Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

It seems like every company nowadays has taken use of a social media platform where they can connect with their customers. Even the local dentist around the corner from where I live has a Facebook page you can like! And it is fully understandable if you think about the opportunities related to this type of marketing; it’s minimal of costs involved (compared to traditional media), you can build and support your business’ image through the way you communicate, it’s an opportunity to create a dialogue with your customers compared to the traditional you-listen-to-me-now-monologue. Even if the dentist so far has only gotten 20 likes, it’s a start and for small businesses it’s important to be visible in order to generate new customers, and to even keep the old ones.

But if we look at the other end of the scale, the companies topping the Fortune Global 500; why should they bother with all this social media stuff when in reality the people they reach out to in this way is only a per mille of their whole customer base. Take McDonald’s for example, they have 64 million customers in their stores everyday, and when multiplied into customers per year… Well, with that secure flow of people buying their burgers why should they even care about their 10 million+ fans on Facebook?

And then we have Walmart; the ruler of the corporate world in terms of generated revenue, landing the top spot of the Fortune Global 500 for the second year in a row. When talking about such extraterrestrial numbers as Walmart’s revenue, can it therefore be that the resources they put into maintaining their social media channels in fact equals what they potentially will earn on the additional sales coming from their marketing efforts in these channels? When you think about it, they are already getting their (piece of the) pie in the areas where they’re in, so percentage-wise it can’t really be significant can it?

I read an article the other day and one of the comments left from one of the readers shared this point of view. The article was about Walmart’s Foursquare check-ins showing that they had a total of 149,000 check-ins in the Thanksgiving week and approximately 35,000 of those came from the US’ busiest shopping day the Black Friday. In the comment the guy stated that

“If every single one of the ~35,000 people who checked in at Walmart on Black Friday spent an extra $10 because of this check-in. (…) That would equate to an extra $350,000 of revenue for Walmart. For comparison, Walmart’s total annual sales number is over $400 BILLION. The impact of Foursquare would boost its sales by a whopping .0001%.”

I guess he has a point, and it almost seems like the big ones can even save money on cutting back on their social media involvement, so why shouldn’t they?

I would say a definite no, they should not. It’s not all about the money (yes, of course in the end it is, but bear with me) it’s also about securing the future sales. Having a platform where you can communicate, for better or for worse, is crucial. The communication will take place, you being a part of it or not. And no company would like to live through the scenario of BP’s Gulf of Mexico nightmare or the release of the two Domino’s Pizza workers’ Youtube video, not at any rate, but at least not without having a megaphone to use for damage control! So if you are my local dentist, McDonald’s, Walmart or anyone in between I see without a doubt more pros than cons for keeping that social media activity up.

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With Christmas just around the corner, it seems like the perfect time for eBay to experiment a little by opening up a pop-up store in London’s bustling & quirky Dean Street in Soho.

For 5 days in December, shoppers could purchase over 200 exclusive ‚Buy it Now’ items using their smartphones to scan attached QR codes, pay for them online and then get the items delivered straight to their door.

This really is an interesting experiment that aims to recreate and simulate the online retail process in an actual physical shopping experience. The concept is great in its novelty and serves to blur the line between on and offline retail, opening up exciting options of how the two could be integrated more seamlessly in the future.

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The Cultural Fuel Trend Report for November is now out. Have fun exploring the latest inspirations, trends and insights that caught our attention this past month!

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Let’s be honest, we’ve all known that feeling of being completely lost in a mall, at an airport, or any large retail space. The frantic search for the ‚You are here’ directory could however soon be a thing of the past, with the latest version of Google Maps (6.0) now heading indoors! Its ‚My Location’ feature, with detailed floor plans and the familiar ‚blue dot’ icon helps you see where you are, what floor you’re on for example, and where you might want to go indoors.

This video provides a great example of how this useful app could come to life during your next Ikea trip!

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This great video infographic highlights and summarizes some useful up to date social media facts & figures from 2011, covering various platforms, including Google+. Looks like there could be some pretty insightful stats at hand!

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Came across this fantastic experiental campaign by ASICS, highlighting their recent sponsorship of the ING New York City Marathon.

At a NYC subway station, a huge video screen (60 feet) wall installation challenged subway users to race against and outrun a video of the renowned American marathoner Ryan Hall, who has an outstanding 4:46 mile pace that he can hold for 26.2 miles!

It’s a great example of bringing the racing spirit to life beyond the actual marathon day and encouraging a high level of physical involvement and participation with the brand.

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eBay have taken a pretty big step into the social shopping scene with their iPad update that features a brand new app. It synchronizes up in actual time to any TV program in the US that may be currently running on screen and allows you to browse relevant eBay search results related to the show. This looks like a pretty neat app and could be huge push on impulse purchases, straight from the comfort of your couch!

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Interesting example of providing game dynamics in what is usually a “Gimme Number 3 without Anchovies” process:

Via Dustin Rideout

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Apparently, the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) is doing some PR for itself. The age of social media has led to a blurring of the lines between marketing and corporate communications. In fact, so many things brands need to do nowadays puts even creative agencies in the territory of PR or vice versa.

The change agent being social media empowered consumers, the effort to redefine PR is quite aptly also a social media crowd-sourced effort in which people can submit their definitions on the PRSA website. A new definition (last updated 1982) may be overdue, but even so, the NYT speculates it may also be an effort to disassociate the industry from the notorious PR Eff-ups of the last couple years:

Among the more notorious examples are BP’s mishandling of the aftermath of its accident in the Gulf of Mexico; Facebook’s hiring of a public relations agency to try generating articles that would criticize the privacy practices of its rival, Google; how ChapStick increased complaints about a new campaign, which asked consumers to “Be heard at facebook.com/ChapStick,” by repeatedly deleting negative comments about the ads from the Facebook page; and how Netflix lost hundreds of thousands of members with a plan, later rescinded, to divide into separate businesses.

Nevertheless, I wonder how an official redefinition can help. In the de facto world of the communication business, PR is no longer the top-down message manager of yesteryear. Just like ad agencies cannot be the top-down message creators of yesteryear any longer.

Making this fact official may help in giving the industry a bit of common purpose and feel-good. Something, that ad people have, frankly, been kind of struggling with for their profession as well. How fitting then that its the PR folks taking the lead on this, staying true to the old PR mantra: If you don’t like the conversation, change it.

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Just came across an article on the Washington Post’ Social Reader entitled “Why brainstorming doesn’t work”. I think most of us had the experience of failed or lackluster brainstorm sessions. In agency cultures, usually team-spirit and teamwork are often sought-for and proclaimed character traits that foster believe in a shared process of coming up with ideas. Territorial posturing aside, there are also some other issues at hand, that make brainstorming ineffective, as discovered by a recent study.

But according to a recently published study, the real problem may be that participants’ get stuck on each others’ ideas. Researchers asked undergraduate students to contribute ideas for improving Texas A&M, both individually and in collective groups. They shared the ideas on a computer, either in small chat groups or alone, but combined together after the fact. As expected, the “nominal” groups, or those made up of individual ideas that were later pulled together, outperformed the real chat groups, both with the number of ideas and the diversity of them.

The cause might be due to “cognitive fixation,” or the concept that, when exposed to group members’ ideas, people focused on those and blocked other types of ideas from taking hold. They experimented with this by manipulating the number of ideas participants saw in their chat windows, with some getting a few cues and others getting more. Their hypothesis was right: When exposed to many cues, the undergrads offered up less creative, diverse ideas. The numbers improved when the students were given a five-minute break during the exercise.

I am not sure the topic needed a study, because the insight is pretty common sense. However it reminds one to question the behavior to just pile a bunch of people in a room to create ideas.

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