Welcome to Community Week on {grow} as we feature thought-provoking, original thinking from our community members. First up is  Jamie Lee Wallace, who helped me with an outstanding ROI and measurement blog series last summer …

Your business’ survival depends on your ability to build, retain, and convert an audience. Sounds simple, but the marketplace is full of distractions and prospects can be a fickle bunch.

Today’s lesson comes straight from the streets. Not the mean streets of B2B Marketing, but the cobbled streets around Boston’s Faneuil Hall where I watched a couple pros demonstrate how to get the job done in under twenty minutes.  David and Tobin are street performers and they hustle. They have to capture the attention moving targets, turn them into fans, and get them to open their wallets.

Watch and learn, people.

Step 1: Build Your Inner Circle

Before the show started, the guys made a big deal setting up their “stage” (a red rope on the ground), and arranging all their props. The minute anyone got curious and paused, David or Tobin would engage them in light banter. No big sell, no big deal – just an acknowledgment, a smile, or a quick joke. Sometimes, they’d ask the passerby to lend a hand, thus making them part of the team, or “Inner Circle.” Nine times out of ten, these people stuck around for the show.

Lesson: Don’t wait until the curtain’s about to go up. Engage your audience immediately. Build your Inner Circle. These are the people who will be your first audience members.

Step 2: Create Excitement

Once the stage was set, the guys started warming up in earnest with a few flips. The fast movement caught the eye of a few more passersby, but they usually kept walking. Here’s where that Inner Circle came into play. The guys asked those of us who were lingering to “step right up.” They drew us in tight and close. No longer just a bunch of scattered individuals, we were now a cohesive group – an audience. Now they had us make some noise. David and Toby instructed us, in a conspiratorial whisper, to whoop and holler when they announced the beginning of the show. They were completely transparent about this, saying, “If you make a lot of noise, everyone will think something really exciting is about to happen, and they’ll all come running.”

Lesson: Use your Inner Circle to build a bigger audience through social proof, word-of-mouth, and testimonials. Be clear about wanting their help and make it easy for them to step up.

Step 3: Make the Audience Part of the Show

Audience rapport is critical to conversion. An audience is just a bunch of onlookers until you make them part of the experience. David and Tobin did this by “letting us in on the joke,” pulling people from the audience to assist or even be a “star,” and keeping their banter very personal and “localized.” They weren’t tossing out canned jokes, they were riffing on what was happening in the moment with the people who were in the audience.

Lesson: Create an interaction that is genuine, personal, and relevant. Don’t be afraid to let people participate. Build trust by listening closely and adapting based on what you hear.

Step 4: Ask for the Sale

You’ve created an audience and turned them into fans, now – and only now – can you ask for the sale. David and Tobin asked for our support while balanced some forty feet up in the air on a ladder that was held steady by four audience volunteers. They explained that street performing is how they make their living. They asked if we’d had a good time and what we thought the show was worth. They joked about how they’d never gotten a $20 tip before. Without pulling out the guilt card (too much), they presented their bid for compensation. Then they added the “dare” with the $20 comment. I gave them $10 – the most I’ve ever given a street performer.

Lesson: It pays to ask, and once you’ve established a good rapport, it’s much easier to make your case and get the results you want.

Bonus Tips

David and Tobin’s act leveraged two other important, Big Idea tactics: offering entertainment and giving it away for free. As Mark has said, people want to be entertained . (Granted, street performing is entertainment, but you get the idea.) The giving-it-away strategy is explained well in David Meerman Scott’s book, World Wide Rave. Sometimes, to make money, you have to put stuff out there with no strings attached.

So, there you have it. Four simple steps to build, retain, and convert your audience. Do you leverage any of these strategies in your marketing? What could you do more of?

This post was inspired by David Graham and Tobin Renwick of the “acro-juggling” act, “The Flash.” You can catch them doing their acrobatic-juggling-comedy thing from Nevada to Scotland to Australia.

Jamie Lee Wallace provides full-service and DIY marketing solutions to entrepreneurs, start-ups, and creative types. Visit her at www.SuddenlyMarketing.com.

Illustration: Acro juggling

In graduate school I took a class on “Leaders and Leadership” that I hoped would give me respite from the grind of finance and economics. It turned out to be one of the most interesting classes I ever attended and it set me on life-long study of leaders.

When I worked for Alcoa, there was one Group President who seemed to personify the best theoretical aspects of a leader. His name was George Bergeron, since retired to Maine and Florida, but there is not a week that goes by that I don’t think about a small sign he had on his desk:

“Leaders Dispense Hope.”

George was not a rah-rah kind of leader. He walked his talk without gimmicks, inspirational posters or “programs.” In fact, other than a few family pictures, that sign was the only adornment on his desk at all.

Those powerful three words sum up so much to me. To be in a position to “dispense hope,” you need to

• Be trusted
• Have a vision that others understand and believe in
• Be an effective communicator
• Rise above the every day office noise to deliver the signal
• Be recognized as the authority
• Have a real plan, not rhetoric
• Transcend politics
• Deliver authentic optimism

Like any executive in a  competitive environment, George had his detractors. But he rose above it all with dignity at every opportunity. No matter what was happening in the world, in the company, or with our customers, George dispensed hope.  A lesson in leadership for a world that needs a few lessons in leadership.

The know-nothings.

You know who I’m talking about right?  Social media “marketers” who have never practiced marketing.  Maybe have never even had a sales job or a college-level marketing class. But they’ve created a Facebook page and have 500 followers on Twitter so somehow that makes them a guru.

“You can’t walk out your house without bumping into a social-media expert today, said Forrester Analyst Sean Corcoran in a WSJ article. ”The reality is the space is still very much a Wild West.”

I’m not going to dwell on the shake-and-bake “experts” and their webinar info-mercials promising to unleash profits through the magic of follower lists and multi-level marketing scams.  Enough has been written about that. The point of this post is that there is a clash in the marketplace because there aren’t enough true social media marketing experts — with the emphasis on MARKETING — to go around.

Look at what’s happening on the demand side.  Ad spending on social networks world-wide is expected to rise 14% this year to $2.5 billion. Every advertising, marketing and public relations firm in the world wants a piece of the action and is looking for talent.   Consider these news bites from the past week:

• Universal McCann, is launching a social media practice this month called Rally.  “Social media is now part of all our clients’ plans; we can’t not be in this space,” says Matt Seiler, chief executive of Universal McCann.
• Publicis Groupe’s digital umbrella organization, VivaKi, says it also will open a social-media consulting practice this year.
• Pepsi’s Gatorade brand created a “Mission Control Center,” which is set up like a broadcast-television control room, to monitor the sports drink around the clock across social-media networks.
• Kraft hired 360i, a digital ad agency owned by Japan’s largest ad company, Dentsu  to monitor brands like Oreo and Jell-O.
• Microsoftis currently searching for a social-media firm to handle duties for its Xbox videogame system.

In other words, social media marketing is white freaking hot.

Now for the supply side of the clash.  Who is going to fill all these positions?   Unless you define success by the loosey-goosey standards of “engagement” and “conversations,”  there just aren’t many individuals out there who have actually demonstrated an ability to use social media to move the needle for a business.  And I don’t mean new “followers.”  I mean sales. Cash flow. New customers. 

If you have the fire-power and mega-budgets of Microsoft, Pepsi and the other big brands, you can certainly buy your way into success on the social web.   But the vast majority of businesses out there are going to be stuck with the no-nothings instead of the exceptional marketing talent they really need to grow their business.

The dirty little secret the know-nothings are keeping from you is that, with the rare exceptions, nobody wants to be Facebook Friends with your company. You’re going to need much more than an intern tweeting earnestly about your latest coupons to impact your bottom line.  We live in a society that is absolutely sick of being advertised to, sold to, and marketed to, which is why most people turn to Farmville and the social networks to ESCAPE commercialism. So if a know-nothing is promising that they have this figured out and they’re going to help your car dealership or clothes boutique be the next Old Spice succcess story by “listening” to the Twitter stream … well, be afraid.

At the end of the day making money on the social web — or anywhere — still gets down to MARKETING FUNDAMENTALS.  Research, strategy, planning.  Creating points of differentiation. Finding a unique way to delight your customers and out-smart  your competitors.  And then, using the social web as a channel. Maybe.

For most businesses trying to figure out what to do with all this social media stuff, forget about finding a social media expert. That’s a hammer looking for a nail. Find the best, most experienced marketing pro you can afford and let them figure out where it fits for you, if at all.

Can I hear an “amen?”

OK, so my headlines tend to be a little sensational sometimes.  Not this one.

I want to share with you the absolute best, can’t-miss technique for truly breakthrough thinking I have ever used.  That sounds like a cheesy affiliate ad or something, but there’s no catch here. I am simply giving you one of my best leadership ideas.

But it gets better. This is also the best documented business case for workplace diversity I have ever seen.

Here we go …

First, you need to plan a brain-storming session with at least 10 diverse people.  Really shake up the diversity in every way you can. And the more people involved, the better. I’ve done this technique successfully with a room of 75 people. Be sure to tell them what the purpose of the meeting is and that they should come prepared with at least a few ideas.

Early in your meeting, have everybody rip off a big piece of easel paper and write their very best idea for the brainstorming topic at the top.  Make sure there is plenty of room below their idea to write additional ideas.

Now, have them go to the walls around the room, tape their idea to the wall and stand in front of it.

Have everybody slide over one space to their right so that they are standing in front of the idea next to them.  Ask the participants to read the idea written at the top carefully and then add to, or improve, the original idea and write their contribution below the first entry.

Now have everybody slide over TWO spaces — not just one!  The reason I do this is because you don’t want the same person continually following the thought process of the person in front of them. You are trying to mix up the mental frameworks.

Write a better idea based on what is on the page so far and then have everybody slide again. This time count off three spaces. Read what has been written so far and add to it or improve it once again.

Do this one more time. Slide over just one space and ask them to come up with a better idea than what has been written so far.

Now introduce a random prompt. Have everybody slide over two spaces and ask them something like:

• How could this idea be illegal?
• What would happen if this idea was invisible?
• What would you do to this idea to have people pay a hundred dollars for it?
• What would happen if this idea was in the dark, or under water?

The reason for these strange questions is to try to get your participants to look at the idea in a totally new perspective. One time I was leading a creativity session to come up with ways that consumers could interact with packaging in a new way. Once when I gave the “invisible” prompt, a housewife came up with an idea for an instant win game that made people a winner if they had the right barcode at a check-out scanner.

OK, now shift one more time. Two spaces. Ask them to read everything on the page and write one more great idea based on everything that is on the page so far.

Then have them go back to their original idea, read the entire page and circle the best idea on the page.

This is when the magic happens.  About 95% of the time, the idea they circle is NOT their original idea! In less than 15 minutes you can turn all of your good ideas into great, perhaps even break-through, ideas.

The theory behind this technique

When I was in grad school studying organizational development, I learned that our basic mental framework — how we process information — is basically complete by the time we are 15 years old.  So literally, it is impossible for you to think “out of the box” because you are permanently hard-wired.

For true break-through thinking to occur on a team, we must combine the boxes we have available. This is why the diversity of the participants is so important. You don’t want to do this where everybody is a numbers-type or creative-type or even all of a certain age or culture heritage. The more boxes you can combine and complement each other, the better the results.  Always!

Even if you are trying to solve a technical problem, invite people from marketing, accounting, HR … maybe even from another division or company all together. I’ve even conducted creativity sessions like this on behalf of a Fortune 100 company with a fifth-grade class just to see what they could come up with.

There is a tremendous secondary benefit to this technique. Notice I said it was important to do this early in your meeting. Typically, when people see the amazing work they’ve done in just 15 minutes, they are energized, engaged and confident in your process. Plus, it’s a lot of fun.

Applying this to the web

I’ve tried to apply this technique to an online setting by shuffling ideas between far-flung participants. It has not worked very well. There is something about the interaction of a boisterous group, a shared experience, the physical movement and the sense of momentum and accomplishment from the live exercise that can’t be duplicated when folks are behind computers in cubicles.

Are you ready to give it a try? I’d love to hear about it. If you have a question, feel free to call me or drop me a line. Happy brainstorming!

A communication industry site, ragan.com, picked up my recent post about why it’s “ridiculous to argue about ghost blogging.”  This was cool because it opened the topic to a new set of commenters and perspectives.

However, I was struck by some of the elitist views on blogging and wanted to address the issue here, instead of a long comment on that site.

What I mean by “elitist” is that some folks seem to uphold a narrow, sanctified view of blogging and dismiss those outside that view (i.e. “Blogs are by definition in their own class.”)

One person opined that blogs should be different than any other form of corporate communication because they “grew from people’s personal communications and because the audience for blogs expect it to remain personal.”

Another reader commented that “Blogs are designed to be be participatory and conversational, with a discussion leader and participants in the discussion.”

And, “To use a blog as a personal communication when it’s not genuinely personal is an assault on the purpose of a blog and an intentional deception of readers.”

Excuse me friends, but who is coming up with this definition of a “purpose of a blog?”

There can be MANY purposes for blogs …

• For the highly-interactive, personal, and prolific Chris Brogan, the blog is an engine to build community and ultimately monetize services and affiliate advertising.
• GE’s stellar corporate blog features product ideas and solutions but has almost no reader interaction or community. They rarely even identify a post’s author.
• Caterpillar’s blogs serve as forums for technical problem-solving and have an extremely high level of community sharing.
• The Red Cross blog tells stories of heroes and global crises with authors from all over the world.
• There is a whole science around connecting blogs to keywords and SEO results. In that analytical world, blog content is derived from probabilities, statistics, and a sales funnel. Personality need not apply.
• For my daughter in college, a blog is simply a way to journal and tell her life stories — no strings attached.

All of these blogs are relevant and serve a unique purpose.  They may or may not be personal. They may or may not nurture community. They may or may not be participatory.

And they may or may not be authentic. Here’s what I mean.  This challenge was posed to me on the Ragan site:  “How would people feel if the marketing/PR/comms guru types whose blogs they follow weren’t written by those people. What if Seth Godin ’s blog wasn’t actually written by Seth Godin?  Would you be okay with that?”

Actually, I’m guessing Seth doesn’t write his blog all the time.  The fact that he keeps a busy travel schedule, writes every day, posts a short riff from a speech or book, and doesn’t allow comments (which would require a response) on his blog, indicates that it is probably ghost-written by an assistant, at least some of the time.  I don’t KNOW this. It’s a hunch.  But in any event, I am perfectly OK with that. It’s his advice. It’s his brand. It may even be him. Ghost or no, the blog provides value to me as a reader which is why I subscribe.

Bottom line, I believe it’s anachronistic and short-sighted to try to force blogging into somebody’s pre-conceived bucket of expectations.  Instead of trying to define and dictate what our blogs and communities should be, let’s celebrate the amazing diversity of writing, readers and missions on the social web.

Illustration: Comedy Central

On a webinar last week, I briefly covered an idea I call the information eco-system (or social footprint) and received a lot of questions about it.  This is a critical concept for businesses today so I thought I should expand on the idea.

If you did a web search for you or your company three years ago, the result would have been a list of websites.  If you conducted the same search today, you may get LinkedIn profiles, YouTube videos, Slideshare presentations, maps, perhaps even tweets from Twitter.  In fact, as the social web has emerged, visits to traditional websites have declined dramatically for many companies.

The implication is that if you have a website and think that’s all you need any more, you’re not understanding the social web.

People have the opportunity to find you (and your competitors) in lots of places now and you should have a systematic, mindful strategy to populate this information eco-system with content that will support your business objectives … and hopefully drive people back to your website. Put your information out there where the people are. Then give them a reason to go back to learn more at your website.

Let me give you a dramatic example of this in action. Recently I posted a slide deck on SlideShare for the convenience of my college students.  I went back to the site an hour later to make sure the slides had uploaded properly and 251 people had already viewed the deck.  None of them were my students, since they didn’t know about it yet!   Those 251 visitors to my deck were vitally interested in a presentation called Social Media 101 and were high potential contacts for me, right?  I added a slide at the end directing people to visit my website, blog, follow me on Twitter, etc.

Another little example: I recently gave a talk to economic development leaders and asked them what they would get if they googled their cities.  If the answer is YouTube videos of drunken conventioneers, they better get out there and populate the social web with videos that tell their story THEIR way.  If you don’t systematically populate the web with your story, you’re abdicating the brand management for your organization.

So, create and own the social footprint of your brand everywhere you possibly can … or at least to the extent that your resources can support.

Does this make sense?  What ideas do you have about this concept?

The blogosphere is buzzing about the new social media measurement platform SAS Institute Inc. announced yesterday.   Is there a place for yet ANOTHER social web monitoring tool in a crowded market? And what is so special about this announcement?

The answer is yes, there is a place for this new entry, and here are four reasons why I think SAS will be successful in this competitive space.

Text-sensitive analysis — I had the opportunity to review several social media measurement platforms over the past few months including market leader Radian6.  Everyone is struggling with accurate textual analysis for “sentiment” reports and are loading up on costly human resources to examine tweets for tone and emotion.  Most don’t think computers can do it.  If SAS has started to crack this code — and some say they have done this by leveraging their other existing technologies — this will be of immense value to customers.  And hey, they claim they can understand and classify conversations in 13 languages (Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish).

Experience — I can say from my corporate days that SAS has a superb reputation in the analytical space and has expert resources that small competitors simply cannot match. During the Internet press conference, Katie Paine (a presenter) said, “Can you imagine the design of experiments we can run with these capabilities?”  Now we’re talking!  Putting the SAS computer power and analytical experience to the test in the social media market will produce incredibly powerful, breakthrough insights. We can only hope they make some of the new marketing innovations available to us little guys!

Market access — This move just makes so much business sense for SAS. They are already providing powerful analytical software to many of the most important companies in the world.  They are already embedded in the corporate cultures.  They speak the language. This is a perfect market extension for them.  They already own these customers and this is way to gather in the social media monitoring revenue as well.

Integration with traditional systems — SAS already provides their customers with services such as marketing campaign management, customer experience analytics, marketing performance management and web analytics. Add the social web on top of this and you are looking for some powerhouse combinations, some potentially breath-taking insights.

So that’s why SAS is going to kick social media butt.  And notice I didn’t even mention the basic analytical capabilities or user interface.  I’ll leave that to the tech writers. Besides it doesn’t really matter.   Nobody will really leverage technology in this space for competitive advantage when all the underlying data is already available.  Making the technology do tricks is the easy part. Having the market presence, integration capabilities, and customer access — now that’s something that SAS can take to the bank.

Is there still room for the other players?  Of course.  First, SAS is going for the large enterprise market. Bring $60,000 in annual fees just to get a seat with the basic platform and $180,000/year for the deluxe model.  That leaves 90 percent of the market for the other guys to squabble over.

Who does this impact the most? Probably Radian6. They’ve been working the large enterprises like Dell and Pepsi so this will be a tough new competitor on the enterprise scene.  But hey, this is a white-hot, still-emerging market. I would expect to see consolidation and players dropping out on the lower end of the market before the higher end, and even that is going to take some time.

What do you think?  Who are the big winners and losers out of this?  How will the market be impacted?

Complexity has been a theme through many posts on {grow}, most typically connected with the word “STRESS!”

I had a fascinating discussion with one of my ex-professors about technological complexity and why it is often making business life more difficult, instead of easier. A fundamental idea we explored was that often, technological systems are implemented to try to make up for a loss of business experience.  Let’s see what you think.  Here’s an example, comparing two real companies I have worked with:

The case for experience

Company A is a mid-sized tech firm whose newest senior manager joined the company eight years ago. Most of the top executives have been in the same company, in the same market, for 20 years or more. Even during the recession, they have made it a priority to retain experienced managers.

Company A has a simple CRM system to keep their sales pipeline straight but for the most part rely on their cumulative industry experience and intimate customer knowledge to serve their market and respond quickly to opportunities. Do they rely on Twitter and social media monitoring to “listen” to their customers? No. They KNOW what’s happening because of their deep personal relationships.  Their customers typically pay more for their services and demonstrate incredible loyalty due to these long-term bonds.

Now let’s turn to Company B.  Over the past decade, this company has rapidly replaced people who fail in a job. So even an experienced “superstar” who goes into a new job and doesn’t knock the lights out right away is replaced by an outsider who has zero experience in the company and probably zero experience in the industry. Within a few years, only one out of their 12 most senior executives was “home-grown.”

Implications of tech versus experience

To make up for the rapid experience and knowledge drain, many of the new executives instituted their own management systems, often carrying over a familiar application from their previous company.  Workers at Company B are almost constantly learning a new “process.”  To make matters worse, if a rumor begins that an executive is on the way out, all progress comes to a halt because they know that the replacement manager is just going to change direction on technology again any way.

When Company B was faced with a contract negotiation with its largest customer, all of the managers who knew the customer and had been part of previous negotiations were gone.  So they hired a consultant to build a computer model that considered supply, demand, competitor capacity, pricing scenarios and every possible angle to produce a can’t miss negotiation strategy.  The result?  Company B lost the customer entirely, an event the computer model predicted could not possibly happen. The computer couldn’t account for trust and business relationships.

Now I know there are a LOT of managerial problems with the Company B scenario I’m presenting, and obviously some level of complexity is inherent in any business.  But the point is, too often we …

• Rely on software to mask over deeper management problems.
• Focus on data instead of information.
• Take comfort in analytics instead of common sense.
• Minimize the value of real business wisdom and (gasp!) intuition because we feel the latest tech hype must be infallible.

Most likely, relying on software in place of real business experience results in personal stress, bloated costs, wasted resources, and excessive complexity.

As you try to stay ahead of the mounting technological tsunami, perhaps it is time to pause and consider whether there is a true business case for that new app or if this is just an attempted quick fix to bigger problems.

What do you think? Does this idea about complexity make sense in your company and your life?

Wanted to let you know that I am one of the contributors in the new book Age of Conversation 3: Time to Get Busy, which will be published in mid-April.

I think you’ll enjoy this book because like {grow}, it looks at social media beyond the hype.  It also examines the practicalities of the social web and implications on business practices.

None of the contributing authors or editors are making any profit from the book — all the money is going to the Make-a-Wish Foundation.  I’ve listed the authors below. You’ll recognize some of your favorite bloggers like Beth Harte,   Trey Pennington, and Michelle Chmielewski plus some new names that will add a fresh voice to the conversation.

You’ll probably be hearing some more buzz as we get closer to publication time but I wanted to give you the inside scoop on what should be one of the most popular business reads of the year!

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It’s uncommon to see much written about individual personalities on the social web — in fact it’s taboo.  However, it’s important to occasionally look at Chris Brogan as a living social media business case study for two reasons:

1) It’s hard to comment on the state of the nation without mentioning the president.

2) Chris Brogan is a pioneer. The issues and opportunities he faces are instructive to all churning in his wake. As Lisa Foote once wrote, Chris is the canary in the social media coal mine.

Chris has created a tremendous amount of value and popularity through his tireless engagement but has also stirred up more controversy than any social media personality, whether through his aggressive use of “sponsored” posts or his apparent sponsorship “flip” at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show.  As I said, he is plowing new ground.  Sometimes you hit a rock.

But last week might have been his biggest buzz-killer when he revealed he charges $22,000 for a day of his services and then subsequently posted (and dropped) an appeal for un-paid interns for his company.

Just to be clear, I’m not in the whiney camp that thinks everything Chris does should be free.  I’m probably the most capitalist, business-driven blogger out here. I like it when people make money. I like it when Chris makes money. I think he should take advantage of his white-hot celebrity, celebrate it, leverage it, and roll in the dough. I hope he can double his consulting fees.

So making money is good.  But from an academic view, it would be useful to look at the “how” — the dramatic shift (or perhaps evolution) in strategy that is enabling Chris to become a money-making machine.

For years, Chris has built his core brand promise on:

• Passionate audience-building through authentic helpfulness
• Relentless nurturing of that audience through tireless engagement
• Putting the audience above personal business needs
• Never, ever “selling”

In one video from last summer, he literally screamed at an audience “This is NOT about YOU and your STUPID COMPANY!”  That effectively sums up his mantra, and the “brand” Chris built around himself.

Around the time of his book release last year, Chris flipped this philosophy upside down and took steps to aggressively monetize his audience.  He explained this change by saying that he had been giving stuff away for a long time and that it was time to make money.  Selling of his products, services, companies, book, affiliate links, and paid sponsors became a common theme. He transformed into the social web’s most visible and highly-paid pitch-man, the Billy Mays of blogging.

Chris also increasingly put himself at the forefront of his topics, including video documentation of a day in the life of himself, photos of himself with near-celebrities, announcements of his new business ventures, and detailed explanations of how hard he works to achieve his success.  As you would expect, some readers expressed disappointment with these changes, and they were sometimes categorized as “haters” instead of “creators” and implored to “get over it.”

In other words, Chris has disassociated himself from that core brand promise to his audience.

In the business world, this would be tantamount to Disney opening a Tia Tequila-themed ride, or Nike doing a fitness cross-promotion with McDonald’s.  When a brand becomes incongruent by building a reputation communicating one thing and then executing another, it can be a recipe for disaster.

In the near-term, Chris and his ubiquity seem to have a limitless ability to capitalize on the goodwill of his audience (heck, loyal customers even bought Toyota cars after the first recall).  From a traditional business perspective, one might predict that if Chris doesn’t practice what he preaches and take steps to return to his core competencies, his brand and his ability to monetize will be increasingly vulnerable.

The furor over the posts last week were not the first signs that people have noticed the new Capitalist Chris.  If it persists, negative outbursts from loyal fans might eventually call attention to the problem with his sponsors and erode his brand and his value.

Or will it?  Another possibility is that Chris is going to be just fine losing some — or even most — of his core followers because he is developing a new audience of corporate folks who don’t care what his brand promise WAS as long as he can deliver results to their bottom line NOW.

In any event, the Trust Agent as we knew him is probably coming to an end as he transitions from social media folk hero to mainstream business consultant.  It will be fascinating to watch the results.

What do you think about this strategy shift?

What are the risks of jeopardizing his core audience for launching a new stage in his career?

With the new demands of the business and publishing worlds, is it possible for Chris to be successful at holding on to both constituencies? If so, how?

Illustration: www.chrisbrogan.com