Mobile is at the forefront of representing a completely new way of thinking about marketing.

But in order to understand this we need to look beyond the SMS and the text voting, and start exploring the real potential of the platform.

Since the Mobile Abilities Map pdf, published two weeks ago, has received a great deal of interest. I thought it would be a good resource to readers if I collected and published my inspiration and ideas to each topic. Hopefully getting some inspirational juice flowing.

- I’ve added links to each resource on slides where this was possible.

I hope people appreciate the presentation, and continue sharing great links on their own blogs (and link back here) or in the comments section on this blog.

There is a big difference between how the existing media business models work in the old landscape compared to how they will work in the new.

Blindly copying concept from platforms where content actually disappears removes us from the ability to create value in an updated reality where content is stored in the “long here”. Where it isn’t static, but grows, connects and augments.

If media is to take advantage of the opportunities in the Everyday Life marketing landscape we need to shred the idea of short term, Attention Web concepts like clicks, views or time.

Explanation of terms here..

As some of my readers know, I’ve tried the last week to digg up some hopefully interesting or inspiring thoughts on the challenges of the media industry. I believe in the industry, but I also believe it needs to break out of the limitations of their traditional mindset if they are to discover new and innovative opportunities. There is a lot of artificially constructed walls limiting their creativity when it comes to developing new ideas.

Understanding how the concept of time has changed, unlocks a few barriers:

1. There is no time. As I stated in my introduction. Content doesn’t disappear, it gets more valuable. We need to connect companies with this content, help it grown, and build mutual and extended value.

2. Time introduces an artificial constraint into the company / participant relationship that limits the participants opportunity to engage and connect with the companies brand values.

Now it’s artificial in the sense that it is not designed by the value proposition offered by the brand to the customer (summer, Easter or Christmas related products could have done that), but it’s limited by money. To be more correct, it’s limited by the cost of running messages in media.

Now in the Everyday Life marketing landscape the goal is to connect and share values with the participant. Constraints on time creates a problem, best articulated by Amanda Mooney back in January:

“If you’ve only budgeted 2 months to be available to our community, we’re only going to give you 2 seconds of our time … at best.” – Amanda Mooney

As I see it, if Media Companies are to have a role – or get value out of the Everyday Life Marketing potential they need to put aside this limitation, they need to develop products for companies and participants without the constraints of time attached. Not putting clicks or views or days as a business model – but shared value.

Our new digital abilities has opened up a whole new kind of marketing. I’ve previously called this both content marketing, situation marketing and even activity based advertising. But have after a rummage through my mac dictionary ended up with the slightly inexplanatory term Context marketing.

Context marketing is two directions of marketing: Collaboration and Utilities, and the convergence of them – which is where all the really juicy stuff happens :o)

I want to try to explain this by adding this slideshow, I find it incredibly difficult to not go into this mumbo jumbo kind of merry go round, so I kept it as short and precise as I could.

To sum it up in one sentence:

“it’s about earning ownership of the experience where your products are used and brands are shaped.”

Hopefully it it presents some valuable ideas, and inspire some new ones. Please let me know.

Digital is by some perceived as “marketing on sale”, maybe due to it’s lack of tangibility, “newness” or failing ability to show it’s potential as the common way of perceiving new stuff is through the lens of old stuff.

But online marketing seems to finally be outgrowing the display/message based advertising frame- and mindset. Starting to see an increased focus on deliberate, value adding services, accessibility and social interaction. In this context digital will and should become the most important interface between brands and participants and ergo the willingness to increase investment should hopefully be inevitable.

Digital marketing and advertising, and by that I mean EVERYTHING digital, should be your most expensive endeavor, and the reason is it’s abilities.

This is a short “Only in Digital” abilities list:

In the traditional brand and communication mindset brands have been thought that they are unwanted and intrusive, but this is not true. Brands and products create immense value in peoples lives, with digital they have been given the opportunity to add to this value through meaningful and deliberate action.

This is an invitation to start believing in your brand communications again…

A lot of intense activity the last couple of weeks, with presentations and alterations has produced a new updated edition of the presentation The New Brand Landscape.

A lot of old stuff for old readers, but hopefully I’ve managed to add some fresh stuff. For new readers who might not have seen the first edition this hopefully will present some valuable and inspiring thoughts.

The New Brand Landscape 2 tries to explain some of the most important changes in digital media, it’s effects and the new opportunities for marketers.

I wanted to try something different. Having “experimented” a bit with slideshare as a tool for communication and inspiration I thought I’d try something new.

In the context of “ideas in Mobile” I published a slideshow introducing this concept:

1. The browser is still the most important point of contact between a company and their participants.
2. But the browser is inaccessible in almost all situations where the brand is relevant.
3. The mobile on the other hand has become an integrated part of our everyday life. – Always at arms length, always on.

The only thing it lacks is ideas. Ideas treating mobile as something different, something unique, not just a smaller version of the internet.

The concept of the slideshow is that each slide carries a link back to a related post on my blog. So each slide becomes an idea. And the slideshow presents 20 ideas I’d hope could inspire and invite to new and interesting ideas.

I really haven’t got a clue how or if this will provide any value for anybody, but I hope it does. Anyhow, since it’s an experiment, if anyone has any feeback, it would be much appreciated, comment, tweet or email me. :o)

View it below, or on slideshare.net.

Companies and marketers should think of themselves and their content as igniters of conversations, not interrupters.

Discussing the findings in the Microsoft 3 screen Research these last couple of days, and reading the post “Give folk stuff to do together (again)” over on over at Mark Earls. It becomes interestingly obvious that marketing should think more about how to help people do or talk about stuff together. This gives me two thoughts:

1. If companies can ignite conversations and action, why do they continue to interrupt them? Is it because of a black & white perspective of advertising, that the only worth value it can create is encouraging a final “SALE”.



2. Making content shareable isn’t about getting people to forward an email with a URL in it. Sharing content is only the first part of the equation, real value is created when the content ignites conversations. According to Microsoft most discussions online are about content, so companies should help people find and share brilliant content that is worth talking about (I am starting to sound like Seth Godin four years ago :o).

In other words, go beyond shareability, create content to ignite conversations, not messages to interrupt existing ones.

Digital is not about technology, it’s about people and the situation their in. Finding brilliant solutions is all about studying these situations and discovering the contexts where companies can contribute, ad value, create meaning and become indispensable.

Steve Cunningham reminded me in a comment to one of my last posts that I was falling into my own trap (not his words, but mine :o) in regards to the fact that I was trying to limit Twitter to conversations, when in fact people should be allowed to use it any way they please.

This should be obvious to me, as I use my own Twitter account not for conversation, but as a feed from this blog and an inspirational desk drawer I update. But, in the heat of battle i obviously slipped up a bit…

So I wanted to take a step back and give a bigger view on my take on technology, people and situations.

First, the short history of developing technological solutions, a combination of thoughts from amongst others Jeffery Veen, Indi Young, Robert Hoekman, Mark Earls and Donald Norman:

- In the beginning of technology, we asked ourselves what can technology do? And then we built it, long lists of it, presented it to the customers and they found some of it interesting and useful, and a lot of it not.

- Then we started talking about users, these soulless mouse button clickers who have no ambition, motivation or context. We started asking people to envision what they thought they needed in constructed situations, the result being even longer lists of stuff that might be important to some people, but a lot of it not.

- So eventually we started thinking about situation, and a bigger picture outside of technology and “users”. We started saying that peoples anticipation, motivations and desires arise from the context they find themselves in. At the same time our/companies ability to ad value into this context is entirely dependent on our understanding of the situation as a whole and finding our role in it – and of course exploring new ways to make the situation even more valuable to the people and participants.

- Finally other people have been added to the equation, as an individual is the product of the ideas of their community, and can not be seen in isolation. They think and act as a result of their interactions with others.

So this is why I think saying it’s about people is a bit to narrow, it’s about context and culture, it’s about situation.

And this is why I’ve been trying to write some stuff on Situation Marketing. Where the goal is not to do stuff because technology can, or produce stuff because the people we ask say it would be a good idea. Our job is to study people in real situations, and be inspired by their every day life. It sounds a bit elitist, but I believe new ideas come from experts. People brilliant at articulating solutions within the context being studied, in this the role of people is to inspire the right thinking.

- Both Malcolm Gladwell at PopTech and Donald Norman in Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things point this out, saying that asking non-experts to articulate their understanding of an object or situation leaves them to become conservative and articulate solutions they later on will be unhappy with.

To sum it up:
It’s about situations. We need to explore these situations in order to identify which contexts companies can add value and where they can make a difference. And then, by understanding people and technology, choose the appropriate tool to achieve the goal.

And an extra thanks to Steve for the heads up :o)

We are as marketers and digital strategists to focused on the tools and arenas we want to be “on” rater than our job; to connect consumers and participants to the brand.

Marketing and brand building is not about being “on” anything. It’s about uniquely communicating our ideas to the customer in a situation where your brand is given the opportunity to mean something with the result of establishing a relationship with the participant.

We need to approach digital marketing value first. Not selecting platforms first, and then try to uncover value through a clever choice of strategy.

In order for us to understand the New Brand Landscape we HAVE TO deconstruct our linear models for distributing content, take one step back, and start understanding how and WHERE people connect to our brand, and then start putting the pieces together in the right order – if there is any order at all?

I attended a brilliant talk Thursday by Jess Greenwood, Deputy Editor at Contagious Magazine. The talk ran through a range of ideas and exemplified them with campaigns, many represented in Most Contagious 2008, and all exploring the new digital landscape. But after seeing all this, we are stuck with wondering how and why do I get there? How do I come up with these great ideas, and not limit myself to the regular receipt:

Old model: Campaign site + banners + Facebook + mobile + large amounts of expensive media = Great Success

as compared to the

New model: value + situation + incentive + existing landscape = arena
(although it’s not linear like this)

Understanding the New Mindset:

1. Brand building is about communicating a unique value with the goal of connecting to people, resulting in extended loyalty and preference.

Communicating value is THE purpose of a value driven company, not banners, display ads, Facebook or blogging. The tools are not the goal, the purpose is. And the purpose is: Value, communication, loyalty and preference.

2. People only care about brands in situations where they are relevant. If I’m baking a cake, I don’t care about Nike, but if I’m exercising, Nike is everything.

This gives that brands need to focus on identifying the situation in which they mean something – the situations are the only events where customers would give a damn, and they are the arenas where the competition between brands occur.

3. Identify your value in the situation where you are important, it’s still not about your product, it’s about identity. Whirpool figured out that no one would hang around talking about dishwashers for weeks on end, and created The American Family Podcast, where Whirpool talks about the Family – for the 264 episodes. Beat that!

4. Figure out how to become accessible. How do participants and customers get a hold of you when they care.

This is where many brands fail, choosing only to be accessible online, via the laptop’s browser, when the customer is at home, after putting his children to sleep. Brands need to shed the notion of having an appearance, and start thinking about accessibility.

5. Landscape. What your competitors are doing are just as important to you as your own activities.

First of all “you can’t out-amazon amazon”; unimaginatively trying to challenge a market leader at their own game has failed many. Secondly, as Dove has demonstrated when developing their Real Beauty campaign, a result of admitting that their old adverts where so similar to their competition that changing the product shot inside an ad with a competitors product, made the ad seem for them, rather than Dove. And thirdly, if everyone else is doing it already, it’s probably easier to win by creating a new idea. In the food world everyone wants to become an online distributor of receipts, but there seems to be little understanding that many food brands are not about food, (like Whirpool being about the family, not cleanliness or appliances)?

So the golden rule of the new marketing landscape would be, given that the uniqueness of communicating your values will be as important as the values themselves: Build your own game.

6. Small successes, it’s all about moving your competitor through the snakes and ladders game board, every step is a success. Make sure you build and measure for all the small steps, with your eye on the final price.

There seems to be a more “direct marketing” effect from social media than brand value and loyalty. According to Razorfish the engagement from social widgets and applications directly correlates with purchase behavior.

I would like to relate two strands to this:

1. Social media is a conversation, not a media channel. So old hat thinking where companies try to interrupt the reader won’t work. Creating valuable interactions with your participants requires that companies become a part of the conversation.

2. The web is a set of cooperative platforms, this means that you don’t have to see a solution on the same platform where you create engagement. You have to see how you can create a pattern, where the result of the interaction between platforms leads to the definite success.

With this in mind, the Razorfish “Social Media Measurement: Widgets and Applications” survey gives us some interesting facts:

“purchase behavior directly correlates to how deeply a consumer engages with a piece of social media *and* where they discover the media.”

I would say this, to some extent, proves that social media, widgets and applications are successful if implemented correctly. Not only for brand building and participation, but for direct marketing as well.