Ben Edwards gives BBS Keynote on Branding, plays hilarious Mainframe video

Corporate branding in the age of YouTube, the Keynote today by Ben Edwards. My usual stream of consciousness was running through my fingers onto the keyboard. Be sure to check out the video:

• Ben spent ages (14 years) working as a print journalist, and moved to “digital publishing” at IBM when he had a small epiphany about the future of print media - it’s on a downward trend.
• What is New Media Communications? Ben tells us: ignore the corporate “gobbledy-goop” up on the screen, I use this slideshow for boring audiences. The slide says “Establish social media skills among IBM Communcations teams around the world. Develop enterprise applications for these seocial media capabilities across all communications disciplines…”
• There is a huge potential, Ben thinks, to destroy costs by adopting social media.
• Ben throws up a number of statistics on the screen - social media adoption is going nuts - BlogCentral has a zillion recorded users, YouTube has 200,000 uploaded videos per day (YoutTube number is real).
• He hates to say it at a blogging conference, but the fastest growing new tool is the Wiki - he shows a chart of Wikicentral registered users that shows just over 0 in December 05 and just about 60,000 by this August.
• Social media are not about the technology. It’s how you use it.
• I like this one: Socil media should not be thought of as new “channels” for distributing existing content and messages. They’re fundamentally different because they have different economics and different audience expectations.
• A new slide: The New Communications Paradigm - it divvies up the Mass Media and Social Media attributes of Marketing, Communications, etc. The basic concept: the fundamental paradigm has changed - we’ve gone to low-cost, active-engagement, individual publishing.
• You need to attract your audience with the value of your content - *ding* he’s right.
• Ben played us a hilarious video. Here’s the YouTube link.

So, on to branding:

• Brands began as symbols of product quality and consistency. Then they began to be symbols of consumer identity.
• Now brands are more about symbols of social aspirations (BP just re-branded to be “beyond petroleum”).
• The prevailing orthodoxy: companies no longer have “control” over the brand. Ben thinks that companies lost control of the brands ages ago, when they became symbols of social aspirations - after all, he says, who controls those aspirations?
• Where is Kodak on FlickR? Good question - get with it boys.
• Users have increased influence on creating and sharing the brand in social media because they are themselves publishers. It used to be a simple relationship between the corporation and the customer’s wallet, with a little bit of mass media thrown in. No longer.
• How are brands doing on YouTube? Cool question. Turns out that people are re-publishing in about four ways:
  • Celebrating the brand
  • Mocking the brand
  • Mashing up the brand with other brands
  • Making a brand perform strange and unnatural acts
• Mass Media didn’t offer a lot of opportunity to listen - just focus groups basically - but new media lets employees, shareholders, customers, suppliers, and partners all publishing about the brand.
• Ben thinks we have a shot at making our brands more secure and healthy - we need to make brands available to everyone, don’t try to segment your audience. Because everyone can publish, you, as a corporation, are “naked” - so the brand has to become something that everyone can relate to and feel comfortable with.
• Listening is probably the big point in making brands stronger. Listen to what employees are saying about the brand. Listen to customers and shareholders and everyone else.
• Question: how do you bring these ideas and these technologies into the fold in a large organization. Answer: It’s certainly difficult - people tend to get angry about social media because they perceive it as a threat. The way to approach it is to be humble - don’t rub it in people’s faces, don’t be arrogant about it, just present it in very practical ways. Bring up Instant Messaging, how it flowered up outside the corporate area but ended up being useful there.
• Question: How does IBM re-spend their ad dollars to put their new brand out in new ways? Answer: Well, there is an increasing awareness that IBM’s ad budget is mis-allocated. They don’t have the resources to create really experimental stuff. Ben really wants to liberate great stories at IBM, and so they need great storytellers, and people that really understand and appreciate business. That combination is rare and difficult to find, so there’s a real “supply bottleneck.” A lot of companies don’t know where to spend their new money.