Browsing Tag

ideas

While unexpected, I am appreciative – Alltop Branding Listing

YEEE HAW! Spatially Relevant recently was added to Alltop under the Branding Section, I think it may have something to do with the eBook, The Social Marketing Construct: Evolving brands and changing realities, but I really don’t know how. It could have been the Presidential Brand post, which I really liked writing with Sheryl’s help. Could be Sheryl’s Out Telling Stories piece? Sheryl is such a better brand person than I and completely saturated with work to the point she can’t blog, but only edit. Obviously she didn’t edit this one.

I really have no idea, I sorta was hoping it was my Social Brand Management Slideshare show, but that was so long ago, there is no way. Another no way it is possible piece is the Brand Extension of the 5th P, but since most folks haven’t read that again no way.

I did search my email and I did find a thread with Neenz, so perhaps that was the selection driver. At the end of the day, it is about value and value is different for every person and marketing is clearly about telling stories and developing a brand and that is about all I know, which apparently may be enough.

After reviewing the list SR is clearly with good company/in over our heads. I can’t inventory all of them, but here are a few of the cool kids, which SR now needs to try and keep up with:

The Big Kahuna – The brand identity guru, Scott White. Gosh I Hope that is how he wants his brand identity cited.
A Clear Eye – Tom Asacker’s blog, this guy does brand math and I’m always happy see people do math.
The Brand Strategy Blog – Not sure their green assertion in the article I linked to is right, since I know some REALLY old folk who are more green than most 23 yr old vegan’s I know.
Krishna De’s Blog – There is a little micro-casting going on over on Krishna’s blog with the Wicklow County piece, but heck it’s a community service and it is Ireland, so you should be able to drive most anywhere at anytime.
Dimbulb – “Brand on the Run” is just clever, no way I will ever be that clever. Added to my reader.
Branding Blog – I’m not sure I’m going to meet cool people and get them rich, so you may want to check out the branding blog, as you ain’t gettin that here team.
Personal Branding Blog – Any person that has a post on Italy and personal branding has to being adding some value, since Italy IS brand from an export perspective. I guess that is what you get with a “global team” of writers.
Dave Knox’s Hard Knox Life is an interesting play on words/name and he appears to have some interesting fact based research.
Brand Curve – The coolest brand blog name out there, IMHO
Whiplash – Any one with an Obama piece has to be OK.
The Engaging Brand Blog – Not sure what it is, but the site makes me dizzy, not so much via the feed though. Could be the far better content than I or something else.
Guy Richards – I like to blog about business travel too. Mainly how much I suck at it.
Greteman Group – I really like their logo, content is good too.
Orange Blog – Just got nominated for being a top advertising blog. Kudos.
The Brand Elastic – The second coolest name for a branding blog. Brand is definitely situational – people, location, age, activities, interactions and the name supports that, plus they are featuring National Geographic post right now.
Director Tom – Actually met him at a conference last year. Very cool to finally be close to his caliber, ok not really that close, but on the same list anyhow.
Expert in the Rough – Not sure, but I think he is using a geology metaphor, so I wonder what is the hardness of the Alltop list on Moh’s scale? Mica? Feldspar?
Brains on Fire – As a marketer, I clearly know hair on fire, I guess brains on fire is the equivalent of not noticing the fire for a while and it getting a little out of control. The thank you video is a good idea, might be better than a list.
ID-ology – Cool name and any blog with a category called brilliant thinking has to have some good content.
Tungsten – I just want to live in the mountains and brand, which is apparently what these folks do. Right on!

There are bunch more at branding.alltop.com, check them out and find what you like. I’m clearly over my head on this, but at least for the next day or so, I will use my listing as market focused validation that Spatially Relevant doesn’t suck, or at least the blog sucks less than I thought. Ultimately brand takes a village and so does Spatially Relevants staying in Alltop, so thanks to all you readers and those that come by way of Alltop.

Cheers!

~jon

November 29, 2008 by Jon Gatrell

From the Stream: Lost and Found

Oh the holidays are here and I now know exactly what is going on in my hometown thanks to Facebook. Well, maybe not exactly, but a good deal thanks to what I can get from my network via their status, invites, picture uploads and mocku-groups, at least for my home town Gaylord, MI. For my Georgia readers Gaylord is a good deal like Helen with skiing. Yup the things and people you find when you actively engage your network – apparently your past is central to that, at least on Facebook.

What are you looking for in a network? Do you actually participate? Do you just watch?

No matter what you do, Social networks continue to proliferate and continue to make it just a little harder to manage from my perspective regardless of the value they are providing. I find that I can really only manage 2 networks and only do that sorta well, nevertheless I have a bunch of ID’s all over the place to make sure I keep my Spatially ID on most platforms. Can’t have someone brand jack/squat on spatially.

For these other “land grab” networks, I participate mainly thanks to syndication tools for about another 6, but it really isn’t active participation more of an echo of other conversations. I occasionally log on to the other networks to only to find out that I have effectively lost conversations, conversations which appeared to be fairly interesting, if I was able to keep up on it. I even find that my two primary networks, Facebook and Twitter have stranded conversations as well. So if you make a connection, ask a question and don’t follow up with the responses how does that impact your personal brand?

I wrote a little bit about this frustration a while back, but it continues to be a point of concern, as I push statuses and content which effectively ping out and are left lost when it comes to follow up. So I’ve deployed some new tools to see if I can be just a little more responsive – Twinkle and Tweetlater.

The Right tool for the Right Job!

I’m sorta all tool out, tools I use, tools I test and tools I ultimately abandon, but I still keep trying to find the right application for a given micro-function or management function. I’ve used several different iPhone interfaces for Twitter and Twinkle is perhaps the best iPhone client out there and has a geospatial feature which allows me to meet folks while I travel or at least better engage locals for places to eat and things to do. What if marketers could leverage this for promotions?

Local promotions or interaction aren’t a far flung option with this tool, but it would require active use. I recently used Twinkle recently to find a very small hole in the wall which I never would have found without the folks on my Twinkle/Twitter network. Small important point – this cool restaurant recommendation was in my hometown of Roswell, GA – I’ve lived here 4 years and the place was not findable on Urban Spoon. The power of a geographic based network.

ANOTHER Network?

The challenge with Twinkle is I think I’m creating yet ANOTHER network – arrgghh! Will this be another place I strand conversations? Probably not, since it will be my main mobile interace. The fact that I am creating a new network is ok, since it is location based – not just twitter. To that end, I’ll deal with it since it is a great app and one I will actually communicate with, at least when I have my phone, which is like always, but I wish data portability was here in earnest – after all it is my data.

My key networks are Facebook and Twitter and twitter is my main interface for updates, so finding the right tools are important for me.

Tweetlater has become a great tool to acknowledge folks which add me with a welcome message and a direct default message which allows them to find my blog and thanks them for the add. This is a good thing, I think as I would NEVER acknowledge adds and only catch up say 2 times a month with reciprocal adds. The other feature I use on Tweetlater is the keyword feature, I don’t use the public Welcome message any longer because it just pollutes Facebook stream. It wouldn’t if it started with the @ symbol, since those are demoted to not be statuses, but that’s not how it works and typically not how humans speak. I will say that I am getting behind the eight ball on deleted direct messages, not on the Brogan scale, but behind.

I may turn it back on, I just don’t know yet…

A Value Network

Clearly there is value to a person or brand being present online, but it requires that you engage. Lost folks, friends and even randoms are part of your network and provide you access and knowledge that you just don’t have alone – the wisdom of crowds indeed. To that end, I continue to proactively manage my Twitter network and random into 10 or 15 folks a week as I try to change up the twitter stream a little every week, some folks I know just keeping adding – not sure how that works. I would like to highlight 1 of the randoms I personally added in the last week was @debraseifert – her tweets were protected, which always adds a little interest for me – so I added her on sheer luck. Her follow up response was super interesting to my add and shows that she is fairly particular in her network usage:

So it appears that Debra actively tends to her network a bit more than most, but it’s her network right? So I’m not sure how long I’ll be conversing with Debra based on the type of tweet I put out there, but I will say she has some very interesting content which is shared with her network. I clearly glad I randomed into her on twitter, so that’s one of the clear bonuses you find sometimes. Luck appears to play a part in at least some of this network thing, but so does what each person is looking for in their network. @Barbara Nixon recently decided that my conversations weren’t that quality or could have been lost responses regardless – your network has a choice and will continue to change.

There are two more adds this week which require a little acknowledgment, first is @Twitter_Tips, always a little suspect of such user names, but her auto-tweet was entertaining and interesting, she provided me links to some Twitter jokes on her blog and the photo below, which was listed as her favorite twitter pic – very cool item to share, so I also added her as @SarahJL, which appears to be her personal account – Two cool adds thanks to Tweetlater, one manual and the other automated.

The other apparent Tweetlater, SocialToo or other automated tool user I wanted to highlight was the one below which immediately got an unfollow since I don’t thing advertsing FREE stuff for online riches is very credible, below is automated response to my automated DM via Tweetlater:

Who’s are these?

Social networks aren’t just good for getting input, keeping in touch, finding lost folks and generally goofing around at work, they also improve productivity and generally save time. I recently had to pack a bunch of gear in my van, so I actually had to move stuff around. During the reswizzle of the van, I found a stack of live music that wasn’t mine. I literally had no idea who’s it could have been since a bunch of people stopped by the tailgate from other cities so it could be any of 15 or 20 folks – some that I had phone numbers for, some I didn’t. I definitely didn’t have all their emails either, so I used Twitter.

I put a snippet online and within the day the shows were claimed, as show below. I invested less than 10 seconds, found the owner and got to interact with a couple of folks along the way, not just folks who could have left them, but folks which couldn’t have possibly left them.

(identity protected, but only enough for those that don’t know claire strowd)

Found things to do

The use of Tweetlater and the auto welcome message which was published to my facebook status was the catalyst for a long time friend to invite me to lunch on Friday when he was in town. Of course his response was completely out of context, but it was just the needed ping for him to engage. My travel goofed that up so I went and caught up with him in Columbus, GA with Dave and a bunch of Nuns. It’s been almost 2 years since we caught up in person, so it was a very useful tool since it continues to ping my networks. I was also able to get an update on the good things he and the organization he works for, the Adrian Dominican Sisters. Those crazy Nuns in Adrian continue to amaze me with the good things they do, as does Chris.

Pragmatic Networking

The more my network grows, the more it seems to deliver increased value and interesting iterations which enrich my life. In somewhat of a counter intuitive fashion the larger the network gets the more it provides streamlined communications and develops key relationships. No matter how many networks you use the value is ultimately determined by how you use it. If you listen, learn and engage you just might find more than you thought. I think I’ll keep doing this whole social media thing, since with FB’s offer of $500M for Twitter it has to be staying around.

Aside – did you notice a couple of forced brand references? Well, that’s because I’ve been added to frickin alltop @ http://branding.alltop.com, towards the bottom. YEAH. So apparently what was a brand piece a month, needs to be 60% of my writing. I’m ok with that. I’ll do a formal notice shortly, but this is clearly something to be thankful for.

November 29, 2008 by Jon Gatrell

Stuck in the Middle: The Committer

I haven’t done a piece around leadership personas for a while. The main reason is things haven’t been that slow to think about leadership styles of late and I have just been getting things done, rather than thinking about things. What a quandary, so I’m writing another piece on leadership, perhaps just to feel a little better about myself or to help a friend out.

This series is basically a pragmatic look at leadership, management and execution as it relates to dealing with specific leadership personas and how to get things done effectively inside a given management mode. Some of the other one’s I’ve addressed are The Collaborator, The Geologist, The Amoeba, The Visualist, The Fence Mender, The Vassalizer, The MBIFM, and a couple of other ones.

It is always an interesting set of problems to solve when thinking on how organizations can communicate better, develop their people, how to look at executing as an organization more effectively and how contributors can create excitement in a given role, even if they have been there a long time. It might be important to note, that everyone needs to contribute – leadership is as much about a team and doing what needs to be done, as it is about “managing”. It’s the last concept which got me back to thinking on this series based on a conversation I had with a friend the other day. Karen is consistently having items thrown into her queue without regard of any other items in progress and it is done via a series of ad hoc commitments which are cascaded down via email with no other interaction.

The challenge/situation is how can you keep up and be successful when someone continuously delegates new tasks without acknowledging capacity/understanding the effort to produce or providing additional context/assistance to ensure success. I can certainly understand the troubles associated with this type of situation, which brings me to writing on this leadership persona. Over commit and under deliver – not sure how this helps anyone – the investors, the customers or the associates. At the end of the day, you have to manage expectations and deliverables – even if they are outside of your control.

As a product manager, I quickly came to grips with the reality that you have none of the authority, but all of the accountability, so working effectively through others is a keen skill to have no matter what role you have. That being said you need to have an environment which allows for achievement and the opportunity for meeting the needs of the key stakeholder and constant agreement and confirmation that you will get it done while positive can lead to issues down the road.

So how do you deal with this? Communicate, communicate, communicate. It also helps to make sure everyone understand what is being work on, who owns it and when it can be done. Transparency is the key to success in this leadership model. If everyone knows what needs to be done, is aware of the current prioritization and is aware of value for the folks who benefit from what is currently in the queue you have the opportunity to drive to closure the right items for the business, the customers and your employees.

November 8, 2008 by Jon Gatrell

Music, Emotion and Shared Experiences

Education and Research – Facebook productivity.

So Alexis, you don’t know her – so I’ll tell you about her – wicked intelligent and apparently a lecturer/professor. Not much more I can be reasonably sure about, since I haven’t spoken to her since 1990, but have connected via Facebook and randomly interacted and those are my impressions. A recent Facebook note I caught from my news feed represents an interesting way to engage the network and leverage the value of the relationships. Normally I would have missed the note, but the title required a click – “music as mood-altering”. So Alexis used Facebook as a follow up/drill down on input she received in her class as an educator – kinda cool social media use case. Connectivity and access to a network can produce some interesting stuff and I think her topic/question should definitely have a response. So with that baseline, Alexis asked her network the following in the Facebook note:

This semester I’m teaching a lower-division undergrad class on language and music. The topic for the past week has been music and emotion, and we’ve looked at a couple of attempts to somehow make concrete our understanding of the mechanisms through which music can pack such an emotional wallop. Some of the mechanisms people have proposed:

mimicking or alluding to emotional signals of the world, e.g. fast tempos convey excitement, echo the way our hearts pound when we’re excited

invoking personal associations

connecting with the responses we have to structures changing and unfolding over time

I’ve heard a lot now about my students and their emotional experiences with music, but what about you, my friends? Does it even makes sense to seek specific musical correlates to specific emotions? How universal (or individual) are emotional responses to music?

What an interesting way to leverage social media from an educational perspective. Not sure if this was the goal, but ultimately this event could be loosely or not-so loosely defined as primary research. Sampling could be an issue. Dewy Wins!

Music and Emotions

This question makes for a timely thing having just got back from spending a weekend with friends watching live music all weekend which was accompanied by shared emotional responses with say 8,000 other folk. I have the habit lately of keeping my own setlist mainly because I can’t get out as much with 4 kids to see live music and to refer to in meetings, at airports or with friends. For me the setlist represents not just the songs, but also the experience which definitely invokes emotions. The setlits conjures up items about the event/evening, a given song’s association, the people and what I’ve actually documented about a given line item. Below are two examples from this week’s venture out to see Widespread Panic, it also represents my answer to the question posed. Typically I would edit before I post, but in the name of research/content analysis….verbatim below:

10/17 – WP – ATL -Lakewood
Set 1
Worry
Drum thing into. Hatfield
Ribs n whiskey
Glory.
Sleepy monkey.
Going out west
Morning dew
Rebirtha slow.
Red beans

Set 2 9:34
Airplane.
Long jam> vacation jimmy killed it
Bears gone fishin
Pigeons
Randall bramlett?. Mega blasters old neighborhood

Chest fever.
Arlene
Bust it big.
Weight of the world.

Encore.
Walking

10/18 Atl 7:29

Set 1

Mr soul

OAS

Drum thing. Into Fishwater big

Last straw

Alg

up all night bramblett mega blasters

New tune/ dance needs no body. Long and boring

You should be glad

Ophelia.

8:35

Set 2 9:16

Chilly

You got yours

Blight huge

Rhm

Angels on high. Lame

Momma told me not to come.3dg

Superstition mega blaster

Tall boy mega

10:22

Encore

Randall. Jb is late

Picking up pieces

North

Pilgrims

Wondering

10:57

The funny thing about reading your setlist later, no matter what I’m doing or where I’m at it — even thought of music is mood altering.

Random proof-point: In the Fox News clip below you can clearly see music alters the Anchors’ moods. I’m not so sure about the chunk of coal reference, but they could turn Jimmy down a little.

October 22, 2008 by Jon Gatrell

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