Badass: Making Users Awesome

11

The Challenge

Prologue



Here’s what my “friends” and

social media consultants say:

If your brand’s not on

Facebook, you don’t exist.

Tastemakers!

One word:

Viral Video

YouTube

Twitter. Duh.

Uh, no, it’s the

In

tention Economy

It’s the Attention Economy

Content Strategy!

Actually it’s the

Sharing Economy

Social Mobile

Gamification

It’s the App Economy

Influencers. It’s all about influencers.

And Pinfluencers. You do have a

Pinterest plan, right?

Don’t out-

spend

the competition,

just out-

friend

and out-

trend

them!

12

The Challenge

Prologue



What does an out-friend/out-trend strategy hope to “win”?

The brand engagement arms race.

They’re on Pinterest? We need to be there. They’ve got

YouTube videos? Let’s do that too. And oh, look, yet another

new social network where our brand needs a “presence.”

Trying to stay one follower, one like, one meme, ahead of

competitors is not a robust, durable strategy. It is not a

sustainable path to long-term success.

A strategy based on out-friend or out-trend the

competition is exhausting and fragile.

And is “engagement” really what we want?

13

The Challenge

Prologue



If it drains our energy to out-engage our competitors, imagine

what all this brand engagement does to our users?

On their deathbed, nobody will say:

“If only I’d engaged more with brands.”

If we can’t out-spend, out-friend,

or out-trend the competition, how

else can we build desirability?

And when you grow up, you’ll get

to engage with brands!

14

The Challenge

Prologue



Sustained bestsellers NOT successful

If we can’t out-spend, out-friend, or out-trend the

competition, what’s left?

What does make a difference? What are the

attributes of the long-term bestsellers?

Which brings us back to... how?

What did these do...

…but those didn’t?

And here we still are,

without a formula.

15

The Challenge

Prologue



This. The bestsellers had this:

Every moment of every day, somebody mentions

something they love-could-not-do-without. Whether

face-to-face or in blogs, reviews, discussions, tweets,

comments, updates, texts, photos—people talk.

Sustained bestsellers are recommended.

And it makes all the difference.

In this book we mean “recommended” literally. When

we say word of mouth (WOM) think only of honest, non-

incentivized comments about either the product or

the results the user got with it.

When people talk about a brand’s contest to win an

iPad, or a funny viral video, they’re talking about the

brand’s marketing, and that’s not the word of mouth

we’re looking for.

Seriously? Then I

need to get that.

I use that app for all my

projects. It’s amazing.