Hittin’ the Tracks, Converse-Style

What comes to mind when you hear the brand name “Converse?” You’re likely to think “sneakers,” “Chuck Taylors,” “basketball,” and even “Nike.” But for many, the word “music” isn’t necessarily top-of-mind. The company doesn’t incorporate music into its marketing, so it’s not surprising that it wouldn’t be associated with the brand.

Why, then, would the sneaker company invest in a 5,200 square foot state-of-the-art recording studio, with award-winning engineers, offering recording time to aspiring musicians… free of charge?

In PJA Radio’s recent episode of The Unconventionals, Converse CMO Geoff Cottrill explains, “Most brands borrow equity from a musician… to make their brand look a certain way to a certain demographic… to look cool.” Instead, Converse found greater value in celebrating its consumer rather than celebrating itself.

Converse built Rubber Tracks, the Brooklyn, NY-based studio, to give emerging musicians the opportunity to record their music, no strings attached. “For what it costs to run three to four weeks of heavy TV [advertising] in the U.S., a good heavy campaign one time for a month, we could… run a studio for a number of years.”

If you think the intent is to make bands famous and tying the Converse name to them, it’s not. Cottrill emphasizes that they’re not making empty promises. “We’ve been really focused on making sure we keep our feet on the ground and that we don’t get into the music business because that’s not our business.”

Rubber Tracks Studio
Brooklyn, NY

The team at Converse wanted to become useful to its biggest proponents by helping those who might not otherwise have been able to afford studio time elsewhere. They channeled their focus from creating a marketing message to turning the experience itself into the message. Doing so enabled them to build more meaningful relationships, and life-long memories for its core consumers—creative individuals. Cottrill notes, “The interactions that they have with you are what they carry.”

The return? Brand advocates.

According to Cottrill, Converse’s Facebook page has grown tremendously over the past few years because they haven’t tried to hook and bait people. “Virtually everyone that’s come [into the studio]… is posting on Instagram, on Facebook, talking to their social media network, their fan base, about this great experience that they’ve had,” explains Cottrill. Now at over 34 million fans, Converse never asks anyone to “Like” a page. It simply adds content and value to the conversations. And Fans consistently respond favorably towards the brand. “We couldn’t be any more pleased with the results. Again I go back to the relationships that we’re creating there.”

Interested in hearing more? Listen to George Cottrill’s approach to strengthening relationships with consumers by checking out PJA’s The Unconventionals.

Subscribe on iTunes for more “unconventional” podcasts such as: Relay Rides, Big Ass Fans, IdeaPaint, & Dollar Shave Club.

BY ALLIE ABODEELY

Driving Social Change in Lebanon

Here in the United States, we’re all too familiar with the concept of “road rage,” often finding ourselves lambasting other drivers for their blatant disregard for the rules and safety of the road, only to be met with expletives, hand gestures, and even indifference.

As we know, this problem isn’t unique to the U.S. But countries tackle these perils in various ways. Columbia Business School, with the support of the Center on Global Brand Leadership, recently published “Cheyef Halak: Driving Social Change in Lebanon,” a case study on how one country took on this challenge, but with a greater purpose in mind—to build an advocacy program inciting overarching social change.

In 2011, LBCI, a popular television network in Lebanon, with then Interior Prime Minister, Ziad Baroud, and Impact BBDO, created the award-winning Cheyef Halak campaign. Cheyef Halak integrates marketing and social media with sardonic messaging to address reckless driving in Beirut. But it isn’t solely about negligent drivers. Rather it used this topic as a launching pad to address a range of issues encompassing internal corruption and civic responsibility.

Described as a “civic movement based on citizen journalism,” Cheyef Halak is a platform on which Lebanese citizens photograph and report irresponsible and dangerous behaviors of individuals who consider themselves above the law. Pictures and videos of violators in action are posted on Cheyef Halak’s Facebook page and Twitter feed, creating what has been referred to as a “Wall of Shame.”

The phrase itself means “Do you see yourself?” but is more commonly understood in sarcastic terms as “Are you proud of yourself?” Instead of taking a patronizing tone, however, the campaign incorporates commercials and outreach embodying a more satirical personality, using irony and humor to engage its audience.

Through traditional and emerging media, the campaign took off with measurable success. Within its first seven months, citizens captured over 2,300 road incidents and posted 100 videos. By the end of 2011, its Facebook page had attracted 27,000 “Likes” and its videos had garnered 68,000 views, now at more than 41,000 and 131,000, respectively. Not bad for a country with only 4.1 million people, about half the size of New York City’s population. It also won the 2011 Gemas Effie gold award for best use of corporate social responsibility, as well as several awards from MENA Cristal and Dubai Lynx.

Support for the cause has caught on with schools and other institutions. And in December 2011, the collected photos and videos were submitted to the current Interior Minister for potential use in policy initiatives.

LBCI and Impact BBDO must now consider challenges as they look towards the campaign’s future. The founders are taking into consideration long-term sustainable impact, keeping messaging fresh and inspiring, raising funds, and whether they can effectively broaden the effort to tackle other areas of political and social strife.

The team remains confident that its initiatives will continue to grow, and as Prof. Asim Ansari and his fellow case writers note, “[The campaign] had empowered everyday Lebanese to become change agents able to track, report, and capture violators when state agencies were unwilling to do so.”

“Cheyef Halak: Driving Social Change in Lebanon” was a collaborative effort written by Columbia Business School’s Prof. Asim Ansari, Prof. Kamel Jedidi, Ziad Naamani (MBA ’12), Prof. Scott Schriver, and Prof. Olivier Toubia.

To order copies of this case study, visit Columbia CaseWorks.

BY ALLIE ABODEELY

Twitter’s Policy Change: Censorship or Aid to Free Speech ?

While many have deemed Twitter’s recent announcement to block tweets country-by-country an act of censorship, even vowing to boycott the social media giant, Zeynep Tufekci, a professor at the University of North Carolina, says otherwise.

“Twitter’s latest policy is purposefully designed to allow Twitter to exist as a platform… making it as hard as possible for governments to censor content,” explains Tufekci in a recent blog post.

According to Tufekci, the policy, which proclaims to take down content only within the jurisdiction of countries with imposed legal orders, actually provides tools for advocates of free speech. She argues that Twitter has effectively focused its policy — previously it was forced to take down restricted content from global viewing — and has made its decisions more transparent. A list of blocked tweets will be published with links to original tweets as well as the country’s court order. “So everyone who is not… [in] that particular country can see what it’s about.”

Furthermore, Tufekci explains that users can easily circumvent blocked content in their country by manually overriding their computer’s country setting.  “[By] making such censorship visible and easily circumventable, it is at least giving the global civic society as well as citizens of a country [the ability] to recognize what’s going on and respond.”

See Zeynup Tufekci discuss social media’s role on the Arab Spring at our BRITE ’12 Conference (March 5-6, NYC).

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BY KIM SHIFRIN

The Buzz of Anticipation

Successfully creating a buzz around products is an art that few companies are able to consistently master. Generating buzz is tough to achieve because it spreads mainly by word of mouth and can’t be created by advertising dollars. Recent examples of great buzz generation include the much anticipated Fox show “X Factor” debut, Amazon’s release of the “Kindle Fire” and Boeing’s Dreamliner aircraft that was just delivered to its first customer in Japan. Given that buzz often leads to profits, this is a problem that many companies have been looking to solve. Interesting research on buzz from Brian Uzzi, Professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, sheds light on how to generate buzz and how companies can be more effective practitioners of this elusive art form.

Uzzi used a private survey which asked 180,000 participants about their impressions of “soon-to-be-released” Hollywood films. Uzzi used the results of this survey and the resulting box office success of these movies to better understand buzz and how it relates to profits. From the data, Uzzi found that once buzz reached a certain tipping point–21% of Americans–there was a dramatic increase in box office revenues. But how did the level of buzz reach this point?

Interestingly, Uzzi discovered that buzz is not generated based on an actual experience with a product but more the anticipation of that experience. He found that there was little to no relationship between buzz and advertising dollars spent. Buzz instead was driven by intangible factors such as a catchy trailer or unique film premise that piqued the interest of movie goers. As a result, Uzzi argues that marketing efforts should focus on planting seeds that consumers would ideally spread themselves throughout their extensive social networks.

One company that has been able to consistently plant these buzz generating seeds is Apple. Famous for its tight-lipped approach to pre-release product information, Apple strategically incorporates secrecy to generate buzz about its new products. It was reported that Apple sent the media invitations for its October 4th event that simply read “Let’s talk iPhone.” Within a few minutes the internet was abuzz with anticipation of what the new iPhone would look like and what new features were possibly going to be in included. In this case less was more, and the web was full of anticipation.

While generating buzz like this is great in bringing attention to products, ultimately, the product itself must stand up to the buzz that has been created in order to be successful. We’ve all had the experience of rushing to a theater or signing up for the latest web phenomenon and have had the product not live up to the lofty expectations that we have had. In the end, buzz can’t substitute consumers’ desire for a product that adds substantial functional value.

BY MIKLOS RAIBON

Avoid These 7 Social Media Fiascos

The list of scandals, embarrassments, missteps, and P.R. fiascos tied to social media seems to grow every day.  Everyone knows the stories of disgruntled customers whose online complaints go viral, attracting millions of sympathetic viewers. Or the employees who get companies into trouble with an ill-advised post on the company’s social media accounts. Even a carefully planned ad campaign can stir up a storm of protest in the social media world.What is a business to do? While it is tempting to stick one’s head into the pre-digital sand, the fact is that organizations today face little choice but to engage with a network of customers that is empowered, vocal, and ready to share their own opinions in social media. To prepare themselves, businesses should apply lessons learned by the failures of others.Following are 7 lessons that will reduce the risk of social media failures for your own brand:

1. Don’t try to fool anybody. In an age of social media, you can only fool some of the people for a fleeting moment, until one of them exposes your deception and broadcasts it for the world to see. While companies may be tempted to plant fake customer reviews on Amazon, Yelp, or blogs, the likelihood of discovery is too high a risk, especially for larger brands. The imagined benefits of something like Wal-Mart‘s fake customer blog, “Wal-Marting Across America,”pale in comparison to the damage to your reputation from its exposure.

2. Follow decorum. The first rule of social media training is that the old rules for employees still apply. When an employee speaks, tweets, posts, or shares a photo on behalf of their company, it should be with the same discretion that they conduct an interview or draft a press release. The second rule is that many employees will need to have the first rule drummed into them. Their experience using these same media for personal conversations can lead to some sloppy habits. If you hire an outside agency to run your social media accounts, it is critical to establish style guidelines and an understanding of their accountability – like for the digital agency that was fired by Chrysler after a staff member inadvertently tweeted an obscenity about Detroiters on the auto brand’s own Twitter account.

3. Balance oversight with speed. Training and guidelines does not mean you can run every tweet, wall post, and image upload by a committee of legal advisors scattered across your company. An executive at Citi told me that he finally got the company to reduce the 20 legal sign-offs required to post to Twitter when he sent senior leadership a calculation of the cost of each tweet. In a world where customers expect instant replies and interaction, companies need to strike a balance between oversight and speed.

4. Pay attention to tone. Customers expect a more personable voice in social media than on a corporate website or press release. So your social media guidelines need to cover not just what you share, but the tone in which you share it. This should include guidance on how to handle irate or unreasonable customers, as well. Using a condescending or sarcastic tone with customers is always a bad idea, as Nestle learned when a tit-for-tat dispute with a customer on its Facebook wall led to widespread criticism and the departure of fans.

5. Know which tools are not under your control. Some social media channels are controlled more by the account holder, and others are controlled more by the public. It’s important for businesses to understand the differences as they start to engage customers. For example, Twitter hashtags (words anyone can use to join a topical conversation), are extremely public. Starbucks learned this lesson when it launched a print ad campaign to promote twitter conversations around #top3percent and found it hijacked by a labor activist’s criticism of the company.

6. Invest in customer service. In an age of social media, good customer service is often the best p.r. money can buy. The worst social media fiascoes stem from customers telling tales of terrible service – from Jeff Jarvis’s “Dell Hell” blog posts, to the “Sleeping Comcast Technician” video on YouTube, to Dave Carroll’s viral music video “United [Airlines] Breaks Guitars.” Customer service used to be an easy place to cut costs during lean times. But now, businesses should realize that investing in decent quality customer service is a direct defense against the worst risks to their brand.

7. Test launch any big changes to your communications. A number of social media protests have arisen not because of companies’ digital marketing, but because of changes to their traditional marketing. Think of the outcry when The Gap tried to change its logo, or when Tropicana tried to change its packaging, or when Motrin ran an ad about back pain from babies that moms found unfunny. Companies should consider pre-testing any major changes to their brand identity in order to gauge customer response, or else launch them with any understanding that they may need to be yanked quickly if customer complaints spiral out of control.

No Heads in the Sand

In an age of social media, brands no longer live in a 24 hour news cycle. It is more like a 24 minute news cycle.  This demands speed, nimbleness, and thoughtfulness on the part of business.

Opting out of all social media is not the answer. In fact, many of the most flagrant social media “failures” have stemmed from old-fashioned “offline” screw-ups that get talked about much more by customers now that they have a powerful public voice of their own.

So be aware of the hazards to your reputation, and remember these 7 lessons as you bravely navigate the risks and rewards of engaging with customers in a world where everyone now has a virtual megaphone.

BY DAVID ROGERS

This was originally posted by David on his BNET.com blog.

Note: Image courtesy of flickr user, Chris Daniel