New Language

• Cultivate: Attract and nurture community members, develop a comprehensive strategy for defining roles, and create demographic and ethnographic profiles.

For me CULTIVATE is really about identifying the roles, profiles and ambassadors that make up the brand. The brand is about more than the expression, more than the experience, more than the ephemeral, in my mind the brand is about the people that make up the brand community. The people who work on the brand, in the brand, around the brand, for the brand, and those who choose to interact with the the brand. Who are they and how do we realistically CULTIVATE (target) them? Not academically or empirically. But really. Really? I've developed branding exercises specifically for the purpose of identifying how the brand community is structured and who is involved in the community.

• Fascinate: Engage members with creative and informative content relevant to the community core and track the effectiveness of new products, services, etc.

OK. Engage to FASCINATE is a little vague right? The point here is that we now know who we are talking to and what their position is relative to the brand community structure so it's time we connect with them in language and images that make sense to their community. Not slick sales materials and advertising fluff, but an authentic voice that gives life to the community through their eyes (not our own). I'm as guilty as the rest when being too close to a topic or project and falling into making assumptions about the receiver of my information. When I use the word FASCINATE I really mean it though. Capture the wonder in their hearts and minds and suddenly "engage" is no longer vague. To engage is to touch. That's right touch their hearts, minds, calendars, clocks, wallets, etc.

• Illuminate: Educate community members to the organization’s new offerings through eLearning environments for mature levels of sophistication.

Fast forward from 2002 when I wrote the first white paper... eLearning is everywhere. Blended learning is everywhere. Virtual classrooms and offices are everywhere. As I expressed seven years ago, the speed of the information and the availability of the information have been leading to more and more advanced levels of user sophistication. ILLUMINATE now means SHARE as much as learn. Please just don't SELL. We're all too old for that now. This ability to share information among one another has lead to word of mouth storms. My friend Pete Blackshaw coined the term Consumer-Generated-Media years ago to describe what was happening when users create content on web sites and become the publishers as the web site owners merely act as host. I use ILLUMINATE as a replacement for advertising because in my own mind that is the purpose advertising serves...to TEACH us. Through social media and these more sophisticated expressions we are teaching each other every day. It can be the best place to get your car washed, grab a bite, find expertise or which detergent to buy. Our friends are illuminating the many options we have and their previous experiences with those brands.

Defining a Community Experience for Marketing Professionals

Community Experience Development™ (CeD) combines the essential elements of technology, brand strategy, and inclusion to deliver an absolute marketing environment.

An absolute marketing environment? What I am really trying to say here is that the combination of technology, brand strategy and inclusion provide a recipe for true community experiences. The web is a perfect environment for these experience and a great incubator for marketing practices.

CeD is a comprehensive consulting method utilizing tools for creating, managing, and tracking brand communities online and offline, including: visitor profile databases, content submission and management, site-building, and personalization tools for cultivating, fascinating, and illuminating the target audience.

Remember that this was 2002 and Editspot (as it is now known) was in its infancy (actually named Digivillage at the time). The idea of the individual (non-geeks) wanting to publish their own content was still a little tough to swallow. And of course, I was creating my own language (Cultivate, Fascinate, Illuminate) for Metaphor that is still used in the business today.

Revised introduction - CED Whitepaper

This white paper outlines a business philosophy centered on the paradigm shift of the branding “push” mentality to the community “pull” concept, resulting in planned consultation methods and technological implementation for both the corporate and non-profit sectors in the development of a community experience.

The core to developing a community experience is providing an opportunity for sharing, participation and fellowship. I'd like to dissect this a bit.

Sharing: Providing others with something that you have is perhaps too simplistic. Only if what you are sharing is actually providing value can you "pull" other into your community.

Participation: Actively being involved in the community and interacting with others in the community. For my own part in this requires not telling others what to do in terms of condescension or how they "should" act. This participation is much more effective if each individual is allowed to be authentic and act as genuine as possible in their communication.

Fellowship: This is the toughest in my opinion. People need to be kindred spirits in some respect in order to find fellowship within a community. I have started following a number of Twitterers only to find that I do not like their "voice" and don't won't my morning to be filled with negative chatter, etc. However I have found fellowship among other professionals that provide links to interesting news and information I may not have found otherwise.

Community Experience Development White Paper 2009

Executive Summary from 2002 white paper "Community Experience Development"

This paper outlines a business philosophy centered on the paradigm shift of the branding “push” mentality to the community “pull” concept, resulting in planned consultation methods and technological implementation for both the corporate and non-profit sectors.

Community Experience Development™ (CED) combines the essential elements of technology, brand strategy, and inclusion to deliver an absolute marketing environment. CED is a comprehensive consulting method utilizing tools for creating, managing, and tracking brand communities online and offline, including: visitor profile databases, content submission and management, site-building, and personalization tools for cultivating, fascinating, and illuminating the target audience.

• Cultivate: Attract and nurture community members, develop a comprehensive strategy for defining roles, and create demographic and ethnographic profiles.
• Fascinate: Engage members with creative and informative content relevant to the community core and track the effectiveness of new products, services, etc.
• Illuminate: Educate community members to the organization’s new offerings through eLearning environments for mature levels of sophistication.

The core CED principles involve leveraging intellectual properties to position each community creator as the expert in their industry. Achievement of CED objectives results in the evolution of the brand community as the destination point for the given topic. This document describes the problem area of access to a unified community experience on the World Wide Web, which is common to non-profit and corporate groups alike.

Community Experience Development

In 2002 I published a white paper titled Community Experience Development: Sharing, Participation and Fellowship Among a Body Politic that covered the topic of using the Internet to develop brand communities. The whole paradigm shift of a brand audience to a brand community requires understanding how our culture is changing and how our relationship with brands (and each other) is changing.

I am going to use this blog to update and revise that white paper for 2009. Considering the 2002 version covered the idea of the social network prior to Facebook, MySpace and even Friendster it will be fun to address the education we have all embraced to bring us where we are today and understand the brand communities of tomorrow.

Who knows, maybe BusinessWeek will do a follow up article related to this interview with me entitled "Giving New Meaning to Branding": http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jan2003/sb2003016_2946.htm

Editspot Back Story

It occurred to me that everyone who reads this blog may not have visited editspot.com. I thought it would be a good idea to provide some background.

back story:

editspot is a privately funded startup with offices in the historic Over-the-Rhine neighborhood of Cincinnati, OH. Started as a side project in 2002, editspot has grown into a real-time web-publishing platform with a service that works over multiple networks. The editspot platform was built out of a genuine need to provide an easy-to-use web site creation and management tool that works. The goal was to develop a web-based personal expression technology for individuals to easily create and publish content to the internet. Currently the editspot team is working toward the goal of bringing the power of Web publishing to everyone for free while reducing the complexity of Web content creation to the level of word processing.

The company, editspot LLC, was incorporated in 2007, but first began life in 2002 as DigiVillage, the vision of founder, Ran Mullins, and a product of Metaphor Studio. The goal was to allow clients access to the content on their web sites. The concept was less about creation and more about maintenance.

In 2004, the name editspot was chosen to give the product new life as more features were added by Troy Davis, CTO. In 2005, additional features were added and the product was further stabilized. Metaphor began to assemble an editspot team and perform test marketing exercises. From 2005 to 2006, editspot grew its client base by 100% and developed the business plan to spin editspot into its own company and raise funds to automate web site creation. In 2007, that goal was realized and the product has been further developed into an automated platform that now allows clients to create, design, edit, and manage their own web sites. So now, editspot, LLC has two products, spotlets, a free ad-supported super blog and webspot, a web-based content management system built on the editspot platform.

Hope that helps.

Linking In Editspot

Reading about LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and the idea that every individual is a small business. Great principles. Looking for ideas of how Editspot and LinkedIn can become more integrated. I'm certain that individuals need to create full web sites beyond their existing profiles on social networks. Excited by the opportunities in front of us.