Canadian Marketing Blog

Social Capital Value Add ChangeThis Manifesto & eBook

This is a follow up to my June 13th post about ChangeThis and Social Capital Value Add (SCVA).

Due in part to your response to that post, a Canadian was among the authors published this week in ChangeThis’ 50th issue. SCVA was released along with ideas from Seth Godin, John Kotter, Jonathan Salem Baskin, Vince Procente and Andrew Abela. You can check out the ideas and authors at www.changethis.com.

Michael Cayley, the author of SCVA has also released an eBook that expands on the highlights introduced with the ChangeThis piece. Like any theory of corporate valuation, the reading gets complex but Michael has tried to keep things moving with a Wizard of Oz metaphor.

As a marketer, I found the idea of memetic brand the most interesting. Here is an excerpt on that …

… “The marketing/communications mix is completely different than it was before 2004. Broadcast’s monopoly on attention is dead. The symbolic brand, which has been the fastest growing source of corporate value for the last quarter century has reached its pinnacle. It is being absorbed and replaced by memetic brand. Technologies have evolved and mapped so tightly to the way humans transact, form relationships and create self-identity that it is time for business management to link the pioneering academic studies of social capital and social network analysis (SNA) to value based management and the priorities of marketers.” …

Even if you find yourself challenging the ideas, the eBook may prove useful to your team and clients just because it is a good overview of the technology and trends at work in the current market (you might insert Fig. 1 attached). A lot of the material is familiar, but SCVA connects it into a useful framework and anytime I came across something that I wanted to dig into further, it was easy to take a little side trip into more depth through a few of the eBook’s more than 200 hyperlinks.

Enjoy!

I read it, its good – I like the ideas

If you research brand advocates, and brand marketing you will notice that this general ideology has been in play for a long time. Social constructs and social groups have long been advocating or collapsing brands. The internet is a new forum for it, that needs a few new rules like those found in SCVA book – but it will not completely change the way large Brands market overall – this is what agency marketers saw before as below the line.

Now that most of their audience is engaging in below the line activities, more dollars are going into their development, also the loud speakers of conventional advertising is convoluted, so SCVA and the like are more relevant tactics to corral advocates and haters because their conversations do not die with them or their groups, they are available to the rest of the world with a click of a mouse.

Indeed, corporations need to take heed in this new space, without loosing sight of the fact that the market is the market, relevance to issues and quality goods and services will still sell products, and the loud speaker will never go away.

These ideas are a component of a scientific revolution that began in the early 1980’s with the introduction of IRC. Organized groups of people who connect online based on issue or interest, not on friendship. The paradigm shifted two decades ago, Michael is one of the thinkers who are going to help it reach the tipping point. (if it hasn’t already).

May I recommend a book to you all – The structure of scientific revolutions – its old – but it fits into the social capital shift – SCVA is one of the pseudo-realities that go along with the shift.

For Brand footprint measurement and the use of that in marketing – this is not new – its just new online – Neilson has been doing rudimentary measurements for decades – its just getting more accurate now. See http://www.sysomos.com for a great software pack for the new age.

I am not in any way discounting the ideas, he is a fantastic thinker and I will have lunch with him to talk shop.