Memetic Brand

Is this like dating?  I have some well planned and thought through moves that I have played over a million times in my mind but it is all a bit different when you are out there playing the field.  Will private moments be reconciled with public pronouncements? Will we score?

Now that Tim Kitchin & I have decided to take our chats at the intersection of social capital and brands public, I think that I am starting to have some insight into how Whuffie expert Tara Hunt and open source leader Chris Messina felt during their online adventure.

Where will this lead?

Maybe I am a bit like Chandler Bing?  Leading with some boyish humour.  Just trying to make the nitty gritty of connecting social media to corporate value a lot more entertaining than it really is.

In any event, what is certain is that while I am full of wonder about where this tangent will lead and can’t promise what “we will” do, I am confident that Tim is a credible thought leader on brands.  I am honoured that he is interested in having these public chats.  Even if I throw in some high jinks, Social Capital Value Add and memetic brand will be better from this exchange.  Along the way there will be something of interest to provoke your thinking or at least a smile.

“Towards Social Branding”, Tim’s post to open this series, starts out with some discussion about brand valuation and the merits of stock values correlating to underlying values.  During this time of financial turmoil it may be popular to throw the corporation as a form of organisation under the bus along with the functioning of capital markets, but at the risk of attracting the ire of the double bottom line set, I am convinced that like it or not, the corporation is a very resilient idea and markets suss out efficiency.

You can spend time questioning markets and trying to impose motives beyond profit on the corporation like arbitrarily selected social “good”.  Social Capital Value Add is not preoccupied with this. As a farmer’s son, I begin from the basis that I can not change nature.  Self interest is undeniable, people trade and, faster than most individuals, the corporation is adapting to new forms of making meaning that have emerged since broadband overtook slower forms of connection.  The corporation will be around, purely motivated by profit, long after I am dust.

Brand valuation was developed to try to bring insight into part of the sources of stable future earnings of the corporation.  That is why it is, and will continue to be, an important part of the haggling over what a corporation (or a product line) is worth to buyers and seller.

Brand valuation is product centric.  It is designed to get a handle on any enduring difference between what a product costs to produce and the price it may command from buyers.  There are many sources (not just brand) of the ability to maintain margins.  They add up to: the buyers’ perception of the product value is greater than the cost of delivering it (including cost of capital).

Broadcast media - from packaging to television - emerged as the dominate method for the corporation and its agents to shape common perception (in the pursuit of profit).  Impact on perception was unbalanced by the articulation of most insiders and virtually all outsiders (the little guys) because broadcast media required lots of capital to emit and has traditionally out scaled (drowned out) alternative interpretations.  In this context attributing intangible value to an idea like brand, i.e. a form of broadcast media, makes sense.

The problem is that brand has become a golden hammer of corporate management.  There is no shortage of conversation about what brands “do”.  Stories, cues, symbols all remain vital parts of value creation.  But when Tim starts talking about brand loyalty or another fellow I respect, Stephen Byrne asks me about participant marketing or brand advocacy, I start to worry that we might be getting off the point.

Do brands invent?

I think there is a point when the term brand gets applied too widely.  Everything looks pink through rose coloured glasses.

We have entered an era where broadcast’s ability to dominate perception is quickly eroding. (Update, Dec. 3: Tom O’Brien makes this point in a very practical way.) To have insight into stable future earnings in an era where common perception is formed by millions of competing channels (i.e. broadband empowered people) I think we will uncover new keys to productivity and value defense and creation if we open up an equally vital examination of the structural factors that underlie the content layer.

Why confuse the examination of a new media form that is a product of connection by attempting to contort the notion of brand, which is rooted in broadcast?

Lots of smart people like Nan Lin, Olav Sorenson, Brian Uzzi, Barry Wellman, Tom Snijders, Martin Van Der Gaag and Matt Jackson have established ways to describe and analyze connections between people also known as social networks.  Social capital describes the resources that reside in these networks and I think social media are artifacts of a new scaled up form of it.

If, in the new context of the networked era we are looking for new competitive advantage as we consider the content layer, then I have found the established work of Richard Dawkins, Susan Blackmore and Ben Mack (who used the term memetic brand first in a powerpoint presentation that I can no longer find online) and other replicators of memetic theories to encompass the content layer but also provoke new insight into the structural factors that cause ideas to spread.

Let’s give the brand establishment the day off.  Sorry Tim, Social Capital Value Add is not “a prescription for the measurement of brand value”.  I have not proposed it to compete with or replace brand valuation, I think it is a useful compliment to brand valuation.  It is proposed to measure scaled up forms of social capital that are an important corporate asset distinct from brand.  For example, if I pick up a great idea or contact like Kim Patrick Kobza at Verna Allee & John Maloney’s value networks LinkedIn group, why should we use “brand” to describe that transaction?

Having said all of this, Tim is bang on in noting “a fundamental change in the way that brands drive value” due to the emergence of scaled up forms of social capital.  I think bouncing these related concepts back and forth will help all of us understand them.

Tim & I are committed to this effort over a series of posts ahead.  We hope our opening two posts are received as an invitation to others to link up their thinking.  In addition to the many esteemed thinkers referred to above, Chris Brogan and Julian Smith have a related manifesto and book in the works. Maybe they already have this Whuffie thing figured out in Cory Doctorow’s Magic Kingdom? Tim O’Reilly has been tweeting it up about social capital lately.   Jonathan Salem Baskin says Branding Only Works on Cattle.

Feel free to add a tweet or post and please use “SoCap&Brand” as a tag.  For example, I hope that Tom Chapman &/or his peeps over at www.socialmediatoday.com add the SoCap&Brand tag to this related post:

Social Capital and building a quality social graph. (I hate registering to leave comments by the way!)

What are the boundaries between social capital management and brand management?

Tim?

I picked up a hard copy of the March 2008 New York Time Magazine at my sister’s place on the west coast at the beginning of August.  At various times it has been on the floor of my rental car, on the beach, in a hotel room in Chicago, in the pile to go out for recycling, in the rack in the bathroom and sitting on the corner of my desk (is that more information than you need to know?).

The serious effects that the addition of Sarah Palin to the equation is having in US politics reminds me … I have been carting this around because I have been meaning to blog about a one page article in it by Farhad Manjoo called Rumor’s Reason. 

In the article Farhad traces the Obama as “Muslim Manchurian candidate” idea back to a summer 2004 press release by Andy Martin.  With no factual proof, the story was ignored by the ”objective” traditional media at first.  But the idea that Obama is Muslim persisted, showing up on the net, breaking through to broadcast media from time to time, to the point where one poll showed 8% believing it.

Farhad goes on to report on the social psychology of why a blatantly false idea can persist.  He highlights “how our brains suss out truth from fiction.  To determine the veracity of a given statement, we often look to society’s collective assessment of it.  But it is difficult to measure social consensus very precisely, and our brains rely, instead, upon a sensation of familiarity with an idea.  You use a rule of thumb: if something seems familiar, you must have heard it before, and if you’ve heard it before, it must be true.”

Understanding these structural factors behind why an idea is accepted and spreads is what we are trying to do at www.memeticbrand.com.  The cognitive factors covered by Farhad are only part of  the story. 

In Social Capital Value Add, I take a deep dive on external structural factors enabling ideas that are inherent in the social web that has emerged in the last few years.  By mashing up a Stanford study by Jonah Berger and Chip Heath (co-author of last year’s best selling business book, Made to Stick) and a Pew Internet & American Life analysis, Buzz, Blogs & Beyond: The Internet and the National Discourse in the Fall of 2004, I tried to illustrated what Dunan Watts might call a global information cascade. (Hey - any crack illustrators want to take a run at Fig. 6 in the eBook? Talent needed!)

These structural factors are often behind overall or turning point dynamics of modern elections.  They matter and they mean that democracy is at work, long before the day comes for you to cast your ballot.  Your contribution to online forums, blogs and the like help charge real world social networks with scales of implicit content not previously achievable. 

“Objective” mainstream media don’t rely on releases from campaigns or blog posts from so-called “influentials”, they use a rule of thumb: if a story “breaks” away from the implicit content milieu it must be a story worth reporting, it has “legs”.

The Pew study tracked the spread of eight ideas during the 2004 election.  Each one of them, in a different context, could have triggered a change of momentum in another election. 

The point is that in the relatively new context where online media has become a fully integrated component of the national discourse, most of those eight ideas were neutralized by competing voices before they spread far enough to change the course of the election.  They remained in the milieu.

The way people use broadband internet takes the milieu out of the cognitive and limited physical word of mouth space and brings it forth as our most intense form of media, incorporating word of mouth, text, audio, photographs and video. 

Ideas “break” when they mutate.  “Obama is a muslum” became an email over the course of two years.  Farhad notes that one version of the email contains a line, “I checked this out on Snopes (a fact checking website), and it’s true”. 

I can tell you one thing.  I would have written this blog post a lot sooner if a friend had sent me Farhad’s piece electronically instead of it being stuck on a bit of dead tree, kicking around in meatspace.  Heck, maybe folks will even stick around long enough to figure out the new spin-doctors’ talents if we que this piece up with something hilarious!

“Obama offered a clear, point-by-point rebuttal to every argument in the chain e-mail, and he provided an important alternative story - “dirty tricks”.  His single voice and one counter story did not kill the story.  To neutralize a negative idea about your brand you need what Seth Godin refers to as a Tribe.  Endless volunteers, amplifying your voice.  Getting your messages out through mutations and offerring the right alternative story to the right audience at the right time.  There are also underlying structural factors that you need to take under management.  Both are involved in memetic brand management.  Traditional central campaign methods are not designed for this.

It was not until 2004 that broadband internet overtook dialup connections, and the correlating behaviour of people and network effects entirely changed the game. 

The spin doctors’ craft has traditionally been more creative than calculation.  In 2003, there was a moment during an Ontario provincial election campaign when the ruling conservative party issued a press release calling the liberal opponent an “evil, reptilian kitten-eater from another planet“.  Many commentators at the time believed that the resulting turn in fortunes against the conservatives was due to voter resentment of negative campaigning.  I speculate that the combination of environmental cues that existed had created for voters uncertainty about the liberal leaders’ leadership qualities.  The kitten-eater moment, filled the void with a tough, vivid image that finally materialized the liberal leader as a force to be reckoned with. 

Over the last six months I have seen demonstrations of real time online social media monitoring systems that dramatically reduce the guesswork involved in exploring what key concepts are churning in the milieu of implicit content. 

Investing in this kind of know how.  Securing corporate reputations in this context.  Making the corporation more accountable to social forces and society more aware of corporate capabilities is the motive here. 

Now let’s test those key words again … “hockey mom”, “ordinary American”, “small town”, “Washington outsider”, “beauty queen” … truth.

A few weeks ago, after receiving a reviewers version of “Introducing Social Capital Value Add” one of the founders of www.changethis.com suggested that I propose SCVA as a ChangeThis manifesto.

This afternoon I received a phone call and email confirming that the Editorial Board at www.changethis.com has accepted my proposal.  It should be posted for voting on their site tomorrow (May 20).

Distributing the SCVA idea through ChangeThis would be a great way to obtain the next round of feedback required to improve it.  Tom Peters, Chris Anderson, Gladwell, Seth Godin, Toronto’s recently attracted Richard Florida and many more have instigated some great ideas through www.changethis.com.

The hitch is that getting a proposal up on the site is only the first step.  Now I need people to vote to have the proposal published as a full manifesto.

I have made a concscience effort to cultivate my social capital over the years volunteering for alumni groups, doing the business, Facebook and LinkedIn networking thing, so I am hopeful that I’ll get by with a little help from my friends.

Nevertheless, the fact is that we’ll need support from far beyond my personal networks to rise through the changethis ranks, so a couple of phone calls ensued today (it being a national holiday in Canada) with my friends at Context and voila!  A little word of mouth campaign was hatched.

As fate would have it there are some key events coming up in Toronto this week.  As I mentioned over at www.socialcapitalvalueadd.com Joseph Thornley has put together a great panel on Tuesday night who will discuss the issue of measuring social media.  And then there is MESH.

So hopefully we will have a few VOTE SCVA at www.changethis.com buttons to hand out at the event but don’t wait!  Please grab the button and link above. Vote and pass, vote and pass at: http://www.changethis.com/proposals/1279

UPDATE: Seth was the founder who suggested submitting SCVA to ChangeThis.  It topped the month and is being published on Sept.10th., 2008.