Influential Marketing Blog

Survive The Modern Believability Crisis: Be Meaningful

Last year when I spoke at a TEDx conference on reinventing marketing, I asked what I thought at the time was a relatively innocent question: "how many people in the audience feel that marketing is adding something positive to the world around them?" Of the few hands that went up, the majority came from people in marketing ... underscoring a gulf that has exponentially multipled in the 16 months since that talk. Today people around the world are launching full occupying demonstrations against big corporate brands and new research points to the US as the only country to see trust in all institutions decline from 2010 to 2011.  The bottom line is we are fully into a modern believability crisis.

And it is not just a crisis for marketing people either. When we live in a world where people become skeptical of everything around them and wary of any type of manipulation, we all lose. Society itself becomes a tougher place to interact with others and survive in. People only consume news they agree with, compromise is seen as surrender and the bickering of politicians becomes just a precursor to a similar toxic dissent which may start to invade the rest of our lives and interactions. 

If this seems like a doomsday scenario, the good news is that this week signs of hope emerged from some very unexpected places:

Though certainly colored by politics, Bill Clinton's new book Back To Work was profiled in yesterday's New York Times. In the review, reporter Michiko Kakutani says that Clinton "serves up a succinct common-sense argument for why America needs a strong national government, why both spending cuts and increased tax revenues are necessary for addressing the debt problem."

Also this week, communications agency Havas Media released a global study which showed that "only 20% of brands have a notable positive impact on our sense of wellbeing and quality of life." In the research which polled 50,000 people in 14 countries, they found that "most people would not care if 70% of brands ceased to exist (and in the US alone this number goes up to 82%)."

In a related point, they found that "nearly 85% of consumers worldwide expect companies to become actively involved in solving these issues (an increase of 15% from 2010)." The underlying message of the research is that companies must find a way to stand for more than just the products they make.  The impact they have on the world around them is becoming increasingly important to increasing customer loyalty.

Today I am speaking and participating in BrandsConf, a conference all about how brands can rediscover their humanity. More than two dozen speakers will share their thoughts in short bursts of 5 or 10 minutes each on how to add more humanity to the way that large organizations communicate. It could not have come at a better time. This idea of more human brands is closely related to why companies matter more to people.  Yes, a big part of it is how you choose to do business in the world and whether it is sustainable and responsible.  The other important piece, however, is the people who represent your brand and the human connection they can offer.

The real battle today isn't one of perception ... but one of meaning. In a sense, this is the big problem I am writing a book about how to solve (Likeonomics) - and one that the many speakers today will likely cover. Ultimately solving it will require a new level of organizational vulnerability and commitment for them to be more human and more honest. Honesty creates trust, and trust leads to us changing the culture of business and our culture itself.

I saw this first hand last week at the Opportunity Nation Summit as well, where business, religious, political and media leaders came together to talk about the importance for all of us to create a nation of opportunity for everyone. For too long, as the summit shared, the zip code you are born in determines our future. That shouldn't be the case.  Business has an important role to play in this revolution ... and it isn't to sit back and let the attacks fly.

In a skeptical world where honesty has become the most unexpected thing of all ... making your brand meaningful to your consumer's life comes first from finding a way to tell the truth when you answer the question of whether you are offering anything positive to the world. Being meaningful is the new secret to creating long term brand value.

What Steve Jobs Really Gave Us

A few weeks ago I was asked an interesting question about what inspires me.  As I thought about my answer, I realized that for me it isn't a person but rather an action that I find most inspirational.  The people around the world who have an idea and decide to do something about it deserve to be celebrated. Entrepreneurship itself is the thing that I find most inspirational. 

Last night as I was watching all the media coverage honoring Steve Jobs and his life, it got me thinking that perhaps his biggest impact on the world wasn't just the products that he helped create, but rather in showing the world just how much people can achieve when they are inspired. Inspiration itself can be like that - a lightning rod that takes an army of smart people and helps them create something real. To me, his power to inspire came down to three things:

1. Passion - By all reports of the people who worked with him, he lived and breathed the products that his company would work on. He would call engineers in the middle of the night, stress over a font or color choice and sometimes micromanage those small details. Still because of that passion and desire to be involved in the day to day work - not only could he make the products better, but he knew the products so well that when it came time to introduce them on stage to the world he wouldn't need to rely on bullet points prepared for him by product specialists. 
2. Purpose - With every new product release, you got the sense that Apple was focused on changing the world in some new way. The ecosystem that each of the products allowed, from new operating systems to iTunes to the billion dollar market for Apps were all poised to make a big impact on how each of us experiences the world. This was the higher purpose behind Apple, and you could see it through the products they released. 
3. Simplicity - When asked by biographers about what made Apple so powerful, one thing Steve Jobs always pointed to was the fact that Apple had always been a company which made less than 10 products. This extreme focus on simplicity carried through in his conversations with employees and how he would present products to the public. Simplicity can inspire because you strip away everything that is unimportant. What you are left with is a big idea which can move people. 

No doubt there will be countless books, articles and stories written about Steve Jobs and his impact over the coming years. For me, the biggest lesson I learned from watching and reading about Steve Jobs is the power of inspiration and how it can lead people to change the world. 

More posts about Apple on this blog:

• Steve Jobs And The 4 Counterintuitive Business Strategies Of Apple
• The Real Secret Of Apple's Success

How Oprah Became Oprah (And What It Should Teach You About Marketing)

In 1986, there were certain rules of television that pretty much everyone followed. You expected news anchors to be buttoned up and serious when presenting the evening news. Television programs (as they often still do) presented a distorted view of reality that only slightly resembled real life, but still allowed you to escape into other worlds. And whether you looked at television as a source of information or one of entertainment - you certainly didn't expect it to openly and honestly mirror real life.

That same year, Oprah Winfrey's talk show was nationally syndicated and on air she broke the taboos and shared openly her story of having been sexually abused at age 9 by a relative. It was an honesty that no one expected to come on television, and certainly not from a talk show host. It set the pattern for what came to become one of the most honest and open shows on television for the next 25 years as Oprah not only asked celebrity guests to share truths about themselves, but also managed to continually find and openly share her own with a live studio audience.

The atmosphere she created was one of openness because she wasn't afraid to be vulnerable and share the deepest secrets about herself. How many people do you know like that? How many brands? As Oprah airs her final episode today, the lesson any of us in marketing should take from her is the unbelievable power that comes from being open and honest about the toughest things. Brands screw up, make bad decisions or bad products, implement the wrong strategy, or treat customers unfairly.

Those aren't the things that drive brands to lose trust and fail. The failure comes from not admitting those mistakes, letting employees be human, and building a deeper connection with customers. Oprah may have been the most believable personality in the history of television. As she signs off today, consider asking yourself one simple question: how could being more honest make your brand more believable?

What I Learned From An Eccentric Norwegian Millionaire

By anyone's measure Christian Ringnes would have to be described as an odd man. He is a millionaire in Norway thanks to his real estate investments and well known thanks to his funding of philanthropic projects such as a $300 million sculpture park in Oslo. His wealth and noteriety has also afforded him the luxury to also create a monument to his surprising lifelong hobby ... collecting miniature liquor bottles.

It is a common collection among those who have travelled often - particularly on KLM where a blue and white set of Dutch house shaped liquor bottles have become so iconic they are actually still given out to passengers even in today's austere era of airline cutbacks. So when Ringnes' wife suggested that he find a better home for these bottles which he had been collecting since childhood, he decided to do it.

That home is the world's only Mini Bottle Museum, which also doubles as an event center hosting parties and private events. After a day of discussions on corporate reputation at an event in Oslo, we ventured into the museum for a tour and private dinner.

A part of the tour was a home-video style introduction to the museum, recorded with Ringnes as the star. Throughout the video, visitors could watch his antics as he paid happy American collectors cash to buy their collections, wheeled 4 huge suitcases with his "bounty" onto airport trolleys, and even took his obsession a big step over the line by jumping into a tub full of (hopefully) empty miniature bottles.

The museum itself features a built in slide, a monthly award for the "tackiest miniature bottle" and even a fake brothel with a collection of 40 custom bottles from the 40 legal brothels in Las Vegas. All of which brings me to that marketing lesson that Ringnes offered through his museum: when you have a passion for something many people consider silly, the best thing you can do is not to take yourself too seriously.

Good advice even if you don't happen to be a quirky Norwegian millionaire.

Life And Marketing Lessons From LIVESTRONG CEO Doug Ulman

Every day too many people hear the three worst words in the English language: "you have cancer." That was one of the many insights that emerged in my talk with Doug Ulman on the stage last night at BlogWorld as we talked about the fight against cancer, his personal battle as a three time cancer survivor and how social tools have helped LIVESTRONG to become one of the most social media savvy organizations in the world of healthcare and perhaps in any industry. With nearly a million followers on Twitter, Doug himself was recently described in a Fast Company piece as the "most savvy healthcare leader in social media" - a description he shrugs off because it has never been a goal for him to achieve that sort of niche notoriety.

The discussion we had, though, was telling of not only his personal philosophy but an enlightened way of thinking about openness and authenticity within an organization that more and more businesses will be looking to for inspiration. Some people know LIVESTRONG from the association with its founder Lance Armstrong. Others know it from the ever present yellow wristbands that many at the event were wearing to remember people in their own lives who had fought against cancer. As we opened the session, I asked people to stand if they were a survivor of cancer, or had a loved one who had fought cancer or if they had someone who had lost the fight against cancer. By the end of it, everyone was standing.

After our session, several people came to me and shared that this was one of those topics that went beyond social media and at a conference like BlogWorld where it is easy to focus just on very tactical things like building an audience for your blog or how to rank higher on Google or how to earn more money from writing ... the bigger picture can be forgotten. Doug's story, for me and many others, helped to bring back that perspective to the event. You can watch our full talk on UStream below - but here are a few highlights that I will take away as advice for how to better use social media to spread an idea, and more importantly, how to be a better person.

1. Be Compassionate. It has become easy not to really care about anything. You can follow advice blindly, do what you are supposed to do and forget about the all important quality of compassion. Yet this compassion is such an important piece of how we connect with one another. It means that you are not only listening to someone, but you actually care about their experience and what they are sharing with you. For Doug, this compassion is a necessity, because some of the people he interacts with may very well be going through the worst experience of their lives. The real question is, how compassionate are you on a daily basis with things that may seem much more ordinary? Compassion stands out. It makes you memorable, and it makes your conversations more meaningful.
2. Try Out Your Dumb Ideas. There was a marketing idea that Nike shares with LIVESTRONG which nearly everyone who heard it hated. It was half baked, relied on a behaviour from people that there was no reasonable basis to expect would happen, and seemed even to visionary leaders like Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, to be a complete waste of time. That idea was to create 5000 yellow bracelets with the words "LIVESTRONG" and the Nike swoosh on them and sell them for $1 each. Then, elite athletes started wearing these bracelets, others wanted them, and the idea went viral. Now the LIVESTRONG yellow bracelet is as recognizable as any iconic cause related symbol all across the world. If LIVESTRONG had killed that idea based on feedback, they would have missed a game changing opportunity. Sometimes you need to let dumb ideas be tried, because they just might work.
3. Channel Instead Of Shutting Down. Every day around the world someone wants to create something to help promote the mission of LIVESTRONG. With a brand to manage, though, the challenge is how to take all of this well meaning energy and make sure that it is being used in an efficient way without damaging the core things that the brand stands for. Doug and his team spend a lot of time identifying people around the world as LIVESTRONG leaders and giving them the tools to work in their local communities to promote the mission of LIVESTRONG, while staying connected to the core organization. This focus on channeling all the energy towards a common goal rather than shutting people out pays off with happy, engaged and motivated leaders and advocates around the world.
4. Use Social Media To Focus On The Real World. Social media can feel like a very virtual and intangible world where people give each other digital high-fives and just do things like chatting, poking, friending and following. One of the biggest things you can see if you look at the content and experiences on LIVESTRONG is that social media is a key way that their organization helps people to connect with one another IN REAL LIFE. They organize events and biking tours, they host runs and local fundraisers. All of this activity can be coordinated online through social media, and content that is generated may live on social media - but the end goal is to get people to connect in real life and get to know one another and build the community.

If you do want to see the full video of our session, you can check out the live video on UStream or watch it below. Also, from the stage we announced the second year of the #beatcancer program - an online effort to raise money for cancer research to be donated to multiple organizations (including LIVESTRONG). To participate, just include the hashtag #beatcancer in a tweet and 5 cents will be donated by one of our corporate partners to cancer research. Last year this effort set a Guiness Book of World Records mark with over 200,000 tweets in 24 hours - and this we want to top that mark. Please participate and add your voice to the global fight against cancer by tweeting #beatcancer!

Gilty Secrets: 10 Marketing Techniques From Today's Hottest eCommerce Site

To say that Gilt.com is on fire may be something of a understatement. The site, which features daily special sales of luxury products at discount prices is on track by some estimates to pull in $400 million in sales for the 2010 calendar year. The growth of Gilt.com has coincided with a shift in how many consumers are thinking about luxury products. As a recent USA Today piece noted, "the new world of luxury is less about designer labels and glitz and more about shopping savvy and an I-feel-good-owning-this mentality." Gilt.com has grown to over 2 million members by catering exclusively to this mentality.

What makes the Gilt.com experience so irresistible? A big part of it is the sense that you are getting a great deal on products from brands that are normally much pricier, but smart marketing is just as much of a component in the success of Gilt.com. Taking some time to analyze what makes the marketing so powerful, here are 10 techniques that Gilt.com is using which might help other brands to duplicate some of this success:

1. Featuring amazing imagery.
The experience on Gilt.com starts with amazing imagery. This is clearly not a site selling average products, because everything about the imagery used on the site indicates a premium and desirable experience. More than that, the images are changing every day, which demonstrates that there is fresh content all the time and that the site will be worth visiting again and again.

2. Offering a sense of exclusivity.

Core to the Gilt.com experience is a sense of exclusivity. You need to be invited to join the site by a current member, and only once you become a member can you access all the special deals. The irony of this is that they have plenty of "sneak in" ways to become a member without getting invited through secret links - but the SENSE of exclusivity is what is most important. It doesn't pay for them to actively prevent people from becoming members, but they work hard to make their current members feel as though they are part of an exclusive club.

3. Focusing on the backstory.

Every product sold on Gilt.com has a backstory which is almost as important as the product itself. Why? Because when it comes to many luxury products, there is an inherent need from the customers to have a shareable story that they can tell to others along with the products they purchase. It is not about buying a blender. It is about buying a blender from a Belgian company that has been making them since 1930, and that you cannot find in any retail store near you.

4. Creating an urgency to purchase without excessive pressure.

Every product that you put into your shopping cart expires after 10 minutes. This may seem like a diabolical move to pressure you into purchasing - and to some degree it does work like that. The aim, though, is to limit the amount of time you can hold onto a product that someone else may want to purchase. As a result, the sense of urgency to buy is built into the site, and when coupled with a relatively easy return policy, it means that they can focus more on converting browsers to buyers in a timespan (10 minutes) that most other ecommerce sites would envy.

5. Providing significant rewards for referrals.

Once you become a member, the reward for referring someone else to the site is a whopping $25 in credit - far more than most other sites. This adds to the exclusivity experience, but also makes it likely that people will share their referral link far and wide with others. As you probably noticed, it is working for me also since I used my own referral link in this post as well.

6. Integrating deeply with email marketing.

Every day, members of Gilt.com get an email telling them about the special deals of the day and reminding them to visit the site to purchase those products before they sell out. They have a blog and a Twitter page as well, but for the vast majority of their users, email is likely driving the largest consumption and traffic because much of their target audience are at work where emails often come with pop up notices letting you know a new one has come in.

7. Selling items that are sold out.

As items sell out or are held in member's shopping carts, the site automatically lets you know and gives you a chance to be placed on a wait list for a product. Not only does this add to your emotional sense of wanting a product (after all, if it is "sold out" it must be good, right?), but it creates a secondary sales channel for Gilt.com where you may not have been able to purchase the product you were most interested in, but might come back to purchase it if it were available. The other benefit of this model is that it helps for projections and planning new sales if you have a good sense of the most popular products based on something active such as a consumer being asked to be put on a wait list for an item, versus something more passive such as impressions to a product or brand page.

8. Standing behind products they sell with editorial.

Not only does Gilt.com offer new products every day, they also stand behind the products they do offer. This "seal of approval" concept lets consumers know that the products they are buying are authentic but also tested for quality and will be exactly what they expect. This also allows Gilt.com on the backend to work with more and better companies to feature products because there is an inherent validation that takes place for a brand that does get featured on Gilt.com that may extend to that brand building more of a relationship or awareness among a desirable group of consumers.

9. Creating a daily ritual.

Every day at noon EST, an email comes noting that the sales for that day are open. Conveniently scheduled at the time when many office professionals are taking their lunch break, this consistently allows Gilt.com to create a ritual for their customers. Not everyone will buy a product every day, but just knowing that this format will take place every day allows consumers to plan a visit to the site as part of their day and helps to drive a big spike in traffic because you know that as soon as the deals open online there will be a frenzy to buy the most popular items before they sell out.

10. Customizing to platforms.

Soon after the iPad was launched, Gilt.com was ready with an app for iPad users that allowed them to purchase directly from the app. Today, more than 10% of overall sales come from the iPhone and iPad mobile platforms that this number is growing. By offering a customized experience for users on certain platforms, Gilt.com is making it easy to purchase no matter where you happen to be.

Not every brand will have luxury products or find this daily sales method easy to duplicate, but taking some of the marketing lessons that Gilt.com already knows could help a large number of brands who have some ecommerce component of their sites to create more engagement with their customers, and convert more of them to action as well.

5 Marketing Lessons From Fast Company's Influencer Project

Who is the most influential person online? That is the tantalizing question behind the Influencer Project, a brilliantly conceived marketing campaign from Fast Company magazine dedicated to getting people to engage with the idea of online influence and pass along their participation to their entire social networks. The Influencer Project is a simple site that gets you to register with a few details, include your photo and then spits out a custom URL for you to use in all your influential efforts online. The more people you get to click on your URL, the more influence scores you can generate for yourself. (Note - the link above is to my personal URL)

The payoff, as with many of these types of campaigns, is personal reputation and bragging rights - but for the growing ranks of people for whom social media offers an additional limb upon which to balance their virtual identities this reputation is more important than money. It could be considered a simple journalistic effort to do this, but if you look at how the project has been executed, it offered a great case study on how to use the power of the Internet to engage people and build an audience online.

1. Have a strategic message behind your campaign. The idea of seeking the most influential person online could have been done by any publication, but the fact that Fast Company has chosen to do it sends a strong message about how they want to be perceived: as the magazine that people who are highly influential online read. There are plenty of choices to fit this category, but Fast Company has long been one of my favourite printed publications that I actually subscribe to in print format and read every copy of cover to cover because of their dedication to merging the worlds of online and offline together to paint a picture of the future of business. It is why I have written for them before and why I often recommend the magazine to colleagues.
2. Make it easy to spread the word. Core to this idea is the fact that every participant gets a shortened URL to use for their own bio. This URL is what anyone can use to pass along the promotion to their social network and is also the primary way that the site can measure your influence. You can also integrate your Twitter and Facebook profiles, but unlike other promotions that can turn into popularity contests through the number of friends and followers you have - the Influencer Project is focused on actual action. The more clicks you generate, the higher your influence score.
3. Support your promotion with your core business. In the case of Fast Company, their business is producing editorial content. Instead of just sticking a banner on their site and sending out some emails to their subscribers, they are also integrating the Influencer Project into their editorial by releasing a series of interviews with influential people online. The first was with Gary Vaynerchuck and presumably the others they do will help add more context to the idea of influence online and take advantage of Fast Company's editorial voice as a way to bring more people into the Influencer Project.
4. Have multiple payoffs to attract more participants. The ultimate payoff, as I noted above, is the ego stroke that having your photo appear larger will give and that will likely drive many people to participate. Fast Company will also publish a large photo in their magazine with a spread of all the participants as well - which adds a dimension to the reason for participating and likely will attract people for whom the online credit may not be enough.
5. Integrate long term brand assets with a short term campaign. One mistake many marketers make is to drive a lot of attention and engagement around a short term effort without generating any longer term value for their brand. Fast Company has the Influencer Project, which will have a definitive start and finish, but they also integrate it with their branded Facebook and Twitter pages, which are longer term assets for the brand. By doing so, they can use the spike in activity around the Influence Project as a way to build greater long term value for their brand and a bigger base of engaged people that they will be able to promote content and activities to in the future.

Rohit's Custom URL for the Influencer Project: http://fcinf.com/v/a7en

Update 07/07/10 - For more context on this campaign and how it attempts to track influence, check out Amber Naslund's great post countering Fast Company on how they are confusing ego with influence. She has a great point about how this is an overly simplistic and ego driven way to track whether people have influence online. Though I agree it is an incomplete metric in terms of influence, I still think there are many marketing lessons you could take from this effort as I talked about in my post - but I found her alternate take on the campaign made me think more deeply about it and I highly recommend you read her post and decide how you land on this campaign for yourself.

How To Take A Journey Instead Of A Trip

I used to hate slideshows. Not Powerpoint as many people call slideshows today, but the old style of slideshow. The one where you set up a carousel projector to show lots of little negatives encased in small cardboard frames to unwilling family and friends. If you are under a certain age, you probably won't know what I'm talking about - but that moment of having to sit through someone's vacation photos with the narration of "and this is us in front of the <insert random place name here>" is unfortunately familiar. The problem isn't that the trip itself was boring, or that you're a cold unfeeling person because you struggle to sit through the shared holiday experience of someone you usually care about. The real problem is that the way the story was told left much to be desired. A trip is something no one cares about except the people who took it.

A journey, on the other hand is more significant. It is something that invites you to take part. Something that has a destination or vision in mind for where someone is headed or what they are trying to do. A journey is a story that matters. This was my thought when I came across Monisha and Harald's journey. They are travelling across India on 80 trains in 3 months and are in the midst of their journey right now. As their site describes,the chaotically efficient Indian railway system is "the largest civilian employer in the world, featuring luxury trains, toy trains, a hospital on wheels, the steepest, the slowest, and the second longest train journeys in the world." Chances are, you're already intrigued by their journey as I was when I first read about it. 

Yet, I don't actually know Monisha or Harald. They aren't personal contacts of mine, and though I might hear back from them if they read this - it is not necessarily about having a personal connection. You might watch a slide show from a family member who you love and find it difficult to get involved in their story, yet reading Monish and Harald's journey is interesting. You can follow them in real time on Twitter at @80trains and share it with others. That is the power of having a journey - it lets others get involved. How many travel brands could inspire this kind of content? Or what about small businesses sharing the story of the evolution of their business? When someone cares about the outcome of any story, they are more likely to try to help and be part of it. So what journey are you taking?

Credit: Thanks to Arun Rajagopal for sharing this link to the 80 Trains Project.

The World Business Forum Highlights The Power Of Passion

Earlier today the World Business Forum, one of the largest business events in the world, kicked off at the Radio City Music Hall in New York City. It was a fitting venue to host a range of visionary speakers that could rightly be called "rock stars" for their varied achievements in the world of business. I was invited as part of a cast of about 50 business bloggers to cover the live pulse of the event and managed to participate in a blogger meetup the night before the event started, as well as a few hours today.

As regular readers of this blog know, I tend to make it to a lot of events and many of them are focused on such niche topics as the future of social media and how Twitter is changing business. I expected, after receiving the invite to WBF, that it would be illuminating in a completely different way about the world that we all work in. My hope was that it would offer a chance to contemplate a future of business in which social media was just one piece of the puzzle and not the whole story. In that respect, the first day of WBF certainly delivered.

The speaker lineup for today included Harvard Management Guru (and bestselling author) Bill George, T. Boone Pickens, Jeffrey Sachs, Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts and filmmaker George Lucas. Reading the stream of tweets from the dedicated bloggers at the event (hashtag/keyword #wbf09), it was clear that there were a lot of great soundbites coming out of the event. As I wasn't able to be at the event for the whole day, these tweets were the method by which I could partake in the live pulse of the event and as I read them it struck me at the "bloggers" the event had invited to cover it were largely choosing to do so through the real time 140 character limited tool of Twitter.

As a result of these many tweets, as an outside reader piecing together the story of the event through these short bursts, it occurred to me that for my recap post from Day one, I would focus on what I felt was a trend that had emerged from all of these micro-observations: the importance of passion. Passion isn't necessarily a word that we typically equate with business. Yet listening to the stories of each of the leaders - passion was a common thread in how they approached their careers and achievements. Passion, to a degree, was what made them great at what they did ... and what they looked for in the next generation of people they hired.

Each of the men presenting today (and yes, unfortunately it was all men) - recounted as part of their point of view their own story of how their personal passion has driven them to do more. George Lucas shared his passion for storytelling. Kevin Roberts on his passion for creating something that people can't help but sharing. Even David Rubenstein (by far the most pessimistic in the group with his sobering presentation about the recession economy) preached being passionate about what you do and choosing something you love.

In the surround-sound media environment of today, there is no shortage of places you can go to see an expert's view of business and where it is headed. What I took from the first day of the World Business Forum, however, was just how important passion is as a common thread in the people (and their organizations) who are accomplishing something. The future of business isn't about leveraging Twitter or weathering the storm, or even finding the next great groundbreaking product. The ones who really change our world for the better will be the ones most passionate about doing it.

9 Ways For Luxury Brands To Use Social Media

Late last week I had the opportunity to be part of a unique event for the Washington DC area. Dubbed "All Access Fashion" - the three day event was part of Washington's response to NY's Fashion Week and featured many luxury retailers participating in runway shows and customer events hosted at one of the largest luxury malls in the country - Tysons Galleria in Virginia. My role was to be part of a well chosen panel that included the CEO of German fashion brand Baseler and Ritz Carlton's VP of Marketing and Communications, Julia Gajcak. 

Through our hour long discussion moderated by Washington Post Style Editor Ned Martel, a key topic of discussion was the impact of the recession on the luxury market and how luxury brands could retain their customers and brand image in a world where anyone can speak for your brand online. The point of view I shared was that in many ways I believe luxury brands are the IDEAL brands to be using social media and that social networking, microblogging and online content creation represent big opportunities for these brands to really stand out, improve their customer loyalty, drive sales and, in fact, maintain the image they have worked hard to create for their brands. If this seems like overpromising, keep reading for what I feel are some of the biggest opportunities for luxury brands to use social media:

1. 

   Live up to the promise of your brand. In luxury marketing, the brand is critical in creating an emotional attachment that goes beyond just a product or services features. If the value of your brand is built through your attention to service, such as the Ritz Carlton, then how can you use social media tools to reinforce that idea for your customers and live up to it?
2. Find your biggest fans. Most luxury brands have a steady stable of hardcore fans. Often these are the people who buy the products frequently, but it could just as likely be the enthusiastic aspirational customer who dreams of one day buying your product. Luxury automakers have known this for a long time, using tools like social networking to make sure that teenage boys continue to dream of one day buying a Ferrari, so one day when they can afford one, they might.
3. Create exclusive experiences. Exclusivity and luxury often go hand in hand. The nice thing about social media is that you have many opportunities to create things like exclusive private networks or special content that is only for customers or VIPs. The added benefit of this is that you can make those individuals feel engaged with the brand in a way that isn't open to the general public.
4. Let fans make your brand part of their digital identity. As each of our digital identities moves online, we have new ways of attaching "badges" to our online profiles, becoming "fans" of brands and using other methods to not just connect with brands we love, but to broadcast that affiliation to our entire social networks online.Gucci does a great job of this on Facebook with hundreds of thousands of fans.
5. Track product or service opportunities. People talk about anything and everything online, and when it comes to the category of business you are in, listening can lead to breakthroughs that you may never have otherwise seen - including what your next product line might be or a new type of service that people are wishing for.
6. Identify emerging brand crisis or issues. The real time nature of much of social media means that many brands are seeing news of potential product defects or other types of brand crisis break through social media before they show up anywhere else. This alone could justify the effort of more actively listening to what people are saying about your brand online.
7. Improve retail and/or distribution. Sometimes the challenge in selling a luxury product or service has less to do with what you have and more about where you sell it. When it comes to deciding markets to focus on, many luxury brands simply focus on large metro markets - but social media can help you identify unlikely markets that might offer golden opportunities.
8. Prove customer base and demand. Part of the challenge for any luxury brand, particularly one that is less established or newer, is proving that there is enough customer passion and interest in the brand to warrant being stocked or sold through more mainstream distribution channels. Having a strong base of support through social media can help you get past this hurdle and demonstrate to a buyer that your brand is worth the risk.
9. Share live events more broadly. Often exclusive events are a core part of how many luxury brands connect with their customers. These are, by necessity, closed and focused on smaller groups - but social media could offer a way to let an equally exclusive subgroup participate in the event (or see an archive after the fact).

Any other thoughts from readers working on luxury brands for potential opportunities with social media?  From my conversations at the event, I got the sense this was a dramatically underdeveloped space and I'm looking forward to seeing more examples of brands actively using social media in the luxury market.