Open up your mind and say, ahh...

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I recently watched the 1966 movie Blow-Up. As the movie trailer warns, director Michelangelo Antonioni’s “camera never flinches” from the “dazzle and the madness of London today!” It’s a great movie that weaves the sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll scene of the mid-1960s into the life of a “wild” fashion photographer. These were the holy trinity of shocking topics of the day, but the movie seems tame and quaint by today’s standards. Which leads one to ask–does anything shock us anymore?

People want to feel alive. We want to have new experiences and see things that surprise, inspire, or yes, even shock us a little. But we live in an Internet-exposed world that gives us all we want, raw and in real time, and we have an “I’ve seen it all before” attitude about everything. Yet companies are more cautious in this politically correct, overly litigious, and socially enabled environment. According to Trendwatching.com, consumers are “able to handle much more honest conversations, more daring innovations, more quirky flavors, more risqué experiences–these consumers increasingly appreciate brands that push the boundaries.” So companies had better figure out how to let their brands thrive in today’s world.

Just where is that boundary, and just how daring are today’s marketers? How do they straddle that fine line between engaging and offending? What happens when the unreasonable objections of rampant political correctness threaten to stifle their best ideas and creative content? Here are a few guideposts to follow in searching for ideas in advertising that could break through.

Understand that it’s all relative: What is offensive to me might make you laugh. What works with a male audience might be way off the mark for women. Regions, religions, and races all possess socially acceptable norms. Because the Internet makes everything accessible to everyone all the time, whatever you do–anything you do–that is remotely controversial will be criticized by someone. Get used to it. You can’t be universally loved and hope to shock people. They don’t go hand in hand. Find the courage to speak to your consumers in a way they will love and care less about what the “others” will say about your brand. See what K-Swiss’ “CEO” Kenny Powers says.

Give them a surprise rather than a shock: Shock makes us stop. Surprise makes us think. Brands need to build relationships that are lasting. Just shocking someone doesn’t mean they will think about or engage with your brand. For a brand to engage, quite often that means getting them to rethink what role the brand could play in their lives. If you do things that are unexpected, fresh, and surprising for your brand, your consumers will start thinking about you in a different light. How best to be surprising? Do or say that thing you always dream of and have never dared express. Good advice in both marketing and life. (See Ally Bank.)

Let your audience help: I just saw a play in New York called Sleep No More, a wildly inventive and brave attempt to create a theatrical experience that brought the audience into a voyeuristic partnership with the actors. We became part of the show, and once you realize that you’re part of the experience, you become less critical because you feel some level of ownership. Brands need to do that same thing. Have the consumers contribute ideas and content to the brand’s story, and its relevance and appropriateness become self-regulating. (See Doritos.)

Lighten up: Companies are way too serious and afraid. I get it. Anything that is different, shocking, or surprising can create extra work and add some risk to the equation. Anything interesting you want to do with your brand will have corporate detractors. Fear drives too many corporations. But your consumers will applaud you for taking a risk, sharing a laugh, being brutally honest about the world in which your brand lives. To do something mildly interesting, let alone shocking, often takes too much effort and the best ideas die before they see the light of day. Have courage, lighten up, and do something surprising. (See Domino’s.)

Don’t be mean-spirited: It’s easy to be shocking at someone’s expense. Don’t. (See Groupon’s much-reviled Tibet ad.)

Realize that candor can be shocking: There is a famous ad by the explorer Ernest Shackleton that says, “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.” Pretty shocking. But completely honest. Marketers get a bad rap (and often deservingly so) for trying to overspin their message. Be straight with your audience. Tell them what you want from them. In an over-hyped world, they will appreciate the candor, and you might just get better results. (See DIRECTV.)

Give it the family test: Your grandmother knows (the cool one on your mother’s side). Your kid knows (the smart one who actually does her homework). And your spouse knows (they always do). If you can’t share your idea or work with your family, it’s probably over the line. I have yet to find something that shocks my kids. Buckle up; when the younger generations take control, things will get pretty exciting.

I love brands that always choose to push the boundaries in ways true to their soul. These brands make me laugh, think, and feel a little uncomfortable at times–and I respect them for their courage and conviction, even if I don’t always agree with them.

Image: Flickr user Thomas Dongga

When we were kids, “driving” involved a pedal car, and Lego hadn’t even debuted Star Wars-themed setups. Now, as part of a driving school for kids ages six to 12 (!), Ford has debuted a bright red Explorer made out of Legos.

The car will mark the entrance to the Ford Driving School at Legoland Florida, where kids born in years as recent as 2005 can drive electric cars on curbed roads, reaching speeds as fast as three miles per hour.

Sure, some pint-sized gearheads visiting the new Legoland might wish Ford had brickified a Mustang or an SVT Raptor instead of the car their mom probably drives them to school in, but the Lego Explorer is still pretty cool.

For one, it came out of the Torrance Avenue assembly plant in Chicago and was created by the same engineers who build the regular Ford Explorer. The Legoed Explorer took 22 people over 2,500 hours to build out of 380,000 Lego bricks. It rides on a 768 pound aluminum base and weighs 2,624 pounds.

Oh yeah — and it’s made out of Legos.

Photos: Ford

Adobe isn’t the only company being tempted by the sweet taste of HTML5, Microsoft has a hankering for the stuff too.

Despite its past efforts to shape Silverlight into the leading cross-platform runtime for the web and the desktop, Microsoft now says that its strategy and plans for Silverlight “has shifted.”

ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley spoke with Bob Muglia, the president of Microsoft’s server and tools business about the lack of focus on Siverlight at the company’s Professional Developers Conference this week.

Muglia’s response was pretty telling. Although he reaffirmed Microsoft’s commitment to making Silverlight the development platform for Windows Phone, he noted that the cross-platform solution Microsoft sees going forward is HTML.

Speaking with Foley, Muglia said, “HTML is the only true cross platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform.”

This is a big admission from the company that has spent years trying to push Silverlight as a cross-platform technology forward. As a video technology — indeed even as an application technology — Silverlight and WPF are actually pretty nice. I attended a two-day XAML workshop held at Microsoft’s Atlanta offices in 2009 and was very impressed with the capabilities and the toolsets that were possible within Silverlight.

However, despite the prevalence of the .NET platform on Windows and in the enterprise, Silverlight has had a problem gaining traction across the web. With the exception of the Olympics and a few other live broadcasts, you almost never see Silverlight used on the web.

Likewise, the number of desktop applications built using Silverlight are nascent in comparison to the growing number of Adobe Aira applications. Aside from Seesmic Desktop, it’s hard to think of any cross-platform apps that are built using Silverlight.

All the while, Microsoft is increasingly embracing HTML5. The company’s recent launch of Internet Explorer 9 beta was promoted using a number of different HTML5-specific web pages and promotions. Silverlight may not have been mentioned much during PDC, but HTML5 certainly was.

It’s clear that Microsoft — like Adobe, Apple and Google — sees that HTML5 is the technology that will work across the broadest stretch of devices — and more importantly, will work on future devices.

Yes, the W3C has stated that the HTML5 spec isn’t yet ready for full use, and in a broad, global sense, this is true. However, when you look at the types of devices that individuals will be buying today and tomorrow, and not the device they already own, it’s clear that HTML5 is the technology that is going to have built-in support.

As a technology, Silverlight has a lot of promise and we think it is still interesting. Still, we can’t help but think Microsoft is making a better strategic move to focus on HTML5 as its cross-platform solution going forward.

Facebook Founder and Chief Executive Office Mark Zuckerberg describes Facebook as a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, families and coworkers.  Indeed, Facebook is so much more than a social network. As a social utility, it changes the dynamics of relationships, how we communicate with one another, and how we discover, share and learn. Facebook and Social Media are redesigning the information super highway, forever altering how information travels and how people connect. The world is literally becoming a much smaller place and as a result, businesses are forced to compete for attention where it’s focused. Otherwise, the concepts of Digital Darwinism and the need to Engage or Die most certainly become reality – out of sight, out of mind.

If Facebook is a social utility then we can use it to engage, to foster a thriving community where its denizens expect information to find them. The future of business is social and it’s giving rise to a new genre of connected consumers who are becoming influential in their own right.

As a platform, Facebook invites businesses to build a presence and design an engagement architecture that introduces a new opportunity to also grow in prominence and connections, thus defining, and socializing, the next chapter in business. A chapter where commonplace terms such as share, like, comment, and add become the pillars for triggering a social tsunami of meaningful business touchpoints and outcomes.

From E-Commerce to F-Commerce

It’s not about simply having a presence, it’s about fostering relationships with people and the varying contingents of consumerism they represent.

As such, Facebook brings to the life the need to integrate a 5th P into the marketing mix, People. And, with the rise of the social consumer,  Facebook and social media in general, also introduce a new “C” into the four C’s of community, Commerce.

While it may appear that we’re progressing through the alphabet here, from “E” to “F,” Facebook represents an important platform to engage and activate the social consumer. F-commerce is the ability to execute transactions in Facebook without leaving the network or leveraging the open graph by integrating Facebook into traditional site-based e-commerce platforms. And more importantly, it ties each transaction to the social graph. With each exchange, an update is broadcast to the news feed of their contacts. This potentially sparks a social effect and ultimately may influence impressions and decisions over time.

For example, Levi’s introduced a “Friends Store” on its website which showcases the jeans that your friends have liked and also allows you to share the jeans you “like.” This introduces a peer-to-peer influence model where we influence and are influenced by those we trust. Levi’s is betting the denim that the more we interact within its Friends Store, the more people we will be introduced to it simply through our interaction. Doing so creates a bridge between the web and social web, content and relationships, thus socializing the objects that move us.

The natural step for Levi’s is to also recreate that experience within Facebook. With Facebook Tabs, the opportunity to create a Friends Store within Facebook exists now as does the means to introduce a sophisticated, engaging, and fully-functional storefront. There is debate as to why brands would willfully sacrifice traffic to its dotcom. In my experience, this comes down to the unique touchpoints that connect brands to traditional consumers and social consumers respectively. With the social consumer, attention comes at a premium and there are great advantages in capturing attention where and when it’s focused.

1-800-Flowers.com hosts a shoplet within Facebook where consumers can browse through arrangements and order without leaving Facebook.

Earlier this year, P&G experimented with a storefront for Pantene, where consumers could purchase products before they were introduced in stores. Not only did this approach integrate F-commerce into the social equation, it satisfied two of the top reasons consumers consistently report why they “follow” and “like” brands in social media: access to exclusive products and rewards or discounts as a benefit of the connection.

ALT-TAB

As in computing,  hitting the keys “ALT TAB” allows us to switch the windows we have open on the desktop. In Facebook, Tabs unlock Facebook’s customization features. Whereas storefronts can take residence as a designated destination within the Facebook brand page, additional tabs can offer discrete engagement opportunities to appeal to the diverse roles of social consumers.  Like traditional web sites, tabs are the social web pages for dedicated experiences. And, not everything has to be related to marketing or promotions.

While we see many companies using tabs to increase Likes through contests and promotions, the effect of tabs are limited only by vision, creativity, and execution.Most notably, each tab can assume the position of a landing page which is intended to visualize the most current initiatives for each brand whether it’s aimed at existing or new “likes” or both. Meaning, tabs are assignable as landing pages, rather than sending people directly to The Wall, where specific content, stories, or programs are presented upon visiting the brand page.

The Facebook presence architected by Dunkin’ Donuts is designed to serve a variety of business objectives. The current landing page is promoting the “Ultimate DD Coffee Fan Contest.”

Just to the right of the this tab, DD presents Marice, a creative application that brings an espresso bean to life and encourages you to customize messages to send to friends.

To encourage customer advocacy and loyalty, DD includes a landing page for its DDPerks program. Again, the experience is maintained within Facebook. This program can scale should DD desire, to include an all-inclusive database that allows customers to access their DD account in Facebook.

I should also note, that DD also uses the left side of the page to recognize its fan of the week. Spotlighting customers is among the most appreciated and effective social sparks that ignite beneficial sharing and conversations.

This is merely a small taste of what’s possible with the structured customization Facebook supports. Perhaps one of the most understated aspects of tabs is that FBML supports website analytics code from major publishers. In my work, we often use Google Analytics to measure the activity of each page and how visitors interact and travel to and from the Brand Page.

Ford set a new standard this year when it officially announced its new Explorer models exclusively on Facebook rather than via a traditional industry auto show. Designed specifically for Facebook, Ford’s Reveal told a human story, led by the people who helped create the new line of Explorers. The customized tab served as the social epicenter for Ford around the launch, and each hour throughout the day, new content was introduced. Ads, Websites, etc, all pointed to Facebook and thus, triggered the social effect that sparked conversations, reactions, and traditional buzz both online and offline. Ford’s head of Social Media states that the Reveal campaign outperformed a Super Bowl in terms of reach, presence, and activity for a fraction of the price.

Madison Ave. is Moving to California Ave.

Contrary to popular opinion, Facebook ads do indeed work. In fact, when designed with relevance to specific social graphs and actively managed, Facebook ads perform extremely well. As in anything, there are best practices that one can follow, but in the end, it takes an intrinsic understanding of the people you’re trying to reach and what compels them to click, understanding that in a network where people are at the center of their own egosystem, personalization and incentives serve as pivotal social hooks. Remember, it’s not about who Likes you today, it’s about reaching those individuals who represent tomorrow’s Likes. And, it’s perpetual.

I’m currently running a diverse ad campaign for a client where each of the pages on the Brand Page benefits from a series of ads designed to spark interest in designated content and experience inherent within each. For this program, we created a rotating campaign of 29 pieces of engaging creative that changes weekly or every other week – depending on performance. I might add that we are on a tight budget, so conversions are key to ensuring the longevity of the program. Thus, I monitor conversions not only from clicks to Likes (C2L), but also conversions of Likes to Actions (L2A). Each page is intended to spur a unique action and is embedded in the experience. Using conversion science, we can change or enhance ads and each tab to improve performance.

Realizing that Likes and engagement trigger the social effect, companies like Starbucks employ a 360 strategy to improve the vibrancy and presence of its social Brand Page.

1. Create a unique experience that appeals to a variety of social consumers

2. Advertise to increase Likes, engagements, and actions

3. Maintain an active editorial and programming calendar that earns Likes and fosters and rewards engagement

4. Engage!

This recipe is good enough to earn Starbucks the number 10 spot for Liked brands on Facebook according to Fan Page List with over 16 million Likes.

In the social web, no brand is an island. It is the responsibility of businesses now to build bridges between attention, value, and relationships. Facebook provides a powerful platform to host lively branded hubs that effectually connect social consumers.   It should not go unsaid. To succeed in business, it is necessary to host active presences on both the Web and the social web. The reality is that our audiences are unique and the traditional and social consumer is motivated and influenced uniquely. It is our job to earn their attention, their business, and ultimately their loyalty and advocacy however and wherever their attention is focused. The question is however, once you have their attention, what are you going to do with it?

Get Putting the Public Back in Public Relations and The Conversation Prism:

Image Credit: Shutterstock