This very public Twitter incident was a good reminder about the importance of social media guidelines. And it got us at sy-ENGAGE thinking…

Where’s the line between brand guidelines and social media guidelines? It’s a very important question for organizations today, for two reasons.

1. Personal brands are so strong. Everyone has a voice, and they don’t always know the implications of that voice/influence/power.

2. Brands are not set in concrete. This has always been true, but again, people have more of a voice than ever before and they have the tools (cameras, graphic design tools, communications channels like Facebook) to effectively create a brand.

It’s a tension between emergence and intention.

Branding says plan everything, be intentional about everything, be united about everything.

Emergence says be present, be scrappy, let the right patterns emerge at the right time and ensure you have the right structures in place to steer those patterns in the right direction. Have the solid intention but also know how to listen and follow.

Engagement (and service-dominant logic) also says people don’t own what they don’t create. Original works are interesting and valuable, but derivative works are often more interesting and arguably more valuable. Mashups or remixes, for example – are they piracy, or are they the best possible sign of brand loyalty.

For example, Camellia and Pooja’s variations on the sy-ENGAGE logo are not strictly “on brand” … is that a good or a bad thing?

So when we develop brand guidelines, there needs to be a seamless segue into social media guidelines. Because in the 21st century it’s not only the marketing department and the design company who create the brand. It’s everyone.

And it goes beyond the visual look and feel; it also includes:

• What photos we upload
• What words we use
• What stories we tell
• What behaviors we exhibit

It’s our entire culture, and culture is not prescribed from a document. The brand guidelines must be intentional but it must also come from an appreciative observation of reality. And it must address how we do what we do. It must be a living document, that lives, grows and learns with the company.

What examples have you seen of brand guidelines that help shape culture?

Kids and the internet – are they a good combination?

We think so!

Hello again, it’s been a while!

This morning on Breakfast on One, Marie introduced NZ to this viral video that’s been capturing hearts around the world.

Already being hailed as “Korea’s Susan Boyle”, Choi Sung Bong is a 22-year-old with an amazing story. Abandoned at age 3 at an orphanage, he escaped into homelessness at age 5, and spent the next 10 years surviving by selling gum and energy drinks.

This is a real tearjerker, even before the music begins. The video (just one version, there are several others) has attracted over 5 million views in just a week since it was uploaded. And the Facebook page set up for Sung-Bong has gathered over 30,000 likers already.

Why?

Every minute, 48 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube. Why do some videos get 5 million views, while others don’t?

It comes back to a larger question: why do some ideas take off, and others don’t?

It’s a question that a team of filmmakers took on in creating The Influencers, a 13-minute documentary that asks some of the world’s movers and shakers what it is that makes someone influential.

The filmmakers say they’re trying to find out “what makes a person influential without taking a statistical or metric approach.” However, they do refer to the classic adoption curve referenced in books like The Tipping Point and Crossing the Chasm. They even made a fantastically funky graphic about it (click to enlarge):

What’s not often told is that the adoption curve comes out of research into 1950s farmers adopting new kinds of seed.

While it has been a useful way to look at influence, it’s not the only way. Researcher Duncan Watts did some research into influence, and concluded (somewhat controversially) that what mattered most was not so much the influencer, but instead, the influenced.

More on this in Simon’s NZ Marketing Magazine column in the July-August issue. Stay tuned!

This morning on Breakfast on One, Marie gave a preview of the iPad 2, due for launch in New Zealand this Friday, and also gave us a look at the rise of online charitable giving.

First, the iPad 2 is billed as “thinner, lighter, faster” (I’d love to be all of those things!) than the iPad 1. In fact, it’s even thinner than the iPhone 4, and the word is, that makes a significant difference.

The big news is that it has not one, but two cameras, one on each side, so it enables videoconferencing, which was a big request from users after iPad 1 came out. And the camera’s not too bad, either, as our video of the week shows (see below).

Marie’s recommended iPad 2 apps:

• Flipboard: a magazine-like interface for your social networks.
• Dropbox: online file storage. One of the big problems with the iPad is that it’s not easy to move files onto it … Dropbox lets you do that through the internet. Super easy to use, too.
• Penultimate (clever name!): lets you use the iPad like a pen and paper, for writing notes or even sketching pictures. This is pretty exciting!
• The Apple family of products, like Garageband and iMovie, also have iPad versions, which is pretty cool.

As mentioned, the high definition camera is pretty good, judging by this music video shot entirely on two iPad 2′s:

On this morning’s Breakfast on One, Marie explained two buzzwords that have been circulating for a while: cloud computing and gamification.

Cloud computing has been around for a while, but many business owners still don’t know what it can do for them. The Christchurch earthquake brought this issue to the fore, where some businesses were unable to retrieve their paper records because they had no off-site backup.

Cloud computing simply means storing your files on the internet instead of storing them on your own computer. Over the past decade, many cloud options have arisen for normal business processes, such as Google Docs for documents, spreadsheets and presentations, and (New Zealand’s own) Xero for accounting.

It’s similar to the situation when electricity was first introduced. At first, you had to own and maintain your own generator. As time went by, specialist power companies arose, and all you had to do was subscribe to their service, and plug into the mains.

In the same way, cloud computing offers software as a service, rather than as a product you buy. One of the best guides we’ve found to cloud computing is from New Zealand’s own (in fact, Christchurch’s own) Ben Kepes, and his site diversity.net.nz.

Meanwhile, gamification is a relatively new buzzword (there’s even been a conference about it). It’s all about applying the lessons learnt from video games to areas like education, marketing and management.

There’s a lot to it, but in a nutshell, playing is our best way of learning. (We’ve discussed this before with our book review on The Little Red Ball). Volkswagen knows this, and dramatically demonstrated it in their “The Fun Theory” series of videos, including “piano stairs” as shown on Breakfast this morning:

We’ll post the link to Marie’s session once it’s on the TVNZ website.