Fans to Family: Opening the Door

One of the most important lessons I ever learned about brand loyalty I owe entirely to the 80s. But before we time warp back to a decade when Popples, Giggles and school photos with laser-light backgrounds reigned supreme, let’s first journey back a mere 12 hours.

Think back to last night. That whole comfy pants, lounging around unwinding from a long day, channeling surfing while surfing the web all at the same time (don’t deny...) scene. Do you remember any of the commercials you saw on television? Did any of them inspire you to care about a brand? Even if you can name a couple of the brands featured in the commercials, will you remember or care about them in a decade or two?

Probably not.

That wasn’t even twelve hours ago, but I’m willing to bet I can take you back 20-some years with the help of one video (and a brand) you’ve never forgotten.

But first, let me set the scene. Allow your mind wander back to the days when t-shirt clips, bubble necklaces, jelly shoes and Reebok pumps meant you were fashionable. A time when every kid wanted “Pillow People” on their bed, New Kids on the Block in their boombox, a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper in their desk - and we all envied the kid with the Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine.

Like most kids of my generation, my first inklings of brand loyalty were born in my living room.

It all began sitting on the floor in front of an episode of Mister Rogers. I was never one to just sit and watch TV, it was mostly just filler background noise while I did something more important - like drawing. So there I was, dipping my hand in and out of a plastic bucket full of colorful wax nubs in varying sizes (with the exception of white, which was mostly intact, because, let’s be honest, it was the most useless crayon ever invented - except during Halloween, aka: “black construction paper season.”) Life was good - and it was about to get even better.

Though there seems to be a bit of debate amongst Gen-X and Gen-Yers about exactly who took us there first (Was it Sesame Street? Mister Rogers?), you’d be hard-pressed to find one of us who doesn’t clearly recall the magical moment we were transported from the Crayola box to the Crayola factory.

A quick mining of the YouTube comments reveals that I am certainly not alone in this sentiment…

“This video is the reason I love crayons so much.” “I wanted to live in that factory when I was a kid.” “This is one of those Sesame Street moments that people dont forget.” “Entire generations nowadays don't know what this is actually about. And that's terrible.” “Amazing product placement for Crayola - turning an entire generation of 80s babies into Crayola loyalists!! “I used to look into my crayon after seeing this vid hoping it would magically show me how mine were made.”

Sure, there are some who might contest it was nothing more than one of the craftiest product placements to ever capture the minds, hearts and loyalties of young audiences. I, on the other hand, believe Crayola simply opened the kimono (and their doors) to welcome an entire generation of children to not only use their product, but also become part of the magic.

20-some years later, I still find myself drawn to brands that offer a glimpse behind-the-scenes. A few of my favorites...

Stonyfield Farms: Once upon a time, I didn’t know (or particularly care) where my yogurt came from. It was just something to get me through breakfast. Then along came Stonyfield Farms. A couple clicks into the series of videos featuring family farmers who provide milk for Stonyfield products, and suddenly I'm a yogurt passionista. I now not only know where my yogurt comes from, I know who it comes from. I know its story from farm to fridge. I have a vested interest in the success of their farmers, and every time I find myself standing in the dairy aisle reaching for Stonyfield, I feel like I’m making an investment in those families and their story – one spoonful at a time.

Jeni’s Ice Cream: As a former Columbus, Ohio resident, I’m certainly not impartial when it comes to ice cream. Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams (pardon the pun) takes the cake. And while the product itself is – as the name suggests – truly splendid, it was their honest, transparent, passionate approach that stole my heart. Jeni’s blog provides a glimpse behind the scenes of this Columbus staple, welcoming Jeni’s fans to the table to experience the food, friends and farms that come together to make Jeni’s so gosh darn splendid.

Burts Bees: I love just about everything about Burt’s Bees. Their products, their philosophy , their philanthropic spirit. As a result, I have a bit of a brand crush (my bathroom cabinet can testify.) I was particularly delighted to discover that they’re now featuring employee spotlights on YouTube. The videos offer a glimpse at into the lives, jobs and passions of people at all levels in the BB hive, giving fans a chance to meet the people who make the products – and company – exceptional.

Crayons taking shape in Pennsylvania. Lip balm from North Carolina. Ice Cream from Columbus. Yogurt from family farms around the country. What do they all really have in common?  They don’t just push their product, service or message into the world of their fans, they open the door and welcome their fans into their world.

We can all learn something here. And the lesson is very simple.

It's time to open the kimono. That begins by opening your door and inviting people in. It's time to turn your brand's fans into family.

Which brands would you add to the list? Who has opened their doors, invited you to experience how they do what they do, shared their magic, introduced you to their people or made you feel like family?

How to Be Awesome

It all began with broccoflower. But I’m jumping ahead. When Neil Pasricha picked up the phone and the voice on the other end of the phone informed him he had just won “The Best Blog in the World Award,” the first thing he thought was, “That sounds totally fake.”

Nonetheless, Neil’s blog, “1000 Awesome Things” had, in fact, won a Webby Award - and a short time later, Neil found himself author of an international bestseller.

In the wake of a failed relationship and the death of a dear friend, Neil began looking for a way to infuse his life with some positivity. Reflecting on the time period during which he launched the site, Neil says, "If you flipped open the newspaper it was filled with the same stuff every day. The polar ice caps were melting, there were pirates storming the seas, the economy was on the verge of collapse, and there were wars going on all over the world." Rather than allowing himself to wallow in the negativity, Neil began making a list.

A list of awesome. 1000 awesome things, to be exact.

The site is updated Monday through Friday, counting down awesome things from #1000 to #1. What was the awesome thing that started it all? Broccoflower. Or, as Neil describes it, “The bizarre misfit child from two of nature’s most hideous vegetables.”

The most recent post - #255 - is a tribute to “That guy who brings treats to work on Friday.”

Along the way, more than 30 million visitors have celebrated awesome things such as people who look like their pets. The smell of barbecue. Putting things in your shoe so you don’t forget them later. Car dancing. The sound of a golf ball falling into the cup. Dogs with jobs. When iPod shuffle setting reads your mind. Looking through the little window in the oven. Finally finding the start of this stupid roll of tape. Finding out what song is on that commercial. Finding good reading material in someone else’s bathroom. Watching your odometer click over a major milestone.

So here we are. It’s Monday. I am challenging myself to be a little bit more like Neil this week. I’m making a conscious choice to celebrate small joys - whether that means admiring the shape of a melon ball (versus the far inferior melon cube) appreciating puppy breath or stopping to whisper a few words of encouragement to the office basil plant.

I intend to make this an awesome week. And I hope you will, too.

What would you put on your awesome list?

The Power of Storytelling

A few weeks ago the name TMB (Thailand Military Bank) started popping up and onto my radar. I was perplexed. Thailand isn’t exactly in our neighborhood, after all. I found myself wondering what had inspired people on my side of the pond to talk about and care about a bank 9,000 miles away. So off I went to uncover the mystery. It wasn’t long before I stumbled upon a video posted by TMB on YouTube. A bank commercial that had inspired over a million views in just over a month? And it’s not even Super Bowl season? Hard to believe.

Only a few seconds into the video, it became abundantly clear that it wasn’t a bank commercial at all.

So what was it?

The power of storytelling.

“TMB (Thai Military Bank) has launched a new brand vision “Make THE Difference” by making a film to inspire people to start thinking differently with a hope that they will start to Make THE Difference to their own world. It doesn’t have to be big, but a little can create positive changes.”

Set in the tiny village of Koh Panyi, this five-minute mini-documentary is based on a true story. In 1986, a group of children in Koh Panyi decided they were sick of just watching soccer – and decided to build a soccer field of their own. One problem: Koh Panyi is a floating village built on stilts in the sea. It didn’t have an inch of spare soil – let alone enough space to build a soccer field.

But the children of Koh Panyi didn’t let that stop their dream. They just started thinking differently.

I’ll let the video tell the rest of the story…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jU4oA3kkAWU

Writer Robert McKee once said, “Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.”

We are all storytellers…and story collectors.

Whether you’re tweeting from a concert, chatting with a colleague over morning coffee or writing the next great American novel – your story is who you are.

So…what ideas are you going to put out into the world this week? This month? This year? This lifetime?

What is your story?

Where Do Good Ideas Come From?

Where do good ideas come from? For the last several years, Steven Johnson has been investigating that very question. Specifically, what are the spaces that have historically lead to unusual rates of creativity and innovation?

And what did Steven find?  People, of course.

Say farewell to the eureka theory, because it seems great ideas rarely arrive in a flash of great insight. Great ideas prefer to simmer, incubate and marinate.

Great ideas operate on their own time frame. Sometimes it takes a few weeks, other times a few months or, in some cases, a few decades.

And perhaps most interestingly of all, great ideas play well with others. In fact, more often than not, great ideas result from the collision of smaller hunches.

As it turns out, there’s a very real chance that the missing piece of your great idea is hanging out in someone else’s head - right at this very moment - just waiting to meet you. And that meeting is a catalyst with the power to propel your idea from “hunch” to “breakthrough.”

Before we dig any further into Steven’s research, let’s take a trip back to elementary school. One of the first rules we learned was “NO TALKING.” Violate the rule, get your name on the board. Press your luck, get a check mark after it. Three times? Well, we won’t even go there, you rebel.

Now I’m going to ask you to throw away that little schoolhouse nugget forever. Go ahead. I’ll wait. Toss it out. Feel better? You should, because you are now one step closer to greatness.

You see, our teachers had it all wrong. On the quest to foster great ideas, innovation and creativity, the #1 rule should have been: MORE TALKING!

And Steven Johnson’s research agrees.

“The great driver of scientific innovation and technological innovation has been the historic increase in connectivity and our ability to reach out and exchange ideas with other people - and to borrow other people’s hunches and combine them with our hunches, turning them into something new. That, more than anything else, has been the primary engine of creativity and innovation over the last 600 or 700 years.”

And herein lies the lesson for each of us. As marketers. As CEOs. As teachers. As parents. As leaders. As human beings. Great ideas and innovation happen when hunches (and passions ...and people) collide.

Talk to your customers and fans and staff and colleagues and neighbors. Listen to what they have to say. Build unlikely partnerships and teams. Rally together. Shake things up. Encourage and enable interaction and contribution. Invite everyone to the brainstorm and to the party. You never know when or where two hunches will meet and spark the next great thing.

So there you have it. Great ideas are born when we’re busy working, playing and sharing with other people.

Which now leaves us with only one question: What are you doing still sitting at your desk?

Step out of your office. Exit the cubicle. Take a stroll down to Starbucks with your coworkers. Add your voice to a conversation. Share your hunch with someone around you. Dare to chitchat.

You may just find greatness.

Originally posted on the Brains on Fire Blog

Is Your Human Showing?

"I was dumbstruck. There, in a few pages, I read a startlingly concise summary of everything I’d seen in twenty-one years as a reporter, editor, bureau chief, and columnist for my newspaper. The idea that business, at bottom, is fundamentally human. That natural, human conversation is the true language of commerce. That corporations work best when the people on the inside have the fullest contact possible with the people on the outside." | The Cluetrain Manifesto

Like most of us, I have friends who simply don’t understand social media. When the topic comes up, their default response is typically something along the lines of: “I love you, Amy, but I don’t need to know if you’re standing in line at Starbucks. And frankly, I don’t care what you had for breakfast.”

A recent study conducted at Elizabethtown College, however, suggests that may not be entirely true.

In order to examine the role of self-disclosure in perceived credibility, 120 students between the ages of 18 and 23 were split into three groups. Each group followed the tweeting of a supposed professor. One group saw only scholarly tweets, one group saw only social tweets and the last group saw a mix of the two. Each "professor" included the same number of tweets and hyperlinks. Students were asked to rate the credibility of the professor they followed based on the tweets they observed.

The highest ratings were given by students who saw only personal tweets. Mixing in scholarly tweets had no effect on the score.

So what does that mean for marketers? Is it time to start urging our clients to abandon all industry talk in order to start spilling the beans about the aftermath of one too many tequila shots last weekend? Not so much. But it is time to start encouraging them to be real.

Scary? Maybe. Necessary? Definitely.

Welcome to a brave new world. The days of talking at people are over. It’s time to start talking with people. In order to do that, we have to take down our walls, step out from behind the desk and podium and (in the wise words of an MTV series) “start getting real.”

It’s time to show our humanness.

Originally posted on the Brains on Fire Blog

Just a Love Machine

Today I’d like to talk about Todd.

A TODD Talk, if you will.

Meet Todd. We know his name because it isembroidered on a patch sewn to the unassuming beige jumpsuit he wears Monday through Friday. Todd drives a truck full of soda. Day in and day out he stops at various locations around the city, quietly letting himself in and out ofoffice buildings, schools, churches, malls and lobbies. After refilling theemptied racks inside glowing red machines, Todd returns to his truck and heads down the road to the next destination on his list.

Sounds kind of unremarkable, doesn’t it?

Here is what you may not know: Todd is a silent super hero. A secret agent of surprise and smiles. A wielder of happiness. Todd comes and goes - usually without being noticed - but what he leaves behind is felt and shared by many.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqT_dPApj9U?rel=0&hd=1]

When I first saw the video, a quote from the Brains on Fire Book immediately came to mind: Be famous for the people who love you and for the way you love them.

With just a few modifications (and a little help from Todd), Coca Cola turned a soda machine into a happiness machine. Not only did they transform the unremarkable act of buying a beverage into a love-love experience between the brand and their fans, they created an infectious love-love-share experience their fans wanted to celebrate together.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVap-ZxSDeE?rel=0&hd=1]

Take a little time to reflect today. When was the last time your brand really loved the people who love you? And more importantly, what kind of love will you be famous for?

Originally posted on the Brains on Fire Blog

The Art of Being Alone

Welcome to a world where the only places a person “checks in” are hotel lobbies and airports. A place where badges are earned by police detectives and boy scouts. The birds here are not angry, and they not only tweet, but chirp. When we have a conversation, we speak in as many characters as we like. When we like something, we say so by smiling. We still think poking is terribly rude. It began with a simple e-mail.

“Dear friends,

Hope this e-mail finds you well. This message is just to advise you that after some introspection, I have decided to begin a social media fast of undetermined length. I welcome you to call me at 614-555-5555 any time.”

Cheers!”

And just like that, a page was torn out of FaceBook, Flickr was flicked off and one little corner of the Twittersphere went black. The plug had been pulled on social media.

Left with no choice, I did the unthinkable - I picked up the phone and dialed. Once I had adequately chastised his hasty departure from the social media social scene, I pressed my friend for the details of his self-imposed hiatus.

The rationale was quite simple: He wanted to spend more time focusing on the real social connections in his life. He wanted to spend less time on Facebook and more time with faces and books.

My inner social media lover immediately began seeking a loophole in his logic. As someone who avidly uses Skype, Facebook and Twitter to keep in touch with family and friends, I think there is an argument to be made that social media can strengthen real social connections in our lives if we’re committed to using to do so, but is it ultimately at the detriment of those relationships in real time? Does it matter how many adoring Facebook message you’ve left on a friend’s wall if you’re distracted by text messages and tweets when you finally get the chance to sit down to dinner together?

Is social media becoming an insecurity blanket we carry with us everywhere we go?

Curious, I set forth on a mission to read up on other people’s motivations for going off the grid. What I discovered is that they missed the late night backyard conversations. They missed the simple pleasure of chatting over a glass of wine or a cup of coffee with a friend. They missed taking time out to slow down on a Sunday and meet up for brunch. Story after story, what I heard is that by chattering with everyone online, people felt like they were connecting with no one offline, including themselves.

Last weekend a woman pulled up beside me at stoplight. She immediately pulled out her iPhone and began typing. I don’t know if she was tweeting or texting or checking in at “stuck in traffic” on FourSquare, but it struck me as truly ridiculous. On a beautiful Sunday afternoon, was the thought of 60 seconds spent enjoying the solitude and quiet of her own good company really so daunting?

I stumbled across an awesome video this week called “How to Be Alone,” an art many of us have forgotten - and some of us have never learned. It’s a testament to the value of being present in our lives - with others and with ourselves.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7X7sZzSXYs?rel=0]

90% of Word of Mouth happens offline, because life happens offline. Get to know the people you love offline. Get to know yourself offline. Practice pulling the plug on your online life now and then in order to plug into the people, memories, conversations and moments that are your one and only real life.

My wish for you this weekend? A little alone time, a little offline time, more faces and books.

Originally posted on the Brains on Fire Blog

Just a Moment

http://vimeo.com/8189067 Last week I had the opportunity to attend TEDx Greenville. My first TEDx. Nine hours of mental, spiritual and creative invigoration. Truth be told, I’m still feeling a little “TEDded up.”

They warned us that might happen.

While each presenter inspired with their stories and passion, it was writer and teacher Max Strom whose message really gave me pause to think.

<strong>&ldquo;Upload a life of meaning, there is no app for happiness.&rdquo;</strong> | Max Strom

How, exactly, does one upload a life of meaning? I believe the answer is found in our moments, not our minutes.

But what, exactly, is a moment? How do you differentiate between a moment and a minute?

A minute is 60 seconds.

Moments are born when we make the choice to be present in our lives.

A minute is the ticking of a clock, a passive passing of time.

A moment is shuffling through mail to find a real letter hidden amongst a stack of bills. It's the blissfully broken hush between a ringing doorbell and the sound of loved ones bursting through the door. It's blowing out birthday candles and lifting the lid of a Christmas gift. It's taking the route through the sprinkler on a hot summer day - not around it. It's the splash of a penny-shaped wish in a fountain. It's a Monopoly, Scrabble, Uno victory. It's watching jellyfish dance in water and a plastic grocery bag dance on a breeze. It&rsquo;s losing, then finding, your keys. It&rsquo;s a phone call waking you in the middle of the night. It's when the song you were just thinking about comes on the radio. It's driving with the windows down on the first really great day of spring. It&rsquo;s a bouquet of yellow balloons in transit to a party. It's the smell of barbecue from a block away and bonfires after dark. It's the kid at the back of the school bus waving at traffic as it passes by. It's snowflakes at 2 a.m. falling so unexpectedly the weatherman didn't have time to spoil the surprise. It's a first dance and a 50th anniversary dance. It's a hummingbird there one minute, gone the next. It's "now you may kiss the bride." It's stepping off an airplane and into a hug. It's taking one really great deep breath. It's laughing until your sides hurt. It's crying until your heart no longer hurts. It&rsquo;s every opportunity life presents us with to do, feel, live, see, be.

Max Strom&rsquo;s words inspired me to reflect on the value of a moment - to think about what is truly lost when a moment is wasted, and what is gained when a moment is well spent.

<strong>What would happen if we all stopped worrying about time this week - and started caring about moments? What if we all made the choice to be present in our lives?</strong>

This week you have 10,080 opportunities to turn minutes into moments.

Happy Monday.

Originally posted on the Brains on Fire Blog