Welcome to Transmedia Samurai
Over 15 Years of Integrated Brand Marketing and Management Experience
* Brand marketing executive focused on growth, profitability and brand integrity
* Versed in all aspects of transmedia storytelling including, all forms of digital communications, content marketing and strategic campaign development. Also deep experience with web API, video/multimedia and social channels
* Metrics driven, focused on top line growth
* Skilled at developing and implementing teams and systems to leverage and facilitate growth
Specialties
Integrated Brand Marketing
Digital Marketing
Transmedia Storytelling
Content Marketing
Video and Multimedia Production & Distribution
Analytics and Reporting
Client and Vendor Management
Leadership and Team Building
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The content is good, but I still don’t know how this one is going to turn out. These two properties will share a common fate. They’re both going to succeed, or they’re both going to fail.
BY GERALD TELLIS
|FEBRUARY 21, 2013
Companies consistently pass up or cast out those who create friction, cause insecurity among leaders, or make other employees uncomfortable. It’s their loss—since those mavericks are often their best shot at true innovation.
Innovation is vital for the growth, success, and wealth of firms. Yet the source of innovation is not so much investment in R&D, filing of patents, or clever market research but the recruitment, empowering, and retention of talented people, who may appear at times as mavericks. Innovators are not necessarily geeks with super high IQ or long-haired, unshaven individuals, as some stereotypes suggest. Rather, innovators may be mavericks, who come in a variety of personalities.
Innovators may include those who criticize deficiencies in current processes and products. Innovators may include whistle-blowers who call out unethical or self-defeating practices of the firm. Innovators may include dissidents who disagree with the philosophy and procedures of the firm. Innovators may include challengers who question the firm’s past dogma, present practice, and future plans. Innovators may include tinkerers who ceaselessly dabble with new models, often with little success. Innovators may include variety seekers who want novelty in living, work, travel, networks, friends, information, and stimuli. Innovators may include non-conformists who shun the normal and the routine. I use the term maverick broadly to describe a personality type that includes critics, whistle-blowers, dissidents, challengers, experimenters, variety seekers, and non-conformists. Such personalities think differently. And, innovations can emerge from such differences in thought.
The efficient, smooth-running organization dislikes mavericks because they create friction in the organization, insecurity among leaders, and discomfort among employees. The tendency is to quiet, push aside, or eject the maverick. Perverse individuals, who are self-serving or delight in causing grief to others, may well need to be ejected. But it’s a tragedy to lose a maverick, who may have the trappings of a great innovator. The history of innovation reveals such losses.
For example, Roger Newton, the co-inventor of one of the most profitable drugs, Lipitor, left Parke-Davis, where he did not quite fit in. He then started Esperion, which Pfizer bought for $1.3 billion. Tony Fadell was a VP at Philips when he left to develop a digital music player. Steve Jobs recruited him to Apple, where he co-developed the iPod. Jobs himself was once ejected from Apple, the company he founded, and which he later led to great innovations and enormous wealth. Steve Wozniak left HP to cofound Apple. He even offered HP the first personal computer he designed, which HP declined. John Warnock left Xerox PARC to cofound Adobe, because Xerox would not commercialize the InterPress graphics language he co-developed. Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and others left Fairchild semiconductor to cofound Intel, because Fairchild was not willing to implement their ideas.
Google, which often tops the list of America’s best places to work, loses a non-trivial percent of its employees, because such talent prefers the autonomy to develop innovations of their own outside the firm.
What can organizations do to grow their employees into innovators? My research into the history of radical innovations, the origin and demise of market pioneers, and the failure of leading incumbents, suggests three practices that help for this purpose:
- Empower employees with time, responsibility, and resources to experiment and come up with innovations. For example, 3M offers employees 15% of time to work on innovations of their own choosing. Google has an Associate Product Manager program where even young employees are entrusted with resources and talent to design an innovation for a specific market. In addition, asymmetric incentives and internal competition as described below are important aspects of empowerment.
- Provide asymmetric incentives, which consist of strong rewards for success with weak penalties for failure. By doing so, the organization encourages innovators to keep experimenting. If they succeed, they will be rewarded. If they fail, they need to learn and move one, as IDEO encourages its employees.
- Bring inside the organization a little of the competition that flourishes outside in the marketplace. The market outside the firm consists of hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs and innovators all over the world hungry to develop the successor to the firm’s current product. The firm needs to bring a little of this spirit within. It can do so by encouraging idea fairs, prototype races, funding contests, markets tests, and commercializations by competing teams or divisions to build the next big innovation.
Organizations may be tempted to marginalize mavericks because of the discomfort they arouse. However, the creation of innovations can benefit from mavericks. For this purpose, firms can grow mavericks into innovators by motivating them with asymmetric incentives, empowering them with responsibility and resources, and challenging them with internal competition.
—Gerard J. Tellis is Professor, Neely Chair of American Enterprise, and Director of the Center for Global Innovation at the USC Marshall School of Business. He is the author of Unrelenting Innovation: How to Build a Culture of Market Dominance, part of the Warren-Bennis Leadership Series.
Again and again, companies tell their employees what to do… but they do don’t do it. Why? Your company makes it impossible.
The underpinnings of a brand are the culture, conditions, and compensation a company provides for its employees. Unless these three synch with your brand, no amount of advertising can create a brand that resonates with customers. These factors also have traditionally been far outside the purview of the marketers and agencies that manage brands… which is why they often contradict a firm’s public image.
It’s time to ask a simple but potentially painful question: what’s the reality under your brand?
Do you advertise your commitment to customers, but pay your sales force to sell, sell, sell?
Do you crow about “satisfaction guaranteed”, but burden your customer service teams with outdated systems and little if any flexibility to resolve customer complaints?
Do you tell your business and functional units to work as a team, but pay them to compete with each other?
Your enemy isn’t your competitors, it’s the contradictions inside your company, and the unfair burdens you place on your employees.
It gets worse. There may be another problem lurking right under your brand.
Above all else, the core qualities of a modern brand must be flexibility, responsiveness and intelligence. Our economy is migrating from a “make and sell” model to a “sense and respond” approach. Customers routinely expect customization. Product life cycles are shortening. Data is everywhere. Your company has to behave in a manner that customers perceive as intelligent.
Brands have always been about the whole customer experience, but lately customer experience is dramatically more dependent on those factors that dwell under your brand promise. One reason why is that customers used to be happy receiving the same product and service that millions of other customers receive.
No more. It’s time to take on your true enemy, and defeat it.
_____________________________________________________
Bruce Kasanoff is Managing Director of the consulting firm, Sense of the Future. He is co-author with Michael Hinshaw of Smart Customers, Stupid Companies
Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn says the company follows the “next play” philosophy of Duke University basketball — that the team shouldn’t dwell on celebrating recent successes or lamenting failures.
The Value of Sharing
“To do good is noble. To tell others to do good is even nobler and much less trouble.”
~ Mark Twain
The sharing of information has become so ingrained that we do it almost without thinking. You just took a picture of your new puppy, car, or baby- quick, post it to Facebook and wait for the comments and “Likes” to roll in!
Have a gripe about your customer service from the cable company or the local restaurant? Take it to Twitter.
No matter what you want to share, there is an audience out there, waiting, hitting the refresh button, eager to know anything you care to tell them. So how does “good” content rise to the top? How do we as a company, as a brand, know when we’ve created something that moves the needle and creates that elusive but ever-important “brand engagement?”
We create content based on a few key criteria:
#1. TIMELY
If we start posting about Hootie and the Blowfish or other generally “old news” we may get a few die-hard pop culture fans, but in general we’ll have violated #2 below and the content will flop. Content must be fresh and well-timed.
#2. RELEVANT
It should go without saying that content about “How to Groom Your Dog” has no place on the social property of a winery. Unless of course there is the option to pair a particular wine with your dog. Keep your eyes peeled for that post!
#3. COMPELLING
Compelling content can be fun, funny, intriguing, interactive, educational, etc. The most compelling content is content that tells a story and invites participation and conversation.
In support of Kendall-Jackson’s Goes Well with Friends campaign, we recently created a fun, light-hearted and ultimately very engaging graphic entitled “How to Choose Wine” that appeared on the blog and Facebook page. I personally shared that graphic in a LinkedIn Group called Wine 2.0. The group, primarily made up of various wine industry professionals, has been having a spirited discussion about the merits of the flow-chart-style image for the past two weeks.”
Agree or disagree, love it or not, every one of the people who have been active in this discussion on Facebook, on our blog and a majority of the 9,000+ members who receive email updates from the Linkedin group, have devoted their most valuable commodity, time and attention, to the Kendall-Jackson brand. This creates brand engagement, builds an emotional connection between us and our consumers, and inspires people both to keep coming back to our social properties, as well as to participate in the Kendall-Jackson conversation – a great example of appropriate sharing that can move the needle in our business.
My first guest blog post for UC Davis Executive Education…
When it comes to connecting with any audience, but especially a social audience, the key is to humanize your brand. In doing that, a major obstacle marketers confront is some of the perceived snobbery that is deeply entrenched in the wine industry.
Wine has its own language – terminology and phrasing used exclusively by connoisseurs ‘in the know’. So when it comes to making your brand and your product more accessible, it’s important to choose wording that doesn’t alienate your consumers. While there is a place for those types of discussions, they should be reserved for the limited audience that responds and will self-select for those kinds of conversations.
The first step is to create shorthand, or a more common and approachable language about your product. The second step is to widen the lens and make the brand about more than just wine – make it about the experience, the story, and above all, the people.
Contemporary audiences are generally divorced from what they consume. We go into the grocery store and pick out protein, veggies, and wine without knowing anything about what we’re eating and drinking. Because of that, people love an opportunity to learn, connect, and better understand where the wine comes from, how it’s made, and especially who is making it.
Focusing on the human element is the most authentic way to show consumers what your company is all about. For example, we consistently promote the fact that Kendall-Jackson is family owned. It’s part of our DNA to tell the story of the family and above all the values of the family who owns and operates the company. We also tell the story of our extended family – the people who make up the company. That includes the farmers who care for and cultivate the land, the people who make sure the equipment is working, the office staff, the sales people all over the world, and even us here in the marketing and communications team. Everyone who plays a role in getting our product from grape to table is a part of our family, and they have a valuable place in the story we present every day.
Leveraging Opportunities: Undercover Boss
Earlier this year, the President of Kendall-Jackson was featured on the CBS show Undercover Boss. It was the perfect opportunity not only to introduce viewers to our management and company story, but also to showcase how our grapes are grown, and the different human personalities that make us successful.
A great example of this was a particular segment of the show focused on an employee named Rene. During the show he was cussing up a storm, knocking the company and knocking the customers – all without knowing he was talking to the Boss, Rick Tigner. Both during and after the show, Rick could have fired Rene, but he didn’t. In the narrative of the show there was a great moment when Rene realized who he’d been interacting with. In that moment, the ability of both Rick and Rene to come to an understanding while still maintaining their own individual personalities became an endearing moment. Everyone has an inner rebel and so the audience could relate to how difficult it was for these two men to find a common ground. The willingness of Kendall-Jackson to be part of that moment is the backbone of authentic branding, and the most legitimate way to build customer loyalty.
Transmedia Storytelling
Transmedia storytelling is all about delivering relevant, interesting, accessible content in any format and at any time that your audience wants to consume it. In response to the Undercover Boss episode, we created a mobile site, a microsite, custom video content for our web properties, a YouTube channel and social content, and community management on Facebook and Twitter. We tried to provide the widest possible cross section of information and, most importantly, a narrative thread that was consistent across all platforms and interactions, yet uniquely tailored to leverage each specific community and following.
The Undercover Boss episode was all about family, and family is about legacy and wisdom, and preserving traditions and knowledge for future generations. We came up with a Words of Wisdom campaign to tie all the different threads together. The show was aired in January of this year, and just had its re-run on September 14. We’re still able to leverage that content on different channels. Both before and after the show, we have continued distilling our content, trying to get to the universal heart of the message.
In an effort to support our content marketing strategy further, we went out and shot impromptu videos at our wine center, asking people to share their own Words of Wisdom to be passed down in their family and community. There was some great footage of a firefighter from Dallas, Texas. The call to action was really about encouraging people to participate and share their own stories (through pictures, videos and narrative) that would ideally help them connect to a larger community.
Get Real: Strategies to Humanize Your Wine Brand
Start by getting off the PR teat and getting real. Curtail the use of wine ratings and stock imagery of vineyards and bottles, and start talking about things people actually care about. There are always stories to capitalize on if you look in the right places and ask the right questions. For example, I was at Matanzas Creek Winery recently (a Jackson Family property) and learned by chance that it is one of the top ten places nationwide where people choose to get engaged. Tidbits like this are gold – much more valuable and interesting than a high point score on a particular wine. This speaks to passion and romance and gets people sentimental about their own engagement story or dreaming about the day they’ll pop the question. There is a social campaign in the works to capitalize on this narrative thread and, once again, invite people to participate in our brand. Pinpoint the ways in which your wine, winery, team or community is special, what people are passionate about, what kinds of quirky personalities are part of your brand story and tell that story in a very universal way.
When I started this job, a lot of people asked: what’s your relationship to wine? To me, it’s about the social aspect of wine, cracking open a bottle and sharing with friends. A delicious wine can be the centerpiece of the moment, but the whole experience is really about the people you share it with. As marketers working in the wine industry, we can enrich our narrative by making it about much more than just the wine itself.
SOCIAL MEDIA GAME TRAINING (#SMGT)
CASE STUDY: SOCIAL MEDIA CHALLENGE - NATIONAL SALES MEETING 2012
Introducing and training a national salesforce on how to leverage social media to support their goals and enhance their personal brand.
THE “I DON’T WANNA” OPPORTUNITY
With a worldwide sales force responsible for supporting more than 35 different brands the concept of “social engagement as an opportunity” has become my mantra. Each time a sales rep scowls at me and tells me how much they hate Facebook, how they are wary of the big brother aspects of Foursquare, how they “don’t get” Twitter, I smile and nod with a fatherly countenance. “Yes,” I say. “I get it,” I reassure them. “But…” and here is where I raise my eyebrow. “If I told you that with a few simple clicks or swipes you could virtually shake hands with 50 or 100 or 1000 more potential accounts each day, would you let me talk to you about this for a few more minutes?” They soften. I believe that in some Woody Woodpecker-esque moment they are imagining my head transformed into a giant dollar sign. It’s not a hard sell, especially once I explain how they can protect their privacy in the process.
THE “I CAN’T…SHOW ME HOW” MOMENT
Inevitably the next thing out of their mouth is, “Can you show me how to use…” and here you can fill in the blank of your favorite social platform: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Foursquare, LinkedIn. In response to that question we created a Social Media Sales Boot Camp about a year ago. A group of sales folks from different areas of the company were selected to participate in a day-long workshop. The curriculum was basic and broadly defined, there was a guest speaker and the whole event ended with team breakouts for some practical, albeit theoretical use case exercises. Overall response was good but it got me thinking about how to make it less about telling and more about doing.
GAME TRAINING
I’d considered gamification mostly as a customer engagement technique. However, after hearing Jane McGonigal’s keynote at SXSW about her SuperBetter game, I think the idea for the #SMGT gamified training tool began to crystallize. The Fogg Behavior Model suggests that to produce any desired behavior there are three primary factors that must fire simultaneously: motivation, ability and trigger.
The mission of #SMGT, to design an entertaining and practical tool to educate 100+ salespeople on how to, not just use and post, but actually engage with social media platforms. Competition is the lifeblood of salespeople so the trigger was a no-brainer.
THE CRUCIBLE
Our annual, week-long, National Sales Meeting provided an ideal test case opportunity. The challenge was to involve the whole spectrum of users, from the technically savvy to the luddite, all without substantially disrupting their heavily scheduled meetings. The National Sales Meeting is, internally, a high-profile and highly-structured environment with every sales person from the US and Canada converged in one place for a meticulously scheduled 7-day event.
GAME ON
Several days prior to the event we had our EVP of Sales send an email to all attendees describing the Social Media Challenge Game and inviting everyone to participate as well as laying out the rules and detailing the fabulous prizes they could win. We also provided a mobile-optimized, one-page “quick start guide” to help jump-start the registration process.
The Social Media Challenge required participants to pre-register for four popular social, mobile platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram and pass along their user names for each in a private Facebook group.
Participants were then messaged through the group informing them of the rules of play:
RULES OF THE GAME:
- Challenges will be posted on the Facebook Group and on our game specific Twitter account.
- Challenges will only be valid for a short period of time, and expire when the next challenge is posted.
- When submitting a response to a challenge you must include the game specific #hashtag in your post so we can track and assign points.
- Challenges using Foursquare or Instagram must be ‘shared to Twitter’ and include the #hashtag so we can track it.
- You can only get points for completing a challenge once.
We chose a #hashtag that was unique to a large consumer facing campaign that the sales team was getting their first chance to see. The #hashtag was essential to be able to identify “challenge” responses as they were uploaded as well as to populate a Leaderboard to stimulate the competitive spirit of the sales team.
Challenges were posted in conjunction with the schedule of events for the conference. Thanks to some assistance from the Foursqaure team we were also able to create “events” for each of the various meetings being held at a hotel convention center. This allowed participants not only to “check-in” at the hotel but gave them the added option of checking into their specific meeting room. This helped us track more effectively and also allowed us to craft challenges that were relevant to specific topics. A few “challenge” examples:
Challenge #1 of 4
Check-in at the meeting room you are in using Foursqaure. Leave a tip using the #hashtag and share to Twitter.
[2points]
Expires in 45 minutes
Challenge #4 of 4
When you arrive at your next location take a picture using Instagram. Be sure to include the #hashtag and share to Twitter and/or Facebook.
[2points]
Extra credit [1 point]: Apply the “Earlybird” filter to you photo
Expires end of day
All of the challenges were designed to ensure that participants were fully exposed to the platforms as well as the features of each platform and the interactivity between platforms. We also encourage social interaction among participants by moderating the Facebook Group Wall and the Twitter feed.
There, there?
Over the course of 4 days and approximately 120 potential players the interaction statistics were as follows:
- 69 participants
- 48 active players
- 281 Instagram photos (many of these were unrelated to specific gameplay challenges indicating a the ease of use and visual nature of this platform was attractive to both novice and experienced players)
- More than 300 tweets using #hashtag
- High activity on the Facebook Group: photos, comments, likes, etc
While there were many learnings about potential improvements from a logistics and administration perspective the anecdotal evidence from talking with the players was very positive. Another positive result was that all of the players now had (at very least) these four apps installed and running on their mobile devices making the likelihood of future engagement significantly higher.
Most novice participants indicated an enhanced understanding of social media both in general and as it related to their core sales function. Qualitative outreach was vital to ensure the appropriate framework for the game within the professional nature of the event. With that in mind we very purposefully engaged in discussions with individual players (and naysayers) during the course of the meeting about the value of personal branding and thought leadership and how using these platforms could help to enhance their client’s perception of them in these areas.
An unanticipated result was the fact the both the Facebook group as well as the #hashtag have persisted among the population of players. The group has become a kind of unofficial hangout for the sales people to exchange ideas, comments and even collateral material and best practices.
Overall the initiative was very successful and will serve as a model for future trainings with sales as well as with other areas of the organization. I welcome questions and feedback about all things digital so please feel free to reach out.
Twitter: @jscamire
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/jscamire
Blog: http://www.tumblr.com/blog/transmediasamurai
