Social Media Archives - Page 5 of 5

Jumping the FailWhale: Twitter’s biggest problems

This morning’s Twitter outage, symptoms is only one of the many problems facing brand Twittter. Back in June, order early in my Twitter career (yes, the Twitterverse is turning quickly my friends) I blogged about this – No Twitter Brand, what are YOU doing? But now that I’ve had time to think about this some more (thanks for the outage Twitter!), I’ve got some more thoughts – all of which require more than 140 characters.

Aquatic superstar rising (falling?)... Just one of the great fanart images at www.failwhale.com.

Over the next week or two, I’ll deal with 3 major brand credibility problems Twitter is facing, followed by a set of solutions I’ll modestly put forward.

The Jumping the Failwhale series: Twitter’s biggest problems

Problem 1: Brand Promise: (in this post – see below) the free ride will have to end, and the real owners of the Twitter brand will not be pleased.
Problem 2: Brand Character: (coming soon) Twitter feels more “Social” and less like serious “Media”. Basically, the boss ain’t buying it, and unless something changes, he may be right.
Problem 3: Brand Personality: (coming soon)Despite the fresh, breezy cartoon-graphics, the kids aren’t twittering. Twitter is fast becoming an old people’s brand and the problem is hard-wired into the product.
Solutions: (coming soon) My 10 Recommendations to save Twitter.

Problem 1: Brand Promise. The free ride will end.

A Brand Promise is the implicit set of expectations a brand builds up in the mind of its customers over time. And just like a real-world promise, the owner of the promise (and indeed the brand itself) is the person to whom the promise is made: the customer.

The promise of Twitter

Twitter users have come to value, and expect, a free, open online community accessible to all with 1) an Internet connection and 2) enough time to cultivate a Twitter brand of your own.

The problem with this is that of course, the party can’t go on like this forever. There are real world implications to the scale of Twitter’s success. Yup, I mean big crashes like this morning. But more to the point: money / revenue / filthy lucre / a basic business model. This is of course a no-brainer, because it’s a problem with all Social Media. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, and a thousand other online communities and services have built their huge audiences fast on the same implicit promise.

Try it, use it forever, and pay nothing – with no ads – all of these are very attractive hooks to get people in. But having set those expectations in customers’ minds, no one should be surprised if they feel betrayed if you suddenly try to “monetize” their “eyeballs”. Oh, they’ll understand. But this isn’t about rational thought; it’s about a broken promise.

I can hear the objection: “but we never said it would be free forever”. Doesn’t matter. Your actions led them to expect it would be free forever, which in their mind is the same thing.

A summer-friendly analogy

Imagine that one day I mow my neighbour’s lawn, then laugh off any payment he might offer by saying “that’s what neighbours do”. Don’t you think it would make him happy and strengthen our neighbourly bond? Probably. As long as he didn’t suspect my motives.

Which leads me to the following week, when I tell him “I’ve decided that the price of gas being what it is, you either have to pay me a dollar to do it again, or listen to a 5 minute pitch for my business.”

He’ll understand. He might even recognize that it’s a really good deal I’m offering. But do you think he’d be happy about it?

An example from my practice

We dealt with this issue last year while I was acting Vice President of Marketing at CoursePark.com – an online learning management network. We played around with a number of options, from totally free access (like Facebook or Twitter), to pay-per-use, or just a low-cost subscription. Our solution in the end: give users a free-forever option, but a) be very clear what the limits were, b) set clear prices on the commercial e-learning content we sold through our library, c) give them an expanded range of capabilities for free in exchange for sharing their content with the rest of CoursePark, and d) make it easy and transparent to allow them to upgrade to the “enterprise” version for larger programs / more support / more member controls.

The bottom line

Be careful what you promise (even implicitly); your customers will hold you too it.
If you’re building a business, people are cool with that – if they know your motives in advance.
If you have built expectations that you can’t sustain, don’t assume that you can change the rules at will. You will pay for it.

Of skateboards & stripping poles: thoughts on the Mitsubishi City Chase brand

Last Saturday, remedy my brother Brent and I ran and rode OC Transpo buses all over Ottawa. Along the way, we (over) acted in soap opera, skateboarded, played croquet, danced around stripper poles (no nudity involved – this year), and ate really, really gross stuff. Not a normal Saturday for us or the more than 900 other participants – but all part of the fun in the Ottawa edition of the Mitsubishi City Chase urban adventure series. Which got me thinking about brands. Surprised?

My brother Brent and I still looking fresh(ish) at the beginning of the day.

Modeled on the same idea as the “Amazing Race” reality TV show, the CityChase is positioned as a “One-day Urban Adventure Challenge”. “Chasers” (as we’re called) are given a clue sheet at the outset, then have to choose between 10 challenges or “Chasepoints” spread throughout the city. And challenges can range from whitewater paddling to rapelling down a building to eating bugs or other stuff with a high “ick” factor. Chasers can only use foot-power or public transit, and are allowed to use cellphones or smartphones with no limit on the amount of help you can get. This is the third year Brent and I have entered, and it’s a riot.

But since this is a blog about brand strategy, I’ll offer a few thoughts on CityChase branding and marketing.

Brand elements that work:

The name. “CityChase” is a great name. It’s descriptive enough to give you a strong sense of what it’s about (“Chasing” around a city), but the unusual term “chase” lends it enough character to a) force you to think about / explain / start a conversation about it, b) create a memorable impression, c) act as a strong, ownable trademark, d) create natural insider language (GO CHASERS!), and d) lends itself well to sponsor extensions – Mitsubishi here, Samsung and National Geographic overseas.

The logo: like the name, simple, strong. The arrow icon won’t win any design awards, but its placement on the right side of the wordmark, along with the small opening on the right create just enough distinctiveness to allow the organizers to use it as a repeated design element (as in the shirts above).

The sponsors: because it appeals to young, fit urban types 25-45 years old, and because the whole day is about combining fitness, fun, and technology, there are a huge range of opportunities to highlight sponsors in a way that doesn’t seem forced or unnatural. And do I fee better and more in tune with the Mitsubishi and BlackBerry brands after spending a day with them? Yeah. I do.

Local exposure: but even better, because the Chase sends us out into urban retail areas, small local brands are able to highlight themselves and draw new people in. Would I normally walk into a Strip Fitness studio? Not on your life. Will I tell my friends about it? You bet.

The promise: It has been summed up by organizers as “you can expect a day of adventure”. And indeed, that’s what we get year after year. For the more competetive, it’s about moving fast, mapping a route, and strategizing. For the average Chaser, it’s about getting out and pushing the boundaries – testing yourself in different ways.

Brand elements that need attention:

Web site & social media: For a brand that’s built for a high-tech savvy audience, the Web site is pretty clunky, and the Social Media efforts are getting better, but need to be better coordinated as part of the experience. For example, while there are 1100 members of the relatively active MCC Facebook fan site, on Twitter, @citychase has only 215 followers. Why? Because a) they don’t follow anyone back, b) they only use it as a “mesage blast” medium, not as a conversation among co-enthusiasts, and c) they don’t use the opportunity to live tweet or hold CityChase themed TweetUps between events.

Logistics: two years in a row, after waiting several days for the results online, my brother and I have had our ranking assigned to other people. Last year we were 11th, and this year 12th, so we’d love to send the link to friends and family (and further extend the brand!), but this looks like we didn’t finish. We’re coming back next year, but these kinds of problems make it difficult to be unqualified in our praise.

I need to be less clumsy: I think the annotated picture below says sit all.

News item from last year in Philly – does a good job of explaining the Chase.

A new brand for word geeks – it’s Wordnik.com

It’s very seldom I come across a new tool on the Web that jumps straight to the top of my bookmark lists, discount but it happened this morning. I got a tip from Charles Hodgson’s latest post on podicitonary.com on a funky new site called Wordnik.com that had my fast-twitch bookmarking reflexes firing almost instantly.

How does it DIFFER?

What’s so impressive, drug and how is it better than – or at least different from – any of the excellent reference tools out there? UrbanDictionary.com for example has become an indispensible reference for new slang and jargon. Don’t know what a “beauty booger” is? You’re in luck!

But in particular, how does wordnik compare to the granddaddy of them all: Dictionary.com? I have to admit that as a long-time word nerd (Scrabble, reading the OED for fun, the whole works) and professional brand namer, I’m a big fan of Dictionary.com. It has evolved over the past few years from providing a single set of standard dictionary definitions to providing a huge laundry list of definitions from a cross section different dictionaries, including specialized financial and medical searches, as well as etymology, suggested related searches, and cross references to encyclopedia and thesauri.

Oh and advertising. Loads and loads of advertising. Just scroll down through this definition of the word “brand” to see how exhaustive and exhausting this approach can become. So what could be missing? Well, the simplicity and focus of the early days for one. But more importantly, with this “stream of noise” approach, what gets lost is context – a sense of how the word works in the real world.

That’s where Wordnik comes in.

Screenshot of the wordnik results I got for the word "brand"

Check out this search on the word “brand” and compare it to the Dictionary.com approach. The first thing you’ll notice is the clean layout, with everything in clearly marked containers. You’ll also see that the first item is not the definition, but examples of the word in the context of an actual sentence. And quite often from unconventional sources like Twitter.

Wordnik claims to have a growing database of more than 130 million examples to go with its 1.7 million words. This actually gets closer to one intent of the first, and still one of the easiest to read dictionaries, Samuel Johnson’s 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language which promises: “a faithful record of the language people used”.

Check out the Wordnik approach to the phrase “beauty booger” – which doesn’t have a formal definition, and which sends Dictionary.com into a fishtail. But which Wordnik allows you to piece together from Twitter usage.

Or try Wordnik for the word fishtail. You’ll see that they also search Flickr tags, and a quick scan shows me that the term “fishtail” can refer to a kind of braided ponytail, something motorcycle-related, and the name of a peak in Nepal – none of which appear at Dictionary.com.

Where Wordnik needs work.

Okay, it ain’t perfect. That’s why they’ve stamped “Beta” all over it – or as they put it in their welcome e-mail “Because we are still in beta, there are almost certainly hiccups and other infelicities.” In particular, the dictionary definitions themselve quite often fall flat in capturing the whole range of senses for a word.

For example, when you search “branding” the only definition that comes up is “the act of stigmatizing” – which totally misses the sense of the term that I’ve built my business on. On the plus side, there is a bit of Wiki-ness to the Wordnik site, so even if I wasn’t able to add a definition myself, I was able to submit the following comment:

What’s missing here is the modern business sense of branding, which I define as “the process of organizing a company’s products, messages, and corporate identity to help consumers understand who they are and what they do.”

Will this help? Hard to say. It will depend on whether a real human on the other side sees it and does soemthing about it (which is going to be a lot harder when more than 23 people have looked up the word). I’d love to see an open wiki environment moderated by fellow wordgeeks, but that requires a critical mass of users to filter out the type of self-serving editing that I’d love to do on the “branding” entry.

A quick word on the name and logo

Very quick actually: great. Nicely understated on both. It will be interesting to see if the noun-weighted name ever becomes a verb like “Google” – as in ” Wait a moment while I Wordnik that”. Or to use the Twitter / Tweet model: “let me Wordneek that.” Or perhaps I overstretch my point (for the first time ever).

So to sum up: Wordnik is cool for word nerds, and very useful for us in our branding work. With some more tuning and opening the door to deeper user contributions, it could become a killer app for everyone else too.

No, Twitter brand: what are YOU doing?

Okay, dosage confession time. As an emerging Twitter devotee, page (@denvan) I’ve been “drinking the Kool-Aid” of the Twitter brand for too long to really be objective about their brand strategy. I’m a tribe member now, viagra 100mg and I’ve learned the buzzwords, tools, and idiosyncrasies of this social media monster. But as a brand strategy geek, I also hear rumblings of trouble in the Twitterverse that I can’t ignore…

As I encounter more and more fellow “tweeps” (a word about insider language later) and have the same old “what the heck is Twitter GOOD for” conversation, the more I begin to wonder about different aspects of the Twitter brand package – are the elements holding together? Do they make sense? Could this be why we learned yesterday that Twitter’s growth is flat-lining and more than 50% of Twitter accounts are dead? Perhaps.

But let’s start with the good stuff.

What I love about Twitter Branding:

Basically, the thing I like about Twitter is the thing that may kill it in the end: it’s rough around the edges.

Twitter gained my instant affection by making absolutely NO attempt to be slick or professional – in design, messaging, or corporate positioning. The graphics are simple and inviting in a cartoonish-but-zen-elegant way that gives the site class tempered with a sense of humour. Nothing arty farty-highbrow or in-your-face revolutionary here.

Scroll down to the bottom of any twitter.com page and click on About Us and you get the feeling that this thing started in somebody’s garage in 2006, and that they’re hoping to stay there. The main login page is a study in simplicity with only 183 characters in the main body copy (note to Twitter: I could help you get this down to 140. I’m getting REALLY good at that!).

“Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

Aw shucks. Ain’t that nice?

The whole brand package seems to promise new users a few key things: 1) small (i.e. unintimidating – easy to grasp), 2) fun (breezy tone, quick hits of cool content perhaps) 3) free (not going to take my credit card and sucker-punch me later with weirdo fees), 4) easy (get started – and hooked – fast), 5) social (geared toward social, not “serious” conversations)… and 6) disposable (geard toward a quick pay-off for a small amount of effort).

Which brings us to the potential dark side (spoiler alert: the light sabers are about to change colour!).

The potential problem(s) with Twitter Branding

The problem with sustaining this promise can be expressed in one word: Oprah. Okay, maybe two: Oprah and Ashton Kutcher. All right, three: Oprah, Ashton, and the coming of Summer patio season to the Northern Hemisphere (now THAT’s a social network!!). The first two are problems of scale, that is, reasons for rapid viral growth, while the third is one of the non-brand factors that should lead any sane person to want to get away from the computer or Blackberry (he writes at 5:01 p.m. on a gorgeous Friday evening).

The big question for the Twitter brand is this: can it scale to meet the hype?

In early 2009, Twitter went from cool-kid buzzword to mass market sensation with over 5 million additional new visitors in March – up from 4.3M in February to 9.3M in March. And the growth continued strong into April with the addition of the Great One (Oprah not Gretzky) and the 1 Millionth follower for Kutcher – with the attendant .

And the pressures are only increasing with big serious events like the election in Iran and the attacks in Mumbai, and the pundits trumpeting the game-changing nature of the medium.

And with all that hype, came… a great big collective “HUH?!?” from the new users attracted to the platform.

Because, you see, the Twitter brand is havign trouble emerging from the basement it dug for itself. Its initial brand promises are being met with the problems of massive growth:

Promises Twitter might be breaking

1. Small: sorry Twitter. MILLIONS of users. Repeat that. MILLIONS.

2. Fun: despite the breezy graphics and light tone, Twitter is not fun until you connect with at least one other active human. But for the average newbie, Twitter.com doesn’t do a very good job of helping you understand how to make that first connection (or whay
you’d want to)…

3. Free: for now, but with the weight of so much stuff comes the time cost that mid-market adopters are more likely to factor into the equation. Business users in particular are skeptical that this isn’t just another time-waster for employees, and Twitter doesn’t help itself – starting with the name “Twitter” which is incredibly catchy and viral, but also implies empty, and possibly annoying background chatter.

4. Easy: I like and compulsively use Twitter, but even I barely ever use Twitter.com. TweetDeck and other tools are absolute necessities for anyone serious about the medium. Twitter itself may be Open API-ing itself into obsolescence unless it starts taking the user experience – and more to the point – the IMPRESSION of control that a new user needs – more seriously.

5. Social: This and all the other examples on the site imply that Twitter is just for F2F (Friend-To-Friend) communications. Sample value messages are about delving into the trivial parts of people’s lives, which, as most people find pretty quickly, is not the main content that forms the bulk of Twitter traffic. I’m finding that the most successful Tweeters mix maybe 10-20% personal with maybe 60-70% subject matter expertise and useful cross references, and the rest being current events, trivia, etc. Twitter has outgrown “What are you doing” and has crossed into the realm of “Why are we doing what we’re doing?” and “What does it mean to me?”

6. Disposable: here’s the crux of it for me. By playing up “fun” “easy” and “social” aspects, Twitter’s current brand strategy is focused on “fast-twitch” brand drivers, and missing the most important aspect of the Twitter service: that it takes time, effort, and commitment to really get anything out of the medium. New users see the firehose coming at them, and it’s no surprise they’d be tempted to go elsewhere for a drink.

So how does Twitter tune its brand package to 1) help the newbies get it and get involved, 2) make the case about the serious work values the medium can fulfill, without 3) losing the core values and emotional ties that made the brand attractive in the first place?

Or is it all just a deeper level of brilliance than this poor brand geek can grasp – after all, they’ve got the millions of devoted (and not-so-devoted) users, so something must be working.

That’s a question I throw back to you dear reader. Comment away.

Your word of the day: Crowdsourcing

Maybe I’m a bit slow, more about but I just came across the term “crowdsourcing” – the process of solving business problems using social media (not to be confused with another term I recently picked up: “FLASHMOB” – the process of creating absurd but strangely compelling YouTube videos with your friends).

The image above is from my experiment with one of the early commercial applications of the concept. 99Designs.com allows businesses to design their logo / business card / Web site by posting a prize, a creative brief, and holding an online contest.

In this case, I’ve challenged designers to tackle a logo for the BEGtoDIFFER brand. The results are mixed, but while there are no obvious winners in the pack yet, the results are really creative and certainly better than a lot of professional designers I’ve worked with for a lot more money. But is it an ethical way to secure creative content? I have two minds about it: 1) the client mind: great! Bring it on, and 2) the agency / freelancer mind: whoa, that’s undercutting and devaluing the industry!

As if to underline the difficulty of the issue, one interesting sideline came up in the process that illustrates both the risks and some of the issues involved in this process. One entry, quite a strong one, which contained a sheep similar to the one in the graphic on this page, struck me as oddly familiar, and upon some reading, sure enough, it is very similar to the sheep icon used by a 1.5 Billion dollar British ad agency: http://www.bartleboglehegarty.com. That’s not to say there was any plagiarism involved – far from it. It’s just to say that the onus is still on the owner of the “marque” to ensure that the final product isn’t going to get you into any trouble.

As a further cross-current, I found to my surprise – that the “research” arm of BBH, called BBH Labs recently commissioned its own crowdsourced logo from another site called crowdspring.com. Well, can you imagine the indignation from the “serious” design community when a big firm offers *only* $1500 for a logo…

Some industry commentary:

Reflection from BBH Labs on their own blog:

So how about you? What do you think?

I’m looking for comments on both the ethics of crowdsourcing professional services and on the logo options I’ve got in the hopper right now.