Creative thinking requires a creative climate
Posted on | January 17, 2011 | No Comments
Helge Tennø wrote a good post “There is not enough creativity in strategy” on how the traditional strategy process may need some re-thinking. He suggests that:
…a strategic process often starts with the demand and then sets of to find all the answers in a straight line – you write an interview guide before asking anybody even one question, so you wall your search in between these limitations of what to explore and which outcome to look for – Not allowing for the event where the first question to the first person might completely turn everything on its head.
The traditional strategic process is essentially geared to finding the same answers every time.
I completely agree with this view. Adding to the creativity, what you often need is speed as well. Online conversations are fast-paced. Issues arise quickly and so do unforeseen opportunities, which are lost just as fast. In this environment there is no time to rewind all the way to the beginning of the traditional planning process and start all over again. What you actually often need is very quick and creative response to what is currently happening. Getting lost in the details can make keeping things simple quite hard. And indeed, many times simple things make the difference. The KISS (keep it simple, stupid!) principle can be applied to strategic planning too.
As Tennø writes, the creative and strategic process needs to develop and explore solutions together. Sticking to the already existing ways of working and processes may slow you down considerably and actually prevent you from seeing opportunities outside the solutions you are limited to in the traditional thinking.
Creating a creative climate requires freedom, motivation, challenge, empowerment and fun among other things. Making assumptions, over-reliance on logic, fear of failure and following the rules can sometimes be your worst enemy – prevent you from seeing anything outside the traditional thinking process and moving fast at the same time.
Tags: conversation > creativity > empowerment > fun > marketing > motivation > planning > strategy
Happiness is contagious
Posted on | January 14, 2011 | No Comments
Happiness is a fundamental part of human existence, like empathy, altruism, love, hate and fear. Happiness is something that all of us try to reach. The word “happiness” and doing good in general has been used more and more in the past few years in the context of business and marketing. I suggest you read an excellent post by a colleague Dan Goodall on the topic. Building on that thought, Umair Haque argues that
Here’s the score: Striving to do more good is associated with greater profitability, equity and asset returns, and shareholder value creation
For sure profit is where the bottom line is for businesses. But what does doing good or “delivering happiness” actually mean especially from the social perspective?
First you would need to understand what constructs happiness. Social psychologists and sociologists too have taken many different approaches to this. There are two different paradigms that aim at explaining what constructs happiness or well-being: The theories that focus specifically on predicting happiness as the outcome variable and theories that focus on the related constructs of what happiness is made of.
In research, many attributes have been pointed out to correlate with happiness such as social interaction, extraversion, marital status, employment, health, democratic freedom, optimism and so on. I can recommend reading Cultural constructions of happiness: theory and emprical evidence, if you want to learn more. However, no matter what attributes of happiness or which cultural background you take, one thing is clear: Relationships are consistently found to be the most important correlation with human happiness.
What’s most interesting in this is that several studies have pointed out that happiness is actually contagious. A widely cited long-standing study published in the British Medical Journal aimed at evaluating if happiness can spread from person to person and if niches of happiness form within social networks. The study findings summarize:
While there are many determinants of happiness, whether an individual is happy also depends on whether others in the individual’s social network are happy. Happy people tend to be located in the centre of their local social networks and in large clusters of other happy people. The happiness of an individual is associated with the happiness of people up to three degrees removed in the social network. Happiness, in other words, is not merely a function of individual experience or individual choice but is also a property of groups of people.
People’s happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected. This provides further justification for seeing happiness, as a collective phenomenon. This gives an interesting insight to businesses: Happiness spreads, right, so what should you concentrate on? Making people happy? Sounds pretty obvious, but it’s easier said than done. On the other hand now that the world is more connected through the various networks on the web, there are more opportunities for happiness or unhappiness to spread.
What is key in the earlier mentioned study is that the researchers reported that happiness spreads more consistently than unhappiness. I suppose you’ve noticed that if you walk into a store where the staff is energetic, smiling and seemingly in a good mood it sticks on you even after you have left the store. This would indicate that you should concentrate on the happy people: they will talk more about their positive experience, they are loyal and even help you in marketing your product.
The unhappy people shouldn’t be forgotten about either though as they are the ones who can be very vocal about their negative experience. Everyone probably has experienced the feeling of doing business with people who are negative or apathetic and how that negativity can get stuck on you and prevent you from seeing the positives.
Which actually brings up another interesting question central to comprehensive positive psychology: Why are some people happier than others? That’ll be worth another blog post in the near future 
Tags: happiness > marketing > positive psychology > social network analysis > social psychology
What exactly does a community manager do?
Posted on | January 11, 2011 | 14 Comments
Inspired by a post by Lee Odden at the TopRank Blog, I wrote a few words about my experience as a community manager. I’ve been doing all sorts of community management tasks for quite a while now starting from some sneaker forums back in the day (yes I am a sneaker freaker!) through heading up various blogs to my current role as a community manager here at Nokia.
I really do community management only about 30% of my time. In addition to that, I’m also the editor in chief for all the channels I manage, head up planning and social strategy for certain areas, write guidelines and policies, consult global marketing campaign projects as well as write the occasional blog post too on a company blog.
Even if my role involves a lot of planning and looking ahead on what to do next, I believe, like mentioned in the very first post, that in order to have any clue on how to create fantastic digital marketing, you absolutely have to know what is going out there, get your hands dirty and join the other people on the internet.
Besides, I love the part of my job where I get to talk to people, so complaining there! Obviously this all is not done by me only, but with my virtual team of fellow community managers and product experts such as @suryasnair, @haikus, @ovisteven and @davisatnokia in addition to fantastic people from @1000heads.
A community manager wears a wide variety of hats including customer relations, marketing including planning and execution, PR and communications, event planning, writing, tech support, metrics and insights expert, someone who tries to decipher legal texts into something that makes sense to us mere mortals outside the legal department too, to an internal lobbyist who tirelessly goes on about the importance of listening to what the customer has to say and forgets themselves sitting in front of their laptop staring at tweets and Facebook wall posts rolling in.
Needless to say that a role like this requires passion, heaps of it. Blaise Grimes-Viort wrote an excellent post about this earlier where he captures the same thing very well. Here’s a snippet from his post:
…you need to have a basic passion for people, and helping them interact with each other and the positive experience your brand is promoting to them. Investigating all the shades of grey in human communication must be something you are naturally pulled towards.
What’s equally important that the the traditional “Ad Men” are not a good fit for a role like this. The traditional advertising or marketing guy created fab ads on TV or newspapers, later on flashy microsites and flew over to Cannes to get the prize and have a glass of bubbly and moved on to the next project. Now, this does not really work anymore when we are talking about communities on the web.
A community manager is not the one who wants to stand under the spotlight, he or she puts their community first. It is about helping people to connect and the community grow, which does not happen overnight. You need to be an absolute team player and walk the extra mile for the community, not for yourself. Of course the big campaign bangs are needed too, but for them to succeed, you need to have your “base” in good shape.
To get to the original point, a glimpse of my day, not a typical one as every day is so very different. On the underground to work: checking RSS, news, tweets, FB wall posts, alerts etc to get an overview of what’s been going on while I was sleeping. The rest of the day consists of (in random order): working on Twitter RT-ing, responding or assigning tweets to product area experts, looking through FB comments and wall posts, approving/responding to blog comments if there are any. Making calls to different teams in case there has been issues, emailing to customer care and product teams about issues or feedback. Occasionally consulting PR department with responses. Agreeing on schedules and writing copy with the team. Talking with marketing campaign people about upcoming campaigns and social integration. Participating into various internal and external tool and platform development projects. Thinking about the strategy and where to go next. Testing out new apps, services & things both our own and others. Meeting up with digital marketing or developer agencies to take projects further. Working on metrics and related processes with the metrics and analytics people and taking that insight further in the organization. Planning and organizing events from time to time. Trying to make Nokia employees get involved on these channels.
…and just generally coming up with something fun that my community would like. The list could go on and on. Sometimes you are so busy that you’d like to multiply yourself at least by three, but then you also get to do a wide variety of things – just the way I like it.
Tags: advertising > campaign > community > digital > marketing > passion > social
What brands are made of
Posted on | January 9, 2011 | No Comments
According to Wikipedia a brand can be defined as:
… the identity of a specific product, service, or business. A brand can take many forms, including a name, sign, symbol, color combination or slogan.
The key word in Wikipedia’s definition of a brand is identity: An identity is something that is established by an individual (or an organization), but reinforced by the communities they belong to. This applies to both people and brands. Some people have a bigger, some smaller influence on who you are. Nonetheless everyone is affected by the people they spend time with, admire or despise, love or hate.
The identity of a product or a company is validated by people who find some meaning and value in it, be it positive or negative. Brands are living things and should evolve as the world with peers, supporters and haters evolve. The relationships with people and other organizations are therefore the most valuable asset a brand can have. A identity does not survive in a vacuum.
“Brands are made of people”, is something many social strategists have repeated for a relatively long time now. This is something that has really sunk in with the marketing people in the past couple of years. As a result, everyone wants to be a part of “social media” and “do” social media, because that’s the thing you should do, right? The concrete outcome of that often is perhaps an ad-blast on Facebook, a campaign site with a tweet button, or maybe creation of branded profiles on various social networking services without really thinking the why, what and how first.
Now, imagine meeting someone you know very little about over coffee. They’ve wanted to meet you and you are curious to get to know that new person, even if you haven’t paid much attention to them before. You have a cup of coffee and all that time you hear the other person talking about themselves, how great they are doing and how absolutely fabulous their life is – to the extent that you are annoyed. They never even asked how you are. Eventually you actually start wondering if there’s something seriously wrong about that person’s life as they go about boosting their own ego. Needless to say, you will avoid any of their future contact attempts.
Same applies for a brand’s presence on social networking services. You have to acknowledge the fact that all the venues are unique and all the people you meet as a brand have a unique point of view and standing point. Like in a normal conversation, you want listen in addition to talking, right? That way you’ll actually know what’s interesting to the community you are addressing.
Not only shouting your sales message, even if that should be done from time to time, you would have to respect that you actually often are entering people’s personal and private zone, when you address them on a social networking service. Some places obviously are naturally more open to this than others, but you will need to learn the unwritten rules – just like in every day life.
Obviously it goes without saying that you have to weigh in what you’ve said and done in the past to know if your message resonates with the community, i.e. measure if the conversations meet your AND the other participants’ needs and objectives. All this is far away from a time-boxed campaign and takes time to build.
Sadly companies looking for short-term wins, only having the present quarter in mind, will loose on the long term. These companies have often fail to see the ROI ever to materialize.
Tags: brand > community > facebook > identity > nokia > ovi by nokia > people > relationship > roi > social
Which came first: technological or social change?
Posted on | January 2, 2011 | 1 Comment
A side project I’ve been working on lately has challenged me to do some thinking on how us humans construct our lives and especially the social side of it. While you could take an unlimited numer of starting points for this, one of the most interesting debate is the technological determinism versus social determinism – a true chicken and egg type of question.
Do advancements in technology shape the way our social structure and relationships are formed on the web or is it the changes in people’s behavior online that drive the change in technology?
Technological determinism is a reductionist theory that presumes that a society’s technology drives the development of its social structure and cultural values. Social determinism is the hypothesis that social interactions and constructs alone to determine individual behavior as opposed to technological advancements for example. Marshall McLuhan argues that the new electronic media is changing the way people think, act, and feel. McLuhan believes that the inventions in technology invariably cause cultural change. McLuhan’s famous saying “The medium is the message”, implies that the communication channels we use are the primary cause of cultural change.
Social determinism, which is often referred to as the counterpart of technological determinism, perceives technology as a result of the society in which it is developed. A number of contemporary media theorists have provided quite persuasive accounts of social determinism, including Lelia Green.
This is especially interesting if you think of the ways the market forces work. To build a technology product you need finance. The finance can really only come from previously implemented ideas that have become popular i.e. the community has accepted them. Something that is not well-designed, properly built or do not fit the needs of the target audience, will not fly. With this thought in mind you could conclude that technology can’t be autonomous.
I am, if you did not guess yet, more in favor of the latter point of view, but obviously the question is not that black and white. Rather than focusing on this, maybe a more interesting point would be to examine people’s social constructs though social network analysis. Social network analysis, or rather theory as it’s become a paradigm of it’s own, does not assume that groups are the building blocks of society. The approach is open to studying less-bounded social systems, from communities to links on the web.
Rather than treating individuals or organizations as discrete units of analysis, it focuses on how the structure of ties affects individuals and their relationships. Social network theory does not suggest that social norms determines behavior – it focuses on the importance of relationships between people or organizations rather than the attributes of the individual actors implies that the social structure and composition have an effect on the individuals’ relationships.
Technology is not “just technology”- in isolation of the context. It is a combination of what is possible in a time and what is desirable in a certain socio-historic context.
Tags: culture > lelia greene > marshall mcluhan > social determinism > social network > society > technological determinism > technology
The about post
Posted on | December 15, 2010 | 1 Comment
Hi there! In this blog I ‘m planning to writ about the things I’m passionate about: the cross-roads of the web, sociology, social psychology, marketing and maybe some other things too, who knows.
I’m passionate about many other things too, like snowboarding, especially exploring the untouched powder in the mountains far away from the hustle of every-day life. I couldn’t live without music or pretty sneakers, well I could theoretically, but I don’t want to really. Friends and family are the most important thing in my life.
I work at Nokia with Digital Marketing. My role is a a mixture of strategic social media planning and day-to-day community management among other things. I believe that “getting your hands dirty” is the key to building an executable and sustainable strategy.
This is not my first blog: I’ve been writing a blog in Finnish, my mother tongue, for quite a while and blogging for work too for some years.
Glad you stopped by! Feel free to connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn.