“Market research is what you do when your product isn’t any good [...] Every significant invention,” Land once said, “must be startling, unexpected and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention.” Thirty years later, when a reporter asked Jobs how much market research Apple had done before introducing the iPad, he responded, “None. It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want.”
A kind and insightful article on Edwin H. Land, the genius behind the Polaroid Corporation and an inspiration hero for Steve Jobs.
Last Monday I made my way to Cafe Heffer and participated to my 4th #techMAP Amsterdam. If last meetup was focused around social media and social brands, this time consumer behavior was brought into discussion and how we change, as consumers, in the digital era we’re living in. Among us, as guest speakers, we had Steven Zwerink and Xaviera Ringeling.
I had made couple of notes during the discussions and here are my take-aways from this meetup:
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Do you surprise your consumers or they surprise you?
Steven started with an intriguing statement: “Do you surprise your consumers or they surprise you?” and pointed out the changes happening right now in our society thanks to the wide spread of internet and technology.
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Monday evening I attended my 3rd #techMAP Amsterdam meetup, the main topic of discussion being What exactly is a ‘social’ brand? A long-awaited meetup by many of us, with more than 30 persons showing up at Cafe Heffer.
It was a very entertaining evening and we were happy to have Tom de Bruyne and Joeri Van den Bergh in front of us as guest speakers. It was a great mix between social media, brands, advertising and research. Tom had a keynote on how social media is slowly shaping the future of advertising and Joeri stepped in with a set of insightful learnings from his research around brands and the Millennials generation.
I took couple of notes during the meetup and I would like to share with you some of the key statements that stuck with me after I listened to their presentations:
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It’s hard not to notice the incredible amount of discussions and opinions polarized around the topic of ‘measuring social media‘.
There’s no doubt that an efficient social media campaign can generate fun, word-of-mouth, consumer engagement and invite fans to join in and engage into the conversation. The company can then listen, observe, take notes and collect insights along the way from the groups of fans and followers they’re interacting with. They can see what worked and what didn’t, what should they continue and what should they stop doing.
Mario Sundar from Linkedin said, at the recent The Next Web 2011 conference in Amsterdam, “Social media is like peanut butter, makes everything taste better”.
The thing I mostly enjoy about social media is that no person/company has yet to nail it once and for all. They’re still figuring it out, experimenting, putting ideas into practice, celebrating success, learning from their failures. That’s normal, social media is not like math, an exact science. Takes time & experience to build your craftsmanship. I recently wrote a piece about social media failures, going through another 3 case studies.
I wanted to learn more myself on how to measure social media’s effectiveness and I chose 3 different campaigns which performed online and proved social media’s return on investment – brand awareness, increased sales, Youtube views, Facebook likes etc. Let’s take each individual campaign – from the brief to the ideas, from ideas to the implementation and the responses they got from the online community:
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Social media has turned into a veritable propagating machine, spreading information across geographies in a matter of seconds. Once you post a tweet/an update the power suddenly shifts to the participants who will approve or backfire. I chose a roundup of 3 social media cases, relatively recent, presenting the scenarios and how did the events evolved in connection with social media. It is worth pointing out that these events wouldn’t have made it to the news in the first place, if it wasn’t for the social media.
#1 GoDaddy CEO kills elephant, damaging brand
This news made quite a few front-pages so I’ll go ahead and assume you had the chance of seeing this. In an attempt to actually show he was protecting the crops from the destructive elephants, Bob Parson killed one and proudly tweeted about his hunt in Zimbabwe. Not to mention his gesture of giving away free GoDaddy caps to the local Africans, in an attempt of some sort of branding.
The video provoked quite a rumor throughout the internet, Bob receiving a handful of harsh critiques from NGO’s and fellow Twitter users. NGO’s went even further and suggested users switching to new domain providers.
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We’re not supposed to know the final outcome of this journey and where it shall take us. Whether we’ll undoubtedly succeed or whether we’ll fail miserably.
And I think this is what scares the heck out of every single one of us.
Maybe it’s a good thing. It will make us reconsider things: live more intensely, take joy from even the smallest achievement and learn the most from every single wrong step we take.
As Seth Godin himself put it – buckle up, push it further and further and make it safely through the dip.
Whether it’s gonna be a successful ride or a painful crash it’s up to us. It’s up to us to focus towards the sunny tomorrow or get stuck over the rainy today. Rock on!