Great article by Martin Lindstrom in Fast Company yesterday on the most “addictive sounds” in the world – measured using neurological studies. Here’s his list of the top 10 branded sounds (i.e., sonic brands of one kind or another) in terms of their effect on the brain:

Top 10 Branded sounds:
1. Intel
2. National Geographic
3. MTV
4. T-Mobile
5. McDonald’s
7. State Farm
8. AT&T Ringtone
9. Home Depot
10 Palm Treo Ringtone

It’s amazing to me that there are so few contemporary examples of a “sonic brand”, “sonic identity”, or “audio signature”. Look at (or listen to!) the sheer memory power of these brands. The MTV guitar riff (created by Elias Arts and originally accompanying the “moon landing” visuals at MTV’s launch) is a million miles (and many years) away from what MTV is today- yet it’s familiar to so many.

There are quite a few great companies out there in the world of sonic identity, yet it’s a field that receives little attention.
My experience when attempting to evolve audio brands at corporations has too often been that people just don’t get excited about them. At one company, I had over half a million dollars in my budget for a visual identity and fairly basic website. After much case-making, I got $20,000 to try to develop an audio brand.

We are bombarded with visuals today. Millions of dollars are spent on creating a visual identity – why so little attention paid to a few notes that impact a different part of the brain, literally increasing “mind share”?

From Paul Carr’s TechCrunch piece on integrated advertising, especially on Twitter (the piece is wonderfully entitled NSFW: Give Me Ad-Free Conversation or Give Me Death (Please RT):

A tweet isn’t a “piece of content”. It isn’t editorial. No matter whether we’re talking about what we’re having for lunch or suggesting a new movie or sharing a piece of news, what we’re really doing is having a good old-fashioned conversation. Following people on Twitter is like organising the world’s largest cocktail party – we’ve decided who’s opinions we trust, and we’ve invited them to come into our homes and talk to us about things they are genuinely interested in. The moment people start screwing around with that principle, the whole system collapses.

Couldn’t define the current and/or idealized nature of Twitter any better. As marketers (Carr: “What I do is Good and Pure; what they do is Bad and Dirty.” So true) we are faced with a world where any traditional notion of advertising is easily avoided by all smart people and most not-so-smart. So we leverage ourselves into content and “conversations” because people like those. At which point, like an airborne contaminant, we risk ruining that content/conversation experience by rendering it no longer genuine (the word “authentic” is currently in my “social media cuss jar” via which folks in our meetings are fined for egregious buzzword use*).

One answer to this is to leave the conversations alone in order to maintain their authentic real and genuine nature, thus retaining what is currently a quite effective marketing tool.

Over/under on that happening? Thought so.

* Social media cuss jar is combined with Internet jargon cuss jar and includes such words and phrases as “100,000 foot level”, “drill down”, and the execrable “best practices”. You get the picture.

Just finished lunch with Marc Gobé, friend, mentor, and the man behind Emotional Branding (where I’m an advisor):
emotionalbranding.com
The topic of conversation was largely…conversations. The conversations brands have with their customers, the conversations customers have with and around brands, and how to aggregate the conversation in a way that makes sense. For instance, I’m working my way through and testing the available Twitter tools so that I can ask a question both here and on Twitter, and bring the various comments and discussions back here in one place, making the discussion more immediate and vibrant.

The conversation idea is of course not new. It’s the tools we have to engage it which are multiplying. But does every brand need a conversation? If I’m P&G and a majority of my brands improve various areas of the home experience, I’m going to build something successful like homemadesimple.com . This is an ongoing engagement with my customer and although my brands are present throughout, it’s not blatantly brandcentric nor intrusive, and in fact it’s possible to completely miss the branding (this is a good thing). So, P&G and Tide, Cascade, Dawn, Swiffer, Mr. Clean, Febreze, etcetera, definitely benefit from having this conversation and so do their consumers.

Marc and I wondered, though: does a company which makes, say, galvanized pipe for irrigation need a brand conversation? What attributes does pipe need to have besides being strong, not leaking,  and being well-priced in its market? It would seem ridiculous to have social actions for a pipe manufacturer, right? Well, yes, and no.
For the sake of galvanized pipe discussion, I looked at Morrill Industries . Turns out there are an awful lot of attributes to galvanized irrigation pipe, none of which are probably fascinating to brand people- but they definitely justify a conversation about “Couplers, Tees, Crosses, 90° Ells, 45° Ells, Hex Bushings, Bell Reducers, Reducing Tees, Street Ells……..” – in the right venue.
Facebook’s the wrong place for this, as is any broad-based social application which is difficult to shrink to a specialization- but an aggregated Twitter discussion group could definitely work. Morrill could have the only hex bushing for particular situations, and its audience would never know that if it were not engaged in the conversation. (I have absolutely no idea what a hex bushing is, btw.)

Moral of the story: yes, Dorothy, you can engage social media, but not in a paint-by-numbers way. Find the right destination; don’t just toss darts at Twitter and Flickr; and if what you do/sell is specialized, corral that community even if you do so within a larger social context .

I was committed to never using the term “social media” on my website, but I’m afraid it’s going to be unavoidable in my blog. With the prevailing marketing chatter over the last 48 hours or so about the new skittles.com , there’s really no other term to employ.

To put it in its simplest terms, Skittles has removed a traditional home page from its website; instead, you hit the Skittles Twitter home page and an overlaid nav which will take you to: the Skittles Facebook home, the Skittles YouTube brand channel, a Skittles Flickr page, and yes, information about the (limited but tasty) Skittles product line.

I saw a tweet fly by about how this was an incredibly brave move and that courageous brand managers should sit up and take note.

Well…it’s still fairly cool for a mass-market brand to be active on Twitter (that’ll last about another four days). And I am happy that the Skittles team are together enough to have their, um, social media pieces sorted.Today it would be a bit sad, ok, unheard of, to not have one’s Facebook brand page and so forth set up.

But may I ask what all of this does for Skittles?

What exactly will Skittles-centric Twittering do to increase candy awareness and consumption? Is this where the Skittles core audience is to be found? To judge from Skittles-Twitter-Homeland, all Skittles has done is bait the Twitterverse into snarky comments. That doesn’t matter, it’s still discussion- but how is this discussion going to drive sales? Maybe one or two hungry Twitterers will develop a sudden craving upon the reminder of Skittle deliciousness, but it hardly seems that Twitter should be the Skittles focus area. I applaud the willingness to have unfiltered content displayed around the brand (the Flickr page is a random search)- it’s brave and could lead to some cool usergen content – but again, exactly how does this move candy?

Facebook and YouTube make a little more sense, as engaging a community around a brand is always a good move. However, again, the aggressive social stunt has only brought activity to these pages which is negative. It would seem the campaign is not reaching Skittles fans en masse, nor engaging discovery of Skittles.

There are exactly 3 videos on the Skittles YouTube brand channel at this moment. Wouldn’t it be far more productive to pour some of this energy into having more and better brand-related content? Or, if the point is to drive more Skittle conversation, why not center it around a new development or some really cool event Skittles is supporting?

If the Twitterverse were discussing how Skittles had just planted forests in deforested areas, or built houses in disaster-struck areas, the brand conversation would be a lot more positive, and a lot more interesting. They could even be rainbow-colored forests and rainbow-colored houses – but at least they’d be on point.

I can’t wait to see what this does for Skittles in the actual marketplace. Very curious.

AT&T offers me a full support center for the 3G microcell. Small problem: I can’t buy one yet. Then again, they’re ahead on their web buildabout 23 hours ago from TweetDeck

@Steve_Gonzalez may go to SXSW, figuring it out now. If you’ve never been by all means, go.

CNET on Lala, iMeem,SpiralFrog. Labels REFUSE to license DRM-free AAC /mp3 to SpiralFrog!? That’s what SpiralFrog says. http://bit.ly/VsOn10:13 AM Mar 2nd from TweetDeck

Is the #Skittles webpage “brave” bc it focuses on social media & less on the product? There’s direct nav to products front and center10:03 AM Mar 2nd from TweetDeck

Realized yesterday that I haven’t worked at a company since Napster where I could make salacious t-shirts for the whole engineering team8:24 AM Mar 2nd from TweetDeck

@guykawasaki the pool at the Hotel du Cap is better than almost all pools listed. Although the Icelandic geothermal pool is trés sweet2:26 PM Feb 28th from TweetDeck in reply to guykawasaki

Wouldn’t it make more sense for Bluehost to adopt a policy against hate speech rather than blocking countries w/ messy regimes? Free speech?2:23 PM Feb 28th from TweetDeck

RT @Scobleizer: It’s a real bummer that Bluehost is kicking off Iranian bloggers: http://tinyurl.com/ccsfqv2:18 PM Feb 28th from TweetDeck