Michael Leis

Amidst all the talk around, well, talk, it’s important to remember that a brand strategy working through social media may be a complete MacGuffin.

Most social media brand engagements, after all, follow similar strategy guidelines as any new web or application presence. It’s going to where the people are, understanding what the brand’s role there can be, and then implementing it using tactics borrowed from a range of media, including television, Web development, radio, screenwriting, and simply watching what people are doing in that environment.

After having gone through  the years of Widgets as the next big thing (which they continue to be a valuable part of a marketing mix), social media is still important for brands to understand; the same thing Jakob Neilsen was trying to get across in 2000 (when discussing Web conventions): People will likely be more familiar with every other site than they are yours.

It’s all about the portable Web.

Now, brands have the opportunity to program for all these other sites, services, and platforms: and engage. To bridge offline with online, relationships and devices. Call it Widgets. Call it Social. Call it Mobile. They’re all important channels to have your brand engaged in because people are there, making decisions and looking for ways to express themselves without knowing programming.

How can your brand use these channels to maximize exposure, awareness, and drive revenue? That’s why you’d hire a strategist like me.

While there have been many professionals who have impacted my professional development over the last two decades, recently, Whitney Hess asked me to pick one. I picked William Donnelly, a professor at Temple University who taught Media Planning and Marketing Media Products. She was kind enough to publish my terse answers on her blog here as part of her Mentors and Heroes series, which I highly recommend. Lots of interesting insights there.

What Whitney really did that I appreciate most, though, is getting me to continue thinking about the ways Donnelly has affected my career beyond those answers: read more…

In a recent survey for a client, when asked to describe what people used social networks for, the most-used terms were revealing.

MySpace: Promote

It’s ironic that Yahoo! recently shut down Geocities with this term coming to the fore of MySpace users. Can MySpace even be considered a social network anymore? For many artists, musicians, and small businesses, MySpace has becme the new Geocities: making the promise of high traffic and easy-to-create websites.

In testing, it seems clear that in MySpace, friend counts have become meaningless, because none of the people in the liast (or very few) can even be described as friends. They’re all trying to take a fresh piece of real estate to bring people back to their own presence. The categories have lost their meaning, and everyone is spending time worrying about themselves.

Facebook: Friends read more…

Around these parts, the topic of social media strategy for loyalty and CRM has been getting a lot of attention. And why not? For all the talk around marketing via social media, isn’t maintaining a connection with the people who are already using your products important?

To me, this may be what social media does best for a brand. Though it’s important not to forget email and your traditional direct channels, here are a few ideas I’ve been considering: read more…

Through a great exchange over Twitter and his Blog, Dirk Shaw revives a concept that I’ve been harboring over the past year: how important it is to bring some element of social networking activity back to the brand home site.

Whether it’s a blog, B2B, B2C, or your basic brand hub, it pays to bring these elements back in for many of the same reasons that the social network platforms are doing so well: read more…

Sure, brands are really starting to “get” why they need a social media presence. But where do brand managers start in creating the framework for an effective social communications strategy? What I’ve been developing with clients is The Brand Cause and it works. So I thought it might help others to share: read more…

One of the tried and true methods of creating flow state for audiences in broadcast is the use of contrast to create meaning and subtext between shots in a sequence. This concept was first articulated by filmmaker Sergei Eistenstein when he went to the circus. He found that the more rings a circus added, the more meaning and interest the performances took on.

For example, watching a juggling act alone is entertaining. Adding a fire-eater who performs in a ring next to the juggling ring creates a new experience of watching both acts, but also adds meaning between the two acts. When you have three rings of acts performing at once, the viewer takes even more meaning, gets even more entertainment, and simply can’t take their eyes off the action for a moment.

Today, this approach is so pervasive it’s cliche. Think of the shot sequence for almost any product in a television commercial: a master shot that sets the scene, pleasant expressions of people who can relate to the target audience, and product shot. Juxtaposing smiling faces and products along with light/dark color values engages audiences and sells products.

Applying this idea to the user experience through social networking platforms draws some interesting parallels. People are spending exponentially more time on social media sites. If you think of the visual elements of these sites, there is a ton of contrast and meaning built through the typical browsing experience. Lots of faces of people you know, set against each other in various combinations. Between pages, each of the big three social networks also offer varying degrees of contrast between page states in design choices available to the creator of that profile: both in user interface control placement and color. read more…

Social media has been especially perplexing for clients who have made their hay over the years in direct marketing channels. To help clear things up a bit, here are a few key points from my place consulting these clients:

It’s still database marketing: you just don’t own the database anymore

Direct marketing has thrived over the years on the notion of how big the enterprise database is. Social media forces database marketers to answer the tough question though: how many of these names really count as interested in hearing about your product offer? In social channels, your database is your follower/friend count. To grow that group, you need to have a regular presence contributing value to the community. Ultimately, those people are your database for marketing, communications, and customer support. The only issue is that database is owned by the social network, not by your brand. read more…

Finding a new analogy for consulting brands in social media recently hit me while doing the nightly reading with my son in first grade. It was a book about Alexander Graham Bell and his first successful attempt at the telephone.

All the parts were there: the transmitter, the receiver, and so much wiring that it took up two rooms of his lab. Really, social media today is very similar. To create an effective strategy using social media for brands, it takes a lot of human-powered wiring. Posting content to multiple local exchanges, having someone at the ready to listen, and then respond to what comes back. read more…

An era of upheval: the dominant systems of broadcasting are scrambling. What is this new media that’s popping up? Everyone seems to be gravitating towards it, “traditional media” giants are getting pushed out. Brands wonder how they’ll have a lasting affect here; how can they stay in the discourse.

Worse yet, this new media is full of strange dynamics: New screen sizes? Alternating lines of resolution? New specialized technological jobs? Live audiences being broadcast? Unpredictable, regular people?

Of course, this isn’t the dawning of the social Web, but the beginning of TV networks’ full slate of programming sixty years ago: when there was enough critical mass to have four national networks, and the need arose to be able to fund the new technologies. Brands found how persuasive short demonstrations of their product were, and how dramatically they lifted sales. read more…