The reality is that many products and services have a real human story at the root of their existence. Tapping into this story is what connects us to the heart of a product’s latent community, the living fabric with an orientation toward a specific service.
The existing corporate story related solely to sales should cease as the number one tale known to contemporary society. And this needs to happen now.
Humanity is tired of being “sold”. Humanity wants and needs the magic, the tactile sensibility of a story populated with sweat, flesh and the intricacies of a rich inner life. That’s where connection occurs.
The way out of anything is to go INTO it, so deeply into it that you find the core. The core is usually like a seed or a small infant, no matter what the outer aspects look like. Take that seed, that infant, in your hands, in your arms and it will offer up its need and desire to you. Fulfilling that need and desire at the core of any puzzle, any challenge, any hardened situation, usually results in a fresh flow of life-juice. Peace and Joy are the natural outcome of such love.
Right now our world has a connective digital tissue. It is called the Internet. The Internet has become like flesh now. It is sensitized because of the people who are constantly using digital networks to communicate. And this communication moves very swiftly around the planet. At the push of a one button in the smallest apartment, at an island home or on a farm by the sea, a message can be sent and arrive EVERYWHERE.
It seems there are so many puzzles that humans are trying to figure out at this time in history. And we have the tools at our fingertips.
1. IDENTIFY YOUR MISSION: Use a pen and paper to write it down.
3. FLESH OUT YOUR MESSAGE WITH TEXT, IMAGES, MOVIES, MUSIC AND MUCH MORE: Go to the World Wide Mind and study each type of major social property. Find content related to your mission in these properties by using the Search field. As you do this, you will be discovering a community of like-minded folks. Make a note of their profiles in an Excel spreadsheet. If you spend a whole day doing this, going around The World Wide Mind, you may have discovered hundreds of new friends. Oh, and mash up all of this great content you find, along with your own, to create the first coloring of your own network.
4. UPLOAD YOUR INITIAL CONTENT TO YOUR VARIOUS CLAIMED SOCIAL PROPERTIES.
5. BUILD YOUR COMMUNITY: Contact each of the individuals on your spreadsheet by sending them a personal note appreciating their content. Invite them to be a friend.
6. CONTINUE SPREADING YOUR MESSAGE AND DISCOVERING NEW FRIENDS.
7. STATE YOUR GOALS AND INVITE OTHERS TO JOIN YOU: Write simple short messages each day as tweets, Facebook posts, Flickr photo uploads, YouTube uploads, Twitpics, a song addd to Last.fm, a presentation placed on SlideShare. Socialize these messages to ALL of the social properties in which you are present.
8. TAKE ACTION: Now create an event using Meetup.com or EventBrite and invite people to come and interact. Find like-minded people in the digital networks and invite them. Meeting in the flesh is amazing, especially after having been kindred souls in the digital networks. Use a community like Challenge Post or Giveo to get your cause out there and get something done!
Its never too late to enter social networks. And there’s no right way to be social. After all, as the great mystic Ziauddin Sardar says, “There is more than one way to be a human being.” So go be yourself. Totally. Go where you want to go in social networks and you will find people just like you there!
The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words. ~ RACHEL NAOMI REMEN
When the tribe first sat down in a circle and agreed to allow only one person to speak at a time – that was the longest step forward in the history of law. ~ Judge Curtis Bok
”Council is the practice of speaking and listening from the heart. Through compassionate, heartfelt expression and empathic, non-judgmental listening, Council inspires a non-hierarchical form of deep communication that reveals a group’s vision and purpose.” ~Ojai Foundation leadership, (http://www.ojaifoundation.org/what-is-council)
The way of council circle is THE ethos for our current socially-networked world. This is where each voice has its time and listening is more important than a battle of voices. In council, our pride is in how well we have heard “the Other”. This is humanity’s only hope now.
The wisest being in the circle is invisible, created by the drumming, the silence, the tears, the laughter, the stories. In the men’s circle, we each spoke, wept, laughed, shouted and sang into the silence, into the center of the circle. Often, if I chose to remain silent, waiting until it felt right to speak, another would say something that captured what lived within me perfectly. The feedback after deep sharing and deep listening was appreciation for something other than what I shared. This lifted me up and out of my pain, my pride, my sorrow, my victory and put me back together again…lifting me up or humbling me through warmth, through friendship, through a feeling of brotherhood enwrapped in a profound spiritual sense of community.
I remember a circle 5 or 6 years ago. I sat down and began using the words Us, We and You. A long time circle brother gently stopped me. “Nathaniel,” he said, “I can’t see you when you use these words to describe experience. And I want to see you. Please only use I when you talk about your week and the lessons you’ve learned.”
This was a huge evening for me because I really felt in my body the truth of personal responsibility.
My experience of circle is that I gain incredible wisdom in sitting with others, really on a level rarely plumbed in other settings.
One of the cornerstones of Circle is teaching adults and children to appreciate one another in a manner that the recipient can truly feel the appreciation. I say what I really see inside the person, what I love, honor and respect about the person – not their story. I learn not to over appreciate because I know that some of us can only “hold” so much. I avoid speaking about their appearance but more about their essence. Avoid disguised advice in your appreciations like “ It’s important to take care of yourself”. I try not to use superlatives like greatest, best etc. I try to step out of myself and think only of giving the gift of appreciation in a way that the receiver will accept it with ease.
The principles of deep-listening in Council Circle gatherings are necessary for our now increasingly socially-networked world.
Deep Listening principles from the Council tradition are as follows:
1- Maintain eye contact with the person speaking.
2- Be relaxed but present.
3- Be still.
4- Listen from the heart.
5- Be non-judgmental.
6- Allow the story to unfold.
7- Listen carefully and the person speaking will always tell you what they need.
8- It’s not your job to “fix” the person who’s speaking.
9- Common mistakes to avoid:
a) DON’T give advice (unless asked for)
b) DON’T “swap stories” to reassure the person who’s speaking. You may
think your story is “the same” but its THAT PERSON’S moment, not yours.
c) DON’T interpret the meaning of his feelings
d) DON’T interrupt discharge of emotion (laughter, tears, etc.).
Let the emotions flow out into the circle and sit in attendance to
that emotion.
e) DON’T talk very much
f) DON’T ask questions for your own information.
g) DON’T think a lot about how to “help” the person speaking.
h) ONLY ask questions to lead the person deeper into feelings & his own re/solutions.
10- The most common mistake: Trying to show the person speaking what a good, understanding, perceptive, kind, helpful … person, counselor, leader … you are.
11- Listen, listen, listen! (That’s really what we all need).
The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words. ~ RACHEL NAOMI REMEN
The nature of a circle is equality and if we really want to heal the world through circles (whether digital or in-the-flesh), we must learn the way of circle, which was mastered many moons ago in the tribal cultures of the world. This is our only hope as humanity at this time. We do not have time for the dis-organized, tangled world of arguing as seen in the British Parliment. We NEVER have time for the killing off of other ethnicities and the horrible mess afterwards. We don’t have time for hate-speak and fighting.
If I take time, once a week, to sit with my brothers and sisters for 3-4 hours and only listen to their truth and only speak my truth, we will make light-speed progress through a weaving of hearts and minds. Try this today: sit with your friend, your spouse, your parent, your brother or sister, and simply listen to him/her for 30 minutes. Don’t offer advice, don’t interrupt, don’t identify. Just listen. That’s what our world needs right now to allow our collective intelligence true emergence.
Here’s just one of many takes on giving your gift to the world today!
1. GREAT CONTENT: The bottom line in marketing within the social networks is Quality Content WITHIN a Quality Context. @MarvinTowler
2. THERE IS NOTHING TOUGH OR NEW ABOUT IT: And that nothing has changed at all. The local veggie salesman often knows more about socializing than marketeers. Spend a day at the Farmer’s Market! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Me1zCtzwDM0)
3. GOOD RELATIONSHIPS: It’s about relationships. And humanizing business process. http://www.peopleizers.com
Peter Ecomomides of FelixBNI tells a story of his neighborhood market to illustrate how everything has changed & nothing has changed. Peter talks about conceiving creative & human ways to interact with customers. Applying common sense marketing to social tools (Social Monitoring Tools) & social networks (The World Wide Mind). The importance of adapting social technologies to ways humans have always spent time is vital. We gossip, watch movies, check out photos, listen to music, check the news. The most successful social networks, apps and tools are digital software that serve timeless human actions. This is the beauty of what Mr. Economides recognizes in his statement about “getting back to social”. He acknowledges that social objects – tweets, status updates, photos posted to Flickr, video posted to YouTube, ARE the medium. Mr. Economides writes, “Twitter is not a medium. Your tweets are the medium. Your blog, your Facebook page, etc.”
AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH MR. PETER ECONOMIDES OF FELIXBNI
ON CHANGE: You’ve emphasized that “everything has changed and nothing has changed”. What are your thoughts on that today and why is this an important message for those getting into marketing via social networks?
Everyone in marketing was educated BDSM – Before the Development of Social Media. And the marketing we learned was focused on the Broadcast Economy. Mass media. Mass retailing. The consumer as a demographic number.
Social Media has given birth to the Conversation Economy. Massive media which do not broadcast. Messaging has become stream of micro conversations. The consumer now has a highly individual profile.
My point is that this is the way it has always been. Mass, if you think about it, is the aberration. It’s back to village, where conversation and word of mouth rule supreme. It’s just that this time the village is global. And the main road running through it is the internet and social media.
The irony is that the largest medium in the world has taken us back to a world filled with individuals, conversation and word of mouth. But as Gary Vaynerchuk says, it’s “word of mouth on steroids.”
Social media is influencing consumer behaviour way beyond the internet. And this is the most important thing for any marketer to bear in mind. Great marketing rests on powerful consumer insight. And if marketers don’t understand the 360º effect of social media on consumer behaviour, they’re in serious trouble.
I often illustrate this through my local butcher.
I believe that he has the best meat in Athens. Now, I am not an expert. I do not know this, but I believe it. Not because of what he says but because of how he behaves. He does not impress this on me. He expresses it in everything he says and everything he does.
He has not studied marketing. He knows nothing about social media. But he is an insightful human who understands what makes people tick. His reputation has been built entirely on word of mouth. He knows that. And he also knows that his reputation can be ruined by word of mouth. In a flash.
Smart people have always known this. And the best butcher in the village has always behaved like this. Ask your grandmother.
ON TECHNOLOGY AND CONVERSATION: Danny Brown writes, “Every single one of us is connected, from the tech savvy to the Luddite to the in-between. And if we’re all connected, it becomes easier to help. And if we all help each other, maybe there’s just a chance the world might be a better place.” Do you see social technologies as accelerators of helping each other and making the world a better place? What can humans do in the context of social technologies that is different than via telephone, fax machines, and the Pony Express? Is it only about speed or is there something more tactile about social technologies now?
Conversation is the key.
Good conversation is a dialogue that consists of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. In other words, it is dynamic. It moves somewhere. Social media facilitates synthesis in a way that the telephone, fax machine and the Pony Express never could. It’s immediate. It’s massive. And it’s open. It’s like a perpetual town hall debate.
Television? Just thesis. No antithesis. Certainly no synthesis.
ON TWITTER: What is Twitter and why do you use it?
Twitter’s a cocktail party where you are free to drop into a conversation, plant a seed, pick a fruit, shape a thought, learn, share, contribute … and move on to the next conversation. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
Twitter is also the most immediate news source on the planet. I witnessed the Egyptian Revolution earlier this year by switching between Twitter and Al Jazeera on my iPad. I was in Tahrir Square through Twitter. Picking up news and personal drama. And I’d see the images a little later on Al Jazeera. No other medium could have done that for me.
The evening news? Forget about it!
ON FACEBOOK: Why have so many people flocked to Facebook?
A market is always built on a great product.
And I think Facebook is a great product.
Easy. Intuitive. Lots of ways to share. And, importantly, lots of reward through the Like button.
But there are a lot of great products out there which do not succeed ….
Facebook’s initial appeal was to the high school and college crowd. Important influencers of the older crowd. Facebook crossed the chasm into mainstream through kids. And once they had the critical mass, the network effect kicked in. One billion users by the end of 2011 … remarkable. But that;’s the network effect in action.
Facebook has played an important role as most people’s first step into social media. But it runs the risk of becoming the “low rent district” of the internet.
EXPLAINING SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY TO GRANDMA: How on earth do you explain social technologies and social networks to grandma? Or the crustiest of CEOs?
Back to the village! And back to my butcher story.
You’ve seen many approaches to marketing over the years. What are two of your favorite campaigns, in the past or now? What could social technology and social networks facilitate that maybe would have been tougher in the past?
I’d rather talk about great brands.
Because a campaign is just a stage in the life of a brand.
Every category has a protagonist brand.
And it should be the ambition of every brand to be the protagonist of its category.
Think of a soft drink. Coca-Cola?
The Coca-Cola of vodka?
The Absolut of computers?
The Apple of beer? The Heineken of sports shoes? The Nike of coffee shops?
Starbucks hardly advertises. But look at the quality of the conversation it has with its customers. In everything it says. And everything it does. Everything communicates.
Starbucks knows what its “Starbucksness” is all about. And so does every barista who works there. That’s the key to a great brand. Consistent behaviour throughout the organization. In everything it says and does.
Great brands have always understood the conversation. Great brands have always understood that they sell product to individuals and not to numbers. Great brands have always “got” what the social media experts are preaching. Nothing is new.
Naturally, social media open up new opportunities to connect with consumers through thesis, antithesis and synthesis. I wonder about the future of consumer research …..
ON GREECE: You have lived all over the world – in New York, Mexico City, Hong Kong, Johanessburg, Athens. You’ve marketed huge brands like Apple and Coca-Cola. You’ve been in leadership at major ad agencies like McCann and also done your own thing. Now you live in Athens, Greece. What is happening in Greece right now and how can OR are social networks play(ing) a part in this?
There’s a huge conversation going on on Twitter, revolving around current events in Greece. Also a number of great forums on Facebook. But I don’t see much traction. I am working on a public forum in the style of Quora which I hope to launch soon.
GREEK FAVORITES: Who is your favorite Greek musician? Film director? Playwright? Journalist?
