Corporate Culture

Albums - not just for the music.

I’ll say it: Effective participation in the social web is hard. Damn hard.

It requires strategic acumen more akin to leadership (valuing social capital and investing in the necessary competencies to build and leverage it) and execution skills more akin to in-person networking (add value to those you want to reach and do it all the time) than any kind of marketing and communications discipline.

It isn’t free. It isn’t fast. And the worst time to build your social web presence is at the beginning of a campaign, a crisis, or any other time when you want to broadcast and promote.

It’s exactly the same as this truism: The worst time to build a real-life network is when you want a job. Or a sale. Or anything at all. Social systems sniff out those who are out for themselves. They can detect them like a gas leak. And they’ll leave your house posthaste.

So how do you demonstrate the value of the social web in a culture with competing priorities?

continue

Like the artwork around its vats, the New Belgium brand is made up of many individual parts, while well considered and considerately crafted.

Craft beer on a Wednesday afternoon. One of the perks of working for yourself.

OK, so we didn’t drink beer. But a prospective client and I spent the better part of the day visiting the New Belgium brewery in Ft. Collins, Colorado yesterday. I’m recommending some branding initiatives for this prospective client, and New Belgium provides an excellent analog to what we’re after. (We’ll see where it goes.)

The New Belgium brand is special on many fronts. But one dynamic we saw first-hand stuck out above all the others.

continue

This video is a slide from social media and personal branding presentations I give.

It supports points I make about social media being new tools that require the same fundamental strategy and approach we all know how to do in traditional networking spheres. Namely (and simply):

continue

Ed Stein, EdSteinInk.com, reprinted with permission

If the current dialog about health care reform can teach us anything, it highlights the importance of figuring out our values.

We all know the importance of inside-out strategic planning (and brand development, for those who consider them separate). The enterprise values, vision, and mission (brand) should be a collective exercise. Involve as many people as possible. Hold retreats, perform exercises, play games, put the words of participants on giant sticky notes. Transform the more insightful quotes into pictures on the graphical strategy map. Include verbatims in the final deliverable. Stage-gate the process by communicating back to the larger enterprise during development.

And we’ve all seen the process devolve and the gears grind. Collaboration turns into open season across units: operations launch scuds at market verticals, marketing challenges revenue models. Anyone can write copy — wordsmith-ing hijacks strategy.

Then at some point getting the damn thing done trumps involvement. Can we just move on already? I’ve got work to do.

How to avoid this in strategy and brand development? It’s probably in the values.

continue

There are plenty of indicators that the traditional ad agency model is ripe for disruption. Are they relevant? Are their margins appropriate, and in service to their or their client’s needs? Are their efforts focused in the right places? Are their models flexible enough to adapt?

I come from the client side of this relationship. I’ve hired and managed agencies and have only run a small in-house shop. I won’t pretend to be an expert in their business, and can’t offer any fresh insights to what’s ahead for them.

I also have extremely valuable relationships with agencies and their talent. Mine is a creative background, and I see tremendous value in the contributions agency talent will continue to offer the world.

But clearly there’s a long-running virus in agencies that should be mitigated if they want to stay relevant. The virus has been around as long as I’ve been involved with them, and probably much longer. A virus you can’t find in any meaningful degree within other industries like law, consulting, or financial institutions.

The virus attacking their relevance is an open and blatant disdain for clients.  continue

It’s like a unknown, unmapped compound straight out the X Files. Newmont has built a community in the middle of Ghanaian nowhere for its western expat employees at Ahafo. A pristine suburbia with driveways, lawns, playgrounds, sidewalks, concrete curbs. Flower pots on porches.

And a community center in the middle of it. The gathering place for middle management to vent frustrations of Denver senior leadership, share stories of near mishaps, talk about home.

It was here, drinking beer and eating bar-b-queue, when a concept that’s been bouncing around in my head finally settled.

continue