I see different reasons for that.
1. If you work in digital, you know that in the kitchen, we have defined UX by benchmarked the category and start off a structure that would make sense.
2. Most of the CMS used by the clients are the same for similar sizes businesses.
3. Digital agencies are not always literate around branding and always assume the brand is the logo, the story… but not always an experience.

Example: premium beauty category UK

The result is a tons of .com websites that are completely off-brand, generic and not exciting. Corporate websites became a commodity, and I’m very tempted to say the same is true in social media.

The corporate website is transactional and involves very little benefits for the end user.

Good news is we have lots of work ahead! We can change all that and reinvent the way websites are built by focusing on that unique zone of shared interests between brands and people.

Workshop:
The best way to tackle your website revamp is probably to ask the digital team to meet with the team who designed the offline retail environment and appreciate what is that brand experience built offline is about. And then engineer the website on the same guidelines.

Looking at the underdog also helps because they go with open framework and are much more nimble technology wise, which usually allow them to challenge the conventions and focus on who they are – as a company – and transfer this online.

Facebook made it visible for all, we know want to hangout with our peeps all the time because it’s much more fun.

In that regard, I believe what makes a brand like Nike so successful with Nike plus goes beyond the utility and gaming aspect of it – those discussed by Ajaz Ahmed and Stefan Olander in Velocity.

It comes from the magic link.

The brand becomes the bridge between offline communities that are formed around an interest (whatever location and demographics are). It gives those people a tool to track this interest and to share their experiences among more people like them. It’s very rewarding for them as they become part of a family of people like them.

It’s not about a branded experience anymore but more on delivering branded interactions. No other brand than Nike could provide people that particular interactions, in fact others are trying  hard to catch up with an idea launched like… 5 years before them?

This magic interaction, or link, is converting offline to digital. It’s a branded interaction. It helps stories to be formed and shared, it’s awesome. It never fades out, it can only improve and grow because the more people join the richer the experience is.

Technology makes something impossible in the past possible, it fascinates people. It’s better than unicorns. At anytime there is someone ready to share running stories with me – it allows me to always be connected to what I love and care for.

Take-aways:
What are the offline interests people share around your brand? Which one can you help people to connect around through technology (API, apps or device)?

“While the internet facilitates communication, it doesn’t obliterate that human need to be around other humans. That’s why I think cities consistently become magnets for talent and capital. It’s cities that create great countries.” - David McWilliams (full article here on Google Think Quarterly)

I think that actually that internet is a perfect tool to convert those magnetic places into online communities. The idea is to build on pre-existing offline networks. Remember that the web is just a mirror of the offline world.

Having this idea on mind for a few weeks now, I realized that this is probably what actually Nike+ did. This was probably the magic of it. The chip is actually the layer that has translated an offline network of runners into a digital community of runners. It became the connector that breaks the distinction between online and offline getting everybody together around the activity – the interest: running.

Take-away:

What is the layer your brand can set up to connect and convert your offline networks into online ones? That sounds like a very exciting idea to me!

All the live tweets are accessible here:

Dr Aleks Krotoski PhD

Love when she said “there is very little new about the web”. It is impacting how we preserve and acquire knowledge. It makes things visible; it’s a mirror, a reflection of our desires, wants, needs and fears.

She questions the role of power on knowledge and how we do not really question who is controlling the knowledge and its access in the digital context. The people in Silicon Valley are building tools like Google that help us access knowledge, but who are those people?

Follow her here

We don’t get how power works in the digital world. 

The ability to solve problems is what makes Google so powerful. It provides information in the way you (the user) think. It’s also a collective intelligence. We appreciate more of what it means than what it does.

She suggested cleaning up the messiness of us, because we are in charge of our digital future.

Nick Harkaway.

 I like the idea that the Internet is changing the hierarch of our we disseminate information. In the past people would get news from one place and today we are questioning this authority and we are looking at news from multiple streams of information. The authority of news has changed.

Another nice take-away was to remind us that paper is actually a great technology. Ant today, there is no media that will kill another one, each technology has its own advantages and we let them hangout together.

We end up living in a hybrid mode/world.

Read his book here

Ben Hammersley.

It was a great talk, the thing I would like to share is a something that seems to be quite popular these days. People are questioning their relationship to digital, what does the internet do to our inner life.

We are reassessing what the facebook and other internet tools are doing to our lives. The value it has versus the value we would like it to have.

Brilliant look at our digital time spent that never seems to diminish. I’m quite sure that this is changing, and the notion of digital Shabbat will just keep growing in the next months.

Some of the key ideas I found really interesting for brands to understand if they want to better connect with people through digital:

Circulation versus distribution
Circulation is grass root and communities are at the heart of how media is spread (he took the example of the Pepper Spray Cop). Circulation is also shaped today by unauthorized networks and piracy that create value by not being autuhorized. It’s the same for publishers, you have official sources of information versus the non publishers.

Spreading is an activity

It’s a mix of stickiness and it is an act of circulation. The choices we made of circulating or not are informed. He took the example of Kony 2012. They have been producing media and gathering communities for ages. Data from that campaign shown that mid-cities would spread the traffic much more than the traditional big American cities.

The center of influences were actually based on the network of churches and schools.

They were based out of OFFLINE NETWORKS. Which is something I come across quite often these days.

Regarding the terms used in the social mentions for Kony 2012, there are mostly LOVE and LIFE. Each group that takes the news actually builds a frame and a context around the media. People who are circulating things like that are doing it instead of doing political activities. These people are moving towards new versions of civils acts.

More than HALF OF US are part of active acts of circulation.

Sharing is CARING.

The free digital edition leads to offline purchases, it opens new revenue streams. It is an economic disruption, but it is an economic system people prefers, so the existing system must adapt. People now have a seat at this table.

FREE CONTENT also means FREE LABOR
What we realize is that people are happy to do those things for free. It is a fundamental change in circulation that is based on a culture of gifting from people to people. The economic system and remuneration of work is evolving.

The value system is no more the only system. I send you a video of Susan Boyle to cheer you up, because I care.

Circulation is an emotional connection – for those in this system, content is a currency relevant to them – more than money. It creates a warm feeling between each other and justifies the act of sharing and circulating.

The message and the interpretation of it will depend on each community.

Sharing is a creative decision.

That collectively sharing shapes the media collective. Circulating information is being and active part of the community.

We ended the session on this great idea that we should create drillable media content so every community can frame and appropriate a part of it a their currency. This is where I got all existing linking this back to all the #transmedia research that I’m working on. It’s also really interesting to see that the last presentation I shared about targeting communities not individuals was certainly a growing trend for brands to communicate in the digital space.

He is quite an incredible character on his own, witty and charismatic, I’m glad I saw him on a stage.

Here are some of the thoughts he shared with us: “the team needs to be led”, pulling people together around common purpose, they need to be united.

• What’s the problem?
• What’s the course of action?
• What do you do if it goes wrong?
• What do you must do? 

Analysis is persuasiveness.
The analysis of the situation is critical to lead to a correct strategy.

In a military context, failure is not an option.“Be the best” doesn’t exist in the army as it does in marketing.

You need to go from A to B and to achieve so you have three elements in your hands:

• ENDS: what is the purpose, the objective.
• MEANS: what you have to do it. Time, Money, Arms… all these are your means.
• ART: the art of leadership and communication. From one brain to another brain, the information needs to move as clearly as possible,  everybody should know what they have to do and feel an ownership for their part of the job.

When defining your strategy, map all the different courses of actions with the pros and cons. Make decisions. Debate when a decision is made is a waste of time.

“I wanted to check my own thinking”
When you’re stuck, ask others some questions to help you refine your analysis and strategy.

Which brings me to another point regarding strategy inspired by the talk Gen Sir Mike Jackson gave at the Worlds Collide event.

It’s fascinating how strategy in advertising is about building A plan. THE PLAN, only 1! 1 Strategy, 1 year.

I suspect this is coming grom the old days of advertising where the plan was linked to huge media investments and TV production that took ages to go into the market and etc.

But, this is not relevant anymore.

We should get better at proposing a plan B and start writing a plan C as soon as B is in progress. We should write strategies where this go right and strategies where things go wrong.

Those plans should not be vague options but instead they should result in a realistic set of actions that is easy to implement if plan A becomes obsolete.

Building up this adaptability in your advertising (in your company) means that you need to track the market closer, outside of the sales indicators, to actually react to the market much faster. Hence, the crucial role data capture and analysis will play in the future.

This means to me that companies, and investors, should embrace the idea of always being in a beta version of something. Just like facebook, Google, Apple… They aren’t stuck into something, they do things, they react, which help them generate lots of conversations as well.

This is not possible to work with one PLAN as it used to be. However, building a company capable of embracing velocity is certainly the best thing for markets to invest on.

Each of the four guest shared an enriching and fresh perspective about what strategy really is about, as it is quite often overused and misunderstood.

I’d like to share with you the 10 guidelines Alastair Campbell shared with us.

He started saying “Show me a good looser and I will show you a looser”, it’s important to get into the spirit of the winner, this is the spirit of strategy. As Lens Arnstrong said to him once “loosing is dying”, survival becomes the only objective.

Strategy is the hard bit, and to Campbell, there is no strategy until it’s written down, strategy is also an opportunity for the argument to happen.

1. OST: Objective – Strategy – Tactics: appreciate the sequence and the differences
2. TPTL: You need the best team leaders and the best team leaders. Whatever happens, you need to work with your team and make sure you can build with whomever gets on your team. Whether you like it or not, you don’t always decide on all the persons working with you, so you need to get better at team building.
3. BB: Be Bold. The best strategies are a word, a phrase, a speech and a book.
4. B.A: Be Authentic.
5. CC: Stay Calm in Crisis. Don’t go to quickly into a crisis management mode. When the room says 200 crisis were managed during New Labour when actually it was 5 crisis: foot and mouth, fuel protest, 9/11, Iraq and Kosovo. He ended the point on another great piece of advice “Crisis always end”
6. LBL: Listen But Lead. Once you’ve made a decision you can listen and adapt if needed but you must lead on the decision you’ve made.
7. GGOOB: Get Good Out Of Bad. Whatever happens, turns it into an opportunity.
8. 3-1/1-18: this is the ratio of good news and bad news evolution. Today we live in a culture of negativity, it is crucial to set your own agenda and to not let others do it.
9. HAP: Head Above the Parapet. BP’s CEO was really bad when he had to say something publically, be careful about who is doing what.
10. VTV: Visualize the Victory: more than self-endurance, he tells us a nice story when he had a chance to play soccer with Maradona and he told him to “visualize, visualize, visualize”. Regarding fear, it’s a matter of absorbing it to deal with an issue and then move on.

Would you ever want to talk to someone who is always boasting his own life, credentials and things?

Workshop idea:
I invite you to take 5 of your colleagues. Get the newspaper of the day, each of you pick a topic from the front cover and establish what could be your brand’s opinion of that news? If you think that the brand doesn’t care or shouldn’t express any opinion on 90% of the news, well your brand might be… boring?

Creating social brands is about being capable of connecting with people on everyday matters as well. I believe having opinions and ideas for the world to get better is certainly a good way to achieve this relationship.

Entertainment is a great avenue but sometimes serious matters are also interesting for people, and very little brands are tapping into that opportunity (outside of their CSR program) today. Why don’t you try it?