’s own social network. For agencies, developing these outreach plans is a clear business opportunity.

And after all, don’t we all stand by a social approach to how brands communicate ? Don’t we all want to see the web as a place of conversation and lasting relationships? For that to happen it is of the utmost importance to find middle ground between brands and stakeholders and to have a strong backbone in dealing with situations where we may be pushed towards a less ethical approach.

Sure, saying “no” comes at a risk, but what is is truly important is never easy to do.

Photo by Armando Alves @ Flickr.

Why Communication Professionals must help build a Brand Experience

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 09:00:23 +0000

Pedro shared a video about why “Experience is the New Product”, his presentation at NEXT Berlin.

You should watch it or at least read the slides.

His point is clear, products can be copied while a true experience can’t. He makes a strong case to why companies need to invest in Experience design but I feel the method he proposes can be improved.

From a Design to a Communication Approach

Pedro is asking all the right questions:

Who are our Users/Customers
Which are their Contexts?
What do they want?
What do they need to accomplish the tasks?
What do we need/wish from them?
Where will those actions take place?
Which channels are involved?

The problem is that this approach focuses on a few key external factors, and although they are in fact the most important there are a number of other things to consider.

Lets start from the inside out. First, what are the key departments in your organization that impact customer experience?

One of them will no doubt be customer support. Do they have the right tools, can they solve customer requests easily and most of all do they provide you with information to improve your product/service and experience?

You will no doubt find out that there are a number of people inside your company that impact Experience and at the same time have a number of obstacles to deal with in the day-to-day. As communication professionals we need to be alert to these and other issues and bring these departments on board to help design the customer experience.

Not all stakeholders are internal

You probably have a number of suppliers and other key partnerships to help deliver your product or service. These can be whoever delivers your raw materials, customer support service, handles your deliveries or showcases your product online or offline. Ask yourself who handles this relationship and to what extent you can work with external stakeholders to improve the overall experience.

Meet your customers half-way

Don’t just ask who your customers are, they can’t be a distant entity. Instead, get the demographics, find out where and how they communicate, find ways to get feedback on what they love and hate about the Experience you’re trying to build.

Also, don’t think of your customer as “Everyone”, or “the demographic of people male and female from 18 to 60 years old”. You are either trying to sell more to your current customers or looking to expand your customer base. Either way, your resources are limited and you can’t communicate with “Everyone”.

More often than not, the whole Experience ends in the sale of a product, but that is actually when a new phase of that same Experience begins.

The Experience Brief

The relevant departments of an organization should all be given an “Experience Brief”. This brief should outline challenges and aspects to improve, giving an overview of the whole Experience the customer goes through and setting a six to twelve month deadline to improve.

This does not mean that the brief should be solved by the end of the year. It should in fact be a work in progress with learning shared between everyone. Most of all, the Experience Brief should be a compromise to improve the relationship with key stakeholders and build a true Brand Experience.

Remember Bartleby

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 17:08:59 +0000

A desk clerk spends his days in careful diligence of his work until one day he states to his boss “I’d rather not”.

This is the summary of the book in tweet format, and the culprit for this post is Pedro Rebelo.

The interesting bit about this short story of Bartleby is that his boss gets tangled into procedures and the old usual way of doing things. But as we all know too well, new problems require new solutions.

The same thing happens with companies and brands whose procedures are so set in stone that they fail to cope with digital challenges.

Think about it in this way, back in Bartleby’s time a corporate procedure was meant as a form of control. Today corporations are surrounded by such a large number of stakeholders and external factors that control-procedures fail, they do not scale.

Managers try to fix the procedure and restore “the old ways”, at most they are able to build an illusion of control.

The opposite strategy is to build flexible work methods that account for up to date information and allow managers to adjust their course of action in near real time. It is of course easier said than done.

This strategy will require that everyone in the company shares information and both their successes and failures. At the same time, work methods will need to be more transparent. But no one likes to have others looking over our shoulders or admit or short comings, or at least, they would rather not.