Social Media Simplified

Brilliant. Courtesy via.

Information and Stories

"Audience show up for the information, but they stay for the stories"

This line which I came across here explains the simplest and only formula for attracting a following through communication. If you doubt that, just study a popular politician or spiritual guru or your favorite teacher.

This simple truth also applies to brands.

What is your licorice?

 A friend of mine is a big fan of Grateful Dead. I guess he is one of the Deadheads. I do not know much about music and even less about Grateful Dead. Therefore, I could not relate to his enthusiasm or his almost fanatical worship of this group.

I saw the above picture with that profound line in this lovely article about Grateful Dead. Everything fell into place.

That line and the philosophy that Grateful Dead embodied is a lesson for everyone and every organization. The lesson is simple. Know your core, know your licorice. No one can mess with you.

However, it seems from the mess we create for ourselves, we cannot follow this principle. The temptations are many. Therefore, in our attempt to be all things to all people, we wind up being nothing.

Agencies never fail to surprise me. They never stop from preaching to their clients that they should stand for something, a mission, an ideal. Yet when you question these very agencies what they stand for or what their core is, you will receive one of the vaguest answers that will make a politician proud. And like any politician, most agencies stand for only one thing. 

Conference Calls Part 2 - The Key Moment

The Key Moment from No-Domain on Vimeo.

(Courtesy)

This is based on a true conference call story on the weirdness of pitching and managing creative projects. Not as weird as conference calls themselves.

Conference Calls

Conference Calls from Justin Leibow on Vimeo.

The futility and stupidity of conference calls. This video makes the point brilliantly and subtly. Nothing good comes out of these 'con-calls'. Is it an ego-trip? It is definitely a masochistic trip for the participants. 

Social Media Guru

(Via. Courtesy Gavin Heaton)

Trust Onion to come with the best satire on social media. You cannot but agree with the dissection of social media gurus and agencies in this video as they are so true.

"Using your brains to think of an idea and your skills to implement it? That's the old model."

Another example: 

"Our firm was hired to expand SpeedStick deodorant's Twitter footprint. But they already had a Twitter feed -- and we of course had no original ideas. So we hired a separate company to create thousands of fake Twitter accounts designed only to follow SpeedStick. We were able to increase the number of accounts following SpeedStick from 300 to 900,000 in less than a week. And the best part is, all of these accounts were robots -- so we didn't have to tweet anything, because nobody was reading it."

The inevitable conclusion?

"Ideally, real human users will leave social networking altogether, and all that will be left will be thousands of robots, talking to each other, who we can then advertise to."

HA!

Viral Video

(via)

I cannot help but love stuff that takes a dig at things that marketers and agencies embrace with the passion of a zealot. The video above might be a spoof but I assure you it is not way off the mark. There are companies that help you get followers, likes, clicks and yes, even views. It is also a well-known fact that there are brands who use the services of these companies (abetted by agencies of dodgy reputation). When a marketer's performance matrix depends on the number of followers, clicks, likes and views acquired, what can you expect. 

In my opinion, there is only one viral that matters - 'has the product gone viral?'.