Social Media and its effect on brands

Social networks have always been existing, naturally also before the digital era. They were shaped by our friends, families, neighbours, sports clubs and so on. Word of mouth, the recommendation by a member of our social networks, has as well been existing, and was always the most respected and trusted way of communication. So what has changed, then?

The first thing which changed was technology. The paradigm shift we are experiencing right now is enabled by technology. But the dynamics and the dimension the shift reached is cultural. This is how it goes:

Our social networks have started to be digitalized recently, and the process gets faster and deeper every day with an ever growing amount and speed. I am talking about the large number of social platforms and the trend to get everything, anytime. Real time.

The digitalization of our social networks has turned them into a media. Or to be precise: They have always been a media. One to one. But now they are the new mass media. Many to many. From now on everything has to be true and real. That’s why the shift is a great thing for humanity. It’s hard for brands. But they will learn and evolve. Some on the hard way. Game over, old mass media.

In a nutshell:

The digitalization of our social networks has transformed them in the most powerful mass media. The other thing to remember: Everything is a media. Everything communicates. In this context I can also recommend some classics from Marshall McLuhan, although its heavy stuff.

Social Media is Boring

Houston, we have a problem! It turns out that social media is great use for brands as e.g. customer service / interaction platform or corporate communications channel. Makes sense. But as we at the same time are preaching the end of advertising and the raise of social media, where did the creativity go? Of course I love the transparency and the communicative features social media offers, but I would not like to sacrifice the fun part for it. So here is a proposal: Let’s just stop creating blogs and facebook pages and twitter accounts and youtube channels for our advertising campaigns and reserve them for long term communication. Let’s don’t sacrifice that what once was advertising for it. Sounds clear. And still - useless pages and boring profiles are popping up daily like mushrooms, overloading social media services to an extent which makes them unpleasant to use. Just happened recently to facebook.

So I have to correct my headline: Social Media is not boring. It just gets boring like hell if we try to use it wrongly to extend our advertising campaigns. Just happened to me the one or other time recently. So I promise not to do it anymore ;)

World is changing – Search for great ideas isn’t

Most of the work I am doing nowadays is resulting at the one or other point in a digital solution. However, there is always a lot of thinking involved before a solution comes to life. Communication must be based on a great and relevant insight, a bigger picture framework - let’s call it strategy - and a great idea. All that sounds very easy, but it isn’t. It is actually really hard. Digital media has given us more freedom and allows us more open minded thinking. But it should never lead us in the plain use of techniques. The real killer app for the future of marketing and communications is INSIGHT plus STRATEGY plus IDEA plus DIGITAL. Something we still have to learn.

Come on, let’s play

When you are creating, you are vulnerable. To others comments, to failure, to having the right idea at the wrong time or the wrong place or the other way round. And sometimes the audience is just not ready for an idea, or the idea is plain shit. Anyhow. You will do foolish things. Important is only that you do them, and that you do them with enthusiasm and pride. There has never been created anything new out of hesitation. That’s why I respect people who have been failing. Because next time it will go right. 

Come on, let’s play!

Twestival Helsinki – A Review and a Manifesto

As you can see, my last blog post is already a month old – in blogging time this means a century. It is not that I have been giving up on blogging, I was just extremely busy with an endless flow of incoming projects. And as this would have not been enough, the last four weeks were also the time we got to organize twestival Helsinki.

So, this blog post will be about twestival Helsinki. Was it a success? Yes, definitely, and I will explain why. It is a story about social media in the true sense of its meaning, about good people and about a totally new way of raising awareness and funds for a good cause. It is a story of earned media and the ’plant’ twestival which will grow in time.

Let’s have the hard facts first. Twestival Helsinki and the cause chosen by the public got great awareness and PR. In first place on social media platforms and blogs, but also in traditional media like newspapers, magazines and radio. Further we had some great ad spaces like this 57 outdoor screens promoting the idea of twestival Helsinki and a cleaner Baltic Sea. In addition to that there were lots of flyers and posters. All this is particular remarkable as the overall twestival Helsinki budget was 0 euros. All what we got and achieved was due to great people with passion and a good heart.

We also raised some good money, although we do not know the precise amount yet. We had four different income sources: The donations made in the evening of twestival Helsinki itself, the money people donated straight to the account of our cause, 10 % of the turnover of the venue Nude and last but not least the contribution the Nokia N86 tour will make to our cause. Once again, 100% of the money goes to the Clean Baltic Sea – John Nurminen Foundation.

Coming to a more personal level, I had so many great discussions with people that I got seriously enriched and inspired. One hour of good discussion with Reino Nordin, who played a fantastic acoustic gig in the evening, ensured me to be even more active on an environmental and societal level. As we could read in today’s Hesari, young people are interested in the world, but don’t want to change it anymore. Where does that come from? Young people have always been a guarantee for challenging the status quo. Social media and networks give back power to people, and we are just in the beginning. How about demonstrations in social media channels? If people don’t want to go to demonstrate on streets anymore, they could make an impact via social media. Will work further on the thought. I have seen many people having great discussions during twestival Helsinki, and it was also a pleasure to see how the local twitter scene met IRL = In Real Life. Apart from that folks enjoyed themselves and had fun. People were dancing to the beats of DJ Jacques.

Other discussions were circling mainly around social media, what it has brought to us and what happens next. Rupert Howe, a video blogger from London touring the twestival world for Nokia put it in a great and enthusiastic discussion I had with him and Phil Campbell this way: ’We are living in the future’. This is true for many reasons. I find this piece of video promoting Charles Leadbeaters’ book ’We think’ a good indication for development in the future. We are talking about social wealth vs personal wealth or the concept of owning vs sharing. A true revolution.

Finally, I have one wish for the further development of twestival Helsinki: Take over the project and organize twestival next time. It will be a twestival global again, the date is set for 4th February 2010. Take over the twitter account, the website, the facebook group, the visual identity and the good spirit and make it bigger. There will be more active twitter users in Finland next time, and I would love to see this project grow over all boundaries, hierarchies and companies. Twestival is crowd-sourcing, twestival is social good.

Thanks for everything.

p.s./ 

Special thanks to Henna, Susanna, Mia, Erol, Teemu, Jukka, Delfin, Reino, Tuija, Jakob & Janine. You were building the bird’s nest and left your remarkable piece.

Twestival Helsinki

After finding out that no twestival local (read here if you have no idea whatsoever I am talking about) was yet to be organized in whole Finland I decided to change that and took the role of twestival Helsinki’s main organizer. As the twitter community in Finland is rather small and the timeframe to organize the festival is short I have a small but classy twestival in mind, and let myself surprise by anything more than that. The twestival is organized with crowdsourcing methods where everyone leaves a small part to contribute to one big goal: Raise funds for a good cause. A good start is the logo created by Designer Teemu Kurko, thanks for that, we love it!

If you want to help out, contact me, follow the twitter feed @twestivalHEL, join the twestival Helsinki facebook group, or visit the twestival local website. So far there is a great active team of 5 people working on the event, and the more it will be the better it gets.

More information follows later, but for now, tweet for good!

Twestival local

Twestival local (more info here) takes place from 10th to 13th September in more than 200 cities globally. If you want to take part or want to put your city on the twestival map, contact the organisers.  I am currently checking what will happen in Helsinki, would be sad not to take part.

http://twestival.com/get-involved/

Give a damn!

Hmm, a great summer holiday has come to an end and I want to share a couple of thoughts which came up while traveling the last weeks, related to the topics of marketing and creativity. After every travel, some things are sticking to one’s mind more than others, as they were more special. Let it be great nature, a restaurant, a sunrise, special service or a nice store.

Great things impress us for a certain reason: They are less compromising then others, they are simply outstanding. 

Our goal in marketing, creativity and communications must be the same: Strong, sharp and uncompromising ideas and concepts, polished to perfection with undeniable logic and irresistible emotion, executed with love and great care. 

We need Marketing professionals valuing the art and craft, investing time and money in the right projects – and we need to bring up these projects. So, let’s do just that until next summer, and let’s see where we end up.

Nothing great comes easy!

School’s out for summer

Dear all, 

as summer is approaching I will be on a (totally deserved) holiday in US and Canada from 17th June until 26th July. There won't be any blog entries in this time, after a long, hard and rewarding year of work I will mostly disconnect from the digital world during summer. So nothing happening on my two twitter-streams @tobiaswacker and @PalmerstonHEL or any other social media profile. The best way to connect with me in this time is via sms, as I won't read e-mail. I will relax, get new impressions, think, enjoy and explore to be back with great spirit. Until then.

Have a great summer. Life is now! 

New York Internet Week

New York Internet week is coming up, a week-long festival to promote NYC’s internet industry. Lot’s of interesting events, see the schedule from here.

And the winner is…

…according to Alex Bogusky’s tweets…

… brammo.com, a company producing electric motorcyles. So, they won the CP+B intern summer auction, and get three month of blood and sweat from people fighting hard to start a great career. Nice client and a good deal, I would say – the final sum was 17.655 $ (12.700 €).

7857 € and it’s yours – but you have to be quick

Let’s say, you have just about 7857 € (10.099 $) and let’s say, you need three month strategy- and campaign work from the best ad agency in the whole wild world… no prob. Follow this link, the e-bay auction is still open 23 hrs. If you make the bidding, no minor agency than CP+B itself will work for you. (ok, you have to trust their interns – but I guess they don't allow them to fail over there). Anyone?