How can existing distribution chain members stay connected and become master of their own destiny?

A week ago I had the honour to be invited as key note speaker at the Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam (OBA) for the Unbound Book summit. The theme was the future of (e)books and its’ distribution chain. A huge topic that incorporates radical changes. It endangers the ‘old thinkers’ and provides room for new players and new paradigms.

Keeping and protecting knowledge has always been the leading principle for book industry business models. Nonetheless, with emerging technologies and changing reading & studying behaviour knowledge has never been easier to access and acquire. Online booksellers (BOL.com, ebook.nl, Ebay) deliver at home and even package the present. In addition E-books provide easy reading of everything, everywhere at every time. Due to rising demand for e-books technology content can be ordered from bookstores in the cloud. Great! No hassle, little time consumption and competitive pricing. For the free riders amongst us we can even opt for Torrent downloads… why buy an old fashioned folio format from the bookstore in your nearby shopping outlet when an online version is available for little money which can be ordered online?

Obviously a pre-historic reading or studying book has irresistible charms and remains an excellent means to consume & enjoy content but something is changing out there… and it is unstoppable.

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Last week, the California- based fashion brand Volga Verdi announced “for the first time in history” to offer its customers discounts depending on the number of friends, followers or fans they have on popular social networks.The more online friends you have, the more discount you get.  For example if you have over 200 followers on Twitter, your discount is US$ 15,- .  “A one-of-a-kind-offer.” To get the discount, you must follow Volga Verdi on Twitter, tweet a pre-specified message about the brand, and then email Volga Verdi to confirm you have taken part.

While reading this, my first thought was to immediately put more effort in my online presence and collect as many followers on twitter, Facebook and Google+ as I could.  Because, if this would be the future and all companies would want to reward me for my large online network, I could buy my products much cheaper and maybe I could even earn money with it. I could become rich!

But on second thought, how credible would my message be to my virtual friends and followers if they find out I am not really interested in the brand, but instead it is all about money? And how much will that lower the value of my online network? What if this is NOT the future?

Social media will take a large role in futures’ marketing communication, but not as described above. The Californian brand presents its campaign as revolutionary, but in fact it is a normal (say classic) social media marketing campaign aiming at exposure using a classical incentive: Discount. Influencers post a message of somebody else because of discount, not because of being a fan or because it is relevant to their audience. This is not social business in which companies connect with the right and relevant influencers, listen to them and get them involved with the brand and the product; a relationship in which the company co-creates the message with the influencer to become relevant for him and his audiences.

Let’s see how this campaign could be more social business-like.

Starting with targeting the right influencers. In the campaign, anybody with a lot of friends or followers gets a large discount, even if they don’t care about what they wear or have no sense of fashion at all. Finding influencers that talk online about fashion, have a specific style and are respected for it is more valuable. So don’t let them come to you, talk to them in their social media comfort zone.

Second, setup the dialogue in which you can get to know them better and try to co-create the message and preferably also the product with them. Make your story his or hers and vice versa.

Third and last, offer more than only discount. Other motivations are more powerful.

Considering all this, I decided NOT to collect as many as possible friends and followers for my discount. I’d rather promote brands and products I really believe in.  I will be authentic and real in my message to my own audience.

Reference: http://www.volgaverdi.com/exchange.htm

When you’re studying social network analysis (SNA), like I do, one of the first things you might want to ask is ‘what is social about a network?’, and if so, why would you bother analyzing it? These are questions I’ve asked myself and will keep asking myself. The first is probably easier than the second, but should be answered first. If there is not much social about a network, or not much potential, the second question is obsolete.

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Remember those days when we still lived in caves? When we used to go out hunting or berry picking with our tight knit little community of cavemen. Those were the days. Did you ever wonder how many people these groups consisted of? We did. Why? Because we like to talk about communities. That’s why we looked in to the so called Dunbar Number, a number that predicts group sizes for primates named after Robin Dunbar, anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist. Dunbar was able to determine the maximum size of a group in which any individual can sustain stable relations with all other individuals in that group by looking at cognitive capacity. The bigger the brain, the bigger the group can be without becoming unstable. Read more and discuss… »

Recently two potential clients gave the exact same reason (or was it an excuse?) for delaying the start of a social business project: “We need to sort out our brand first.”

So was it a simple coincidence or not? In any case it got me thinking.

What makes organizations believe that they need to “sort out their brand” before engaging in a conversation with the outside world?
Having worked for over ten years in the traditional branding industry myself, I understand, and in fact respect their hesitance and the need to address the (potential) brand issues. Back then I also used to earn a living on preaching about consistency, produced endless brand bibles and insisted that the brand police abided by every single rule in the book. Structure, coherency and apply rules & regulations to everything you do – did I mention I am German by the way?

So I used to be old school. Very branding 1.0. and now?

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Earlier this month I presented on the interaction possibilities of the Ipad. It still ceases to amaze me how big an impact the tablet has on user experience and use. Bearing no startup time and fitted in a decent size, there is an abundance of possibilities. It’s no surprise unique stories of unforeseen Ipad uses are emerging everywhere. As it seems the Ipad is starting to replace the newspaper as the number one object to bring to the toilet. Nice to imagine what will next.

One of our taglines at Favela Fabric is “We help organizations harness their social capital”. Many definitions exist for social capital, so what do we harness exactly? One of the characteristics of social capital is that it refers to something intangible. Another could be that it refers to human (social) relationships. To me, we’re talking about the value of networks, in an dynamic environment where these relationships can change all the time.

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Decision making comes in many forms. One can easily see the difference between a decision that you make yourself, and a decision that must be made by a group. In the latter example, many people are not quite happy with the outcome, some even not at all, and only a few are getting the outcome that they wanted in the first place. Everyone can have an opinion on the issue, which can all vary on many factors. So what’s the best outcome?

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