Over that time, I have learned a ton! From innovative product and service concepts, to how brands are engaging customers, the pace of change has been incredibly invigorating. In my practice, I have focused on Customer Experience and Innovation with a particular emphasis on the social web. I’ve tried to delve into not only social media tools, but how attitudes have changed within companies as they look at how their business fundamentally interacts with their customers.

I began my company with the goal of “bringing companies closer to customers.” And I like to think that I’ve been able to do that by understanding our clients’ objectives and constructing solutions that help them more effectively interact with their internal and external stakeholders.

But what do you do when you are given a fantastic opportunity to work with a terrifically talented and hard-working team at a great company? As hard as it is to leave what I am doing now, I feel the time is right for me to join the Corporate Development team at LoyaltyOne (AirMiles). This move makes perfect sense for me at this time; I don’t feel that I am leaving anything behind because I am taking all the skills and resources I’ve developed and applying them to a new set of challenges.

At this stage, I won’t be taking on additional clients or projects, but I will, of course, remain engaged in this industry and involved in all the pioneering groups that continue to move it forward. And, I promise to continue to learn and contribute with everyone who has made this medium the great, ongoing experiment in communication and interaction.

With more and more companies starting to realize that product and service innovation is the way to sustained success, model construction and analysis is certainly part of the product innovation process. With Brandsential’s understanding of customer needs and the product development process, clear actionable steps are put in place as part this process.

In a nutshell Web3.0 could simply mean “the Web knowing what I mean.” For instance if I say, “I want a 2-bedroom near the beach for $2500,” here’s what Google gives me:

Not bad, except I am nowhere near California or New York! The trick is knowing the “context;” where I am (“location”) and what I think is “near” (what I call “correctness”) and the “channel” (am I out on my mobile device?)

All this is difficult to say the least and startups like Primal Fusion, Siri and Twine are trying to solve the front end piece and slowly but surely web technologies and standards are being put in place to help structure the underlying data (or make relationships more relevant.)

For those brands that can understand the challenges and opportunities, there will be new leaders created in this next wave.

What Siri tries to do is make an interface that is as natural as talking with gestures that correspond to how you’d want to communicate not to suit the demands of a QWERTY interface or a desk-bound mouse. As Tom Gruber mentions the vision that Apple put forward in their video anticipated many of the technologies we are seeing today. It knows who is in your social network, it knows time (and the interconnection of events) and there was continuous speech recognition which is a bit different than voice commands. This is where the computer knows the context of what is being said and can “intuit” what is meant by the context, something that today’s systems still have trouble with.

But the big question which everyone wants to know remains: “Is the vision of Apple’s Knowledge Navigator here today?” Tom answers, “Unfortunately No. (But we’re getting there)” This highlights the promise (and reality) of Web 3.0 (or the Semantic Web, or Information Simplicity or…) It is really difficult to do all of these things that we take for granted in our daily lives interacting with other human beings. It takes children years to learn social cues, knowledge, basics on living in their environment and current systems are far from the complexity of the human brain.

But we do have some interfaces that point towards an easier way of interacting (besides the keyboard!)  The iPhone multi-touch interface is one approach. Voice-based applications are another, but as I’ve written about before, its not just voice which will be the silver bullet to all our interface problems. As with other problems, there are a multitude of different interfaces we use without thinking (voice, vision, touch etc.) that help us understand the world around us. We have for the past 20 years, confined ourselves to one or two of these because that was the simplest way that we could get information into the cloud and interact. Now we really need to put the multi-dimensional aspect back in to fully experience the richness of information.

(PS Siri looks really cool and I wish it were available now!)

“How To Achieve A Sustainable Social Media Ecosystem”

Here are the event details:

Companies are increasingly tapping into Social Media.  What differentiates the champions from the flash in the pan are two things: Sustainability and an Ecosystem approach.

In this talk, you will first hear about the 4 pillars of achieving a sustainable Social Media strategy:

• Thinking

• Planning

• Building

• Managing

We will then dive deeper into the best practices and case studies of 3 popular Social Media tools – Blog, Facebook and Twitter – and how such an ecosystem, when done right, helps steer a company’s connection with their customers.

Date: Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Time:    6:00 PM – 8:30 PM

Location: Sutton Place Hotel, 955 Bay St., (Royal Sutton Salon A)

To register click here:

]]> http://brandsential.com/2009/06/05/panel-discussion-how-to-acheive-a-sustainable-social-media-ecosystem/feed/ 0 http://brandsential.com/2009/03/27/mckinsey-analysis-of-sector-timing-in-recession/ http://brandsential.com/2009/03/27/mckinsey-analysis-of-sector-timing-in-recession/#comments Fri, 27 Mar 2009 20:15:56 +0000 admin http://brandsential.com/?p=107 McKinsey did an interesting analysis of which sectors either lead or lagged in both the decline and eventual recovery from a recession.

As you might imagine (especially with this current recession) the speed that companies declined going in was much faster than they experienced coming out during the recovery.

The report notes that history suggests some possible indicators of the beginning of a recovery. “In three of the four most recent recessions, higher consumer discretionary and IT spending led the way. When real EBITA growth resumes in these sectors, it may be a useful indication that the economy is turning around.” We will keep an eye on these sectors!

1. Need buy in from the top. There will likely not be the same level of participation from the top but with the right set of guidelines, executives can see that participation from company staff can actually help build customer engagement with the brand.
2. Need an internal culture to support it. Executives must understand that the conversation about their brand and products is taking place whether or not they participate. Lack of participation is not going to stop conversations from happening and may in fact lead to missed opportunities to shape the dialog.
3. Understand that it’s not the tools but the topics. It should be the substance of the conversation which should be the focus. Tools change, but customers have issues that need to be heard and there is a great opportunity to get previously unmet customer needs out of the dialog if you co-ordinate this data with other channels.
4. People don’t live and breath your products. Unless you are RIM or maybe APPLE you have to consider your products in the context of the customer’s lives; how they enable customers to meet (or exceed) their needs. The conversations should be real and not just marketing jargon. Customers can see beyond language that doesn’t relate to their experience.
5. Need to go beyond click-thrus and impressions to measure overall brand engagement. Executives must be prepared that it might not increase transactions in immediate short term but will allow a new dialog with customers. What does this mean? If someone engages with a brand on a social media site then recommends your product to others on their blog should you say your website failed? Of course not. It must be one component of the overall mix.
6. Measure measure measure. Based on your overall objectives and also the objectives of your other partners in the value chain you need to use metrics that have relevance to your business – metrics that executives understand.
7. Need to dedicate resources to this as an ongoing initiative. Just doing it for a short term won’t produce desired results over long term. There’s a need to understand and implement compatible compensation structure to reward success to make sure that this doesn’t go the way of other “buzz-word” tactics.
8. Consider it as part of current marketing mix. It should not be thought of as standing alone, or as a replacement to current initiatives (see excellent post by @tamera)
9. Understand current customer viewpoints on products and services. In order to start finding ways to engage customers, review existing customer needs insight and if necessary look at re-examining ways to get deep customer needs back into the organization.
10. Tweak and build feedback loop to continually improve the initiative.

And don’t fret if it doesn’t immediately take off. No matter what anyone says, nobody has this totally figured out yet…

There is a great article from Geoff Ramsey-CEO, Co-Founder of eMarketer on how it’s important to stay balanced during these difficult times. In it he mentions five key ways to keep on track and avoid seeing every article or news report as additional evidence that we are heading towards an inescapable catastrophe.

1. Understand Your Locus of Control
2. Tighten the Spigot
3. Focus on the Opportunities
4. Leverage Data to Construct Opportunistic Experiments
5. Invest in the Future

What is interesting is that these five ways pretty much mirror in sequence how people deal with other stressful situations in their lives. I believe we are still in the early part of this sequence as business owners and consumers try to make sense of all the statistics and negative news which bombards them every day.

But the critical element in this sequence is moving beyond the paralyzing fear which has gripped the markets and realizing that this will turn around and everyone out there has an opportunity to creatively reshape how we do business. I was at a great talk at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of business last night and the speaker Geoffrey Helt reiterated that we are in a transformation right now and as painful as this is at the moment (especially with everything else going on in the economy) will result in new models and ways of conducting business.

We can help to get past this by decreasing the flow of negative news (#2) and promoting the opportunities (#3) inherent in this shift. Turning down the volume allows you to refocus that energy and hear emergent trends in the marketplace.

Finally leveraging data and investing in the future gives you a starting point for investigating how to move ahead. Just remember to balance what is coming in with a grounded sense that standing still won’t work for long; the agile competitors are already looking at opportunities and trying things to carve out a path to new revenue sources and better customer experiences.

Andrew Long of Critical Pathfinders is introducing a workshop to do just that: its called “Leveraging the Power of Crisis” and will be led by noted author Gina Mollicone-Long. Gina notes,”

“People are constantly telling me that they are worried about 2009.  I’m here to tell them that more millionaires are created in times of recession than during high times.  The companies and leaders that stand out this year will be those who step up and change their mindset,” she adds.

This is crucial to keep in mind. As I have said before in numerous posts, there is a shift going on in the economy and those companies that can see beyond the current turmoil to identify trends and opportunities will be those that succeed!

You can get more information about the sessions here.

” anticipate the deepest and longest recession in the post-World War II era, but consumers do not expect the economy to sink into a 1930s-style depression…”

But in the face of unsettling jobs numbers, consumers are still unsure of the direction of the economy and are looking for direction that there is hope on the horizon. That hope may come in the form of a stimulus package, but we must still keep in mind that comparisons of these current conditions with the Great Depression will not help to spur confidence that government spending will help the situation.

In an analysis of Friday’s jobs report Globe reporter Barrie McKenna cites a University of Michigan professor that notes even though the job losses are large, they more accurately compare with the early 90s recession, not even the recession of the 80s. The reason says Mark Perry is that even though the raw numbers appear unprecedented, in the 1980s there were only about 93 million Americans working in the labor force versus approximately 154 million today. So on a percentage basis there is a distinct difference and a real danger of using raw numbers out of context for other purposes.

What all this comes down to is that as Professor Perry states:

“We’re talking ourselves into a more severe recession than this really is,” he said. “A lot of this is psychological, and that plays into consumer spending.”

But with the pace of job cuts accelerating, market watchers expect that next month’s jobs report will be even worse. One final thing to keep in mind is that these stats tend to be trailing indicators of how the economy was doing. That being said, any commentary on these upcoming numbers has to be framed judiciously so as not to choke off consumers and businesses willingness to spend.