“That was Easy.” This red button was the physical manifestation of an advertising slogan that office superstore giant Staples ran.  They ended up giving away millions of these little red buttons, which said the words when pressed.  Great, simple campaign.

Later this week, I’ll be delivering a keynote to a marketing conference in Manchester.  I’m focussing on convenience as one of the features of something I call the “expectation economy”.  That is, the changing face of why people buy from key platforms.  At home, Amazon, eBay, i-Tunes, Google and Facebook consume the bulk of our face time and are becoming our de-facto on-line shopping malls/social/search platforms.

They are shaking the on-line world down as they continue to consolidate, throw their net wider, provide new and additional services which makes life easier for people.  As an example, in September last year, Facebook started to sell credits in stores in the USA, in the same way you could buy mobile phone credit.  A potential game changing moment. Right now, they can only be used to buy apps or other in-game stuff, however it’s only a matter of time before Facebook becomes a fully blown trading platform in its own right, then what’s going to happen?

Inevitably, they’ll scoop up a process that is currently being transacted somewhere else. They’ll find a way to integrate into their social sphere.  They’ll make it easier for buyers with one-click.  They’ll make it mobile.  They’ll make it easy.  They realise that people are busy, moments are being maximised, the more folk can do on the move or with a mobile in their hand, the better.  Upgrades, last minute stuff, gift certificates, movement of money, you name it, I bet you’re going to see it at some point in the near future.  Perhaps Facebook credits may become a new global currency?

In March, I’ll be attending one of those marketing director forums.  Business model goes like this.  Lay a load of good speakers on; invite a load of high level marketing Directors who’ll want to hear them speak, get suppliers to pay to attend and cover all the costs of the speakers and the attendees, in order to reach the high level decision makers.

Attendees (marketing directors) have to agree to have some meetings with suppliers to attend for free, in order that there is a win for all.  Organiser walks away with lots of happy people – hopefully.   

Now, said suppliers then have to lay out their wares to the attendees, pitching for the meeting time that they have available.  Said Marketing Directors are hugely busy people, inundated with new business calls and e-mails all day long.

What a golden opportunity to cut through.  Yet, many continue to get it so wrong, writing page after page of chest beating copy that means nothing.  We’ve won this, we’ve won that.  And?

Here’s what would grab my attention. 

“If you agree to a meeting with us, we will do a pre-audit or ideas session on any business problem you care to throw our way.   A current campaign that’s not working.   A new campaign that needs some thought.

We’ll come prepared with our thoughts on how we would do it differently.  Just agree to meet and we’ll get our best people on your problem.  Our ideas will do our talking, you judge whether we can cut it.”

Or

“Let us know of a forthcoming networking event where you may be present and we’ll arrange for our “enter title of senior agency person” here to be there, just to meet informally”

OK.  You have my attention.  An opportunity for a quick bit of benchmarking.  Said agency can make a real impact, get real with a real problem, guaranteed engagement from the Marketing Director.  It’s not that hard, loads of room for follow up or development if they do the business by producing some great answers.   B2B is all about grabbing time and attention, plus trust.

Ever heard of the concept of Top 3 box? This describes your prospective customers shortlist which they will be walking around with in their head, when making a key purchase.

In times gone by (not that long ago), a multi-million pound branding campaign would be needed in order to be one of those top 3 on the consideration list.  Today, if you work at proximity (using social media), you can ease yourself onto that list by being around at the very moment when the customer may be close to purchase, by listening.

This gives smaller businesses a crack at the title, particularly niche and boutique brands.  Outside of work, I’m a passionate road cyclist.  I worked with a bike brand to launch them on social media and we increased consideration of their brand from 25% to 90% through regular engagement.  Doing a consideration survey, there were a staggering 25 brands on the unprompted consideration list, so this was quite an achievement.  A stack of the other brands weren’t even using social media platforms - pretty poor when the audience is so engaged with the sport.  Some of the larger brands were simply broadcasting, with little real interaction. #fail

By always being around, you’ll be front of mind.  By being front of mind, you will be part of the conversation and ultimately the consideration.  Don’t be too pushy, be helpful and chatty buyers will resonate towards you.  You can then ride off into the sunset with more customers.

Has anyone ever said that to you? Or more’s the point, have you ever said it it to someone else? You know when someone just looks like they are on another level, sometimes down in the basement, sometimes up in the sky!

Leadership wise it’s a great little anecdote there.  Question.  What Planet are you on?  Answer.  Mars!  Cue the mental image of the Mars advert from the 80′s, because “A Mars a day, helps you work, rest and play.”

Knocking yourself out on the work treadmill, working every hour gods sends, never spending any time to enjoy life,  that doesn’t make you a better leader.  Quite the opposite, you’ll disappear down the plughole of mediocrity.  I’ve blogged previously about what I called “leading lessons.”  The importance of taking a load off.

Work hard, yes. Of course when you’re running a business of any size, hard work comes with the territory.  That has to be balanced however with rest and relaxation and something that brings you pleasure or joy, whether that be kids, sport, gardening or a hobby.  Having those things in some sort of balance will do you the world of good.  Time deadlines, projects, re-organisations, budgets, travelling, resource planning will all get in the way – if you let them.

So, let your leadership mantra be.  I’m on Planet Mars!  Because I work, rest and play.

So after Wednesday’s leaked memo to staff, Nokia CEO – Stephen Elop – today announced a new “broad strategic partnership” with Microsoft (no surprises given he’s an ex Microsoft man himself).

Elop is clearly a man on a mission and is determined to drive through the radical changes Nokia needs to stop it leaking market share like a bucket with a hole in it (facing the brutal facts).  The memo set the scene for this announcement which has clearly been nutured in the background.  It seems there will be big job losses as Nokia opt to use the Microsoft operating system, rather than their own – inevitable when you bring two teams of developers together.  I think this is the right decision and Elop has called it right in terms of dumping their own native operating system and going with something developed by someone else to address the “ecosystem” issue. 

BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones called it right when he said “two turkeys don’t make an eagle,” there is an inter-dependency in this new relationship and re-labelling old wine as new, won’t work.  Both businesses are being battered by the progress both Apple and Google have been making in the operating system marketplace and some genuine innovation is needed if they are to catch up.  Whether the horse has already bolted, we’ll see.

Nokia CEO – Stephen Elop – ignited some interest today when a leaked memo he sent to staff was published to the press.  In it, he used a metaphor of a burning oil platform to describe the condition of the business, it’s product development and decling position in the market.  The Finnish phone maker, formerly a giant in the mobile phone sector, has been struggling to keep up with the market, whilst other brands such as Apple have seen sales soar.

It’s so easy to try and dress this sort of information up when you are talking to staff, using colourful language to – in a roundabout way – suggest the need for change.  Reading through the memo, I thought the metaphor wholly appropriate and the tone just right.  He uses powerful and evocative language and is brutally honest about the position of the company, it’s reasons for getting there and what it needs to do to recover.  Reading through it, you’re left in no doubt as to what the leader is thinking and expects.

Nokia have lost their way of that there’s no doubt.  However, I applaud Stephen Elop for facing the facts, communicating the truth and showing some real leadership.  Here’s the memo wording: -

Hello there,

There is a pertinent story about a man who was working on an oil platform in the North Sea. He woke up one night from a loud explosion, which suddenly set his entire oil platform on fire. In mere moments, he was surrounded by flames. Through the smoke and heat, he barely made his way out of the chaos to the platform’s edge. When he looked down over the edge, all he could see were the dark, cold, foreboding Atlantic waters.

As the fire approached him, the man had mere seconds to react. He could stand on the platform, and inevitably be consumed by the burning flames. Or, he could plunge 30 meters in to the freezing waters. The man was standing upon a “burning platform,” and he needed to make a choice.

He decided to jump. It was unexpected. In ordinary circumstances, the man would never consider plunging into icy waters. But these were not ordinary times – his platform was on fire. The man survived the fall and the waters. After he was rescued, he noted that a “burning platform” caused a radical change in his behaviour.

We too, are standing on a “burning platform,” and we must decide how we are going to change our behaviour.

Over the past few months, I’ve shared with you what I’ve heard from our shareholders, operators, developers, suppliers and from you. Today, I’m going to share what I’ve learned and what I have come to believe.

I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform.

And, we have more than one explosion – we have multiple points of scorching heat that are fuelling a blazing fire around us.

For example, there is intense heat coming from our competitors, more rapidly than we ever expected. Apple disrupted the market by redefining the smartphone and attracting developers to a closed, but very powerful ecosystem.

In 2008, Apple’s market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61 percent. They are enjoying a tremendous growth trajectory with a 78 percent earnings growth year over year in Q4 2010. Apple demonstrated that if designed well, consumers would buy a high-priced phone with a great experience and developers would build applications. They changed the game, and today, Apple owns the high-end range.

And then, there is Android. In about two years, Android created a platform that attracts application developers, service providers and hardware manufacturers. Android came in at the high-end, they are now winning the mid-range, and quickly they are going downstream to phones under €100. Google has become a gravitational force, drawing much of the industry’s innovation to its core.

Let’s not forget about the low-end price range. In 2008, MediaTek supplied complete reference designs for phone chipsets, which enabled manufacturers in the Shenzhen region of China to produce phones at an unbelievable pace. By some accounts, this ecosystem now produces more than one third of the phones sold globally – taking share from us in emerging markets.

While competitors poured flames on our market share, what happened at Nokia? We fell behind, we missed big trends, and we lost time. At that time, we thought we were making the right decisions; but, with the benefit of hindsight, we now find ourselves years behind.

The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable.

We have some brilliant sources of innovation inside Nokia, but we are not bringing it to market fast enough. We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market.

At the midrange, we have Symbian. It has proven to be non-competitive in leading markets like North America. Additionally, Symbian is proving to be an increasingly difficult environment in which to develop to meet the continuously expanding consumer requirements, leading to slowness in product development and also creating a disadvantage when we seek to take advantage of new hardware platforms. As a result, if we continue like before, we will get further and further behind, while our competitors advance further and further ahead.

At the lower-end price range, Chinese OEMs are cranking out a device much faster than, as one Nokia employee said only partially in jest, “the time that it takes us to polish a PowerPoint presentation.” They are fast, they are cheap, and they are challenging us.

And the truly perplexing aspect is that we’re not even fighting with the right weapons. We are still too often trying to approach each price range on a device-to-device basis.

The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.

This is one of the decisions we need to make. In the meantime, we’ve lost market share, we’ve lost mind share and we’ve lost time.

On Tuesday, Standard & Poor’s informed that they will put our A long term and A-1 short term ratings on negative credit watch. This is a similar rating action to the one that Moody’s took last week. Basically it means that during the next few weeks they will make an analysis of Nokia, and decide on a possible credit rating downgrade. Why are these credit agencies contemplating these changes? Because they are concerned about our competitiveness.

Consumer preference for Nokia declined worldwide. In the UK, our brand preference has slipped to 20 percent, which is 8 percent lower than last year. That means only 1 out of 5 people in the UK prefer Nokia to other brands. It’s also down in the other markets, which are traditionally our strongholds: Russia, Germany, Indonesia, UAE, and on and on and on.

How did we get to this point? Why did we fall behind when the world around us evolved?

This is what I have been trying to understand. I believe at least some of it has been due to our attitude inside Nokia. We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses. We haven’t been delivering innovation fast enough. We’re not collaborating internally.

Nokia, our platform is burning.

We are working on a path forward — a path to rebuild our market leadership. When we share the new strategy on February 11, it will be a huge effort to transform our company. But, I believe that together, we can face the challenges ahead of us. Together, we can choose to define our future.

The burning platform, upon which the man found himself, caused the man to shift his behaviour, and take a bold and brave step into an uncertain future. He was able to tell his story. Now, we have a great opportunity to do the same.

Stephen.

Everyone has had a dent in confidence at some point in their life or career. It can be triggered by the smallest thing, person or event.   Often lack of confidence come as a by-product of some past experience.  Those experiences can lead us to have a distorted view of the world, seeing things irrationally or in an exaggerated manner – known as Cognitive Distortions.  I recently read a book about cognitive behavioural therapy, as it was a topic that interested me following a session with some business psychologists.  Cognitive distortions came up as part of that session; can you recognise any in yourself?

1. All-or-nothing thinking: You see things in black and white categories.  If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.
2. Mind reading: You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you and don’t bother to check it out. You anticipate that things will turn out badly and feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.
3. Jumping to conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.
4. Overgeneralisation: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
5. Mental filter: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened
6. Disqualifying the positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. You maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.
7. Emotional reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.”
8. Magnification (catastrophising) or minimisation: You exaggerate the importance of things or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear insignificant.
9. Labelling and mislabelling: This is an extreme form of overgeneralisation. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to them.
10. Personalisation: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event for which, in fact, you were not primarily responsible.

If you work in a large business, the e-mail daddy is still outlook.  Now it has been said that Microsoft arrived very late to the party when it comes to all things social media and I think that’s borne out by the number of developers now working on plug-ins.

Two that I’ve recently been evaluating for Outlook are Twinbox and Xobni.  Twinbox is a plugin which forwards Twitter messages into your Outlook client.  It’s pretty handy as you can set it up to forward your replies and direct messages straight into an Outlook folder, with an appropriate alarm to let you know they’re there.  I’ve found this to be worthwhile as you are pro-actively alerted to messages which are specifically for you, rather than have to check into another Twitter client. 

Xobni (who I was recommended to by the uber digital brain David Edmunson-Bird at MMU who you can follow on Twitter here)  is a great plug-in.   It indexes your contacts and then sucks in their latest status updates from Linkedin, Twitter or Facebook into a small frame which sits in your Outlook desktop.  It’s pretty handy, as you can quickly see what’s going on with someone, without having to jump in and out of multiple cloud platforms.  It also drags together all of your recent activity, e-mails, attachments and common contacts.  Everything is a click away.

The view of your network is becoming 360 degree.  Small plug-ins like this continue to allow you to be front of mind, to be more efficient, to respond quickly and be relevant.  I’m sure they’ll be the first of many and I’m also sure Microsoft will be pretty happy that someone has got their back.