Stars in our eyes - Ideablob award to Atlanta entrepreneur

Thanks to my friend, Mike Schinkel, I spent last Friday evening at a cool little awards ceremony hosted at the Fernbank Science Center.   The event was a special gathering to recognize a local entrepreneur and PhD candidate, Jessica Hammock, and to present her with a photo-op-ready oversized check for $10,000 to help her lauch her new business idea.   Jessica is developing a business, called Project Epiphany, to help urban kids learn about astronomy and give them a chance to do real field observations with professional equipment and far enough outside the city lights to be able to actually see something in the night sky.   Sounds like a great idea, and it is one of many businesses receiving funding through an innovative program inspired and funded by Advanta, called Ideablob.   In their own words:

Ideablob.com is a community of small business owners and entrepreneurs who bounce ideas off each other. They give feedback, advice and much-needed encouragement. Every month, the community votes on the best idea. The winner gets $10,000 to help their idea grow.

Check out their site and join in to congratulate and support Jessica Hammock, our local winner.

Dancing + Chewing Gum = Joy, Courage and Leadership

I’d like to thank Jennifer A. Jones and Dan Greenfield for calling to my attention a wonderful video and a great story that I feel demonstrates the best of what branding should be.

A fellow named Matt Harding has been traveling the world and marking each location visited with a short video of himself doing a silly dance. Sometimes he dances alone and sometimes he dances with the local people. It is simple, charming, beautiful and joyous. At this point about 6 million+ viewers on YouTube seem to agree.

But there is a little bit more to the story. It turns out that Mr. Harding’s former employer, Stride Gum, has taken on the role of sponsor for this remarkable project. Stunningly, they have not plastered their name and logo all over the video. Matt wears no Stride apparel. The song played on the video is not a corporate anthem. It doesn’t even look like Matt is chewing gum! The only mention of Stride is in a simple thank you graphic at the very end of the video. This is GREAT branding. Instead of trying to “own” the project, Stride is content to lets it happen. Instead of trying to milk the publicity, Stride lets the message spread - and boy is it spreading! By all the standards of conventional wisdom, by all the instincts of the old marketing, this was a risky, even reckless, act. But marketing is changing, and what this project has shown us is that a sincere message, an expression of values, IS important, and if we have the courage to present such a message with integrity people will respond. As Dan points out, “…I am writing about a chewing gum company now.” By all measures this has been a great path for Stride - sales are up, market share is increasing, and awareness is on the rise, or as Jennifer states it, “Clearly, the goofy dance is moving the needle.”

I think also that by recognizing Matt Harding as a leader, and by leaving him essentially unfettered by the usual corporate billboarding, Stride Gum has shown itself to be a leader. We can’t help but assume that the positive values demonstrated in the video: joy, hope, and a global generosity of spirit, are values shared by the sponsor who has supported the production with such humble integrity.

Tell me a story

We are born with a craving for stories.   Ask any parent if their kids ever ask them to read them a report or a product sheet or a market study - of course not, but “tell me a story”, that’s a common refrain.   As adults we may not climb into a lap to ask for a story, but we’re wired for them just the same.   Yesterday, I had the good fortune to sit in on a presentation by Mike Wittenstein of Storyminers.  Mike is a great storyteller, but more importantly he helps people to see the importance of story as a means of making a connection with people.  For us so-called grown-ups, “What do you do?”  is the common refrain, but Mike reminded me that what is really being asked for is that same “tell me story” from childhood.

What if the next time someone asks you that question you answer with a story, instead of the usual 30 second commercial?   Try a real story about one of your customers, and describe the journey taken in working with you.  Set the stage by  talking about the client’s situation and the emotional state it caused.  Talk about the problems solved and the changing circumstances that came as a result.  Finally, bring on the “happily ever after” - share the client’s success and happiness that were the outcome of working with you.  Find the compelling beginning, middle and end and you may find that talking about someone else’s experience is an effective way of communicating your own abilities.

where personal branding and technology meet

Just wanted to point you to a nice interview on Dan Schawbel’s blog with Sarah Lacy, journalist and author of Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0.  Sarah comes across as very down to earth and drops some great branding thoughts as she discusses her career and her opportunity to interview some of the innovators and success stories of Web 2.0.  Here are a few gems that jumped out at me:

” That’s the most lasting way to build a brand, one relationship at a time.”

” It just takes building your credibility and trust over time. Put another way: your brand within your small sphere is crucial to build before you can build any sort of larger brand in the world.”

and my favorite

“And second, business reporting done well are just stories about people. People love stories about people.”

Thanks Sarah and Dan for sharing this people story!

If you vote with soda do you call that a straw poll?

Who says branding can’t be fun… and political?  Take a lesson from Jones Soda, the oft-feted purveyors of oddball limited edition flavors and arty labels, the folks that make news every Thanksgiving with the arresting annual appearance of turkey and gravy soda. Yup, them. Well the Joneses may have outdone themselves now, and managed to rewrite the rules of political pollstering in the process. Check out http://www.campaigncola.com/ for “Capitol Hillary Cola” “Pure McCain Cola” and, of course, the Obama-inspired “Yes We Can Cola”. Cast your vote, and call your dentist. Friends, you just can’t make this stuff up.

where branding and technology meet… and lay an egg

Google has done more for the practice of branding today than any other company in the world (sorry Coke). The findability of virtually everything has magnified the end consumer’s strength in the power relationship of a brand. More than any other company we can thank Google for that. Google also has been a model example of letting function lead form and creating alignment of the brand message with the delivery of the core product. It also managed to make a goofy logo, cute, friendly and meaningful to billions of people - to the point where Google’s holiday and special occasion logo variations are celebrated by faithful followers.

So Google, what’s up with the new favicon?

Lowercase “g”? Where did that come from? And why the circle with the predictable, Web2.0ish shadow? OK the main Google logo was never going to win any design awards, but really is a gray egg the best you could come up with?

Atlanta should skip Web 2.0

I love Atlanta. I’ve been here for almost 12 years and I think it is a great city. We’ve got millions of people,  great neighborhoods, great restaurants,  a major airport, lots of free wi-fi, plenty of diverse businesses, a healthy laptop per capita ratio in any coffee shop you should happen to wander into, but somehow I think that Atlanta is not living up to its potential as a great center for web innovation.   And I don’t think I am alone in this opinion.

I’m not saying there is no innovation here, but I think as a city we are a little behind the times.  I offer as example the reluctant adoption of Web 2.0 in Atlanta.  Web 2.0 as both  a term and a practice seems to have only grudgingly been accepted in the Atlanta business world.   Sure, there is a growing pool of adopters leading the charge at events like SoCon07 and 08, AWE, and Barcamp, but to call them early adopters would only be accurate in a geographically limited definition.  They’re early for Georgia, but not for the world.  I’d like to see that change.

I think Atlanta should skip Web 2.0.  Not skip as in miss, but skip as in skip ahead.  Instead of playing perpetual catch-up with innovation centers like Silicon Valley, Seattle, Boston and NY, we should leap-frog those places and boldly invest in our time, money, thoughts and effort in redefining the context of the Internet.  The web has become the plumbing of our lives. Business is changing, marketing is changing, socializing is changing, lines are blurring, but we drag our feet and take incremental steps toward ideas that come to us from the west coast.

There are people in this town who would like to see Atlanta at the center of the discourse - a legitimate force in shaping our collective destinies through technology and its catalytic effect on human interaction.  And there is no reason why we can’t be, but we won’t get there by being a follower.  We need to figure out what Web 4.0 is, or 5.0, or maybe dare to embrace a term that isn’t Web x.x anything, but something new, something ambitious, something risky.  We might look silly, but we also may find a point of view, a value, a context that re-centers the discourse.

Let’s start talking.

“Soulful Excellence”

That’s a nice pairing of words; “soulful excellence”.  Highly evocative, together they smack of quality and emotion, like art - not clinical quality, like a spreadsheet.  So few pairings of words smack of anything so I just had to point them out.  I wish I could say they were mine, but alas credit must go to the remarkable Joey Reiman who uttered that phrase yesterday during a presentation for the Technology Association of Georgia’s Enterprise 2.0 Society. Yesterday we had a fabulous meeting featuring Mr. Reiman, Thinker & CEO and Elizabeth Clubb, Thinker & CSO, of BrightHouse.

Perhaps even more remarkable than the phrase itself is that it was used in the context of discussing new enterprise technology solutions.   The social computing mindset is different: powerful and enabling and dangerous to old modes of thinking.  It is changing the way we brand and the way we work.  They are becoming one. “Soulful Excellence” is evidence of that.  Chew on that phrase and watch out for more.

Don’t build a better mousetrap

Sometimes the good stuff leaps out at you during a random phone call. Tonight it was from my good friend David Bailey, a source of many gems, but this one I particularly liked. So, with his permission:

If your customer has a mouse, don’t build the better mousetrap. Just trap that mouse.

Don’t just focus on what you can do. Focus on solving your customer’s problem.

I couldn’t have said it better myself

Just wanted to share two great quotes from a terrific article: “Can You Say What Your Strategy Is?” by David J. Collis and Michael G. Rukstad in this month’s Harvard Business Review. The first is the teaser for the article:

“It’s a dirty little secret: Most executives cannot articulate the objective, scope, and advantage of their business in a simple statement. If they can’t, neither can anyone else.”

Although the article is discussing strategy statements I think this speaks to the vital importance of brand positioning and the all-to-common void of clarity in this area from the corner office on down the line. The second quote points to the solution by affirming the power of well-chosen words to act as a catalyst for brand alignment:

“A 35-word statement can have a substantial impact on a company’s success…. Spending the time to develop the few words that truly capture your strategy and that will energize and empower your people will raise the long-term financial performance of your organization.”

– Can You Say What Your Strategy Is? by Collis and Rukstad, Harvard Business Review, Vol.86 No.4, April 2008

I love it!