How Jamie Oliver is Building Belief

Tonight is the launch of Jamie Oliver's: Food Revolution on ABC. For us in West Virginia it is an interesting proposition. A national show based on the premise of helping our city of Huntington deal with it's unwanted moniker "the unhealthiest city in America". So for us "locals" there are a lot of angles to this story, but for you as a marketer, there are lessons to be learned in building belief.

Here at Mythology we have a pillar of empowered marketing actually called "Mythology".  Mythology is creating and sharing you stories in unique and unexpected ways.  To do this you must understand your market, and your value proposition, and what makes you different from your competitors. Once this foundation is clear, then you can get creative and start building belief.

In our current world of message confusion and never-ending hype, you have to build belief through stories that can break through the clutter and stick. IN past posts we have mentioned the Heath Brothers and their formula for stories that are Made to Stick:

Via Presentation Zen

• Simplicity - Finding the core of the idea
• Unexpectedness - Combining surprise with interest
• Concreteness - Bringing it alive by engaging the five senses ("memory Velcro")
• Credibility - Tapping the power of authority - or anti-authority - to build belief 
• Emotional - Priming people to care
• Stories - Generating involvement that leads to action 

As I watched Jamie Oliver's TED presentation from February, I was amazed at his use of the formula. I suggest you take 20 minutes to watch the entire video.

Now let's break it down...

Simplicity 

Education about Healthy Foods Save Lives.

Unexpectedness 

Diet related disease is our biggest problem. Homicide is on the bottom of the list.

Concreteness 

Pulling all the food that one family eats in a week together in a single place and bringing a wheel barrow of sugar from years worth of drinking milk on stage made the problem concrete.

Credibility 

Connecting the statistics, the stories, and the solution together with real numbers and real costs.  

Emotional

An overweight family that struggles. A pastor that buries those who die.

and Stories

Jamie builds the story of the individual family, the Huntington WV school district, and his new culinary school and leaves the audience with a formula on how a solution can scale.

"One person teaches three others 10 health recipes and they then teach three more each."

He finished his presentation with a clear call to action.

Finally, I think it is important to understand that you have to work hard at creating your story. You won't be able to just sit down with powerpoint tomorrow and develop this deep and compelling masterpiece. It will take time to cultivate and build. But if you want to build belief in your idea then you might want to learn from Jamie, his presentation won the TED prize.

    

Creating Memorable Experiences

On Feb Feb 18^th Verizon West Virginia presented The West Virginia HistoryMakers Event, “A Conversation with Henry ‘Skip’ Gates Jr." Mythology was contracted to manage the overall event experience utilizing our strategic communication techniques.

Crystal Good took the lead on the Mythology team by organizing the demand generation strategy, building a highly targeted event guest list, managing the RSVP process and leading the creation of the website.  “We sought to add value and creativity to the event structure and production details wherever we could,” Crystal said, “The History Makers event was full of lessons and opportunities. We were reminded throughout the event planning of the value in essential marketing tools:  communication, organization, team work, and preparation."

Assisting Crystal where Adrienne Sommerville and and intern Leslie Gibbs from the Univeristy of Charleton's MBA program.

Gibbs said, “At Mythology, teamwork is a technique that starts out like a triangle. The bottom layer is used as our base and in this case, it represents our team.  This is where we get together and see what each of us can contribute to making this event a success.  The middle layer is organization, planning, and preparation.  This is our 'get it done' stage, where we try to catch mistakes, edit, and peer-review everything that is being distributed out to the guest.  The top layer is our success.”

In this case with the team celebrated the top layer with a successful event, “A Conversation with Henry ‘Skip’ Gates Jr.”

 Joe Long, Verizon Director of Corporate Communications describes Mythology’s impact on the event:  "As the title sponsor for the HistoryMakers™ event honoring Dr. Henry Louis Gates, we engaged Mythology to provide support with event coordination, promotion and creativity.  The event and the very diverse audience were perfect.   Mythology's experience in building buzz and bringing people together helped make the event a great success. We were very pleased with the results."

Next Mountain State Marketers Webinar Event March 30th

 

Building Brand- A Simple, Data-Driven Approach to Establishing Awareness, Trust, and Affinity for Your Organization   Join us for a Webinar on March 30     Space is limited. Reserve your Webinar seat now at: http://bit.ly/msmevent4   In a world of social media and search marketing, does brand still matter? If so, how can you take a more scientific approach to building a brand that establishes measurable improvements in awareness, trust, and affinity for your organization, product, or service?  Hear from a marketing director who has recently built a strong, measurable foundation for her brand refresh initiative and how she plans to maintain a data-driven approach to holding their marketing investments accountable.   Title:   Building Brand- A Simple, Data-Driven Approach to Establishing Awareness, Trust, and Affinity for Your Organization   Date:   Tuesday, March 30, 2010   Time:   12:00 PM - 12:45 PM EDT   After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.   System Requirements PC-based attendees Required: Windows® 7, Vista, XP, 2003 Server or 2000   Macintosh®-based attendees Required: Mac OS® X 10.4.11 (Tiger®) or newer

Mythology is excited to continue to be a part of the Mountain State Marketers group and excited to announce the next speaker in the series of monthly webinars. Elizabeth Teets is the Marketing Director at Davis Health System in Randolph County, West Virginia and will share her experience in market research and building a successful brand.

Supporting Social Media Engagement

I was fortunate to attended the Society for Applied Learning Technologies Conference last week in Orlando, FL as a speaker. The event focused on the latest learning technologies and the application of those technologies. The audience was a mix of higher education, industry, and a few government folks. I choose to present our approach for supporting social media campaigns with organizations we work with here at Mythology.   Because it was a learning-focused conference, I was a little worried because I invested some time setting up the "why's" and "how's" of social media marketing. I think it worked out, because the audience stayed engaged for the total 40 minutes and some followed me in the hall for further discussion.  

The presentation starts out sharing some thoughts and facts around the current marketing environment and the current importance of social media when it comes to word-of-mouth marketing.  Next, I shared the 10 Pillars of Empowered Marketing and specifically the three areas that social media can directly work as a strategy, Engagement, Dialog, and Empowerment.    The truth is, that we can leverage social media for most of the other pillars as well, but the focus for this presentation was on social media and alignment.  I also showed the funnel that we use to support our measurement of social media engagements as a clear process for accountability. Once I got through the why and how setup, I moved on to the alignment pillar and supporting the team.

This section of the presentation discussed the components of alignment and how important it is and then walked through specific learning activities that can be implemented to support the organization that is implementing the engagement plan.  Primarily I outlined the skill areas needed to implement social media such as content development, two-way conversations, real-time conversations, and the new set of tools that have emerged such as Facebook, Twitter, and many others that manage social media activity.

Check out the slides.

Supporting Social Media Engagement

View more presentations from Mythology LLC.

I wrapped up the presentation by talking about performance measurement and the where the future of performance measurement might go.  Think sentiment analysis.

The attendees asked about policy and culture and how these issues can be handled as part of the social media engagement and I think they are good topics. Many organizations are not sure how to even start. I recommended that they go back to why they are leveraging social media. Is it to market a product or service? Is it to engage in dialog with their potential market?  Then focus on plans and policies around making those outcomes happen.  If they are using social media to support the learning activities of their organization, then they need to think about how they want to govern it's use in that context.

Overall, I enjoyed the experience and hope that I can do more speaking engagements in the future. 

What do you think? How do you support social media engagement in your organization?

Olympic Empowerment: Creating a platform

With the 2010 Winter Olympics happening these past two weeks, I thought it would be a great time to talk about how NBC has used social media to empower it's athletes to share their experience in Vancouver.  Wanting to reach younger audiences who are now online and engaged in social media networks, NBC looked to leverage Twitter and its realtime messaging to get a more authentic and transparent experience out and to pull a more engaged audience in. To accomplish this task, they created a social media platform at nbcolympics.com. 

Empowerment

Creating a platform for the most influential in your community or market is at the heart of our Empowerment pillar here at Mythology.

At their site, nbcolympics.com, NBC has created what amounts to a content aggregation site that allows the athletes and fans to participate and share in the Olympics, while keeping it all under the NBC brand. I understand there was some complaints/confusion about the rules. I am sure they made mistakes and will learn a lot from this experience.

So by allowing the athletes (the influencers) to share their Olympic experience this platform empowers direct communication between these personalities and their audience through a media that allows the audience to have control over that experience.

The Mythology empowerment pillar is about looking for these types of opportunities within your market. Where can you connect your thought leaders directly with your audience? Sure, the olymipcs is a grand event with star power, but while the scale my be different the principles are the same with any market.

Dialog 

While we are on the Olympics, I wanted to be sure to share the second Mythology pillar that is being supported with the nbcolympics.com social media site, dialog. Dialog is about creating opportunities for you to connect with your customers or audience. NBC created the Twitter tracker to facilitate the dialog that is happening around the Olympics. The tool filters the twitter conversation around specific Olympic events or timeframes.  

 It also allows visitors to participate in the conversation and provides a visual representation of the number of tweets around the event. Again, the platform is about aggregating and filtering the information in a way that makes it easier for their audience and continues to reinforce the brand.

Overall, I think there are things that could be improved by NBC, but it was a really good attempt to leverage social media conversations around the Olympics and connect them with the NBC brand.  The advertising on the site was clear and didn't really impact the quality of the experience in my opinion.

So what do you think? Did you like what NBC did? How can you do something like this in your world?

Update on Saturday, February 27, 2010 at 12:11PM by Lee Kraus

And play the Apolo game http://raceapolo.com/ - not really empowerment or dialog, but certainly engagement.