Author: Angelo Fernando

Will game mechanics be the new marketing?

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What is marketing, if it is not a total experience –between buyer and seller, service provider and end-user? When I hear someone dismissively saying that marketing is a game, it often means one of three things:

  • Marketing companies have ‘fixed’ the system in a way that you have to abide by their rules. In other words, you are some sort of a victim
  • Marketing is a pretend activity where they make it seem that you get some value, and you pretend that you love the brand. The transaction is not exactly mutually respectful
  • Marketing is a product of a bigger manufacturing and industrial gaming complex. One has to hack the game in order to gain an upper hand. As in jail-breaking an iPhone, being persistent about getting your rebates etc.

You probably have a few more variations of this.

But when I like to think of marketing as a game, I like to think of it in a good sense. Market situations are very fluid. Demand and supply, customer loyalty and brand choices are a product of many other dynamic situations -climate, timeliness, scarcity, local needs etc.

In this situation, game mechanics in marketing might be a clue to the future of marketing, now that games are being seen as not just a down-time experience. Game Zicherman, writing for Mashable pointed to five trends in game mechanics, where he predicts health –“Gamified health” –could incorporate more ‘fun’ elements, with apps that tie in to achievement levels.

Games could be also considered scenarios, and do not need to be called, or look like games. I just had a conversation with someone who’s using scenario-based experiences in financial planning. We talked about systems thinking, and how marketing could become a collaborative discussion with dynamic scenarios built-in. Similar approaches — scenario-based methods in law enforcement, for instance -have been attempted.

“In scenario-based learning, the situation is always dynamic. The officer is interacting with live role-players, who react to what the officer says and does. That is why scenarios are such an excellent training tool.”

But with the advent of games such as FourSquare and Gowalla, and the increasing role of a smart phone as a market navigation tool, marketing will surely begin to embed game mechanics this year. In 2010, Gartner noted that games were the No. 1 application, identifying mobile shopping, social networking, and productivity tools as big growth areas.

Maybe your next marketing effort will incorporate systems thinking, where your customers will be able to say that marketing is a game in which the odds are not stacked up against them.

News Flash: Some companies do listen!

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I like to follow up on my experience with Data Doctors two seeks ago, when I complained that I had been taken. It was a communication problem, rather than about bad service.

Before the end of the day I wrote that post, the CEO of the company wrote to me (via Twitter) indicating they wanted fix the problem.

But it didn’t stop there. The next day, Robert called me (you could listen to a short audio clip), explaining why they disagreed with the ‘policy’ that had been thrown my way, and making an offer to remedy it.

So while we do hear of how often organizations are tone deaf to their customers and prospects, a good number of them have empowered their employees to be the antennas of the organization. Unfortunately it doesn’t hit the wires often enough when companies do listen!

Indeed, listening is only one part of the equation when there’s a dent in reputation. Following it up makes a big difference. As Robert told me, Data Doctors has had to live with the fact that a post from one disgruntled person (an employee, apparently), albeit inaccurate, still lives in the blogosphere.

I brought this up at length on my radio show this week (iTunes or player here) if you like to listen to the follow up and more context.

Digital media’s unpaved road

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I get asked often how I would handle a situation in an organization that uses a smattering of digital media. The easy answer would be “It depends.”

Not to be facetious, but it not only depends on the passion and the inclination to wade into the confusing digital communication environment (using strategies around incorporating Slideshare, Twitpic, AudioBoo, MediaWiki, UStream etc).

It depends on the people on your team who have an appetite for this. Not everyone feels comfortable in this environment. I sometimes talk of one of the most cynical team members in an organization who has become a pro in using digital media. His concern (“I don’t need to know what someone is having for lunch” – a famous knock on Twitter users) was that it might be  a waste of time for him and the organization.

It helped that the organization thought differently, and it was my job to inspire him and others like him to take this unpaved road. Watch how Sean Smith, became a citizen reporter out of Vancouver, using nothing more than an Android phone. And yes, he began tweeting too, but not about his lunch menu!

Welcome to the discomfort zone!

If you’re in media relations or marketing, or even if you’re running a department that has nothing to do with PR, that road beckons. It’s still rugged, and may never be the smooth ‘superhighway’ we were once promised. But the traffic is building up.  No you don’t have to be a pro at producing videos, or writing blog posts. (That’s why citizen journalists have become such an essential part of the news cycle.) But you and your team do have valuable knowledge that’s worth sharing. “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department,” someone –perhaps Seth Godin–once noted. Ditto for PR and customer service. Ditto for content creation, and digital marketing communications.

Welcome to the unpaved road.

Stop worrying about the technology, and start thinking of participating.

Where are the ‘conversations’ after the Tucson shootings?

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The shootings last Saturday in Tucson set a horrific tone for the new year for all of us in Arizona.

The tone has all become politically charged, vitriolic, cascading into media finger-pointing, political caricatures, party bashing. It’s time for everyone to cool their jets, and rally together as a community. We are still in a state of shock.

Speaking of shock, this hit me when I ran into Walmart very early this morning to pick up a bottle of medicine for my daughter. There was hardly anyone in the store. I went up to a lady in the pharmacy stocking the shelves to ask for help and she shrieked! It must have seemed as if someone had crept up behind her. She apologized profusely, and pointed me to the shelf. But I went away thinking this might be the thumbnail of how we are all feeling as a nation, caught off guard.

We have seen a sad decline in discourse in this country. We don’t spend enough time engaging it it because, frankly, people don’t even know, or care, what discourse means. It’s not a synonym for comment wars. Or mocking wall postings and adhoc pages on Facebook. Or rude posters and Tshirts at rallies. I picked this definition (an archaic one for sure!) that says discourse is the “mode of organizing knowledge, ideas, or experience that is rooted in language and its concrete contexts.” The word ‘conversations’ — a term we social media types use flippantly, sometimes — have a lot to do with it.

Social media  both informed us and confused us over the past few days. You probably saw this in the wrong ‘reports’ that were quickly repeated and re-tweeted. Things were less heated at Wikipedia, on the entry for Gabrielle Giffords. The editors were more civil, debating the reports that she had died, and whether to use the Sarah Palin map, just because other media were mentioning it. In short, there was –and still is — some restraint.

Maybe we could learn a thing of two from the discourse, based on established guidelines, at Wikipedia. Maybe we should all calm down a bit, and not feel the need to shriek when something of this magnitude creeps up on us.

Sidebar:

Here are some thoughtful commentaries on how social media has played out so far:

Six months in ‘multi-media radio!’

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Can’t believe it’s been six months since I took up the challenge of starting the weekly radio show, Your Triple Bottom Line. It’s truly been a terrific ride!

There’s a lot that happens behind the scenes, lining up the guests, planning topics, keeping the content fresh on the web site –which runs on the WordPress blog platform — and using Twitter to chat with listeners, often while the show is in progress! Sometimes we upload photos, and have even tried video streaming. And then, after the show, I edit down the file (shrinking the commercial breaks, etc) to  a podcast format that I upload to iTunes and Libsyn. With so much multi-media rolled into the show, I find this new radio format invigorating.

It also lines up nicely with my other digital and social media work.

I am truly grateful to all our guests (who agreed to be under the microscope, so to speak), and of course our listeners. Thanks too, to my co-host Derrick Mains who is such a natural on a talk show.

Speaking of whom, listeners, many of you may have been tuning in to the live stream or listening to the podcast via iTunes, seem to add an international flavor to  show that happens to be primarily out of Phoenix Arizona. Listeners seem to come from Australia, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Chile, Brazil, UK, Israel and a few other places, apart from the national audience.

How do I know this? I use the URL shortener bit.ly, which has a great feature that tells us about incoming clicks on the live stream link, http://bit.ly/Your3BL.

Next week, we plan to do a survey to get more feedback from listeners. Till then:

When ‘Policy’ is a synonym for Ripoff at Data Doctors

/ Angelo Fernando / 4 Comments

I should’ve read this before I went to Data Doctors. Check this: http://ow.ly/3yKSN

I took in my son’s laptop in for a diagnostic, and was given a price breakdown.

  • Cost of hard drive was $109.
  • Cost of installing OS was $199.

The Hard Drive had failed, so since they told me that the cost of the diagnostic ($59) would be deducted from any services they carry out, I then asked them to install a new HD.

But that’s probably the cue they were waiting for. No can do, they tell me.

Why?

The magic statement: “That’s our policy.”

Which is?

“We could only install the hardware if we also reinstall the Operating system.”

Oh, really?

Policy is a terrible way to enforce a service that denies customers their rights. Also hiding behind policy is a a formula to take advantage of someone with a fee for something that is way out of line with normal business markup.

In one of those reviews of a similar ripoff (and there are more) a customer noted that

“The guy quoted my 100.00 just to sit down with the computer and see if the data could be retrieved, and then said it would be another 99.00 to obtain this data on the computer and give to me.”

I have no problem paying for a diagnostic service. I don’t even mind that the Hard Drive I was quoted is an unrealistic price. But I do have a problem when someone attempts to enforce an all-or-nothing plan.

That’s not just service policy. That’s a policy which guarantees you never have a repeat customer.

By the way, this was store #240.

Top 2 PR Crises of 2010 involve taking eye off social media

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What were the top-5 PR nightmares that got you fired up, or made you realize that social media is playing a bigger role in our reputation systems, marketing strategy, and media presence?

There have been just too many mis-steps this year, but here are my top two.

But… why stop at two stories? Here are some other categories that 2010 will be remembered for.

As for the best of, here’s the one campaign we could learn from:

And for the Evergreen PR Issues of 2010, I have two strong contenders:

Most Overblown story of 2010

Media Foot-In-Mouth Stories

Why was it that this year saw so many ‘name brand’ media people get into trouble? I was personally shocked

  • When NPR sacked Juan Williams. No one really knows what’s hidden in the code words it used when NPR stated that William’s comments were “inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR.”

‘Now Revolution’ book tour begins soon!

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Why do I feel like the word Revolution is all over the place? Maybe it’s that ‘ear worm’ of the Beatles signature tune from my radio show that’s in my head.

Jason Baer and Amber Naslund’s upcoming book, The Now Revolution, has the word in its title, though it’s the word NOW that jumps out. As they lay it out, they say that this book isn’t about how to “do” social media, but about a broader need to rejigger the organization on the ‘now’ factors. The chapters have those broad goals, such as how to ‘engineer a New Bedrock;’ ‘Organize Your Armies;’ ‘Answer the New Telephone;’ ‘Build a Fire Extinguisher’ etc.

You could find a free chapter if you go here.

On February 1, the book will be on shelves across North America.

Jay and Amber have a post-launch speaking tour for The NOW Revolution. If you, or an organization you know of, likes to have either of them to present the “7 shifts” to make business faster, smarter, and more social, they are open to talking.

Here’s the deal. Just commit to buying 200 books (ideally before release) and we’ll work with you on a date between February and June where we can visit your region and do a presentation, book signing, tweetup, game of Twister, etc.

Email them at info@nowrevolutionbook.com.

But wait! There’s More! If you’re into the Quick Response Codes, use your phone and take a picture of this image (right) using the Microsoft Tag software, for bonus content.

It’s a pretty cool way to promote a book using the very principles it talks about.

 

Once upon a tree –powerful outdoor activism

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What does this look like?

Sure, a dead tree. But what did it give up its life for? Hint: It’s part of an outdoor campaign for forest conservation in China.

You’ll never rip open a pack of chopsticks again, just to play with it in a restaurant.

I just can’t resist campaigns like this where words become unnecessary. The trees were made from 80,000 pairs of used chopsticks, and ‘planted’ in public squares.

However if you prefer words, interactive outdoor is so much more powerful than some of the boring, static billboards we see around town for business schools, restaurants, movies.  Check this out: passers by are encouraged to text in their message, and watch as the words get changed to display it.