(mobileYouth) Influence - A Marketer's guide (Free Ebook Download)

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Copyright
© 2011 by mobileYouth
All rights reserved. No part of this document may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without prior written permission of mobileYouth

Authors grant fair use of book’s materials according to
conventions of “fair use” covering printed materials


A special thanks to

the mobileYouth team

Bernard Hor of Youth Works Asia

Marlon Parker of RLabs

Roman Ravve of Anketki Research


INTRODUCTION
Remember the ‘60’s?
No, neither do I.
Yet it’s amazing how brands insist on marketing like it’s
still the 1960’s. “Create a great brand story and push it
out there.” Sure it worked for Pepsi back when the cool
kids wore bellbottoms but things have changed since
then. We’ve landed on the moon. We’ve torn down
The Wall and then there was this thing called “The
Internet”. But, marketers still ask questions like “How
do we identify influencers on Twitter that would tweet
about us?”, “How can we get youth talking about our
brand” or “How do we get more people to ‘Like’ us on
Facebook?”
These are all the wrong questions to ask.
Nobody cares about your brand story. At least, not when
you’re the one telling it.
If your idea of marketing is still about finding the
busiest place where you can stand alone yelling out your
story with a megaphone, stop and take a look
around. The only ones still doing that are the ones
holding a “The end is near” sign.
Actually, even those guys have gone online.
Deep down even the most adamant billboard-space
salesmen know that the world of influence has changed.


The drivers of influence haven’t changed but being
influential has. The branding game used to be about
having the loudest and most interesting voice. It was
about Paid Media or buying youth trust and attention.
Those with the biggest budgets won the game.
Old Influence = Hot Creative Agency + Media Buy
This used to be enough to influence customers to
come. Now, telling your brand story can actually scare
influencers away. It’s not that they don’t like your
branding tone, or your story, or your choice of medium
but that you’re not creating any space for them to tell
their own story. And this is why so many brands fail at
the new influence game; the space you need to free up
for these influential storytellers is currently occupied by
celebrities and creative agencies. They are products of
the 1960s and don’t belong.

You see, the new rule of influence is as follows:
It’s not who’s telling your story but whose story
you’re telling that counts.
New Influence = Create Tools for Customers to tell their
Story
It’s happening because there are multiple narratives out
there. Who to trust? The answer is simple, people just
like them. That’s why Earned Media is the most critical
factor in brand influence today. You can’t buy youth
trust and attention anymore - that strategy was born of


an era when they were abundant. Today, you have to
earn it.
This book is about how brands can create influence and
successfully navigate this new landscape of the post-
advertising world. It’s about change and anticipating the
future. It’s about the role that you can take in it. And
that’s the key.
Even though our partners have conducted a superb
research covering four continents (Americas, Europe,
Africa, Asia) and we’ve combined the results with the
10 years of insights and experience collected by
mobileYouth, you shouldn’t expect this book to spell
out for you what you need to do.
Yes, you’ll find plenty of examples and best-practices
here but they’re not meant to be copied. They are meant
to inspire. I didn’t write this as a book of answers after
all. I wrote it as a book of questions.
We might be experts but you’re the one who has to
make the decisions. Marketing is broken and today, it’s
your job to fix it.

Ghani Kunto
ghani.kunto@mobileyouth.org


CHAPTER 1


Influence: The New Normal
* Awareness means nothing
* Peer Recommendation is now the key market driver
* You cannot buy influence anymore, you have to earn it
Early August 2008 was a special day for Gadis. It was
one day before her first day at university and she was
about to celebrate it by buying herself a new
phone. Gadis checked out the campus and was on her
way to ITC Ambassador, one of the leading places in
Jakarta, Indonesia for mobile phones.
The 15-minute drive stretched 45-minutes but she didn’t
mind because she was comfortable in her air conditioned
car, accompanied by music from the radio. Her favorite
song came on, interrupted only by the DJ ad-libbing a
promo for a music event sponsored by Nokia.
Peering outside, Gadis briefly noticed a Nokia
billboard a stretch of downtown street. She recognized
the celebrity featured in the ad and Gadis smiled. She
liked the celebrity, she didn’t mind the ad and had
always liked brand because she had been using Nokia
since she was grade eight. Her previous four phones
were all Nokias. While she usually didn’t notice ads,
this time was different. Gadis was about to buy a phone.
She noticed all of them.
Vast Nokia billboards hung right above the mall
entrance and flanked by further signage along the
escalators. Even as she arrived at the crowded 3rd floor
of ITC, where a thousand mom-and-pop mini outlets


crammed together cheek-by-jowl selling mobile phones,
there was no way to ignore the Nokia presence.
Nokia was everywhere.
Making a beeline towards the outlet recommended by
her older sister Gadis blazed through the cluttered space
to commandeer a stool right in front of the display
cabinet.
“Excuse me” she says to the store attendant. She taps on
the glass pane to draw his attention to the model she
wanted. This was the moment she had been looking
forward to all week. She made up her mind long before
she reached the stall and that’s why she had been
brimming with both anticipation and excitement from
the moment she turned the key over in her car’s ignition.
“I’d like a BlackBerry please.”
***
At the time of writing, Nokia still has the largest market
share in Indonesia. However, like in many other
countries where Nokia still leads, competition is rapidly
eroding the customer base - one Gadis at a time.
Looking around the mall at ITC it’s easy to be
convinced otherwise by the millions of dollars spend on
bright, confident ad hoardings. Every young Indonesian
knows Nokia but here’s the rub - less and less of them
care enough about the brand to buy its products.
In the midst of all these glossy in-you-face Nokia
advertising Blackberry is nowhere to be seen. Why then


are youth like Gadis demanding the brand that doesn’t
advertising? Consider too that Blackberry was designed
for corporate executives but the phone’s reality in
Indonesia is anything but; from housemaids to stay-at-
home moms to 10-years old kids everyone seems to
have one. The brand is one of the most coveted in the
country’s growing market of 180 million mobile
owners. Research in Motion (RIM) gained all this love
for the BlackBerry brand not by winning the mass
advertising game but by tapping inadvertently into the
key driver in modern marketing today -
recommendation.
Recommendation is simple but most marketers over-
complicate their lives. Recommendation is a square peg
in a marketing mindset of round holes. These are kind of
questions marketers typically ask:
 How do you measure Recommendation?
 How does Recommendation compare on a cost-per
basis?
 How do you justify the cost of gaining
Recommendation with long term results that would
supposedly follow?
 How do you gain Recommendation in the first
place?
Maybe you’ve tried this whole “recommendation
marketing stuff” using various campaigns: member-get-
member programs, ambassador programs or paid
tweets? Perhaps you’ve done this “social media” thing


before? Recommendation may be simple but the
simplicity betrays its elusiveness. We marketers can’t
win the Recommendation game through changing
strategies and media tactics - we first need to change our
mindset.
I was curious. How does Recommendation determine
the fate of brands? How could we extrapolate these
results on a global basis to transcend local
idiosyncracies? To do this, we’d need an industry that
was both truly global in availability of products and one
that touched customers in similar way across every
market. That’s why mobile telecoms is our passion
because it checks all these boxes - every teen in every
market of the world knows of and has probably owned
at some point in their life a Nokia. We looked at the
USA, South Africa, Russia and Malaysia because we
wanted to cover diverse markets that had very different
economic, social and cultural conditions to test the
validity of both our theories and data. Our challenge was
to develop a simple tool that could identify how and
why Gadis bought Blackberry and not Nokia. We
needed a tool that measured Recommendation only such
that brands could easily take it and use it without having
to go hire expensive creative agencies. We also needed a
tool that was forward looking - i.e. predictive - rather
than one based on history. And so, the Simple Mobile
Advocacy and Recommendation Tracker (SMART)
index was born.
In this book I’ll refer back to the SMART index as the
scientific crux of how Recommendation can be
measured and how it can also provide insight into where


brands need to start. You can learn about this more in-
depth in Chapter 3. We developed this core competency
for mobile brands and youth but it could be equally
applied to any age group and any vertical sector.
Our research into youth attitudes towards mobile brands
across 65 markets now spans a decade of insights,
travels and stories. We found SMART to be a reliable
indicator of future brand growth and profitability. You
can use SMART in a number of ways:
 Measure your Recommendation scores
 Measure the impact of marketing on
Recommendation
 Identify who your fans are
 Develop a profile of your most vocal fans
If you asked me to summarize this work in one sentence
it would be this simple truth - you can’t buy
Recommendation, you have to earn it.
This is Earned Media. Earned Media isn’t a curious
anomaly that bolts onto the mainstream marketing, it is
marketing today. To understand Earned Media we need
to first appreciate where we’re coming from - the era of
Paid Media - and the broken mindset that accompanies
this approach.


When advertisers still roamed the
earth
* Advertising used to be the most effective tool to create
influence
* Habit, fear of change and lack of direction continue to
keep advertising in business
* The price of attention is higher than ever: Supply of
advertising has increased exponentially but Demand
(customer attention) remains fixed

Before the 2008 economic crisis advertising was a $480
billion industry globally. Then the crisis hit. Everyone


from consumers to companies suddenly had less to
spend and anything considered as dead weight was
jettisoned. In 2009 global advertising spending dropped
by 10% to $50 billion. It doesn’t seem like companies
had fallen out of love with advertising though because
analysts predict that by 2012, spending will have passed
the $500 billion mark. That’s twice the GDP of the
Republic of Singapore. Although Paid Media is
becoming less effective in comparison to Earned Media
options, fear of change and ingrained habit keeps brands
and brand managers clinging to the familiar rather than
the effective.
The love story of modern advertising began in the
1960’s. It was a time of social change. Prior to World
War 2, there was no such thing as teenagers; there were
kids and there were adults. Then a whole new generation
of consumers inbetween adult and childhood appeared
on marketing radars looking for a way to identify
themselves. They knew they were different from their
parents. They didn’t empathize with the fear of being
invaded by hordes of Nazis or being drafted to attack
small islands in the Pacific. They knew they weren’t
their parents but they didn’t have the media outlets or
voice to express this point of difference. That was before
the “Big Idea”.
In 1963, advertising executive Alan Pottasch decided
that this was a question brands could help answer.
Before Pottasch broke with tradition, advertising
focused on product features;; “The gentlest dishwashing
soap for your hands”. Occasionally, advertising focused
on tangible benefits “The dishwashing soap that’s so


gentle, you wouldn’t need gloves.” But to Pottasch, the
growing importance of media in teen lives presented an
opportunity for advertising to play a bigger role in
helping this lost generation find their voice. Pottasch’s
idea was “The Big Idea” - the benefit of the benefit. The
Pepsi Generation was born.
Pepsi’s invitation -“Come Alive! You’re the Pepsi
Generation!” - helped the Boomers in defining the sense
of displacement they were feeling. Pepsi took the
leadership position simply by giving a name that
Boomers could use to gain a sense of belonging yet still
maintain the sense of significance that differentiated
them from their parents.
Pottasch’s advertising model worked so well that many
companies started copying with devastating succes all
the way into the late 1980’s. Michael Jackson sang
about Pepsi to the tune of Billy Jean and while the older
generation debated whether or not Madonna was indeed
like a virgin, the young people knew that Madonna
indeed liked Pepsi.
Advertising told stories that people liked; if you made a
good advert, people actually looked forward to seeing
it. Advertising made the news. There was even
advertising about upcoming advertising.
Before the 1990’s the most important questions that a
brand faced was, “What’s our brand story?” It seemed
that if they could only figure that out, then people could
buy into the story, and then it’s just a matter of
distribution and operations. And, if they couldn’t figure


it out there was always a creative agency waiting to
write the blank slate as long as you wrote the checks.
Brands always vied against others for attention leaving
the one with the deeper pockets the winner. They could
afford the bigger idea, the more famous celebrity and the
louder campaign. But by the 1990s, the media landscape
started to shift fundamentally. The growth of multiple
media channels meant brand managers couldn’t simply
buy media space as a guaranteed method of winning
eyeballs. Where were those kids now? Brands now faced
a whole set of new challenges. By mid-2000 the average
person was seeing 500 advertising messages a day -
more than 10x the number in 1970s. As that number
continues to rise a new generation of consumers are
growing up trained to ignore them. There is simply too
much noise to appraise every ad message on its merit.
Now we’re only listening to those messages our peers
are recommending. You can spend millions buying
media space that Gadis will see but you can’t buy that
all important place in her heart.
In this post-advertising world, marketing is just that - a
love story. It’s about heart. It’s not about being “liked”
but being “loved”. Cynics point to youth’s fickle
relationship with marketing as indicative of a generation
that lacks the ability to focus or develop deep
relationships on a meaningful level but that misses the
point. This generation has adapted to a media landscape
that has changed fundamentally to the Pepsi Generation
we grew up with. The internet changed everything.


Blame It on Internet
* Advertising treats internet as new real estate to tell the
brand story rather than a new form of storytelling
* In the pre-internet era marketing and consumption
were compromize. Today, however, we exist in a
fragmented Interest Economy
* Relevance in the Interest Economy cannot be defined
at the level of advertising - it must be self-created
It was just another day in Twitterverse.
As usual, a collection of largely unconnected and often
unknown topics dominated the global trending topics
top 10. On that day, June 27th 2010 the top trending
topic was #wasitgoblog.
People jumped in. Some rode the coattail of the trend
advertising their own content with links to articles like
“7 Tips to Drive Traffic to Your Blog”. Most, however,
were curious. What happened? Did it happen on Go
Blog? What is Go Blog anyway?
Gadis would know. The penny dropped. Most of the
tweets were not in English. The tweets were in
Indonesian and these Asian Twitteratis were actually
referring to the controversial call made by the referee in
an England vs. Germany Soccer World Cup match. It
was around 02:00AM in Indonesia and most of those
watching the game watched it in the comfort of their
own homes. For a short moment in time, these total
strangers voiced out their frustration. From a corner of
the world that often receives little attention on the global


media’s stage and that voice drowned out everything
else on Twitter. Translated, #wasitgoblog means
“stupid referee.”
It was past midnight in the country of more than
300,000 islands. How else could an Indonesian fan of
England’s football team find so many others like her that
they could overwhelm other things in Twitter at the
time? The internet is made of an infinite number of
these small moments. Total strangers finding others
who are passionate about some seemingly obscure
thing. Fans of Call of Duty in Calgary, Canada playing
with a modded version of the game that was developed
by another fan in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Fans of
Japanese anime who liked to dress up as their favorite
characters finding each other to organize regular cosplay
festivals. Fans of Korean pop music in Mexico getting
together for karaoke parties.
This is the Interest Economy and the internet made it
happen.
The internet became a place for the world for all the
things that didn’t have space in the sound-bite-only
traditional mass media. Things that seemed
insignificant—even inane—to most, but very important
to some now found a home. For many young people
discovering and exploring their identity the intenet’s
Interest Economy offers an attractive alternative to the
world of compromize and its Pepsi Generation approach
offered by brand managers. Just like previous
generations youth wanted to be different but now they
didn’t have to be different alone.


For advertisers, the early internet held so much promise.
Here was a new media that people were avidly paying
attnetion to. Maybe this was the next television?
Eyeballs translated to speculative growth and growth
drove stock prices through the roof. Everybody wanted
to the next big thing and the next big thing would be
found in the media presence that had won the most
eyeballs. The business model, it appeared, could be
worked out later.
Banner ads, pop-up ads, pop-under ads, the list goes
on. Advertisers kept finding new ways to make sure
plenty of eyeballs saw their advert.
Fast forward to post-dotcom-bust era, brands started to
realize how much the internet is not like television. Yes,
people consume this new media but the beauty of this
media is that people can produce content too. And most
of those who do are doing it to connect with others like
them.
If John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and
Ringo Starr had only met today and made songs as
legendary as The Beatles we know had, they still would
not have been as successful as The Beatles were. They
would still have the groupies. They would still rock their
live shows but they could never reach 30 million album
sales like The Beatles did with The White Album
because you don’t have to listen to the Beatles today to
belong to your peer group - you have unlimited choice.
You don’t just have 1000s of music genres to browse
you could also be a Lego fan or be into World of
Warcraft, My Little Pony, hang out on 4Chan,


Hypebeast, Threadless or the millions of other
community websites out there that house people just
like you. In the 1960s you either liked the Fab 4 or you
didn’t.
In 2011, global recorded music sales lost a further
USD$1.5bn. People just aren’t buying albums
anymore. No one can come near the record-breaking
album sales numbers that artists used to get prior to the
internet. Michael Jackson’s Thriller was released in
1982 and sold 110 million copies. Even if you added up
all the new album sales of 50 Cent, Justin Bieber, Cold
Play and Beyonce in the last half of the decade, you
won’t come near those numbers.
From the troubadours of ancient Greek to singers who
made it big via music videos and MTV to our current
crop of household names, performance artists have
always been the best storytellers. Their gift was the
ability to enrapture their audience with charm and
personality, along with on-stage performance. In
today’s world, while their names might be familiar
across the globe, less and less people care enough to buy
their albums because there are a million stories vying for
the same amount of eyeballs as there ever was. What
chances do brands and advertisers have?
Today’s storytellers (artists/brands/advertisers) might be
better at telling their tales than their predecessors, but
today’s young people don’t care. Young people today
don’t need a company telling them that they can become
cooler if they’re part of the some soda generation.


Young people already have other young people who are
telling them that they don’t have to be cool.
The internet changed how we marketed “cool” forever.
No longer was “cool” even relevant because it
represented a mainstream interpretation of how we
should be. Today, the Interest Economy permits us to
indulge our passions in communities that have found
fertile soil on the internet. What matters today isn’t the
voice of aged DJs, magazine editorials and the images of
the silver screen but your new friends - the relationships
nurtured on the internet.

New Sincerity
* Mainstream definitions of cool have changed; cool is
not about getting elected but being relevant to specific
interest niches
Today, it’s hard to sell cool, because nobody knows
what that is anymore. Driven by fan discussions online,
a show that one television network deemed “made TV
too gay” actually became a top hit. The Gleeks—as the
Glee fans call themselves—proudly show their love for
the show. Make a nerdy TV show like Glee, Ugly
Betty, or Big Bang Theory and you’ll find a
fanbase. Make a geeky movie about comic book
superheroes like Iron Man you’ll find fans of all
ages. Nobody needs to hide their inner nerd
anymore. This is the New Sincerity, where guilty
pleasures are just pleasures.
Being a nerd is cool now. But being cool is also still
cool. Perhaps the term “nerd” is simply a term coined by


mainstream media to control, corral and terrorize a
vastly diversified and unique group of individuals into
believing in a myth of the mainstream.
When we were kids we were told to be ourselves but not
it was difficult advice to action. It was too hard to just
be ourselves. “Being myself” often meant “being by
myself” and nobody wanted that especially young
people. Being part of the group was more important
than being ourselves. Most youth would rather go on an
unhealthy diet to look like the models they saw in that
cool advert where it seemed like everybody had
friends. Some young people took the other route, and
thought they could get friends if they emulated the
romanticized image of bad boys who sat in the back of
the class.
Today, while many young people are still trying to fit
themselves into the traditional ideals about cool many
more are discovering and defining what cool is for
themselves. Cool is just a Google search away.
Today, youth can be themselves without being by
themselves. The Interest Economy is a growing
diaspora of fans united not by geographical proximity -
as was the haphazard zip code lottery of friendships in
the pre internet era - but by passions. If youth can now
defined their own cool, advertising no longer plays a
central role in their story. The Pepsi Generation is over.
Storytelling - the art of the advertiser - has now become
the prerogative of the customer. In particular, the young
customer. It’s here in these self-defined stories about


what brands are and are not that youth shape the
fortunes of billion dollar companies. Young black South
African females redefine the story of an executive
messaging tool to create one of the country’s most
identifiable brands. Millions spent on ad agencies trying
to make Nokia cool fail to impress a whole new
generation of customers for who the brand means very
little.
In the era of Earned Media the story isn’t written by the
brand manager or ad agency but by the customer and it’s
this change in mindset that forms the fundamental
prerequisite of getting strategy right. You can’t generate
Earned Media if you’re out there still make the narrative
about your brand, you have to let them tell the story.

The Alternative
* The alternative to advertising isn’t advertising
* Brand ambassadors, paid tweets or user-generated
logos may use new media but it’s business as usual
* It’s not who’s telling your story that counts, it’s whose
story you’re telling
Irrelevancy impacts your marketing like smoking
impacts your health. It’s a slow, insidious creep rather
than a game change paradigm shift in behavior. It’s just
enough in the long run to propel the brand to a fatal
outcome but never enough in the short term to jumpstart
marketers into making change. Brands like Nokia are
feeling the first impact of irrelevancy on their brand
health;; ratings agency Moody’s just cut the company’s
debt rating to just two grades above junk. But as with


any chronic sickness that impacts health, the symptoms
aren’t an overnight phenomena - they are the product of
years of neglect.
Nokia lost relevancy with youth long before the
Moody’s downgrade in 2011. In early 2010 we shared a
presentation online appropriately titled “Hey, Nokia -
remember me?” featuring the voices of youth who we
were interviewing at the time. We were finding
increasing evidence that this once untouchable youth
brand was now falling out of touch with its core
Beachhead in key markets. Needless to say, the usual
suspects - fear of change and a lifetime of habit
prevented the companies own change agents from being
heard. But it’s not all doom and gloom for the company.
If you’re a brand who has lost credibility with your core
market you can win it back. We’ll show examples of
how to start in Chapter 3.
Irrelevancy faces all brands today. Every day their
employees need to wake up in fear that they are less
relevant than yesterday. Yesterday they had relevancy.
Yesterday their brand stories meant something to the
customers. Now most of these stories are lost in the
wall of noise the advertising world itself has created.
And even when brands reach the customer and show up
on the creative agency’s “awareness” based metrics,
they are still meaningless. After all, you all know
Cadillac but when was the last time you bought one?
The two most ineffective methods of marketing today
are based on Paid Media models:


 Feature based marketing
 Brand management
The first finds its roots in pre-World War 2
advertising. “Now featuring QWERTY keyboard,” and
“winner of a design award.” Dishwashing soap,
anyone? This is feature based marketing and is the
product of companies that don’t get out into the real
world enough. Nobody wakes up thinking about your
products or brands anymore. Get over it.
The second ineffective method of marketing is brand
management. Brand management means controlling the
storytelling and works something like this: If young
people prefer listening to each other, then lets pay them
to talk about us! Brand management comes in many
guises:
 brand ambassador programs
 cool ad campaigns using a drumming monkey on a
tricycle on Youtube
 Facebook fan pages that talk about your brand,
paying those with high influence scores on Twitter
to tweet about the brand
 anything with Lady Gaga in it
 most of what comes out of creative agencies today
 and the rather desperate “Submit your most creative
pose in front of our logo, and you can win free
stuff.”


Feature based marketing and Brand management are the
key composites of Paid Media. Today, neither is
effective at building long term Recommendation.
Paid Media has always been a short term game ever
since the days of Pottasch and the Pepsi Generation.
Brand managers were tasked to spend not invest
marketing budgets. Back then it worked because you
were guaranteed that as soon as your campaign ran its
course the customers were waiting there like some
faithful puppy dog anticipating your next offering.
Today, however, Recommendation rules. 65% of youth
will buy their next mobile phone based on what their
friends say not what the creative agencies and brand
managers say. That’s a game changer for Nokia;; you
can’t simply go to the creative agency and say “I want
you to make us an ad campaign but this time make it
something that people are going to recommend to
friend.” It doesn’t work like that. In fact, in this
redefined marketing landscape the creative agency often
becomes a significant part of the problem.
Of course, there are outstanding creative agencies out
there but they are the exception rather than the rule.
Most creative agencies are the products of an era built
on the assumption that youth trust and attention were
abundant and that simply isn’t true anymore. For brands
to win the Earned Media game they have to seriously
challenge their own internal assumptions about how the
marketing game works. Sure, you can easily win a
Cannes Lions for an ad campaign that looks great and
satiates your corporate ego. Ask Gadis what she thinks


about it and she’ll say it’s great but when it comes down
to it, she goes off and buys your rival. This is the irony
of Paid Media today - billions of dollars wasted because
of fear of change and habit. In years to come we will
question how we ever put up with it during these
transition years but that wisdom is afforded to us with
hindsight. For now, I’d like to impart some foresight
based on 10 years working with your next generation of
customers.


CHAPTER 2


Building a Movement
* Global brands like Ford are adopting Earned Media as
a core composite of their entire marketing approach
* Earned Media means working with fans who wanted
to be involved rather than paid celebrities and
ambassadors
* Fans need brands as much as brands need them -
brands simply have to remove the walls that prevent fans
engaging with them
Standing in the shade out of the sun’s scorching heat,
Maria de los Angeles cups her hands in front of her
gingerly holding two little critters.
“Can we get them to make that cute little noise?” she
asks, half squinting as the Summer sun beats down on
her brow. Her friend Brad Schenck gives the hatchlings
a little rub under the chin. They start chirping.
“When you’re in the everglades and you’re canoeing in
the wilderness, if you hear that,” Maria paused, “it
means that there’s some baby gators around.”
The two baby alligators in her hands started squirming
as if they knew she was talking about them. Maria is at
the Gatorland theme park and wildlife preserve in
Orlando Florida. This was a little off her usual path in
Miami but not so far that she was out of her
element. She always liked writing about her adventures
in Florida and together with her filmmaker friend Brad,
they made a pretty good team sharing what the Sunshine

State had to offer. In the last few months alone, she had
adventures with alligators in Orlando, uncovered a
behind-the-scene look of the graffiti scene in South
Miami and helped build a home for a family with
Habitat for Humanity. She was doing the kinds of
things she had always been doing - things that she loved
doing - but with a slight difference. This time it wasn’t
just Maria.
After the 2007-2008 economic recession, the Big Three
of American automobile manufacturers reached
the bottom of an economic pit that many analysts had
declared would be the end of the line. Thousands of
workers were laid off. A number of well known sub-
brands discontinued. Trust at domestic automobile
brands were at an all-time low. In a situation where
many were losing their homes few were in the mood to
take out a loan to purchase a new car. Set against this
backdrop companies were advised that they needed to
keep advertising to retain consumer trust. When brands
failed to maintain their brand with high visibility
campaigns, we were led to believe, customers would
think they’d gone out of business.
The received wisdom of the advertising industry didn’t
find favor at Ford, however. Here was a brand that was
determined to re-engineer its marketing by jettisoning
the mindset that got it into its financial mess in the first
place. Out of the Big Three, Ford was the first to emerge
from the slump. Half of its turnaround story was due to
the shedding of old lines that were no longer relevant in
the American market and shoring up its manufacturing
process. The other half came from introducing


innovating products launched on the back of equally
innovative marketing. When it came to building lines of
influence at Ford, advertising and the creative agencies
took a back seat. Earned Media was in the driving seat.
The Fiesta was as an unlikely success story for Ford in
the US market as could have been conceived during the
bubble years. Even before the recession, banking on an
entry-level model to drive sales was not a safe
bet. While there were numerous offerings for the youth
market, sales in previous years for that segment of the
market in the US had been dwindling. Urban migration
made public transportation more appealing for day-to-
day commuting and gas prices meant car maintenance
expenses became too costly for those trying to find their
feet on the economic ladder. For youth, automobiles
meant freedom but in the current economic climate they
increasingly became a byword for burden.
Ford took a chance. The company took an entry-level
small-engine model already avaialble in Europe and
planned a launch in the US. Traditionally, auto launches
at Ford adopted the Paid Media approach to new
products:
 generate buzz at trade show via unveiling of new
model
 court trade press and media
 edgy TV ad campaigns
 expensive media buys


Post-recession Ford, however agreed to adopt a new
approach that captured the zeitgeist of the era - less risk,
less waste, less glamor and back to basics. To crack the
youth segment Ford understood that “good enough” was
no longer “enough” but short of investing millions in an
expensive media buy, they’d have to re-build a customer
base one Maria at a time. Necessity is the mother of
invention and Ford’s drive to focus on optimizing their
capital outlays from manufacturing to marketing created
the perfect environment for the birth of some very
innovative Earned Media marketing. The Ford Fiesta
Movement was born.
“We haven’t completely decided what’s going to
happen,” said Scott Monty, Head of Social Media for
Ford Motor Company. “We’ll be continuing the
relationship with the agents and ensure that we make the
most of it.”
The agents Monty was referring to were the participants
of the Fiesta Movement, all 100 of them. They were
perfect strangers who led active lives, both on and
offline. While they did have some social media
presence most were by no means online celebrities.
Maria De Los Angeles was agent #27.
These hopefuls needed Ford’s platform to tell their story
and Ford needed them to generate the Earned Media it
required to shape their target market. It was an approach
that required a degree of confidence in the new Earned
Media model and a departure from the ubiquitous “go
social” attitude offered by creative agencies.


“We didn't want A-list celebrities. We know that people
trust people like themselves most, and our agents are a
good representation of many of the people we're
interested in reaching. Plus, they all wanted to be part of
this - we didn't have to go out and hire them,” said
Monty.
These weren’t brand ambassadors in the traditional
sense - they were Fans. Nobody was getting paid. When
Ford asked Maria and the agents to blog, share and
record their daily experiences on video they didn’t need
to hire an agency to tap their ambassador network, these
Fans were already lining up. This is what Maria does for
breakfast - video, broadcast, editing. It’s all part of
telling her story and Ford just happened to give her the
Social Tools to make that go even further.
Even though they knew they would not receive any
monetary compensation other than some gas money and
a 1 in 100 chance to win a new Fiesta, over 4,000 people
applied to spend 6 months of their lives to be part of the
program. Your fans are out there, you just have to
break down the walls and mindsets in your organizations
that prevent them from engaging you.
These were individuals who liked to talk, write and
create movies. They liked to perform. All Ford did was
give them a stage - a car for half a year and told them to
do what they’ve always loved doing.
And the agents did just that.
FFM agents created video shorts, documented their
travels, discovered little-known places, interviewed


interesting people - one of them even used the car to
elope. Very few of the pictures taken and videos created
were about the Fiesta itself. Those that did just showed
the car briefly - around 3 seconds in a 5-minutes
video. In fact if you look at the agents’ page on the
FFM website you struggle to see any evidence of the
Ford logo or brand. It wasn’t about the car, after all. It
was about the people.
Earned Media works. It doesn’t just drive mobile
handset sales it also drives the auto industry. The Ford
Fiesta launched in 2011 and is now top seller in the
small compact category for the youth segment. While
this new approach to marketing was new to the
company, Ford did not take a blind chance. Ford
already knew the ground rules of Earned Media.

What Doesn’t Work
* Earned Media does not equal Social Media
* Social Media is a tool in the strategy not the strategy
* Earned Media strategy means making customers the
storytellers
“Let’s get someone on this right away. Twitter,
Facebook, YouTube, whatever. Go make something
viral.”
This was how companies like Toyota ended up with
campaigns like Shareathon, where those who purchase a
new Toyota can get a $500 debit card for tweeting
about it. Toyota gave away the debit cards to 2,000
people. The million dollar campaign lasted for four


days. The company added another $500,000 as a bonus
at the end of the four days.
Four days, one and half million dollars later (more if
you include the fee for the agency that hatched the plan)
and people have pretty much forgotten about the Toyota
marques being pushed in the campaign, just like Gadis
at the mobile mall.
As JP Getty once said “any idiot can sell a dollar for
eighty cents”. This is not what Earned Media is all
about. As the name implies, you have to earn it.


The 5 Laws of Influence
Rule #1: The best things in life are
free
* Paying for media can prevent fans from getting
involved
* Earned Media needs to allow fans to decide what
stories needed to be told rather than determine the
content
* Brands can provide guidelines and leadership but
ultimately the story needs to be the customer’s
“I got involved in this not only because I wanted the fun
and the opportunity to create great content for my blog,
but also because I wanted to experience it from a
professional angle,” said Maria.
I’ve seen countless brand ambassador programmes
where companies have hired agencies to recruit and pay
for presences on campuses, in malls and at events. Most
of them simply rock up to score credits on their resume.
Others need the money. When the proposition is right
money and resume credits don’t even enter the equation
- they do it because they love doing this anyway and hte
brand simply gives them better tools to achieve their
social objectives. Like many kinds of human
relationships, once money enters a relationship it opens
up issues of power, control, and trust. Not exactly the
kind of things you want on the table early on in a
relationship. So, how did Ford control what was being
said? The short answer: it didn’t.


“We're the curators. It's up to the agents to create their
content - and post it on their own sites, not on ours,”
said Monty.
Indeed, Ford’s Fiesta Movement’s official website only
gathered content that the agents created and scattered all
over the internet. Of course, there is an element of risk;
what if the cars turned out to be lemons and agents bad-
mouth the brand? Fortunately for Ford the autos are
reasonably sound so recurring glitches were not an issue
but this still doesn’t pre-empty any PR timebombs that
could occur from letting youth loose on your brand. It’s
when Ford turns from content creation to content
curation that risk self-mitigates.
You see, the program was never meant to highlight the
car. It was meant to highlight the social context of the
car. While a small part of the market might be interested
in the technical specs of the vehicles, most people were
more interested in how the car would blend into their
lives. This realization was what lead Ford to its hands-
off approach. When the story is about them not the brand
why would agents like Maria risk everything by making
themselves look stupid? There is no “evil brand” to flip
the royal finger at here - this is about them.
“The whole process has been very organic, warm and
fuzzy, and not at all pushy or forced,” said Maria. “I’m
not a ‘money’ person and I have no idea if this will help
Ford’s bottom line in the end when it comes to selling
cars but I can tell you that from professional perspective
that this has got to be one of the most brilliant
campaigns ever. It fully engages us as ambassadors


without us being hardcore sales people. We are not
required to yap about the Fiesta constantly and we can
pretty much say whatever we want. The only thing
we’re not allowed to do in our videos is shoot something
stupid — ie, driving without a seat belt, that sort of
thing. Ford took a great risk in putting these cars in our
hands.”
What if Ford played it safe by doing what everybody
else had always done? “Safe” does not mean guaranteed
returns like it used to. In youth marketing today,
playing it safe is the riskiest thing you can do.

Rule #2: Be something to somebody
* Earned Media is not about getting elected but focusing
on a core of fans who care
* Focus on which of the 3 groups of change agents are
most relevant to your brand message
* Create Influence by creating a relevant Social Space
for your targeted peer group
It’s one thing managing the risk of agents producing
negative content but what about the possibility of them
producing no content at all? How many times have we
seen corporate ghostships ply the oceans of Second Life
or brand-centric social networks within months of the
multi-million dollar launch?
Marketing fails when the tail wags the dog. When
marketing is created to fulfil the needs of the
organization it becomes focused on big hits, Big Ideas,
silver bullets and locking down uncertainty to manage


returns. Uncertainty is almost always a byword for any
kind of customer interaction.
In the restaurant business, the organizational needs of
outlets often determine the structure of its marketing.
The McDonald’s success formula is QSC&V (Quality,
Service, Cleanliness and Value) - not taste. Take a drive
along a US highway and the golden arches are
inescapable and often visible for miles. The McDonald’s
franchise relies heavily on securing prime real estate.
When overheads are this high the franchise can’t take
risks - it needs to guarantee the slimmest of margins to
stay profitable and everything needs to be segmented
and systemized to ensure risk is squeezed out of the
delivery.
When the marketed becomes dominated by volume
players who excel at mitigating risk it may appear staid -
a few large players who seem to be more comfortable
with their limited competition than to be drawn into
entering an all-out price-war. Real choice may be
limited. Customer influence is drowned out by mass
market advertising.
In these markets innovative marketing can answer public
need but not through established outlets. It takes
innovators like Kogi - the Vietnamese/Korean/Mexican
fusion food truck operating in South LA. Kogi’s success
in drawing in a young hip crowd has spawned countless
imitators because the low overheads and easy point of
market entry allowed entpreneurs to hit the market
where McDonald’s was weak. McDonald’s marketing is
based around fixed real estate. By using Twitter to


promote its movements, Kogi could free itself from the
yoke of staid innovation and fill the gaps left by the
incumbents. Search the words “Kogi Food Truck” on
YouTube, and you’ll see videos of people standing in
long line ups even before the food truck arrived.
The key to Kogi’s success in drumming up custom in
the saturated markets of South LA hasn’t been in the
technology it used (sure that was a key component in
making it happen) but it was using that technology to
create influence. Kogi’s success lay in its fans.
Los Angeles is a heterogeneous city with a large migrant
community open to new and different experiences like
fusion food. LA is also a city of concrete built for cars
with highway upon highways, sometimes stacked on top
of each other. What the city needed was more Social
Spaces, more pop up communities and less of the
monolithic offering they could get elsewhere.
Kogi fans documented their experiences and food
reviews, regularly posting them on YouTube. They also
tweeted and retweeted the truck’s movements turning
corporate PR into a social event. For the fans, buying
fusion tacos became less about the taco and more about
what the taco did for them - provide an opportunity to
meet up with friends. In a world where time was
increasingly becoming a scarce commodity and where
McDonald’s could deliver your a filter coffee in 2
minutes or a Big Mac in 3, being “stuck” in the lineup
with your friends became an anomaly. This wasn’t about
concrete highways and risk-free efficiency but the Social


Space Kogi fans were searching for. The longer the
queue, the more valuable the social space became.
Of course, most people were time-pressed and had to
scurry back to their offices before the end of lunch hour
but then Kogi wasn’t targeting “most people”. Like
Ford, Kogi took a brave decision to not be everything to
everybody but something to somebody.
Taking the first step means realizing that being #2 no
longer counts and that in this world of no-compromize
fans don’t want to settle for second best. By trying to
win market share rather than share of customer you end
up becoming a mediocre offer that people like but don’t
love enough to talk about. When Earned Media
determines the success and failure of brands you can no
longer rely on this strategy.
Understanding what people love is a game changer. The
word “love” itself is the uncomfortable elephant in the
room when it comes to marketing because we don’t like
talking about deep rooted emotional feelings - especially
with strangers. But, the reality today is that winning
influence means getting over these hangups and
investing time in really understanding your customers.
What drives them? How do they interact? What are their
emotional attachments to your brand? What do they
love? What are their social needs?
I’ve put together an outline of the 3 key fan groups in
the youth segment to help you make that transition from
everybody to somebody:


1) Teenage Pirates
* Belonging and the fear of being left out are key drivers
for teens
* Teenage Pirates are outliers who emphasize skill and
knowledge to hack brands and products
* Teenage Pirates influence peers by finding better ways
to use existing products
To understand teenagers look at their relationship with
the mobile phone. US youth own their first phone
around age 13. In Europe they’re getting them much
earlier (as early as 8 yrs in North Europe).
Technically, teens remain adept in mobile use at the
basic operational level. They’ll skip the incumbent
protocol of usage and use it they way they want to (not
the way it says in the manual). As social circles expand,
the mobile phone becomes an intrinsic tool within their
growing network - address book contacts and Facebook
friends lists grow as a moniker of social worth. Those
without friends are seen as outsiders or simply put not
“in”. Social exclusion for many teens is a fate worse
than death. It’s a simile not used lightly;; teens will
experiment with lethal substances (such as tobacco) just
to be “in”.
The premium placed on Social Tools compels a subset
of teens to experiment with these tools to make them
deliver more Social Currency. From “discovering” SMS
and txtspk to corrupting BBM, mobile phone fascias or
exploring filesharing it’s the Teenage Pirates who have
been at the forefront of evolution in mobile technology.


From high school to homes, the typical teenager lives in
a highly structured environment. This type of
environment molds even the most diverse groups of
people into a homogenous one, much to the displeasure
of those in it. After all, late teenage years are that period
of life when one looks to define one’s self.
This search for social significance drives some to join
after school sports activity, the traditionally most
effective way to gain social currency. Others follow
their own strengths and skills. If you’re interested in
baseball history you could gain social currency by being
resident baseball expert, the guy to go to when you want
to know anything about baseball. If you’re into music,
you can gain social currency by becoming an expert in
that. Or if you’re into graffiti, or the occult, or anything
at all. Expertise creates social currency and, with that,
influence.
Teenage Pirates possess a different kind of expertise -
innovation. They hack stuff. We’re not talking about
hacking into government mainframes here but often
simple, innocuous incidences of innovation from
“rooting” and android phone to remixing a ringtone that
allow the Social Tools to evolve beyond their original
function.
Teenage Pirates exert influence in many ways:
 TPs often are the first to innovate new usages and
functions for existing products
 TP influence spreads rapidly within the teen
segment. Successful innovations filter through the


mass market without the need for centralized media
authority to accept or recognize the trend
 TPs influence family by introducing technologies
into the household and later educating the family on
how to use them - how often do you hear a
marketing exec recall the tell of her female daughter
using BBM at the dinner table?

2) Cashless Innovators
* Cashless Innovators are students, often male and have
a growing need to establish significance
* Cashless Innovators focus on creating alternative
social economies
* Influence is based on innovating unused or abandoned
items and assigning new social meanings - e.g. retro,
hipster, Instagram and fixie bike etc
As teenagers mature and enter college their social
networks change. Gone are the large inclusive groups
that divide on male/female lines and in their place are
more fragmented lifestyle based groups built around
shared interests, beliefs and identifiers such as music.
Where teenagers sought belonging over everything else,
students also seek status. They don’t just want to belong
to the group, they want to be something within that
group. That’s why peer groups fracture from being the
monolithic mass into smaller ones where individuals can
play a significant role.
The key distinction of student lifestyle is an excess of
time and restriction of money. Student’s seek status but


they don’t have the economic means to demonstrate
arrival in the same way their older peers would.
Consequently, it’s left to the Cashless Innovators - the
change agent subset of the student category - to eek out
innovative corruptions of existing Social Tools to infer
status on the owner.
Cashless Innovators are the backpackers of the youth
market - they were the ones who sought out Maya Bay
in Kho Phi Phi Lee, Thailand in movies like The Beach.
Unlike Teenage Pirates they’re not looking to break the
system, they’re seeking an alternative. That’s why the
Social Tools adopted by CIs are often old, discarded
tools that have little mass market worth enabling them to
be reborn, reinvented through a few hacks and patches
that are beyond the knowledge repertoire of older
generations.

CIs created fixie bikes (or scrapers as they are known in
the US) - old rusty fixed gear bikes that often have no
brakes. They’d take them from the junk yard, color them
in bright, garish colors and ride them around
town. Rather than look forward they distinguish
themselves from teenagers by sourcing their material
from history - such as trucker hats and vintage t-shirts
back in the early 2000’s before Ashton Kutcher made
them a fashion item.
Cashless Innovators derive Social Currency from
abandoned Social Toosl by recreating their meaning.
Old rusty bikes become the symbol of cool. Vintage
filters on their mobile phone photographs become a
better way of sharing than the latest high-def DSLRs. If


you don’t “get it”, you’re “out”. That’s why outsiders
see CI innovation as awkward, sometimes more focused
on winning attention than anything readily practical.
They speak of ‘Hipsters’ in the pejorative grouping a
whole bunch of lifestyle tweaks into one package. But,
for those living on the inside, it’s different - these are all
microsymbols that strive to keep the outsiders on the
outside. If it was easily discerned, less obscure and
simpler to understand - it wouldn’t work.
As the Cashless Innovator tries he find out who he is by
trying on different things and different ways to look at
life his peers look to him for answers. In the ongoing
quest for self-discovery, CIs lead opinion, shape trends
and form a key line of influence in today’s marketing.
Many brands, however, only see the tail end. They jump
on the bandwagon once these things have become a
trend or hire trendhunters to go source the latest, coolest
happening from the street only to find that, by the time
they reach the boardroom, CIs have moved on. What
they don’t see is the force that propels CIs to innovate in
the first place - defining an alternative social reality.
Once brands hijack the scene, the alternative becomes
mainstream.
There are brands, however, that understand that the
Earned Media game is a long-term play. These are the
brands that don’t have to chase trends because they’ve
been unofficially adopted as partners by the Cashless
Innovators. We will address these examples later on.


3) Disruptive Divas
* Disruptive Divas are often female and college age or
older
* Disruptive Divas favor social tools that represent
symbols of the establishment (e.g. Louis Vuitton or
Dad’s Blackberry phone)
* In societies where the role of females have changed
radically in the last generation (e.g. India, South Africa,
Indonesia), this group of change agents are most visible
and place a high premium on symbols of belonging
As students mature, society takes hold. The first job, the
first home and late nights at the office. Social circles
shrink rapidly. It’s at this point, the key differences
between male/female and developed/developing markets
begins to manifest because it’s here that the freedoms
afforded to teens and students yield to the wider
economic realities facing young adults.
Even though this is the 21st century, it’s still harder for
women to establish themselves in the workplace than it
is for men. That’s why young women pay greater
attention to the Social Tools that facilitate status within
the workplace as opposed to those that work outside.
Women strive harder to achieve titles and recognition so
compensate by purchasing readily visible status symbols
such as handbags and shoes.
Few countries can claim unilateral economic equality for
women, that’s why you’ll find the Disruptive Divas in
every market. This group of change agents are typically
in their 20s and almost always females (although we


have seen male examples but the drivers manifest very
differently).
The worst thing you can do for this group is market to
them as females - the “Pink Phone Syndrome” as we call
it. Sure, you need to account for the fact they are women
but you can’t patronize them by inferring that the key
requirements for women are that the model should be in
pink. DDs are attracted to the symbols of the
establishment - particularly in developing markets.
While many may argue that females in developing
markets now have equality of opportunity, pointing to
the first Indian female PM in 1966 and the first female
head of state in Indonesia 35 years later in Indonesia,
let’s not forget that these “role models” wouldn’t have
achieved anything without their powerful
fathers/husbands who were also once heads of state.
Real emancipation is still very far away, that’s why
they’ll seek out “dad’s phone” (the Blackberry) than
what marketers would have them believe as cool
because they’re more driven by recognition as economic
players than the need to pigeon-hole them as cool youth.
They’ll also attribute more value to Social Tools that
reflect the establishment and heritage - e.g. Louis
Vuitton rather than those that infer cool such as Nike.
DDs are disruptive by the very nature of their disruption
of social convention. DDs don’t conform to the
centuries-old tradition of how a young girl should
behave. She’s 25 years old, unmarried and seeking a
career. Unlike the Teenage Pirates and their system
angst or Cashless Innovators and their quest for an


alternative system Disruptive Divas want to become part
of the system. They aspire to belong in the mainstream.
Disruptive Divas generate significant Earned Media
because they’re masters of networking and they
naturally like to share information about their lives. The
rest of the women in the same age group look to
Disruptive Divas as compasses as to how to make their
purchases.
An important note to marketers: if you’re selling a
product by directly aiming at the female segment and
think that you can get Disruptive Divas onboard as a
means to generate Earned Media, think
again. Disruptive Divas are attracted to symbols of
power and arrival that are traditionally not reserved for
them. They gravitate toward luxury brands and brands
that are aimed at male executives.
Don’t expect Disruptive Divas to generate Earned Media
for your laundry detergent Facebook campaign.
…
Teenage Pirates, Cashless Innovators, and Disruptive
Divas are all very different. Each subset has its
characteristics, motivations and interaction. Their shared
qualities aren’t their need for “cool”, “fun” or
“personalization” as tech marketers so often put it but
their fundamental need for Social Space and the Social
Tools that help them get there.
The “cool”, “fun” and “personalization” approach to
youth is the product of marketing that tries to be


everything to everybody. Sure, you’ll get awareness.
Sure, they’ll like you but if your young customers like
you be afraid - be very afraid. Being something to
somebody is about love. What do these change agents
love and how can you add value to their social needs?
We have to get passionate about their needs and start
understanding the social Context in which these
dynamics take place. This isn’t a quick fix which is why
so many brands try to fudge or fake it. This brings us to
the 3rd rule of influence...

Rules #3: You can’t hurry love
* Creating sustainable Influence is a long term endeavor
* Highly influential brands like Apple have built their
fan base over 20 years
* Brands need a long term vision to build Social Space
for future fans rather than pandering to short term and
urgent organizational needs
Fans of a brand don’t just like a brand. They love
it. They talk about it. They defend the brand if it’s
attacked in public. They think about the brand even
when they’re not in contact with it. They like things
about the brand that they know nothing about. This was
why products like iPhone5 could get more than 71,000
likes on its Facebook fanpage, even though it was still
more than a month prior to the rumored product launch
date and no one had actually seen the actual product yet.
Much like human relationship, when a person loves a
brand the brand becomes an integral part of their


lives. And much like human relationship, real love takes
time.
One of the biggest hurdles companies in creating
influence is internal; most corporate cultures feed off
instant results and as the rule says - you can’t hurry love.
We’ve seen brands invest heavily in building intricate
profiles of their young customer base only to, at the last
minute, be seduced by a creative agency pitch and go
and blow all their good work on an expensive social
media ad campaign. Why? Because influence takes time
and time tests the resolve of even the strongest marketer.
It’s easy to capitulate against the pressure of next
quarter’s earnings bearing down upon you and
capitulating means handing over your marketing budget
to the agency with a resigned “here, take this problem
away from me.”
Marketers need to have faith. Ford Fiesta movement
didn’t start in the year of launch 2011 but back in 2008.
Ford simply created an environment for the long term to
take seed. Some crtics questioned the decision,
wondering if it was too early and whether or not Ford
can keep the momentum going until launch.
Similarly, internal critics within brands like BlackBerry
from Research in Motion (RIM) prevent the company
from building out on the Beachhead of Influence in
markets like Indonesia, India, and South Africa because
all the corporate results needed to be yesterday. If RIM
can create an environment - a separate project team
perhaps - that can build out these lines of influence long


term then RIM has a role to play in the future of the
mobile handset market. Right now, the corporate edicts
from Waterloo Canada reflect a growing sense of
immediacy that the answer lies not in long term
sustainable change but in silver bullets. RIM has just
announced 7 new handsets to compliment its existing
range within a year of its ill-fated Playbook launch.
It’s funny that the only incidence of a Playbook being
used in public by youth seen by any of our team was
when our founder Graham Brown saw a student using
one at Amsterdam airport. The student in question was
quite obviously Indonesian (Indonesia has strong
historical ties with the Netherlands and many students
study there). Perhaps RIM missed a trick here because it
had an existing line of influence with Indonesian
Disruptive Divas that it ignored. It’s easy to forsake
what you have right in front of you when you are
seduced by the alchemy of analysts and creative
agencies who seek to undermine your own corporate
confidence by telling you that you are not enough.
Blackberry could be a great brand if it built on this
influence and took time in doing so. If Blackberry
listens to creative agency pulp that suggest social media
campaigns or design agencies yammer on about Steve
Jobs then it will end up sacrificing its strength for
mediocrity.
Brands often lose their way - it’s part of the growth
cycle that blights so many successful companies. It’s at
these times of lost direction that brands need fans to
reinstigate momentum and to keep the brand alive.
During its 80-year history, Converse sold 170 million


pairs of the black canvas sneaker with white rubber sole
- the Chuck Taylor All-Stars - in 144 countries. Yet, by
2001 the company had filed for bankruptcy only to be
rescued by the unlikeliest of suitors - Nike - in 2003.
Converse had a long tradition of market influence - here
was a brand once worn by Larry Bird, Dr. J, Elvis
Presley, Magic Johnson and Kurt Cobain because it
stood for something and had built that brand story over
the long term.
The undeground punk rock scene bought into Converse
because it also stood for the anti-establishment. Here
was a basic shoe canvas that could be co-opted and
recreated with a simple Sharpie permanent marker. The
white canvas became storyboard for expression for
wannabe Kurt Cobains.
Interestingly, Converse’s fanbase was a sleeper hit for
Nike. When Nike bought the brand out of bankruptcy it
did so on the basis of its basketball heritage as opposed
to its punk fan base. But, as often the story goes, it was
the latterly discovered line of influence that turned it
into a success story.
Rather than push the basketball heritage, Nike began to
gear its marketing focus towards the underground
punk/skateboard scene and supporting fledgling music
acts. Converse’s new spirit of intentional rebuttal against
overindulgence resonated with a new generation of
students who became sensitive to a new economic
reality of compromize. New terms like “staycation” and
“frugalistas” were coined. Converse reacted to the
change in the market in the best way possible. While it


spread its distribution to make it accessible to more
people, it continued to focus its marketing on its
fans. In 2011, Converse opened a free recording studio
called Rubber Tracks in Brooklyn to help new emerging
artists gain access to resources they may not have been
able to afford.
In the traditional Paid Media vernacular, recording
studios do not create awareness. But then Converse
doesn’t want awareness it’s seeking to engage its fans.
By focusing on this core group of fans, Converse gains a
number of different advantages.
 It had a solid group of people to continue to promote
the brand, even when the brand was not putting
money into new campaigns.
 By looking at how its fans modified the shoes,
Converse also knew the types of design that
customers were looking for in their next shoe
models.
 Converse also had a sounding board to test out new
ideas to see what would work as it reentered new
markets. This worked out well for the company, as
it started staging a comeback in Asia. The company
found an even more militant base of fans there. It’s
not strange to find Converse fans in Asia who were
so into the brand that they would collect every color
combination of the Chuck Taylor All Stars.


Hunting vs. Farming fans
When in 1998 Apple release the iMac, it gained a
significant press buzz over its approach to design, with
Apple declaring, “the back of our computer looks better
than the front of anyone else’s.” Apple continued to
make headlines over its design and user-focused
interface as it began its long march to occupy the
market’s mindshare. It released products that
continually redefined the market: iPod, iPad, and of
course the iPhone. By 2011, the company was named
the most valuable company in the world, usurping
Google.
While many companies tried to follow in Apple’s
footsteps what they missed was that Apple’s success did
not only come from its product designs. It also largely
came from the company’s approach to finding the love
of its fans.
Apple did this through a multitude of approaches, the
underlying theme being the same: give your fans the
social space they need and they’ll use it to show their
love for you.
Turn Retail Stores into Social Spaces
 Apple created temporary social spaces for its fans
through programs like turning its Apple Stores into
an Instagram Gallery or by fueling fans dialogue
through the Mac vs. PC debate that enraptured the
citizens of geekdom.


Train Future Fans
 Apple Camp teaches kids how to make movies and
music, training a generation to believe that Apple is
the number one tool for the creatives. Apple also
trained teachers to use their software
Share of Market vs Share of Customer
 While the main competitor focused on getting a
computer into every home, Apple focused on
making the best computer for every home it was
already in. Apple’s rising dominance in the mobile
market in the last stretch of the 2000’s was a result
of not just avoiding being everything to everybody,
but also from consistently being something
significant to somebody.
All of these approaches take time and vision. Time is the
cost of making them happen. Vision gives people the
faith to believe it’s the right thing to do. Vision prevents
fallout and marketers scurrying back to their creative
agency with their marketing budget on the plate.
Like any relationship, with Earned Media, you can’t
hurry love. You can only prepare for it. CEOs need to
create the right environment for love to take hold.

Rule #4: Learning to let go
* Brand influence isn’t a product of marketing strategy
or creative agency genius but brand culture
* Influence today stems from a company culture that
embraces the brand innovators (often hackers and


teenagers) rather than viewing them as a threat
* You no longer own your brand - it’s owned by the
fans. Influence comes from becoming its custodian
rather than manager
Since its humble dorm-room beginnings in 2004,
Facebook has become what some dub The Second
Internet. The founder became one of the youngest
billionaires in the world. The company has captured the
imagination of so many people that they made a movie
about it. The movie was nominated for eight Oscars and
won three.
While many factors undoubtedly came into play in
creating Facebook’s success, perhaps none was more
important than the fact that the company’s culture
allowed it to hire people like Chris Putnam.
In 2005, Chris and his two friends worked on a series of
hacks and pranks on Facebook. They did a number of
different things from creating a worm that posted
random messages on friend’s walls, like “Hey, nice
shoes,” to changing the Facebook layout so that it
looked like Facebook’s more popular competitor
MySpace.
Soon enough, fixes for the worm started rolling in from
Facebook and Chris was contacted by an inquisitve
Dustin Moskovitz - one of Facebook’s co-
founders. Instead of a cease-and-desist message, Chris
received a friendly one instead, and it led to a back-and-
forth between the two which led to Chris receiving a job
offer from the company.


To put into the job offer into context, Putnam’s incident
happened not long after a similar incident happened with
MySpace. Like Putnam an amateur hacker had
penetrated the site’s code thus alerting the management
team. The hacker receives a “friendly” email from the
MySpace team invited him in to discuss his findings
further. At LAX airport, believing himself to be on his
way for a job interview at MySpace, the unwitting
hacker was surrounded by cops and arrested.
Putnam was well aware of this precedent and the
invitation from Facebook’s Moskowitz was naturally
greeted with a high degree of suspicion. Was this
another trap? After all, what was the difference between
MySpace and Facebook?
It turns out that the although MySpace and Facebook are
both social networks and were both bootstrapped from
the early days, their similarities end there. Where
MySpace was intent on controlling the brand experience
Facebook adopted an altogether different attitude. When
Putnam finally agreed to his “job interview” he was
relieved to find this was no ambush. Within 3 days, he
was working with the team.
On face value, they are the same but when it comes to
culture, the two brands are worlds apart. For Facebook,
hackers aren’t a threat to the business but part of
it. Facebook thrives on maverick thinkers; they
regularly run like the Hackathon—where students and
young engineers were given a chance to win a game by
completing a series of increasingly challenging hacks.
From letting go of the brand and embracing the hackers,


Facebook not only opens itself to the innovators of
tomorrow, they also source valuable insights.
Hackathons produced the all-important “Like” button as
well as many other widely used features.
Culture isn’t just the soft underbelly of the brand, it is
the brand. To create influence you need to create a
culture that allows influence to grow from the grass
roots. This stuff can’t be manufactured. In terms of
product MySpace and Facebook were the same thing.
What distinguished them was culture and the results are
evident for all to see.
Letting go may be easier if you are a start up or a
relatively small brand so can global brands really let go
of their brand pretensions? How about a brand valued at
$500 billion like Google? Surely, this has to be one of
the most recognizable brands in the world today. Can
“letting go” co-exist comfortably with superstar status?
It appears it can. Those in the mobile and internet
industry are undoubtedly familiar with Google Camp for
Techies aimed at college-bound students that have a
knack for computers and are planning for a career in
computer science. More recently Google had turned and
focused such camps on the Droidettes.
Since the first of Google’s Android phones were
approved by the FCC in 2008, the Android OS had
become one of the most adopted operating systems for
mobile phones in the world. Android had become such
a big success in such a short period that in August 2011,
the Federal Trade Commission began looking into


whether or not the Google had breached any antitrust
issues.
Android’s quick rise into prominence would have been
difficult if Google hadn’t done all it can to understand
the mobile market. It was a foray into a relatively new
market for Google. The company understood that if it
had relied only on the experts that it had—of which the
company had many—it could not truly understand the
market quick enough nor reliable enough. Thus, entered
the Droidettes.
Droidettes - teenage girls who develop apps. Google
invites them in to the Google campus to experiment,
play and develop. Not only is Google training a
generation of future developers it’s also building its
fanbase one teenage girl at a time.

Fear of Losing Control
Apple, Google and Facebook are all brand success
stories because the size of their brand hasn’t been a
function of their advertising budget. In many cases,
they’ve built influence organically, over the long term
and one customer at a time. In all cases it’s been
marketing pull over marketing push. They “pull” the
market into their organization - whether it be the office
or the stores - rather than “push” their ideas out on to the
market.
Push is a control based marketing strategy. Push means
defending and protecting the brand to ensure that the
market interferes with this story as little as possible.
Push means defining and following a clear marketing


trajectory that’s been tried and tested for generations.
The problem with push is, however, that fans will
always want to interfere because they want to tell their
own story. Look at the amount of fan fiction that
surrounds television series like Star Trek. Trekkies have
developed such a complex mythology around the Star
Trek push reality that practically every character has
numerous versions of rich back stories. They take
artifacts of the television serial’s story - like the Klingon
language - and invest years into to creating new Social
Tools with it, like using the Klingon language to
translate the Bible and all of Shakespeare’s work. Go
Google it yourself - they exist.
The question is - like Facebook do you try to fight these
“hackers” because they’re interfering with your brand
story or do you try to play with them? When George
Lucas produced the last three prologues of the Star Wars
franchise fans took vocal issue with the movies. Google
“Jar Jar Binks must die” and you’ll find over 45,000
pages referencing fan dissent with Lucas’ newest
character Jar Jar Binks imported into the prologues as an
addition to the original story. Sometimes you just have
to sit back and let the real brand custodians look after
the brand. You are simply the curator now. Messing
with the brand is a potential powder keg of negative
publicity. When Star Wars fans released “The People vs
George Lucas” featuring countless scenes from the
original recut and recast by fans in everything from
claymation to costumed re-enactments they were doing
so because Lucas was managing the brand against their
beliefs about what the brand should be. Fans didn’t care


that Lucas directed the original Star Wars trilogy - it was
their story now.
With a continuous decline in the number of female
undergrad pursuing computer science degrees from 40%
in the 80’s to just below 12% today Google knows that
in every aspect of society that a brand touches there are
untold stories - people who see things differently and
people who feel aggrieved that their story is not being
told. Google did it by empowering minorities within the
industry. Lucas should have done it by first appreciating
that there was a group of fans who had a very strong
emotional attachment with his work.
Managing the brand means restricting what fans do
naturally - influence. Push means silencing these
dialogues through loudspeaker style marketing. Pull
means stepping back and letting these conversations
happen with your support - giving them Social Tools to
connect with each other and ideas to share.
…
But what if you’re not Google or Facebook? What if
you’re a century old company with 54,000 employees
and with a mountain of debt? It’s a question that a
company like Ford might have asked itself. Paying
$1.5Billion just in debt interest alone in 2009, this was a
company that many other priorities before it can start
thinking about Earned Media.
One of the key challenges a company will face in
starting into the world of Earned Media is from within


the company itself. Ford addressed this by bringing in
the right people for the job.
Jim Farley headed Toyota’s Scion line -another youth
car success story -before he was brought in to lead
Ford’s marketing and communication. Fiesta was one
of his first challenges. Having brought back the results,
his concerns are now in replicating this success with
other lines of Ford’s products.
At the end of the day, its the people in the company that
will make-or-brake the jump into Earned Media. It’s the
people after all that creates the company’s culture
because the culture is the people. If you’re an
organization run by old creative agency execs or folk
from the advertising world you’re going to be stuck with
a culture of control. Letting go in this sense means more
than just letting go of the brand conversation.

Rule #5: Ego kills relationships
* Ego is the enemy of relationships, branding and
influence
* Letting go is key to creating space for relationships to
grow
How can a company like Nokia win awards for its
devices on the one hand and still bleed market share
globally on the other?
By the end of July 2011 investors had lost so much faith
in the once mighty giant the US rating agency Moody’s
cut Nokia’s credit rating to just two notches above junk.


To those who’ve followed the company closely, this
would not come as a surprise. A mobileYouth SMART
Index Survey showed that Nokia had lost relevancy
among teens in a number of key markets like the
US. For youth in the older age group the only relevancy
Nokia had for them was nostalgia. The company clearly
meant something for young people once upon a time but
that meaning has slowly eroded.
“We had Nokia fans for some of our models,” a Nokia
marketing exec once admitted, “but they’ve become
‘haters’ now.”
“It was because we basically ignored them.”
The exec quickly added, “Well, the guys before us did.
We’re on the ball now.”
It seems that in some markets, Nokia had realized that it
needed to take a different approach. It needed to start
focusing on people - its fans specifically - rather than
technology. In key Asian countries, Nokia was
committed enough to a different approach to marketing
that in the last year changing more than 80% of its
marketing department personnel.
Gaining - or in the case of Nokia regaining - Earned
Media will take time. Nokia didn’t lose the
recommendation of youth overnight and it won’t regain
it by next quarter. Jobs retuned to Apple in 1996. It was
2001 before he launched the groundbreaking iPod thus
paving the way for the iPhone and later the iPad.


Similarly, Nokia’s ills won’t be solved by a creative
agency silver bullet. Nor will they be able to address
their product portfolio with the wave of IDEO’s magic
wand. It’s going to take hard graft and years to
turnaround. That requires faith and vision.
Brand turnarounds also require CEOs to lose the
corporate ego. Nobody likes to be world ruler one
minute and has-been the next following in the footsteps
of a much cooler upstart who caught you by surprise.
Ego means hanging on to the brand story or refusing to
hear the harsh reality that kids think your products suck.
It’s not easy when you’ve spent your whole career
investing time and effort into those products only for
some unqualified and ungrateful teen punk to puncture
the brand bubble with an unhealthy dose of reality.
The most important rule to keep in mind in the Earned
Media game is that it’s always about other people not
you. This is the underlying rule on which all the other
rules are founded. A focus on people instead of
technology or protecting the organization itself is what
makes brands like Apple attractive to people like Trevor
Moran aka. iTr3vor.
At 12 years old, Trevor Moran’s YouTube channel had
more than 43,000 subscribers. His video posts fetch
more than 1.5 million views. His more popular posts
feature him dancing and lip syncing to pop songs in the
middle of an Apple Store. If you happened to be in the
store during one of his performances, it would be near
impossible to miss it. Some of those in the store choose
to ignore him, some shoot him dirty looks, others join


in. What would you do? Is he part of your “vision” for
the brand? Does he fit into the story or simply confuse
it? In most cases, Apple staff let Trevor do this own
thing because it’s the fan story as much as their own.
George Lucas discovered this at cost to his professional
credibility. Apple staff also know that they need people
like Trevor to pay their wages because he is their
informal marketing department.
Trevor is an Apple fan. While the fact that Apple
employees let him perform in Apple stores helped
Trevor spread his love for the brand to his followers in
its focus on people, Apple did more than just that.
Apple avoided the Big Idea brand story. Apple also
managed to avoid the trap that many other companies
had fallen into: identifying customer stories and then
incorporating them into an advertising campaign—
usually involving a celebrity or a mock impromptu man-
on-the-street comment about the brand. Apple had made
the brand into a necessary tool for its fans to tell their
stories.
This is why Apple has so many fans and this is why it’s
hard for other brands to follow Apple’s footsteps.
Stand in line in any of long queue of people waiting for
the next iPhone launch, and you’ll find that these people
talk about design, art, life in general, and only very little
about Apple or Steve Jobs. While Trevor uses the prefix
“i” in front of his online persona, the content of
iTr3vor’s video posts are mostly a sublimation of his
ambition to become a performance artist. Even those


people who’ve gone so far as to tattoo themselves with
the Apple logo are fans not because of the brand stories,
but because of the brand’s ability in helping them tell
their stories. A brand’s ability to integrate itself into its
fans’ telling of their own tales is what creates Earned
Media.
For Earned Media to work a brand has to look at its
relationship with its customers like a man would look at
his relationship with his wife in a marriage. While open
communication and commitment is important, one of the
key things in a successful marriage is about throwing
your ego out the window.
Branding efforts are often ego stroking exercises for the
brand, its executives and its agencies.
“This is our story, aren’t we great?”
You don’t tell your husband or wife you’re great do
you? (You wait for them to tell you!) Ego has a way of
clogging your ears from listening to your fans and filling
your mouth with bravado such that even when you’re in
dialogue with your fans all you’re really saying is,
“That’s wonderful, but you know what’s really great?
ME!”
A friend once confided in me his secret to a successful
marriage. The spirit of his adage would work well in
generating Earned Media.
“My formula is simple,” he said. “Happy wife, happy
life.”


Keeping fans happy works.
Apple has plenty of happy fans because it helps them
tell their story. Ford also applies this approach to selling
auto and it works; 60% of Fiesta are now the 5 door
hatchback (the model used in the FFM) rather than the
sedan sales into that of the five-door, 97% of those who
expressed an interest in buying Ford didn’t own one and
most importantly and sales continue to outperform the
rest in class.


CHAPTER 3


SMART - Simple Mobile Advocacy
Recommendation Tracker
* You can’t create influence without metrics that
measure it
* We’ll look at an example of how simple metrics can
be used to identify influencers and measure the impact
of marketing on influence
* We’ve used SMART for mobile brands - it can equally
be applied to any sector
As the old McKinsey adage goes, “What’s measured,
gets done.”
The key challenge in generating Earned Media is finding
a way to measure your efforts. Most metrics are either
too convoluted (e.g. agency “brand equity” type
measures that measure multi-dimensional aspects of
branding), too short term focused (e.g. market share, net
additions) or just plain irrelevant (e.g. awareness,
expressions of interest and “top of mind” surveys).
For a metric to work successfully we laid down a set of
criteria as prerequisites:
 Simple - You should be able to go out and measure
this metric yourself without having to commission
agencies to run surveys for you
 Clear - metric had to measure one aspect
(Recommendation) and offer a clear gauge in
response to company market activity


(mobileYouth) Influence - A Marketer's guide (Free Ebook Download)

(mobileYouth) Influence - A Marketer's guide (Free Ebook Download)

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