Fusebox

“Vision, trust, and transparency.” This was Stowe Boyd’s summary of the current state of the new “Post Normal” Era of Business. His perspective was a recurring theme throughout Pivot Con.

Some other thoughts…

On Vision: Be flexible on details, and stubborn on vision. A great example is Marc Benioff’s vision, which is all about the future. He speaks about the future as if it is the present, allowing his employees to fill in the details. Vision must be rooted in the future and not the past.

On Workforce: Embrace the “3D” worker who is distributed, decentralized, and discontinuous. It’s about being mobile, utilizing tablets and ultra notebooks.

On Leadership: Smaller groups with a fail fast mentality towards risk taking result in less management and flatter organizations.

On Social: All employees are the voice of the company, creating a company wide endeavor. While management will set the tone, the employees will be trusted to convey the messages. The new employee brand ambassadors receive extensive training in how the company’s messaging is executed. This creates a culture of collaborators having perpetual conversations. These conversations are happening internally as well as externally. Social is here and it’s not simply a department!

On Facebook: Coke shared some insights into who are the ultimate fans of the brand. At over 50 million fans, Coke has the highest number of Facebook fans than any other brand. They used brand connections, the ratio of the number of people in their network and how many of their friends also follow the Coke page. They took a sampling of the fans and looked at low noise fans .66 brand connections, and high noise fans 30+ brand connections. They found that engaging the high noise fans demands disproportionately high connectivity, 30 times more than the lower noise fan. They effectively identified small clusters of fans with strong influence on their friends, rather than targeting influencers.

On Content: Consumers love stories! No longer relying on press releases and product pitches, It is all about storytelling. Stories engage the consumers, thus allowing the users to personally connect with the brand.

On UX: The user experience is not just your website or mobile application. It’s everything your company does, including customer service, social engagement, etc.

On Development: If you don’t ship, it doesn’t exist. Ship fast and ship often. Sephora ships every 6 weeks, with new features and enhancements.

On Devices: One word, mobile! While the desktop is not dead, it is on life support. The process is now: mobile, tablet, desktop. As the tablet market increases that might change to: tablet, mobile, desktop. 44% of all sales will be done on a mobile/tablet device with 80% taking place on the tablet.

On Search: YouTube is the number 2 search engine! It is also the number one place people go to find out about companies and brands, they do not go to brand websites or even Facebook pages first.

On Engagement: Without engagement a company does not have a pulse! Engagement is not an ROI metric, but more of a company health metric. This is very important. Your company’s digital IQ directly reflects in shareholder value.

On Advertising: Consumers have more trust in Earned Advertising rather than in paid ads, resulting in an ROI 14 times greater for the earned versus the paid. A growing trend is a combination of the two forms and a hybrid of the two to amplify the earned ads.

On Cool: What makes a product cool and how do you measure it? The impact of cool is important to all demographics, but it differs between them. Cool is something that is below the conscious ability to measure with traditional tools. It’s more reliably measured on non-conscious methods. Buyology has come up with a method of having people ask questions about a product. They can then determine where that product falls on a coolness factor. Cool characteristics: Authentic, Inspiring, Creative, Attractive, Edgy, Rebellious, Mysterious, Surprising, Takes Risks, Unique.