12Apr 2013 by Aaron Templer
Not the viral you were hoping for

Not the viral you were hoping for

Three Over Four Approach
Don't you love the surveys like this one that pit congress approval ratings against things like lice and (worse) replacement refs? (Congress looses in a landslide in case you were wondering. You may now thank me for not using the phrase "Spoiler alert.") They're funny because they use the device of surprise. When you say something unexpected or place an element outside its usual context it makes us uncomfortable or jarred, and we laugh. The other response to an unexpected element is revulsion. Like the way a body works to expel a virus. It’s working against the system. It doesn’t fit. Kick up the heat to try to kill it, ‘cause it’s gotta go. This is what's happening to marketing across the social web. So-called social marketing doesn't work. Marketing…
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12Jul 2010 by Aaron Templer No Comments

A small wins strategy: The social web as liner notes

Three Over Four Approach
[caption id="attachment_2064" align="alignleft" width="250" caption="Albums - not just for the music."][/caption] I’ll say it: Effective participation in the social web is hard. Damn hard. It requires strategic acumen more akin to leadership (valuing social capital and investing in the necessary competencies to build and leverage it) and execution skills more akin to in-person networking (add value to those you want to reach and do it all the time) than any kind of marketing and communications discipline. It isn’t free. It isn’t fast. And the worst time to build your social web presence is at the beginning of a campaign, a crisis, or any other time when you want to broadcast and promote. It’s exactly the same as this truism: The worst time to build a real-life network is when you…
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17Jun 2010 by Aaron Templer 3 Comments
As Branding Dies Leaders Rise

As Branding Dies Leaders Rise

Branding
Branding (not product branding, but that enterprise-level notion of name and reputation we’re still wrestling with) is dying because we’ve run it into the ground. If you asked anyone or anything to wear as many hats, mean as many things, or be a placeholder for so many musings as contradictory (think tactics promoted as strategy), impertinent (think one-size-fits-all-contexts theories), and importance-inflated (the genocide in Rwanda is an element of a brand? Really?) as we ask of branding, it’d die too. From sheer exhaustion. It’s not the years (to paraphrase Indiana Jones). It’s the mileage. Branding started as a notion of something you could control. If you had the resources to overcome the complexity of making fires and casting iron, you could mark something with a fair degree of inspiration, but…
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17May 2010 by Aaron Templer No Comments

Two lessons in collaboration and learning

Three Over Four Approach
[caption id="attachment_1980" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="There are new bedfellows in the world of communications."][/caption] I had an interesting week of facilitating workshops and guest lecturing. Standing in front of people and trying to add value – acting like (as my late uncle used to say) I knew what I was doing. Two key takeaways from the week of acting like I knew what I was doing: (more…)
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