Brand Blog

It’s sometimes common for executives today to diagnose themselves as having ADD, or Attention Deficit Disorder, when they appear forgetful or impatient. But the truth is, particularly with young people, we live in a world that is increasingly based on doing two things at once. We do email during meetings. Talk on the phone while driving. Read something else when we should be listening to a speaker. Some even (gasp) can’t resist texting while driving!

As communicators, we have to accept that giving someone your “undivided attention” is rapidly becoming a thing of the past – and that communications are often better packaged in short, scannable, “Twitter-sized” bursts and videos rather than in longer blocks of prose, no matter how beautifully crafted. The explosion of online video isn’t necessarily due to us becoming too intellectually lazy to read. It’s just a reflection of the way we’re being conditioned to communicate – short, fast, to the point, and with the understanding that there will be something else distracting our audience from the message we’re trying to share.

My daughters gave me the book Scorecasting for a birthday present, which talks about the surprising patterns that determine who wins games – applying a bit of the Freakonomics approach to sports. In the book’s first few pages, the authors identify four themes that drive sports, and they are amazingly similar to the same success factors behind most businesses:

- That which is recognizable or apparent is often given too much credit, whereas the real answer often lies concealed.
- Incentives are powerful motivators and predictors of how athletes, coaches, owners, and fans behave – sometimes with undesirable consequences.
- Human biases and behavior play a pivotal role in almost every aspect of life, and sports are no exception.
- The role of luck is underappreciated and often misunderstood.

Go Tribe!

The way b-to-b marketers are using social media is evolving but gaining steady acceptance and growing budgets, according to a new study by B2B Magazine. We’re still in the early adopter stages of social media, in most cases, and few are able to measure impact and sales conversions from the new tools. However, companies have recognized that it’s an important marketing channel that deserves the growing investment it’s receiving. Key findings from the study:

- LinkedIn and Facebook are the “platform” sites for social media marketing for b-to-b companies. Twitter follows as a close third.

- When the question is changed to “what’s the one MOST IMPORTANT method used,” blogging rises to the #3 ranking (followed by LinkedIn and Facebook). Blogging assumes an even higher priority among tech companies than b-to-b companies as a whole.

- Branding, website traffic and the promotion of products or events are currently the three most common uses of social media marketing. The main metric that marketers look for in gauging the performance of a social campaign is website traffic.

- YouTube reached “effectiveness” faster than any other social media channel. Forty-two percent of marketers using YouTube said it achieved effectiveness within a quick two- to six-month period.

A side note from another piece of research: we’re all getting older, and that includes the people using Facebook. A Pew Research report shows the average age of a Facebook user is now 38 years, and half are 35 and older. Fifty-six percent are female. Teens and young adults concerned about being friended or followed by parents have every right to be worried! (Facebook is now up to 750 million users, rapidly approaching the billion-user mark.)