Social Business…..mmmmm

Talk talk talk…about Social Business

Restricting access to creative expression

If my theory that the less opportunities one has to express creativity in ones work and play is inversely proportional to ones need to consume ( in the modern sense of the word) is correct – then it seems entirely plausible that established power structures would try to limit the creative educational opportunities available to the young soon to be consumers ( such as art, music, dance etc) which could increase their ability to express themselves creatively and therefore diminish their need to consume and thus threaten the current consumerist led economic structure on which the aforementioned powers rely.

Viva La Revolucion Digital!

I recently chaired AdTech London and I got very excited about the great case studies that were presented over the 2 days. We had some very clever people and some very successful brands from the UK and abroad come and share their ideas about the future of digital and show some good old digital best practice. And it was great to see digital in practice. By necessity due to the amazing pace of change there is a lot of theory in Digital I find. What we need more of is practice in my opinion because without it we are fumbling about in a digital darkness. Less concept, more proof of concept, so to speak.

My post about Unconferences on Huff Tech

Top of the pops!

How I came to rekindle my love for the conference

I work in Digital. Nothing spectacular in that. In fact, nearly everyone you meet these days works in Digital (I am guessing it was the same in the 19^th century with the invention of the internal combustion engine where every second person you met was a mechanic of some sort!).  A side-effect of working in Digital is the number of conferences one has to (or should) attend in order to supposedly ‘keep up’ with what is happening. After all, if Digital does nothing else it does change rather quickly. And a side side-effect of going to all these conferences is conference burn-out – a term used to describe the ashen-faced ones like me who sit in the back and smart-phone their way through the presentations/panels and once in a while tweet a snidey remark about the panel/presenter (I take this opportunity to say sorry to them all – I was just bored!).

But then something happened in the middle of one of these conferences while I was buying a 10mm Red Power Ranger for my son on my Amazon app – a question suddenly popped into my head:

Were conferences always like this – so static, passive and lethargic? Is there not another way?

Why defining your company’s Digital Brand Experience Strategy is key to creating brand advocates online

We are hard wired by evolution to see structure in everything. We look for understanding and empathy everywhere: we see faces in clouds, in burnt toast, in rice pudding, we look for the friendly face in the crowd and we gravitate to empathic people. And thus when we are online we prefer companies whose websites show humanity, forgive our errors and have personality over the more generic ones. In short, we want our digital brand’s interfaces to mimic human to human interactions. Therefore it is key that your customers can see the face of your brand in your website interfaces and can hear its voice in the copy, and that that face and voice is on-brand (i.e. coherent with your offline brand if you have one) and one of meaning and purpose.

From recent work with our clients we know how crucial it is to understand what your current brand experience is (across all touch points) and why it is so important to build a cohesive strategy in order to compete in the digital economy.

Below I detail how and why you need to create a Digital Brand Experience Strategy.

First of all, what is the Digital Brand Experience?

The Digital Brand Experience is the feelings and thoughts generated by an interaction with a brand’s digital interfaces across multiple digital marketing channels and touch-points with the purpose of creating a lasting relationship between the company and the customer across the entire Customer Decision Journey.

Digital interfaces must be on-brand in order for a customer to have the correct experience (feelings and thoughts when interacting with the brand across digital touch-points) and then execute the correct actions. This experience must be unique to the brand and coherent across all channels and platforms.

Before a coherent digital brand experience can be achieved the ‘experience’ must be defined, and once defined then implemented through the design of the interactions which make up the interfaces.

Ad-Tech London

I am chairing Ad Tech London this Wednesday and Thursday (19,20 Sept)….mmmm….where’s that Best Man Joke book again?