Dr. Augustine Fou, Group Chief Digital Officer of Omnicom’s Healthcare Consultancy Group wrote about the confluence of trends like mobile and social media. He poses that consumers may see the customer service representative as irrelevant while shopping, preferring to access product information, pricing and reviews via mobile devices. “With continuous and ubiquitous information available to consumers, advertisers cannot claim anything that will not be double-checked by the consumer. Advertisers will need to truly differentiate.”

I’m not sure if it’s about differentiation at this stage when a consumer is searching for brand or product information while shopping. I think it’s more about validation. They wouldn’t be searching after all if there wasn’t a baseline interest. If that’s the case, brands should consider a few ways to finalize the sale:

Consistency – Consumers may go to a brand’s site, Facebook page, Amazon or any number of other online retailers for information. Making sure that the messaging is consistent across all media can prove legitimacy. This is also a great opportunity for SEO/SEM tactics to make sure consumers are visiting the best window into the brand.

Immediacy – Once the consumer is on one of the brand’s owned media, easy access to information is crucial. Making sure that the mobile information architecture gets the user easily to whatever their needs may be can instill confidence in the brand and lead to purchase.

Reinforcement – Highlight the most popular aspects of your product or brand. If the consumer thinks and feels a certain way about the product, but sees a difference in messaging or priority while searching, they may lose confidence in the product itself. Earned media as evidence of the brand message but also the tribe the brand belongs to can help reinforce perceptions.

By validating a consumer’s intent to purchase can give them reasons to purchase the brand, not merely consider the brand over others. These tactics, tied into a brand’s paid, earned and owned media, can convert baseline interest into action.

I’ve been reading quite a bit recently on brand storytelling. Here are three different takes on the subject, and what I think they reveal about how brands can succeed.

Gunther Sonnenfeld of ThinkState proposes a storytelling framework that includes the metastory, program and media. The framework is a little confusing, and to the author’s point – pointless. “Storytelling is a holistic practice,” he states. “Channels and inventory play second fiddle to experiences that are relevant to various audiences and consumer segments.” Regardless of the framework, what he’s saying is that brands should ensure the same story is being told across media.

Arjun Basu of enRoute talks about the shift of brands as content providers. Content of course is another word for storytelling, and he proposes that everything can be a story. “Everything – from nacho chips to shoes to television – throws content at us and it is this content that makes up the stories of our lives.”

Edward Boches analyzes Ads Worth Spreading, observing that those who won are telling stories about what the brand stands for rather than product attributes. “A look at the work quickly tells you that messages about a brand’s values, beliefs and purpose — rather than facts about a products’ efficacy — prevail.”

When synthesizing their takeaways – telling a holistic story, telling the story through any brand manifestation and stories based on purpose – it reveals what I think is a method of effective storytelling. I think of it as a cycle of depth and consistency.

Having a brand platform beyond simple product attributes enables limitless creative angles to pursue. The more ways to tell a story makes it easier to create consistency across media and campaigns. Conversely, consistent storytelling creates authenticity that drives loyalty, conversation and sharing. These acts of co-creation between brand and consumer deepen the meaning of the brand story, finding new directions to grow the story.

I think this storytelling framework is enabled by the digital landscape that offers new ways to tell and perpetuate brand stories, and enables increasing the potency of depth and consistency through co-creation. Now that media is hyper-fragmented and consumers can find countless ways to view a brand story, understanding this cycle of depth and consistency could help align digital strategy and brand goals.

Mahendra Palsule, editor at Techmeme, wrote an awesome piece on what he deems as the “Age of Relevance” where he splits information discovery platforms along four quadrants:

He says that relevance can be found in every quadrant. “Relevance is very dynamic – it depends on the needs of a person at a specific point in time. There are times when users want to know about the most popular stories, and other times when they seek personalized content.”

I stared at this perceptual map for a while because I think it highlights a new approach for targeting. Gone are the days where we have one target audience that will do everything we need. Digital relevancy takes enabling different users to interact with and share content. Here are my thoughts on what sorts of audiences lie in each

Personalized – This is where the influencer segment lies where brands can expect more involvement through comments – brand-to-consumer, consumer-to-brand and consumer-to-consumer conversation. The goal here is cultivating the network’s participation to create a base and use propagation planning as a framework.

Popular – This larger audience has an awareness and curiosity about a brand. They engage with content on a lower level (i.e. sharing, liking, retweeting, reblogging, etc.). To enlist these people to a brand’s cause, seeding and ubiquity across relevant platforms will drive action.

Search – This is an inverted bell curve of people where there are some who are aware of the brand whereas others are more loyal. The goal for both is to drive content consumption, but the needs are different for each subsegment. My general assumption is that content should be more informational for the low awareness subsegment versus experiential content for the loyalists, but that’s obviously dependent on the unique needs of each. Regardless of the needs, I think its important to have a brand’s network do a lot of the talking at this point – the more socially earned media shown increases credibility and authenticity.

Serendipity – Because consumers here find content by chance, the brand’s aim should be to attain cultural relevance through earned media. The content and coverage must expose this segment to the brand experience and point of view so they’ll want to explore more deeply, and the credibility earned through third-party endorsements (whether they be from media or consumers) will drive that process.

Using this as a model for targeting, brands can choose which segments within their audiences to maximize results based on their unique goals. I think though that it’s most likely going to include a mix of all four because they’re so interconnected – for instance, a brand often cannot target influencers without targeting those they influence on the popular media side of platforms. The evolution of these platforms has made targeting a little more complex, but unlocking this approach can create relevancy for a brand within its stakeholders.

Essential Co-founder Richard Watson wrote a piece on old brands making a comeback. He poses a great question that can apply to any brand: How much do consumers really care or know about brand authenticity?

I think they do care – a consumer subscribing to brand messages through social is a big indicator of their interest. I think the bigger question is when they care enough to subscribe to a brand’s message, how can authenticity be displayed?

I think there are a lot of dimensions to authenticity. On the surface level, being authentic is doing something expected. That maintains the status quo with consumers, which can be a great accomplishment for brands in highly competitive spaces. A deeper sense of authenticity is when a brand does something unexpected by communicating a message or experience that provokes attention, but tells a story that tethers the unexpected to the familiar.

There are many ways to use the unexpected to provoke consumers, but digital and social spaces where two-way communication is the norm makes it easier to exhibit authenticity. Beyond the fact that social gives brands a voice, the goal of brand/consumer conversation should be to evolve the brand story. While its core never changes, conversation expands upon the story to create a shared meaning. Because the consumer becomes a co-creator of the story’s new chapter, its authenticity becomes undeniable and brand loyalty is strengthened.

Because consumers care about brand authenticity, brands must find ways to show and build it. Participation through digital and social evolves a brand story to bolster their affinity the brand through genuine interaction.

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson wrote a fiery piece where he argues that marketing “is for companies who have sucky products.” He then lists “non-marketing” tactics like social media, event marketing and PR. I’m not going to belabor the point that all the tactics he listed were marketing/communication tactics because most of the comments below the article did that for me.

What I do want to address is how disturbed I am at how frivolous the author touts these tactics. The way the author discusses them makes the tactics seem so easy to do when in reality, they take an immense amount of thinking and creativity to do them well. There are plenty of examples in the article, but here’s one that made me smirk: “The digerati hangs out on Twitter and will see the tweets and RTs and many of them will try [the product] out.”

Tweet about it and they will come? There are more than 190 million accounts on Twitter and over 65 million tweets per day. It takes a little more effort than just showing up to get noticed. What is it that we want people to do on Twitter? More importantly, what is it that we’re offering that will get them to participate? I’m not talking about just the product – I’m talking about what experience can we invite people to that will prove the brand is worth their time? What tone should we take? Are there people on Twitter who can help us spread the word to their circle of friends? How can we get them on-board? There’s a multitude of questions that need to be answered that the author woefully packed into the one sentence above.

My problem with this article is that it strips away the core of communication: empathy and creativity. The flippant way the author describes how to persuade people through communication minimizes the passion and heart that goes into our industry. Don’t confuse the minimal barriers to entry with easy to do.

There’s a bit of talk going on around the premise that brands need to focus more on consumers and less on the brand itself.

Hornall Anderson CXO Jamie Monberg wrote, “This is the new world of what I call the “post-positioning era” of branding. In the post-positioning era of branding, what you say about your product or service matters almost nothing at all, and what I, the consumer, can do with it matters completely.” MRM Worldwide Global Chief Creative Oren Frank wrote in AdAge, “A new paradigm in which consumer-centricity becomes the core, or maybe the very definition of marketing, and a way of life for its practitioners.”

How is it that the practice of branding left consumers behind? The act of branding, or crafting a personality to a company, always implies the question, “For whom?” Brand value comes from the people the brand serves.

I think it’s hard for me to understand this problem because as a digitally focused communicator, there is no way for me to escape the consumer. There is an immediacy and intimacy with consumers that is available through digital analysis should a brand choose to embrace it. Social is an obvious way to bring consumer voice into the mix, but that’s certainly not it. Search and upstream/downstream behavior is indicative of the context consumers put brands into. That can reveal how and when a brand should be useful to needs derived from their digital behavior. Likewise, gateways in and out of your digital footprints show what messages get people to buy into a brand, and what messages they might not care for.

There are plenty of digital metrics that reveal consumer behavior, and behavior can often times reveal more than interviews and surveys can. For brands that lack consumer voice in their decisions, understand digital activity will translate into understanding user perceptions, feelings and reactions to any brand action.

Josh Rose, EVP from Deutsch LA wrote an op-ed recently about social media’s positive impact on culture. He beautifully writes, “The Internet doesn’t steal our humanity, it reflects it. The Internet doesn’t get inside us, it shows what’s inside us.”

I blog a lot about targeting and cultural relevance and I love his point of view: that a brand’s responsibility is to reflect the humanity within us.

Targeting isn’t all about finding a demographic or mindset that agrees with your message. It’s about arousing emotion and spirit from individuals. From this perspective, maybe brands and agencies should stop trying to finding pre-existing groups and talking to them. Rather, brands and agencies should seek to inspire an audience around their attitudes and beliefs.

This reminds me of a post I wrote a few weeks ago about experience designers needing to consider experiences in context of emotion instead of aiming for simple driving statements. This applies to audience discovery as well. Instead of talking about insights, maybe we should be talking more about emotional context. What dominant emotions drive them towards action relevant to the brand? What weaknesses can the brand authentically alleviate? Can the brand trigger or ascribe to moments of elation? This type of framework could be worthwhile to to drive thought and from that, user experiences.

Chris O’Hara from TRAFFIQ proposed his thoughts on what digital agencies need to do to stay relevant in 2011 – that a digital agency’s core competency should be “building great creative that drives forward brands… and finding new audience to interact with those brands.”

Intersection between brand and culture? Those are table stakes for any communications agency. Commercial creativity is based on that framework. It’s where that intersection is brought to life that’s different for us – we just happen to play in the digital space. Yes, the digital space is evolving everyday – usually in the in the tools that build user experience and resources that help better target different audiences. But that doesn’t mean that creativity isn’t inherent in all we do.

That in my opinion is the core competency of a digital agency – their capability to evolve with technology. That takes understanding the culture of the Internet, how the brand’s audience interacts with technology and what tools are most appropriate to build the best experience. The magic comes from mixing this tech know-how and creativity to make something captivating.

The rapid evolution of technology can seem daunting, but it doesn’t mean that it’s this alien world that operates on a new set of laws. Creative and strategic thinking still apply here. Successful digital creativity is built upon the passion for and application of new technologies.