I’m new to 1000heads, and have often been asked by family and friends what it is we do. Here’s just one example.
We recently supported the Nokia US launch of the Nokia Lumia 900. The brand and international rap superstar Nicki Minaj teamed up to host a launch of epic proportions, live from Times Square. Local New Yorkers and tourists from around the world witnessed an exclusive visual and musical takeover, using nine immense CGI screens, crowned by a show-stopping performance from Minaj.
She performed a medley of songs from her brand-new album and then introduced the exclusive Nokia remix of her latest single ‘Starships’, featuring London-based DJ Doorly. Lucky fans in the audience were also filmed to appear in the official video for the Nokia ‘Starships’ remix.
And what was our role in all of this?
Prior to the takeover we invited bloggers from the worlds of music and technology to join us for the event. The bloggers, as well as New Yorkers in and around Times Square, had no idea what was planned. Aside from a few hints, everything about the event was secret. The only real clue was a giant blue box that had been planted in the middle of Times Square the day before the launch. The box was unbranded but for a distinctive clock that was counting down.
To add even more intrigue and mystery, on launch day we gave each blogger a scaled-down version of the blue box; inside was a pair of Monster headphones and a miniature countdown timer, synced with the main box.
To support the activity online we created a Facebook tab on the Nokia US page called ‘Lumia 900 Live’. The tab mirrored all activity leading up to the event on the ground, still giving nothing away. Then, post-launch, we ran a Facebook competition giving fans the opportunity to win a Lumia 900 signed by Minaj herself. The tab was also the home for the official video for the Nokia ‘Starships’ remix.
The trip was a blast for lots of reasons, the main one being getting to meet our bloggers face to face, and giving them an experience they’d never forget.
As a regular at Pho in Soho, and as a social media addict, I was immediately interested in the Foursquare competition running at my local branch. It awards each month’s ‘mayor’ a free bowl of Pho noodle soup.
While angling for a free lunch (or at least a bowl of noodle soup), my colleagues and I asked about the deal. We were surprised when our waiter confessed that we’d never be in with a chance of winning, because the branch manager checked in religiously every day, cementing his position as location mayor. My Pho fetish would have to be fed daily to rival his check-ins.
Turning to Twitter I shared the negative experience, tweeting that in my view the promotion was far from fair or honest. In response, Pho Restaurant gave a defensive and rather rude answer, seemingly challenging me on my report of the experience.
Perhaps the waiter got it wrong and the manager really wasn’t trying to win the free soup, but regardless, instead of apologising and offering to find out more about the promotion, the response was defensive and disinterested -a classic case of bad customer service.
In contrast, when I tweeted about a negative experience I had in Tesco, the concerned and helpful tone of its practical response immediately turned a negative into a positive.
Time and again research and experience shows that something negative (or sometimes simply unusual) gets us talking, but this fundamental rule of customer services seems to be forgotten as often as it’s remembered.
This is not rocket science. And this is not about ‘knowing how to do social media.’ This is simple business sense. Face to face or via social media, a brand is really only the people who represent it, with all the complex emotions that drive their own behaviour. As we’ve discussed before, it’s important for brands to embrace their humanity. But to make sure the rough never gets served up with the smooth, the right checks and balances are vital.
Truth is, we don’t want brands to be ‘human.’ We want them to be great brands – more patient, courteous, helpful and charming than most people ever bother to be. Yes, it’s important for brands to find a personal way to communicate – but however ‘social’ the media, they need to be professional, too.
Augmented Reality apps aren’t new, but while playing around with Aurasma I started thinking about how I, as a consumer, am able to express my feelings about a brand.
I’ve never used AR before, so I started simple, creating a rudimentary example that exemplifies how I can, at the simplest level, say what I think about Marmite.
This love/hate example neatly fits in with the brand ethos of Marmite, which prides itself on the intense emotional response people have to its taste. But for any other brand there’s no doubt that a virtual sign shouting out ‘I hate’ whenever you point your phone at its label, could be seen as a problem. Brand vandalism, if you will.
Obviously, one of the glorious things about social media is that we can publicly comment on (and subvert) a brand however we see fit (as long as we’re not breaking any laws, that is). But we’ve seen how uncomfortable this has made brands in the past.
In 2009 Skittles turned its homepage into a live feed of consumer tweets, where any tweet featuring the word ‘skittles’ would be shown. But thanks to a lack of foresight (and appropriate language censors), chaos ensued.
Similarly, McDonald’s was hit during its ‘McStories’ campaign – when conversation about the brand was hijacked for the best part of a week, with a storm of complaints and vitriolic comment.
So are these sorts of AR apps about to make them terrified?
Well, perhaps. But in both these cases one could argue that the damage done to the brand was minimal. From a personal standpoint, if I’m craving a McFlurry on a sunny day, the likeliness of me being put off by a Twitter tag faux pas is frankly non-existent. But they do highlight a vitally important lesson; social means everyone can, and most probably will, have their say. Brands don’t get to choose who says what about them, whether online, in AR space, or in the real world. Social media and AR are simply new tools with which both brands, and their customers, can share their feelings.
What this does mean, however, is that brands that put themselves out there and encourage participation have to be ready for the consequences – and ready to respond to potentially controversial situations in an appropriate and positive way.
Beyond those instances where a person has a well-founded complaint, the majority of brand vandalism can be seen as silly, irreverent but also complimentary. If your brand excites and interests someone enough to generate an emotional response, even if it’s not on message, that should be welcomed and embraced.
Do the opposite by going on the offensive and you risk ‘doing a Nestle’, turning an opportunity to genuinely engage around an important issue into a potential PR disaster.
Ultimately, being part of the social environment means being part of the conversation. And just like in any conversation, confidence, humility, and not least a healthy dose of humanity, will prevail.
So don’t let the hijacking possibilities of AR put you off exploring an awesome new technology – just – like the proverbial Scouts, be prepared.
The UK moved to British Summer Time at the weekend, yet it’s Tuesday and some of us are still bemoaning the loss of a crucial hour of sleep, not least because of the infographic below.
Created by the East Village team for the London Living blog, it shows just some of the things Londoners do in a typical hour.
We’re currently doing some very exciting work with East Village. If you’ve not heard of it, East Village will become London’s newest neighbourhood after the world’s best athletes vacate the current premises after the 2012 Games. It will become a living, breathing community – providing homes for thousands of people and a long lasting legacy for East London.
East Village is driven by three core values: more time, more space and more choice. We’ve used these as the inspiration behind our work, to develop engaging and interesting ways to evoke a sense of community, excitement and anticipation around East Village.
After an intense brainstorm late on a Friday afternoon, with the goal of encouraging people to talk about time, the team came up with a peach of an idea. We’d offer someone the chance to have their very own PA for a day.
Asking people on the East Village blog, London Living, just what they would do with ‘more time’, we awarded one lucky winner the services of yours truly for a whole day (absolutely free, I might add).
The aim here was to provide a personal and unique experience, giving the East Village brand a recognisable face and a human quality at the same time. Like a personalised random act of kindness, this was about us going that one step further for our client, and one leap further for our audience – and about taking something online, and making it happen offline.
I never really considered being ‘auctioned’ off as a prize to a member of the public as part of my first permanent career role, but I nonetheless looked forward to it with a lot of excitement (and a bit of trepidation).
It was with a nervous skip in my step that I went to meet Julia, an aspiring writer currently working in film, at 7am sharp (I know – an early start!) at the Shoreditch Grind, a lovely East London coffee house that sits next to the bustling roundabout by Old Street station.
It seemed Julia could not get over the novelty of the situation at hand; she’d clicked onto our blog, commented under a post, and now she had someone at her beck and call for the whole day. She thought it was a fantastic idea and said she’d dreamt of having a PA for years!
Having got thoroughly stuck into Julia’s mass of short stories, creative scripts and sonnets, editing and collating material as I went along, I spent the day organising her work into digestible prose. It definitely wasn’t light work!
Yet it was clear when the day came to a close that I’d really made Julia’s day that bit better. We know that 90% of recommendations come from face-to-face conversations. In this sense, Julia experienced the East Village ethos through a personal experience, and we amplified this message through proactive engagement with a member of our community.
It’s amazing what physical interaction can do, and Julia was full of praise for the concept and the execution.
I’d like to think Julia’s nascent opinion of East Village is now very much one of advocacy and that we’ve shown East Village is more than just London’s newest neighbourhood.
Last year, Abi Sawyer, Senior Producer for Future Media at the BBC World Service visited 1000heads to update us on how such a complex and public organisation was embracing social. Molly wrote a great blog post about the insights we gained into balancing transparency and public content with journalistic rigour.
So when I stumbled across the announcement of the World Service80th birthday celebrations, I was intrigued to learn that it would be inviting the public to see behind the scenes of some of its programmes. Another ‘head and I duly headed over to Bush House for a glimpse at the mechanics behind World Have Your Say.
As an editorial manager I was naturally interested in seeing how the editorial meeting panned out; particularly as the agenda for the programme on this special occasion was to be set by the its vast audience of listeners from across the globe. Taking our place amongst a select group of live participants, we were given headphones to listen to the calls coming in from around the world as the WHYS editorial team planned that evening’s broadcast.
The calls came in from regions as diverse as Indonesia, Tunisia and China. Topics ranged from McDonalds’ newly unveiled plans to open another 225-250 new outlets in China, to Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki offering asylum to Syria’s leader Bashar Assad, each suggestion resulting in an intensive debate amongst the team and audience as to its value and relevance to the global community.
With this international conversation unfolding from a collection of tweets, messages, emails and calls, it was a brilliant example of how the BBC uses social media as a supporting voice when creating a cohesive deconstruction of global opinion.
Steve Titherington, World Service commissioning editor, said: ‘We are turning Bush House inside out, showing who we are and what we do and asking what the world wants next from the BBC World Service’, while Peter Horrocks, director of Global News, added: ‘These are historic and changing times for the World Service. We want our audiences to be at the heart of both the commemoration of the past and conversation about the future.’
For me, this tied nicely into Nokia’s announcement at Mobile World Congress that it would be taking the new strategic direction of ‘co-creation’, with fans invited to collaborate with the company’s marketing team to create more interest around the brand. In short, both the BBC and Nokia have recognised that involving their audiences increases trust in their brand and encourages more emotional attachment, as well as resulting in richer and more valuable content. In turn this creates advocacy, whereby fans want to share the work or concept they helped to create, and ultimately helps brands to take a real step towards being an integrally social business.
Even 80-year old, traditional and highly regulated organisations such the BBC World Service are fundamentally changing and embracing social. If they can do it…
We have a new look. Perhaps the result of a delayed January detox and an early Spring clean, we’ve tweaked our brand identity and revamped our website.
Yet while visual updates are refreshing and reinvigorating, what else has changed?
Mike Rowe recently talked about the journey we’ve come on, from humble beginnings in 1999 to more recent client wins, new hires and award successes. Over that time we have changed – in size and skill set – but what’s remained constant is our steadfast belief in Word of Mouth, conversation and sharing; in social communication.
And as the marketing and social landscape continues to change, at a rate nobody could have ever predicted, this ethos has never been more relevant.
So we’ve given ourselves a new look and used some new, simpler words to set out our stall.
Last week, my boiler broke down (bear with me I do have a point here). For two full days during one of the coldest weeks in the year I had no hot water or heating in my flat, and when I called British Gas I was quickly assured that an engineer would be round imminently to fix the problem.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that the person on the other end of the phone was charming, personable and efficient. I hung up feeling like a valued (albeit rather cold) customer, secure in the knowledge that I wasn’t going to be left to freeze. But no one turned up. Then, after waiting for more than ten hours, I had a call from the British Gas engineer to say he couldn’t make it that day and would come the next.
As a result, British Gas found its way into my bad books.
The point I want to make (see, I said I had one) is that despite the very good customer service I experienced from one part of the company (in this case, its call centre), the no-show and rather dismissive attitude of another part (the engineer) succeeded in tainting the whole of the British Gas brand for me. I even tweeted about it:
We at 1000heads are strong believers in the fact that in order to become successfully social, brands need to become more human. This is true both on and offline, whether the point of contact between a brand and an individual is someone sitting in a call centre, standing behind a counter or updating a Twitter feed or Facebook wall. People want to be able to put a face to a name, and a personality to a brand. That is what being social means.
But companies are often so preoccupied with ‘humanising’ and engaging people with certain aspects of their brand that they forget that for the average person, the brand is seen as a single entity; if they have a bad experience with one aspect of the organisation, then it will taint their perception of the brand as a whole.
The trick is to get the balance right. Being human should not mean losing sight of the overall message you want to promote, and being professional should not mean coming across as unapproachable or disconnected.
British Gas made the mistake of believing great call centre experiences are the key to customer loyalty, rather than customer service as a whole (although I should mention that it has since apologised and offered me compensation for the extra day I spent feeling like a polar bear in an ice storm). Others have cottoned on to the fact that maintaining a personable, human side to every aspect of their brand is crucial in making people believe and trust the services on offer. Take a look at this little gem. The sign could easily read “Please use other door”, but in saying so much more, it (ahem) says so much more about the brand beyond the doorway….
This week, I claimed that companies like ours are the agencies of the future but somebody put me in my place by pointing out that 1000heads is a child of the last century. Day to day work normally gets in the way of reflection, but this made me pause for thought and consider the journey we’ve been on and the journey that lies ahead.
It was indeed in 1999 that plans to launch 1000heads were first laid. To put this into perspective, there was no Facebook (can a $100billion business really grow that quickly?), no Twitter, no YouTube, no MySpace, and social media meant no more than sharing a newspaper in the park.
We may not have partied like it was 1999 ever since but it’s been an action-packed, white-knuckle ride from our early days in a (thankfully converted) cowshed in rural Oxfordshire. We now have around 75 talented and inspiring people working out of our offices in Soho, we have a dozen more in New York under the leadership of North American CEO Mike Davison, plus growing teams in Australia and Germany.
As the grizzled veterans of social media, we have seen a global industry grow up with us, and around us, and we are proud to be a part of it.
In addition to clients such as Nokia, whom we have had the pleasure of working with for the last seven years, we are delighted that Mars Petcare, Skype, Toyota, Rebel Sports and Gala Bingo, to name but a few, have recently joined the 1000heads family.
Social media is in our DNA but today brands want so much more. We talk a lot about social communications, helping brands’ stories to travel further and faster. People talk and share information wherever they are, whatever they are doing, and whoever they are with.
Meeting that challenge is sometimes scary but always exhilarating and I’m delighted that we are able to welcome some fantastic new ‘Heads’ to the fold, as well as promotions for existing Heads, who together will be part of the leadership team taking 1000heads forward.
Joanne Jacobs takes up a position as Chief Operating Officer in our Sydney office from March 1st. Joanne describes herself as a ‘geekgirl’ and has a passion for all things social. A former lecturer in the MBA program at the Brisbane Graduate School of Business at Queensland University of Technology, Joanne is returning to Australia after a four year stint in London during which time she was Client Director for Xenial and more recently Chief Operating Officer for Hibrow, an online arts offering from British-based film-maker Don Boyd.
It’s a real coup to have Joanne join us and I know she will build on the great success we are already starting to see in the Australian market.
Here in London, Phil Borge has been appointed to the newly created role of Strategic Planning Director. He joins us from PR agency Eulogy! after 10 years of service, where he was most recently Senior Account Director and strategic lead within its marketing services division.
In short Phil is a guy who gets things done and he will be responsible for developing the agency’s approach to client strategy, working with the insights, project management and creative teams across multiple projects and campaigns. He will also spearhead the addition of PR activation within client campaigns.
He will be working alongside Frank Grindrod, previously Group Account Director, who has been promoted to Client Services Director. Frank has been with 1000heads for six years and while ‘social media guru’ is a term he would shrink from, we call him it anyway.
Simon Adamson, another long-serving ‘Head’, has been promoted to Group Account Director and will continue to keep calm while all around him ‘chaordic’ enthusiasm reigns.
We also shortly hope to be announcing the appointment of our first Community Director, another key hire for the business. The Community Director will be responsible for our 20-strong Community team, running social presences, advocacy programmes, and community events.
Our journey may have started in the last century, and it may feel like we have been travelling 100 years at times, but the reality is that we have only just left the station and the tracks are infinite. We are delighted to welcome our new travelling companions on board.
Scarcity, secrecy, exclusivity. Three words that don’t exactly reflect the transparency and freedom of information that brands are supposedly striving for in a social age. But that’s also the reason that they can be so powerful in triggering emotional impact and peer-to-peer conversation when they are used well.
Last week, a friend of mine invited me to volunteer for something called YMBBT. Armed with no more information than an address in the West End and a time for that evening, I was slightly nervous that I had signed myself up for some dubious Soho debauchery. When a quick Google search revealed nothing except for the fact that YMBBT stood for ‘You Me Bum Bum Train’, my anticipation – and anxiety – understandably increased.
For those of you who haven’t heard about YMBBT, well – the first rule of YMBBT is that you don’t talk about YMBBT. All I need to tell you is that it’s a highly sought-after interactive theatre experience run almost entirely by volunteers who, like me, don’t really know what they are volunteering for. And when I say highly sought-after, I mean sought-after. 80,000 applied for just 1,000 tickets during its last run, all without a clue what they were signing up for.
The absolute secrecy of the whole enterprise is key to its success. Counter-intuitively, explicitly asking people to restrict the nature of their word of mouth drives word of mouth like wildfire.
YMBBT is just one of several examples of brands that know the value of cloak and dagger. We’ve talked before about how pop-up shops harness people’s desire to uncover unconventional retail gems before anyone else.
Secret Cinema is another fantastic example. Paying over the odds to see a film you may or may not like in a location that may or may not be anywhere near you sounds bizarre in a world of hyper-personalisation, convenience and tribal passion groups. But it sells out every time precisely because it subverts those trends. Sometimes, not being pandered to makes you respect a brand or experience very much indeed.
Of course, exclusivity taps into very basic human drives. We’re herd animals – we enjoy inclusion and being privy to something special, and those emotions can quickly be converted into loyalty and advocacy. We want people around us to know we’re part of this magical experience, both to bond with our fellow participants and to badge our selves with a sort of ‘in the know’ cool.
Of course, not every brand lends itself to this kind of ‘popularity through secrecy’ approach, especially those that can’t rely on the impact of the live experience. Practical, non-experiential and non-luxury items such as say, household cleaner, rely on candidness, transparency and cold hard facts to make their product stand out in a sea of competitors.
But Apple is proof that you don’t need lots of stunts to make consumers feel special. Its carefully – some might say anally – controlled flow of information is absolutely key to the cult. The ultimate Generation Y brand, Apple doesn’t have a blog, Twitter account or Facebook page.
Yet by revealing so little Apple all but guarantees that every announcement it makes is met with fevered global excitement and advocacy.
So how might you be able to drive demand with a bit of social scarcity? What assets, information or experiences might you be able to withhold, tease or stagger to generate that sense of privileged camaraderie? Don’t forget: silence can be one of your most powerful tools in harnessing word of mouth.
