The Engaging Brand

Don't be generic, be interesting!

Do we look for something interesting each day?

I know that sounds silly but life can be generic and what we offer can be generic.

This can be as relevant for brands and for leaders. Brands offer what people expect them to, leaders read the business books and follow the standard steps.

For me generic is boring - generic should form the basis of your thinking but then you need to look deeper and make the offer, make your ideas 'interesting'.

By personalising to your brand values, by showing an individualised brand personality you bring colour to an often grey marketing world.

That means chipping away the generic elements and using the generic concept and design your own personalised, individual characteristics. 

How often do you imagine a day in the life of your consumers, how often do you watch consumers and how they live their lives.....how often do you ask how interesting the offers are to you? Because if you feel they are generic then your consumers also will!

Keep chipping away at the generic elements to create an engaging brand

Why silence is more important than ever

Facebook, twitter, blogging...gosh so much information by social media! So what can we offer that sparks engagement?

Silence. It is a scarce resource nowadays.

Think of the great orators of our time....the pauses between words were often more powerful then the words themselves.

So how can we pause to create a stronger engagement?

• We can listen more than create.
• We can tell part of the story and let the readers, audience etc finish the story in their own context.
• We can provide ideas rather than solutions, questions rather than answers...and then allow others to find their own truth.
• We can stop occasionally and take a breath.....and renew.

We can all offer noise but today what about thinking how we can offer silence for others to engage with our thoughts.

 

The Power of Tension

Tension is created in our minds between who we are and what we want to be, between what we fear and what we hope for...

Tension is a wonderful selling tool. Think of the last wonderful novel you read, it had a tension built in to create an inherent drama and pique your interest.

Brands need to consider how tension can be used as an engagement tool. We all want to know what happens next....so

• With social media can you pique interest by creating an ongoing story narrative?
• Can you show you understand the tension in your customers and how you can help resolve that tension?
• Can you create a tension, which creates a need, which creates the desire for your product?
• Can you balance in your messages two contradicting emotions - fear with hope, sad with happy etc

Tension is something that we all live with - so lets use this resource for the good of our brands rather letting it destroy our creativity!

The Context of Social Media

Social media is like all the arts...the words you write are not the experience. Just like the music, notes, art are a vehicle of emotion.....and it is the audience that takes that emotional message and relates to their life...so it is with social media.

The reader, the listener creates the context. This is even more so now people digest the blog, the podcast, the tweet in different places because of the rise of mobiles and tablets.

When you think about it this is subtly different from the past. The context was either a shop, your internet site etc

For me the lessons for marketing and business can be drawn from the arts

• Concentrate on what is your passion, passion travels to any destination.
• Practice, practice and practice your skills - your notes are the words, your music is your story
• Context is created by being able to relate....what are the most relatable concepts...stories. Create stories around your service.
• Surprise. With so many words coming at people...yours need to stand out. That can be done by provoking people to think about their life in different ways.

 

7 Crowdsourcing Sites for Brands

Most weekends I publish a guest post from a reader who wants to share their thoughts on branding - if you have one for our community email it to me at anna@theengagingbrand.com ...here is this weeks

Branding can be expensive. Branding takes real expertise. Yet even small business owners can now afford quality branding services thanks to the concept of crowdsourcing.

Here is a list of seven crowdsourcing sites that can help you build a better brand, improve customer service, strenthen you reputation, all while keeping your costs to a bare minimum.

1. PickyDomains.com It all starts with a name and finding great domain name nowadays can be really tough. This is where PickyDomains comes in handy ? you deposit $50 and specify what you want (desired length, extension, keywords). A virtual army of 44,000+ name spinners starts working on your order right away. When you find that name, a person who made the winning suggestion gets 40 to 60% of the fee. And if you don?t like anything ? - you get your money BACK. No risk involved. PickyDomains also does names and slogans.

2. 99Designs.Com Pretty comes next and 99Designs does pretty best or at least very inexpensively. 99Designs does everything from logos to buttons to actual web design. The required minimum for most project is $150 and 40,000 designers from all over the world are ready to fight over your project. Sorry ?we charge by the hour? digital artists ? you lose.

3. iStockPhoto.com iStockPhoto deals in stock photographs, video footage and audio clips. It?s probably not what regular website owner is going to deal with, but if you work with media a lot, this crowdsourcing resource sure comes in handy. My only complaint ? strange ?credit? system rather than dealing in dollars directly.

4. Microworkers.com This is a unique crowdsourcing resource that deals primarily with microjobs. What?s a microjob? Say, you posted a YouTube video. You can pay 10 cents to each person who upvotes it and Microworker will be happy to provide you with such individuals. Yes, this is where moral dilemmas come in, but for things like voting, leaving comments, adding your site to social bookmarks, becoming a facebook friend or twitter follower on a budget this service is great. Hey, it?s not as bad as hiring fake paparazzi to follow you around, pretending you are a celebrity.

5. RedesignMe.com Unhappy with your existing project? Hire RedesignMe wonks to tear it all apart and put it back together. This site also offers other services, like market research, knowledge management, creative consulting and so on. Essentially, you are asking people to become co-creators of your product or service. And oftentimes best ideas come from outsiders.

6. Poptent.Net This service is of interest to anyone who wants professional ads without ad agency rates. Poptent pitches itself as the best social network for commercial videographers, directors, actors and animators, what really matters that for $5,000-$10,000 you can get an ad spot that would be as good as anything done on Madison Avenue.

7. LiveOps.com LiveOps is a call center, except it?s not. Instead of 500 people stuck in cubicles in a single building somewhere, LiveOps lets you hire individual workers to essentially do the same work ? either to call or receive calls. Combined with a screening process, and a flexibility to work when they want, folks who signup to field calls from businesses can earn competitive rates. This flexibility can be passed onto customers, who in turn see fluctuations in calls being handled in a more efficiently.  

A guest post by Dmitry Davydov is the founder of PickyDomains.com. He has helped to name over 1500 online businesses since 2007. Dmitry can be reached at support@pickydomains.com.

Show 339 - Innovation, Growth and Change

Show 339 of The Engaging Brand leadership and marketing podcast is ready just for you. To subscribe or listen for free, you don't need to download anything and all explained at the end of the post.

Andy Stefanovich Chief Curator and Provocateur at Prophet has earned a reputation as one of the most disruptive and effective advisors in business, joins Anna Farmery to talk about the  about aspects of his new business book on innovation, Look at More an Inc. bestseller, including

• How important is mood for creativity
• What makes a mood good or bad?
• 3 Ways to change your mood
• How to make a question provocative in a good way?
• Devils advocate vs Angels advocate
• The power of the question 'What don't we know'
• When you take people out of their environment to change their thinking is it a short term fix?
• Can noise always be good in the office - how to make office noise a positive aspect of the office.
• How a newspaper publisher promotes creatively his news stories.
• How to promote wool on a restricted budget, which takes the breath away.
• How creativity can flow in hard times
• Feel free to email Andy at Prophet with any questions

If you have feedback for me on the show or topics that you would like me to cover then e-mail me at anna@theengagingbrand.com or join me on twitter.

How you can listen to the Engaging Brand

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Oscar Wilde on Social Media

"When we experiment on others we are really experimenting on ourselves"

Words from Oscar Wilde and a great insight into business and social media - if we actually recognise it. 

Social media is a wonderful way of experimenting, of collaborating, of trying something new....because there are no absolutes just ideas or the search for ideas.

Social media can reach out but it can also 'reach in' by 'reach in' I mean a chance to explore your real brand values rather than what you want them to be! A chance to explore your skills and develop your thinking....

If we look at as experimental or exploration then we don't eliminate risk but we embrace it as part of the process.

The Power of Contrast

Contrast is hugely important in creating emotion.

Watching a bald Lady Gaga with a piano covered in hair - creates ideas, thinking, emotions in the audience. It strengthened the words in the song, it gave visual memory as well as audible.

Marketing can also benefit from using contrast. Contrast in terms of stories, colour etc but also in how you convey the message. 

A message which balances the contrast can be so more powerful - for example,  health issues caused by obesity followed by the hope of losing the weight.

The important bit is that the contrast comes to stir emotion not in illustrating inconsistency in your brand values. The contrast of what you say and what you deliver is not stirring the right emotion from the customer!

The question is

Do you convey a straightforward message or do you use contrast to create a greater impact?

 

The Provocative Nature of Social Media

Social media is great for inspiring dialogue, great for sharing, great for collaboration but there is also something else which I touched on with a question to Alina Wheeler in last weeks Engaging Brand podcast.

Human beings have a natural inclination to be predictable in many ways, as much as we hate ruts we seem to manage to find ourselves in them quite often! We often want to move forward but don't know how to, or need inspiring or even directing in how to move forward.

Social media can help provoke people to challenge their thinking, to challenge their view. We can provoke either a reaction or even inspire climbing out of the rut. We can provoke the feeling of something better, we can provoke the feeling of recognition, of aspiration...

If you struggle to see how your brand can use social media, maybe think of it as a provocative tool?

What are you wanting to provoke in people and then use social media as a platform to show how you play a part in improving their life.

5 Ways We Can Learn to Engage Through Words

Musicians have notes to convey their ideas

Artists have colour to convey their ideas

Graphics have pixels to convey their ideas

Leaders, managers, marketers, people....have words. 

Yet how much time do you spend on understanding, on practising, on building your skill and knowledge of words....they are our fuel, our most precious resource...so a challenge for us all this week

1. How about writing down words which annoy you when people say to you and ensure you don't fall into the trap (i.e.paradigm shift, impactful for me!)
2. How about writing down words you hear that move you, engage you...and use them more!
3. How about learning just three new words a week
4. How about reading poetry not for any other reason but to learn the importance of rhythm.
5. How about instead of reading magazines, books, papers....review how they use words. For instance the use of headlines, the use of paragraphs, when people go into detail..and when they don't...I find it interesting to look between different newspapers to see how to engage different sections of society - the headlines in a tabloid is so different to a broadsheet.