Steve McCallion recently posted an interesting recap of the Gap logo debacle.  But his most interesting insights concern the notion of a social brand platform and why it is so important to get this right in an an age where everyone is engaging with brands in ways that brand managers can’t even control.  He cites the Levi’s Workshops as an example of a brand taking on this new dynamic with a sensitivity to the way that communities always and already are sculpting the brand identity by engaging with real and valuable resources:

Levi’s spent this past summer running a print workshop in San Francisco – the first installment in an ongoing series of platforms called Levi’s Workshops. Participants are invited to learn a creative skill, for free, with the best work produced going up on the workshop website. With one grand gesture, Levi’s hit every aspect of a good social platform: the workshops teach a useful skill, provide context for socialization, offer an ever-changing and deeply layered experience, and Levi’s curates the results for public view, to the benefit of their own brand.

An excerpt that further elaborates on the vital social brand platform:

Useful

Logos create value for brands, but social brand platforms create value for people. Nike+ helps people run and get healthy. Facebook keeps people in touch with friends and family. Etsy connects cottage industry craftsmen with buyers. Converse has just announced that it’s building a recording studio in Brooklyn to help up-and-coming musicians.

Social brand platforms are not experiential marketing gimmicks. They do not exist to promote something else, but rather they are useful in and of themselves. A logo, by contrast, doesn’t actually do anything.

Social
Logos are about control and consistency, but social brand platforms focus on defining the context — there are no standards manuals. They invite people to interact with each other in a variety of ways including one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many.

Nike+ lets friends challenge friends, individuals compete with the crowd, and universities compete with other universities. Nike defines the context — letting people track their mileage — that lets people provide the social interaction.

Living
With rare exceptions (notably MTV and Google), logos are static. But social brand platforms are living experiences that take place over time and increase in value as more people participate. The Apple and Android app stores become more valuable as the crowd contributes to these platforms.

Etsy offers a clean, well-curated introduction on its homepage to its collection of handmade goods

Layered
Not everyone wants to participate on the same level. Social brand platforms thrive by offering multiple levels of involvement. They recognize that not everyone is a creator. Specifically, they provide room for three types of involvement – creation, commenting and consuming.

YouTube is often heralded for its user-generated content, but only .1% of YouTube users are creators. The rest are making comments or simply consuming. All three types of involvement are necessary for a sustainable platform.

Curated
Finally, great social brand platforms provide enhanced functionality that helps aggregate and amplify user-generated content. Without curation, user-generated content is useless. Etsy provides shoppers with a number of ways to discover hand-made products including by color, location, time, and a 10×10 grid of editors’ picks to name a few. Threadless uses a combination of user evaluation and staff recommendation to push the best T-shirt designs to the front.

I have started acknowledging that there must be other people out there with a similar approach to marketing and brand engagement.  Although, I find it uncomfortable to align myself with their strategic analysis and prescriptive methods: “This is what the world is like and if you want to better market to contemporary consumers you must adopt their forms and engage in their games.”  Instead, I prefer to think that brands can learn from a genuine engagement with the world and that by opening up small spaces for dialogue and resource exchange, the very structure of the organization will necessarily adapt.  Alan Moore,  a marketing consultant in the UK, seems to understand this ecology but is playing his hand for a particular audience.  He primarily serves the business interests when he advises:

Community based engagement initiatives goes beyond marketing communications and will become the primary means by which all organisations will engage with their audiences. This new paradigm requires a multidisciplinary approach, as a consequence, we get a clashing of cultural and ideological gears, companies aren’t prepared to deal with the friction that allowing their staff to connect internally of externally generates. Further, Knowledge gaps widen which means assumptions are made, and key strategic decisions are executed that damage the longevity, and even existence of companies. (“we thought it was all about technology”) The perilous state of the media and broadcast industries in the UK is but one example.

Perhaps these are some principal ideas that fall out of this particular conversation are:

1. Create platforms/services/tools that enable people and are built upon human principals of sharing and co-operation
2. Engagement is based upon tenets not technology
3. Community co-creation around a central purpose is very powerful bonding agent
4. Be Grassroots – be truly useful
5. You have to re-organise

Alan Moore in conversation with Jason Kirby explores what this means to him.

We need to embrace the interactive age to break with traditional, ineffective interruptive communications, using engagement techniques to change behaviour and outputs through involvement. In a participatory culture, people embrace what they create.

Community Based Engagement Initiatives (part 1) [16:38m]: Download

I’m not sure how, but I’ve recently gained a new batch of European Twitter followers.  Most of them seem to be brand / marketing types.  And perhaps because they’re European, they appear a bit more critically appealing (at least online) than their American counterparts.  Anyway, I have historically made a point of not participating directly in this kind of dialogue, but that is changing (see forthcoming posts about the book I’m planning to write).  But, I found this letter on one of my new followers pages (trndmrkr.blogspot.com).  Then the comment post with a letter of response from “Advertising” on johnniemoore.com was about as nauseating as I can imagine - read it at your own risk.  But here you have two sides of the circle: a “consumer” acknowledging and engaging with a brand despite their stated indifference, and a marketer affirmed that their consumer research justifies a bullshit engagement opportunity.

August 23, 2010 19:27:

Dear Brian,

We are terribly sorry for the misunderstanding. It turns out you weren’t the target for our advert. We’re working on making our content more targeted through digital distribution tools, but for now you’re going to have to simply take what you can away from our messaging - which was clearly about sausage - and simply not participate in the microsite and video part.

See, there are people out there in the world who have a job that involves work they find particularly interesting, and it does more for them than paying their bills. Your attitude toward work and life suggest that you wouldn’t be the type to make a video even if it brought you definite rewards. This is called a psychographic, Brian.

Also, being 27, you’re right on the edge of a technological and behavioral shift. All the people younger than you have grown up with video editing software and the ability to dynamically use the Internet and technology in unprecedented ways. It is they who will go to our site and submit a video. And they will share, and comment, and take interest in the possibilities of their creativity and the creativity of others. (That is, if we do a good job providing them with a reason to be there and to contribute. Leave that up to us).

It’s a new culture, Brian - your having children in the past few years and working a job that likely doesn’t hinge on the latest developments of the social web has perhaps kept you a bit behind the curve. Don’t worry, though - you’ll eventually assimilate. And so will 100 million others just like you. In the bell curve graph you’re what we call the “late majority.” Maybe we can talk next year. Perhaps by then your kids will be sleeping in on Saturdays and you can use that time to explore the creative, social web. We’ll be there - feel free to look us up.

Sincerely,

Advertising

Somewhere between a transcendent purpose and demoralizing charity…