Sitting beside Janice on a flight is a fascinating experience. She’s naturally social and refuses to let you not be. Mind you, she isn’t annoying or overbearing, but pleasant, friendly and interesting. She asks questions that make you feel important, a part of her life though you’re really not. She’ll interject a factoid or two about her own story if the opportunity presents itself, but mostly puts you on stage and appreciates your little soliloquies of self-reflection.

Janice looks at her cell phone a couple times a day, checks email at the beginning and end of her day and works in between, only texts her teenage children to remind them to check in and set up a Facebook profile so her younger sister, Deneice, would stop pestering her about doing so. A successful financial planner at a large bank, Janice spends 3-4 hours each day pouring over projections, reports and forecasts, checks on market numbers through the company’s real-time dashboard and only occasionally ventures beyond the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg websites. If she’s read a blog, she doesn’t know it.

She doesn’t instant message. She doesn’t Twitter. She thinks Flickr is something fireflies do and Digg isn’t something she would like to do at all. “Shovels give me callouses,” she asserts.

But Janice is a connector. She collects memories of people she’s met, dined with, even sat beside on a plane. She refers people to others she knows, offers to email you their contact information and actually follows through in doing so.

Janice recommends products, too. She lit up telling me all about her new Ford Flex, calling it, “A soccer mom’s dream come true.” She even recommended some sort of Swiffer-esque lint wand to keep in my bag to clean my laptop screen and keyboard. When I told her about my children, she immediately started giving me alternative meals than chicken nuggets or pizza to fix for them when my wife leaves the meals up to me.

Even when I tried to focus on my laptop to do a little work, Janice interjected some other question that distracted me from the task at hand. Without seeming to do so, Janice prevented me from getting lost in my technology and gadgets and forced me to make a human connection with her so she could make one with me. At the end of the flight, I felt as good as I’ve felt in a while. We had a great conversation, learned a little bit about each other and ourselves and got some new products and services to think about using.

We were being social. Without a computer.

We were influencing each other. Without a blog or Twitter account.

We were sharing. Without clicking a button.

Before you get lost in your next gadget-assisted attempt at connecting with someone, remember that the Internet and technology allows you to do things. It doesn’t allow you to be anything.

It’s a mechanism. You are the platform.

As my friend Jay Baer recently said, “Your business shouldn’t ‘do‘ social. It should ‘be‘ social.”

To know if yours is, turn it all off, look your customers in the eye and see what happens.

IMAGE: Litmus Test by Jiri Slama on Shutterstock.com

New research released today by Edison Research and Arbitron tracking three years of data and surveys related to Twitter use further solidifies the notion that the social media world is far different from reality. “Twitter Usage In America: 2010” shows that while 87 percent of Americans are aware of the microblogging site, only seven percent actually use it. For comparison’s sake, Facebook’s awareness rate is at 88 percent. Usage? 41 percent.

The research, far more reliable than most API scrapes you’ve read about recently, echoes Citibank’s report last week that asserts the vast majority of small business owners don’t even use social media. The simple fact of the matter is social media evangelists, enthusiasts and addicts make up a small portion of the population and, though trendy and early-adopter-ish, have a long way to go before their advice holds water with the real world.

That’s not to say that social media isn’t important or a trend worth incorporating into marketing. Just that we should balance our enthusiasm for the new and cool with a dose of reality. Most people don’t get this world and need more education than marketing advice.

I’m working on it.

The Edison/Arbitron report, unveiled in a webinar today by author Tom Webster, Vice-President for Strategy and Marketing for Edison, pulls data from a nationally representative survey of almost 2,000 Americans age 12 and over that was conducted via telephone interviews in February of this year. The data was laid over similar studies from 2008 and 2009, giving us probably the most comprehensive and statistically accurate representation of Twitter-related use statistics to date.

The report contains a bevy of updated stats and new insights into both Twitter and general social media usage. I’ve downloaded it for use in talking to clients and conference audiences moving forward. You should, too.

The report can be found on the Edison Research website.

My kids watch a cartoon on PBS about a talking dog named Martha.  It turns out the dog ate some alphabet soup and through the magic of television, learned how to speak English.  However, to the dismay of my children, this post is about talking blogs – not dogs.

Thanks to BuzzVoice, my blog can talk.  (Sadly, it is cursed to repeat my words, as opposed to being able to speak for itself.  Maybe one day artificial intelligence can replace me.)   BuzzVoice enables automated text to speech editing for blogs.   I managed to finagle an invite from my friend John Atkinson to try the beta version of BuzzVoice for publishers.  I have now installed the BuzzVoice widget in the sidebar of my blog, enabling you to listen to my posts as read to you by the same computer voice from another favorite site – xtranormal.com

The text to speech recognition is actually quite good.  BuzzVoice does a very nice job of converting my ramblings to audio, and it costs me nothing.  What is really cool is that the BuzzVoice widget makes the content on my site available as a podcast, which visitors can download and listen to at their convenience.

As a creator of content, BuzzVoice is a great tool with the potential to deliver my content to new people in new ways – with very little effort.  As a consumer of content it provides with a convenient option for getting information.  If you find yourself with more unread content than time, their iphone app is well worth $1.99.  My thanks to the BuzzVoice team for making my blog talk.  Now I am tasked with continuing to make sure it has something to say.

Check out BuzzVoice and ask them about getting widget for your site.  Thanks for reading and potentially listening to mine.

What do you think of BuzzVoice?  Do you mind the computer voice?  Will you listen to blogs?  Would you want others to listen to your site?

Last week at ad:tech San Francisco there was a lot of talk about media and the impact that blogs and social media are having on traditional news.  I’m not a news expert, and have never worked in traditional news, but I think that traditional media can learn from how other industries adapted to significant shifts in the landscape.

While all forms of traditional media – from print to radio to tv news – seem to be struggling, the key question that needs to be asked is How do we reinvent ourselves to stay relevant?

Here are a few examples of how new and old paradigms of business have co-existed by adapting.

Blogs are like WalMart

Remember when WalMart started to grow and how communities reacted? Some communities tried to keep WalMart out, for fear that their local businesses would be destroyed.  The reality is that WalMart did put a lot of companies out of business – both retailers and suppliers.  Businesses that survived adapted their model and built their business around a strong value proposition.  They provided something that was more important than just price, or they died.  Despite the success of WalMart there are still new retail businesses starting every day.  They differentiate themselves on quality, selection, location, convenience, etc and thrive and grow despite WalMart.

Blogs are the WalMart of the media world.  They create content that people like for a lower price.  Most bloggers publish as a labor of love – they don’t need a huge paycheck.  Big blog publications have a different cost structure than traditional media, so they can generate profits from online display ads (a cost structure that won’t work for most traditional media).

In order for traditional media to survive the content revolution (where everyone is a content creator), they have to adapt their strategy to focus on their core value proposition – investigative journalism.

Most bloggers (not all) don’t do a lot of primary research.  They actually build their stories on stats, facts and research from traditional media and use it as a source for their articles.  Traditional media should be The Resource for investigative journalism – a service that is needed for bloggers to exist.

I have a friend who is a TV news producer.  To “create” the news producers do research.  They check facts.  They look up stats.  They get multi-media from different sources, or create it themselves.  They go out and interview a variety of people.  They investigate and report. These core competencies of traditional media must be heightened to create a clear value proposition.

Video Killed the Radio Star

Actually, it didn’t.  When TV and video came along, radio didn’t die – it adapted.  Now I wasn’t around at the time, but if you look at the evolution of radio, prior to mass adoption of TV radio was a platform for both music and story-telling entertainment. Families would gather around the radio and listen to stories for entertainment.

Then TV came along.  Radio wasn’t really the best medium for story-telling type entertainment – TV was.  So, TV focused on fictional story-telling entertainment and radio focused on music.  Radio adapted the content to focus on content areas where it could win – music, call-in talk shows, etc.

Both TV and radio continue to exist but with different content and in different use cases.

So What Now?

There are some traditional media sites that have innovative views about how they can adapt.

Chris Graves at the Cincinnati Enquirer launched a program called LOL: Locals on Living .  LOL creates content for both the web and print editions, and it clearly changes the cost structure for the enquirer (no full time writers creating content). Clicking on the blogs opened 2 highly annoying ad pop-up windows, however as the model evolves perhaps there will be opportunities to find different revenue streams.  It launched last July and has expanded to integrate local bloggers from lifestyle content to Sports Content (see SportsTalkCentral).  The program is beginning to dip into news/business with the integration of BuildingCincinnati, which is featured both on our business and news page. They currently integrate 17 bloggers on the site.

At ad:tech Chris Anderson, EIC of Wired shared information about how Tablets can provide new opportunities for publishers.  By leveraging interactivity and the tablet technology, publishers may have the opportunity to charge for content vs. the current web model where everything is free.  It will be interesting to see if this plays out.

What do you think?

How can news sites continue to thrive?  Quality investigative journalism is important for our society, but traditional media outlets are struggling with their business models.  How can they reinvent themselves?  Have you seen other examples of this?

I probably don’t talk enough about the power and effectiveness of email marketing here. I should do that more often. More and more with clients I find myself recommending email marketing strategies and for a lot of reasons.

The main reason I believe in email and email marketing is that real people still use email as their primary communications method. And by real people, I mean those outside the social media echo chamber. I wax poetic on the subject today over at the Blue Sky Factory blog. For more of my thoughts, pay them a visit.

While you’re there, check out Blue Sky Factory. They are my email service provider (you should subscribe to my newsletter if you haven’t already) and I often recommend them to clients. I do not profit from our relationship at all, though they’ve been known to promote me from time to time. Like asking me to guest post on their blog. Enjoy.

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It recently occurred to me that through the course of my life I have devoted way too much time to socks.  Yes, socks.

No, I don’t have some weird sock fetish or a creepy sock collection, but rather I have spent countless minutes here and there sifting through laundry baskets, rummaging through drawers, and searching aimlessly for matches to my various socks.  Brown socks, blue socks, black socks, running socks, tube socks, argyle socks, each requiring organization in my dresser and each requiring a match to be useful.  Every different type of pair added to the mix adds an exponential level of complexity to the process of sorting, matching, and putting away.

Upon some reflection, I have realized that I don’t care enough about socks to waste time on things like:

• thinking about which is the right pair to wear.
• wondering if the pair of socks I grab in the dimly lit morning actually matches.
• sorting through laundry baskets to find my socks and match them up with one another.
• maintaining a drawer of orphan socks waiting for their match to return from the abyss of the dryer.
• identifying matches to damaged socks that need to be disposed.

Having a choice of socks is not something that matters to me.  When it comes to socks, I want simplicity, speed, and utility, not choice – hence I recently reduced my choices – black dress and white running socks.   Anything that deviated from the specs was delivered to the rag pile in the garage.

I started by retiring all existing socks to the rag pile.  It had been a while since I had gotten rid of any socks, so they were due to be replaced anyway.  By starting fresh, I made it easy to implement my new system of simplicity.   I then went to Target and bought a 10 pack of Hanes black dress socks and 2 six packs of Hanes low cut running socks.  Inventory in place, I then moved forward with my simple system.

This may sound silly, but it makes a difference.  Rather than multiple types of white socks, black socks, and all sorts of other varieties, I standardized to work socks and exercise socks.  That easy.  No more choices.  Much less matching.  A little stress removed and a life regained.

Now, I never have more than one orphan sock, because if two go missing I am simply down to 9 pair.  That easy.  At the end of the year, I will convert them all to rags and start over.

This is also helpful when getting dressed in a dimly lit room early in the morning, while others are sleeping.  No guessing if the socks match or if they are black, brown, or blue.  Grab a pair and go.  I actually went as far as to organize my drawers by activity to further simplify things.  I have a work drawer with boxers, undershirts, and black socks, and I have an exercise drawer with running shorts, briefs, running shirts, and my white socks – further simplifying the putting away and putting back on of my laundry.

Sometimes life is made better by eliminating choices.  I guess the saying would be “sometimes less is more.”   If you love socks, than this system is a horrible idea for you.   Socks is not really the point.  The idea is just to figure out what matters and simplify the rest.  This will not add seven years to my life, but does add a few minutes here and there.  More importantly it simplifies something that is unimportant to me, saving time and attention for the things that are.

What silly lifehacks do you use to simplify your life?

Vivaldi Partners recently released a study entitled “Social Currency” that looks at why brands need to build and nurture social currency.  Social Currency is one of those sayings your hear tossed around, but no one ever really defines it.  That is one of things that makes the Vivaldi study so interesting.  In the words of Vivaldi’s founder, Erich Joachimsthaler,  Social Currency is:

“the extent to which people share the brand or information about the brand with others as part of their everyday social lives… Social currency is not  just about conversation, buzz or community.  It is all this and much more. It does not impact every brand equally and certain levers of social currency are more important than others in driving value for companies.”

The report is a great read but there are a couple of key takeaways and snippets that I have captured from the report below:

Social Currency consists of six core levers

• Affiliation: What share of your users has a sense of community?
• Conversation: What share of your brand users recognizes and stirs buzz?
• Utility: How many of your users derive value from interacting with other users?
• Advocacy: How many users act as disciples and stand up for your brand?
• Information: How many of your users feel they exchange fruitful information with others?
• Identity: How many of your users can identify other users?

Social currency represents a shared asset of consumers and company-owned brands

It originates from interaction between customers and consumers.  Companies can stimulate the creation of social currency through means that cultivate a sense of community, strengthen consumer interaction and provide value to the community.  When done credibly brands earn trust  and can grow into an integral, almost symbiotic role in customers’ lives.

What matters is “meaningful” social currency.

Social media efforts should be evaluated in terms of the extent to which it contributes to a brand’s equity, the extent to which it drives category or industry attributes or connects with consumers. Example: successful viral efforts like Burger King’s subservient chicken digital efforts created a lot of buzz but did not really contribute to the strengthening of key components of its brand equity nor did the effort deliver on factors that drive purchase and consumption in the category.

Social Currency must be built and nurtured

Today’s digital technologies open up new and enormously exciting opportunities for building social currency. While there has been a plethora of experimentation over the years, it is clear that we have merely scratched the tip of the iceberg. As technologies evolve, new ways will emerge of how social currency can be built over time.  The big conundrum for marketers is that in an online world, brands are far more broadlyand proactively discussed than ever imagined.  As these conversations are often beyond the direct influence or control of a company, marketers must find innovative and creative ways to thoughtfully leverage these independent brand conversation and act credibly in the digital arena.

The full report does a great job of pulling out examples of Social Currency across different product categories.  Also, for more perspective on the topic, the May 2010 issue of Fast Company used the study for the article  “Five Steps for Consumer Brands to Earn Social Currency“

Automated sentiment scoring has evolved as the feature du jour of the social media monitoring platforms of late. So many services were offering it, even big players like Radian6 had to bring it to the table for fear of losing prospects. It’s not enough to tell brands how many conversations are being had. Social media monitoring services have to now must report on whether or not they like us.

A few months ago, we discussed automated sentiment scoring with Jeffrey Caitlin, CEO of Lexalytics, a leading natural language processing firm that serves as the engine behind many monitoring service’s offerings. His assertions were that while natural language processing can do a lot to get you close to scoring the sentiment and tone of a given piece of content, teaching computers to recognize sarcasm, false positives and the like is a significant challenge. Looking at sentiment scoring across a large data set gives you a more accurate view, but is still an estimation and not exact.

So the belief is held by many that sentiment and tone scores by social media monitoring services are pretty good, but not perfect. Still, it’s the accepted mechanism to know if people like you or not. Human analysis is better, but more expensive and potentially cost prohibitive, particularly for medium and small businesses. So, automated scoring is accepted as an industry feature and we’re all happy, right?

Not so fast. Scott Marticke of Sentiment360 reached out to me after my assertion earlier this month that human deciphering of information is something the monitoring services don’t offer, to let me know he had some surprising comparison information of automated sentiment scoring vs. human analysis I might like to see. Sure, he wanted to ensure I knew about Sentiment360, which adds a layer of human analysis to social media monitoring, but it was the disparity in analysis that struck me in our chat.

In a recent comparison for CBS Television on conversations around the show NCIS, Sentiment360 found as much as a 50% swing in sentiment, or lack there of, in machine vs. human analysis. Essentially, once you let humans analyze the data, the machine-produced results are crap.

Here’s a run-down of their comparison:

• Sentiment360 used an unnamed social media monitoring service to collect the data. (They’re tool agnostic and say they use several different ones depending upon the client need. Companies they report as part of their arsenal include Radian6 and ScoutLabs.)
• The results showed 50,000 conversations around the show in a given month with the search performed in March of this year.
• According to the service’s automated scoring, of the 50,000 conversations, 84 percent were neutral or passive mentions, 11 percent were positive and five percent were negative. NCIS is talked about a lot, and more positively than negatively, but the vast majority of the conversations don’t hold an identifiable opinion.
• Sentiment360 pulled a sample of 3,000 of those conversations and had their analysts go to work. So the results show just the human analysis of the sample, but the sample is six percent of the total data set, far better than most market research firms offer.

And here’s what Sentiment360’s analysis found. Some of these numbers astounded me:

• 23 percent of the entries were irrelevant. They mentioned NCIS or linked to the show, but contained no other qualifying information about the show or were spam sites.
• Once the irrelevant entries were removed, only 30 percent of the entries reviewed were found to be neutral or passive, a 54 percent difference than the machine analysis.
• Human analysis found that 63 percent of the online conversation around NCIS was positive, not 11 percent as the machine asserted.

Looking at the comparison, a couple of thoughts came to mind for me. In using several monitoring solutions, I’ve noticed a great deal of the automated scores I see are passive or neutral, proving overall useless to a brand. I’ve also noticed an awful lot of irrelevant posts appear in your searches, almost regardless of how minutely you program your keyword searches. If human analysis shows 23 percent of the results are irrelevant and that more than 50 percent of the passive/neutral results can be scored, then automated scoring needs to get a LOT better.

Caitlin was right. Automated sentiment scoring can only get you so far, but if this experiment is representative of what would happen with your brand, I’d say automated sentiment scoring doesn’t get us very far at all.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying the people behind automated scoring aren’t working hard or helping us accomplish a difficult task easier. I am saying, however, that we need to be clear that letting a machine supply us with this particular piece of marketing intelligence is flawed. It’s not that we shouldn’t do it, but that if we do, we must understand the limitations and prioritize the intelligence accordingly.

You can certainly question the human analysis. Sentiment360 uses analysts from the Philippines to provide their analysis. Outsourcing overseas is cheaper and allows them to offer human analysis at a much lower price point than the big research firms. But they claim all their analysts are graduate or post-graduate level analysts and recognize that the Philippines is the third-largest English speaking country in the World. It was also once a U.S. colony, so there’s a faint cultural commonality, too.

But what you can’t really question is who’s believing the results. Saatchi & Saatchi’s New York operation just named Sentiment360 as their preferred social media listening provider with VP for Digital Strategy Shel Kimen saying, “Sentiment360 demonstrated that their combination of machine listening and human analysis provided us with excellent intelligence. We had looked at a number of their competitors and Sentiment360 excelled in quality of the analysis, ROI and delivery time.”

Not bad for a firm that began to exist in December.

Sentiment360 is going to run you around $7,000 per month, so it’s still prohibitive for medium to small businesses. But more importantly, they are helping us all see that the machines are good but not great (or, depending upon your perspective, not really all that good at all) and natural language processing has a long way to go.

I don’t see Sentiment360 as a competitor for many social media monitoring services because of their price point. They’ll hob knob with the major brands and do well, but for companies that need to refine monitoring to less than $2,000 per month (which is the majority of companies), Sentiment360 doesn’t fit.

What I do see them doing, however, is forcing companies like Lexalytics, or even the core social media monitoring services to either get their algorithms better faster, or add a layer of human analysis on top of what they offer.

Have you or your company conducted similar experiments with machine vs. human analysis? How about service vs. service analysis? If so, please share your results or thoughts in the comments. If not, go try it and report back. It will make the industry better as a whole.

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More brilliant work from the folks at Nike.   The blending of marketing and entertainment continues…

A few weeks, Rob Go from Spark Capital approached me with his idea for writing a series of posts about Consumer Packaged Goods and the Internet.  In particular, he asked if I’d be willing to write a guest post to cap off the series providing my thoughts on what start-ups can learn from CPG Brand Marketers.  The following is that post, which first appeared on Rob’s Tumblr.

5 things every start-up can learn from CPG Brand Marketers

Increasingly when I get the question of what my job is, I tell people that I play the role of a “translator.”  After all, working in Corporate Marketing, I do not spend my time only focused on a single brand.  Instead, my role leads me to interact with a variety of brands, both inside and outside of the company.  One day that might be a fellow Brand Marketer at a consumer package goods (CPG) company.  Other times it will be a strategic partner, whether that is an agency or digital media company.  But increasingly, I am finding my interaction to be with more and more start-ups and the Venture Capitalists who invest in them.

It is in this last bucket where my role as a “translator” becomes the most evident.  After all, the numbers behind Consumer Packaged Goods are daunting when you consider comparisons such as this:

• Pampers has annual net sales of approximately $8 billion, which makes it larger than Yahoo ($6.5 billion in sales for 2009)
• In 2009, the advertising spending of the top 4 companies in the US was greater than the total fund-raising by US Venture Capital Funds ($14.5 billion vs $13 billion)

These numbers are not to say that bigger is better.  Instead, I would say that the worlds of Brand Marketers and Start-ups are just two distinct cultures.  Like all cultures, they have their differences, but also their similarities.  But more importantly, there are things that both cultures can learn from each other.

In his previous posts in this series, Rob has done a great job of providing the perspective from the start-up side of the table.   Now I wanted to provide my perspective on what start-ups can learn from the culture of CPG Brand Marketers.

#1 – The Consumer is Boss:

This is a mantra that was first coined by AG Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble.  But you could say it is just an evolution of what David Ogilvy once said – “The consumer isn’t an idiot… she’s your wife.”   Consumer is Boss is a simple saying but it holds a universal truth for Brand Marketers who spend billions of dollars a year on market research.  Consumer is Boss is about letting the people using your brand / product guide your decisions.  This doesn’t mean that you follow a consumer blindly off a cliff.  But it also means you don’t add a feature just because it is a fun engineering challenge.

Now you might say that true innovators think the opposite of this.  After all, Henry Ford once said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”  But that is taking the mantra of “Consumer is Boss” much too literally.  When Ford asked people what their problem was with transportation, they likely said that horses were too slow and that trains did not give them the freedom to go where they wanted, when the wanted. That understanding of the problems faced by consumers…the needs that they had in their lives…is what led Ford’s innovation.  Whether he realized it or not, he was one of the first people who practiced a Consumer is Boss mentality by understanding the motivations and desires of his potential consumers.  That conveniently leads to the second point…

#2 – Know Your “Who”:

Brand Marketers spend a tremendous amount of time focused on their brand’s “Who.”  Broadly defined, a Brand’s “Who” is their target consumer, the type of person with whom the brand has the greatest business potential…both in the short term and the long term.  The “Who” is a profile of a consumer and paints a picture for who that person is, what is important to them, and why they make the decisions they do.  If a brand has done a great job defining their “Who”, it makes other decisions that much easier.  Need to figure out if a product feature is worth investing the time / money to develop?  Check if your “Who” to see if that feature address a barrier your consumer has to using your product.  Need to create your marketing plan for your start-up?  Well then look at your “Who to determine where they can be most easily reached with a message about your product.  Your brand’s “Who” can be the foundation of just about every business decision your start-up makes.

I would argue that one the pillars for GroupOn’s success is that really understand their Who.  If you look at their About Us page, they list their company philosophy including this statement: “We sell stuff we want to buy.”  There is a lot of power in that short statement.  GroupOn makes their decisions about products to feature based on the things they would want to buy themselves.  They understand their Who, because they are their Who.   Not all start-ups will be lucky enough to launch a business where they are the consumer they are trying to reach.  It is a challenge constantly faced by CPG Brand Managers and a reason why we put so much focus on really understanding our brand’s Who.

#3 – Design Matters:

Why can you recognize the Google logo even when they use different themed graphics on the home page each day?  And why has Method cleaning products been able to grow so fast in every category they enter?  It is because these brands have put a huge focus on Design, including incredible attention to their Brand Identity.  I am a huge believer in the design revolution that Jason Putori, Designer in Residence at Bessemer Ventures (formerly of Mint.com), is trying to bring to the start-up world.  Great design can be a major competitive advantage.   And this advantage is multiplied with a consistent use of the design in everything that your brand does.  You know an Apple product or message the second you see it.  With great design…and great consistency in that design… you can have the same for your start-up

#4 – Think about “Share”:

Share is everything to a Brand Marketer.  The career of a Brand Manager can be made or broken based on Dollar Share or Volume Share.  At retail, Brand Managers pay close attention to “Share of Shelf” or how many facings their brand has compared to competition.    In media, CPG Marketers look at “Share of Voice” to track the percentage of time consumers hear their brand message versus competition.  This constant, some would say obsessive, tracking of “share” is what keeps brand marketers focused.  Having viable and impactful measures for your start-up that you track consistently is something every business should do.  It helps you prioritize and keeps you focused on what moves those other important financial numbers (ie revenue, profit and cash flow)

#5 – Everything you do is part of Brand Building:

From day 1, your start-up is a brand whether you like it or not.  As Seth Godin once wrote,

“a brand is set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”

When a CPG brand thinks about Brand Building, they take that to mean much than just advertising.  In fact, often you will hear Brand Marketers talk about “Moments of Truth”.  The First Moment of Truth is often the experience in-store from merchandising to how the product looks on shelf.  The Second Moment of Truth is about the experience after the purchase when people use the product for the first time.  While he didn’t use the language of “Moments of Truth”,  Sean Ellis of 12 in 6 is talking about that very thing when he makes this point:

Starbuck’s process of building their brand is a great example for any startup.  There was no heavy spending on brand advertising.  At Starbucks it’s all about the brand experience.  They obsessed over everything – from the quality of the cups to the quality of the toilet paper.  The music, colors, furniture…  It’s all an orchestrated brand experience.

For a CPG Brand Marketers the process of building a brand involves every facet of the business from customer service to marketing to even your company letterhead.  While a start-up has many things they have to juggle, how your build your brand should always be near (if at) the top of the list.