Business as Charity: The Ever-Evolving World of Social Impact

As someone who takes social-impact work very seriously, I’ve found the Stanford Social Innovation Review to be an invaluable window into the world of social and economic justice.

I recently came across an interesting SSIR blog post which touches on what I think is a very constructive development in the world of charity: business as charity.

In our current economic climate, where job creation is a keystone in every political campaign, Jim Koch, founder of the Boston Beer Company (they make Samuel Adams beer), decided that instead of giving money to charity he would become, essentially, a microlender. His new program, called Samuel Adams Brewing the American Dream, gives small loans to small food, beverage and hospitality businesses in South Boston.  It also provides free coaching and mentoring from members of Koch’s team. The point? Trying to create new jobs by supporting small business rather than non-profits.

This is an excellent idea. Even a small loan can determine whether a micro-entrepreneur’s business succeeds or fails; I’ve seen this firsthand in my own business.

At ThinkInk we recently launched a PR and thought leadership campaign for a Miami-based microfinance company, OUR Microlending. To date, the company has disbursed about $6.2 million in loans to over 600 small businesses across South Florida, including a Colombian souvenir store, a printing and vinyl signage shop, a cell phone accessories wholesaler and a nutritional consulting and supplement store. These are hardworking entrepreneurs whose loan applications were rejected by the big banks. Because of OUR Microlending’s services – which are sorely needed all over the United States, not just in the developing world – these self-starters have been able to grow their businesses and create jobs to help stimulate their neighborhood economies.

Of course, this is not to say that I don’t think we should support nonprofits. In fact, we are in the process of restructuring The ThinkTank, a division of ThinkInk that is devoted to helping nonprofits grow their organizations through visibility and intelligent PR. We’re recreating the company into a for-profit/nonprofit hybrid that would allow us to significantly expand to this unit to help more nonprofits throughout South Florida.

In his SSIR post, author Aaron Hurst, founder of the Taproot Foundation and a well-known leader in the world of non-profits and social-impact, asks: is business the new charity?

I’d have to say no. Charitable giving is still crucial to nonprofits’ ability to fulfill their missions. However, considering how difficult it is today for the owners of very small businesses to access traditional banking services, I hope to see many more programs like this spring up to help create much-needed jobs and re-energize our still-shaky economy.

Even Decade-Old Lies and “Omissions” Can Wreak Havoc on a Brand.

One would think that in our 24/7 news cycle and oversharing age, companies and celebrities – who depend on public goodwill to remain famous and profitable – would resist the impulse to lie or cover up less-than-flattering information.

Perhaps guess GlaxoSmithKline and “Dr. Drew” Pinsky missed that memo?

Last week it was revealed that Dr. Drew, an addiction specialist and host of Loveline and Celebrity Rehab took more than $250,000 from the British-based pharma giant in the late ‘90s to talk up its antidepressant Wellbutrin on Loveline.

Even as he touted the drug for its effects – or lack thereof – on libido, the good doctor neglected to mention he was being paid to promote the drug.

$250,000 is a rather handsome sum of money, but in failing to disclose his financial link to GlaxoSmithKline, Dr. Drew ended up doing a great deal of damage to his own brand – more than a decade down the line.

As a PR practioner, I’ve said this so many times to my colleagues and will continue to until I’m blue in the face: Dishonesty will always come back to bite you on the behind

The GSK kerfuffle could end up costing Dr. Drew far more than money – just read some of the comments following a recent CBS News report:

“Dr. Drew, too bad you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube once it is out. You are now and will forever be a pharma shill. Unlikely that you will ever be seriously considered an astute medical practitioner.”

That’s what I mean about being bitten in the bottom.  I wouldn’t want to be associated, even tangentially, to what officials are calling “the largest case of healthcare fraud in US history.” No sum of money can make up for such a loss of credibility – in my mind, at least.

I recently wrote a post about the massive PR blunder committed by lobbyist Stephanie Harnett of Mercury Public Affairs on behalf of Wal-Mart: she posed as a reporter to infiltrate a meeting of union members opposed to a planned Wal-Mart in Los Angeles. She was caught, then fired and managed to garner some (more) negative press for Wal-Mart, the exact opposite of what she – and her previous employer – had intended. Not that Wal-Mart is a stranger to awful press, of course.

While these are two distinct scenarios, they both raise the issue of lapses in professional ethics and serve as yet another reminder that dishonest behavior in business, particularly in our always connected age, can backfire disastrously.

So what have we learned from GlaxoSmithKline and “Dr. Drew” Pinsky?

Credibility is our most important asset. If we don’t have that, we don’t have a business. At least not a business worth having.

Start-Up Capital Democratized: Long Live Crowdfunding!

Back in 1997, the British prog-rock band Marillion was having trouble scraping up the cash to embark on a tour of North America.

This news quickly spread among the group’s devoted fans, who rallied – without the band’s knowledge – and managed to raise $60,000 to help finance the tour. Four years later, Marillion’s hardcore fans, known as “Anoraks,” financed the band’s 2001 record Anoraknophobia by pre-buying copies of an album not yet made.

Just over 10 years after the release of Anoraknophobia, this type of phenomenon now has a name: crowdfunding.  Crowdfunding is getting a lot of media and business attention and there are sites springing up weekly where people can finance start-ups, artists, community projects and charities. What’s unusual about crowdfunding though, is that until now it has only been legal if the funders had no expectation of financial gain. They could receive some sort of benefit-in-kind like an album for example, but it wasn’t considered a bona fide investment – until recently.

Thanks to our slow-jamming President who signed the JOBS Act (Jumpstart Our Business Start-ups in early April 2012), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is introducing rules that will allow almost anyone to invest in new companies – up to a total of $1 million per year – and receive equity in return, as long as the middleman rounding up the cash is SEC-registered.

The new rules should be in place by the beginning of 2013. This is great news, considering that in our down economy, it’s already difficult enough for start-ups to raise the capital needed for a proper business launch.

So hooray for crowdfunding! This is exactly what those entrepreneurs without access to traditional finance or VC funding need.

The legislators in Washington and suits on Wall Street tell us that the Great Recession is over. But considering the miserable jobs report we got last month, it’s clear that for too many Americans the financial pain endures without respite. Enormous numbers of our young people are graduating from college only to find that the job market simply doesn’t have a place for them.

So, what are many of them doing? They are starting their own businesses, of course. And already, corporations such as Fundable are gearing up to inaugurate investment vehicles wherein anyone with a little cash to spare can help a start-up get a foothold – in exchange for a stake, regardless of its size, in the company.

Let’s hope this democratization of start-up capital fulfills its promise as a fresh new way to support America’s next wave of forward-thinking entrepreneurs.  I’m all for that.

Separating the Wheat From Chaff: Can We Focus on What’s Really Important?

I frequently comment that I can’t multitask. And yet I often find myself doing just that.

I frequently talk to clients on the phone while emailing others while fielding a barrage of Google Chat questions from my employees. When you have to juggle so many balls – handling clients, hunting for new ones, taking care of employees and family – sometimes your brain just sort of gets stuck in a groove and you find yourself spinning your wheels without really getting anywhere.

A few weeks ago, right after barely emerging from one of the most hectic weeks I’ve ever had, I wrote a post about how important it is to find that illusive work-life balance and how our ever-present mobile devices make it increasingly difficult to abandon the cares of the office even for a couple of hours.  To reinforce my argument, a recent post from the Harvard Business Review goes further, raising the issue of whether all of the whirlwind activity we engage in simultaneously is actually helping us meet our goals in a timely fashion.

HBR blogger Greg McKeown argues that it isn’t, and I agree with him. I call this the confusing activity with achievement syndrome.  McKeown also suggests that narrowing our focus instead of trying to do everything at once will help us get each of the things we’re trying to accomplish done better and more quickly.

And he certainly has the data to back up his argument. In 2009, researchers at Stanford found that heavy media multitaskers are more susceptible to distraction by irrelevant stimuli. On top of that, they also have a reduced ability to switch tasks easily.

Of course, this information can also be arrived at via plain old common sense. The more things we do at the same time, the worse we do each thing.

In his post, McKeown links to another HBR piece, this one about Steve Jobs and how the late Apple co-founder pulled the then-moribund company from the brink of bankruptcy in 1997 by jettisoning most of the products the company was making. Some of those products were bringing in profits, but Jobs, famous for his devotion to simplicity, chose to focus on just four product lines. That’s it.

And we all know how that one worked out for Apple, don’t we?

I’ve been having to do similar things at ThinkInk – albeit, of course, on a much smaller scale. For example, the company is growing and I am constantly looking at ways to make the agency more efficient while delivering the very personal service we have delivered as a smaller operation. And I am also forced to do the cost-benefit analysis of keeping some clients - and not because they cant’t pay. Sometimes you get into bed with the wrong partners. If that’s the case, my advice is to give up what isn’t essential or creating value to your agency so you can focus on the essentials and value-creators better.

To be sure, I don’t see myself going to the lengths the girl in this droll video does to eliminate the distractions of her gadgets. But I get the message, and I can see myself making a conscious effort to quit multitasking so much.

Maybe we all can. And actually get more done. And done better.

Here’s hoping.

News Flash: Mobile is the Future! Is the Marketing World Keeping Up?

Last week Wal-Mart’s CEO Joel Anderson announced, with the proper captain-of-industry gravitas, that mobile is the future.

“I can't overstate how mobile is changing how we interact with our consumers,” he proclaimed at the 2012 Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition in Chicago.

Why are still having this conversation when I, and a lot of agencies and brand marketers I know, have been saying this since 2005?

Let’s start with going back to 2007. That was the year that hundreds of thousands of Americans camped outside Apple stores and stood for hours in queues that wrapped around the block to part with up to $599 for the much-coveted “Jesus Phone” (I think we all know what insanely popular gadget I’m talking about).

In 2008 researchers at the Pew Internet and American Life Project released a report wherein tech leaders and analysts predicted that mobile devices will be the primary way most of us access the Internet by 2020. That mobile is the future hasn’t been news for a while, but Anderson’s quote made me wonder if marketers are truly doing enough to tap the enormous potential of these mobile devices that spend increasing amounts of time in our hands – and in front of our eyes.

Let’s take North America, for example. Last year, North American marketers spent $40.2 billion on marketing content as a whole. By comparison, they spent about $1.6 billion on mobile ads and marketing during the same year. That means mobile represents only a tiny sliver of the overall marketing budget pie – just over 4%.

When you consider that in the US alone 88% of adults have a mobile phone (46% of those devices are smartphones), you realize that the amount of money being allocated for mobile marketing just isn’t enough. It’s barely a drop in the bucket.

We’re fortunate to work with a number of companies who understand there’s an untapped goldmine in mobile marketing and that its potential can only grow considering the rates of smartphone and tablet adoption – and what they can do to connect and engage with consumers, and ultimately sell more stuff.

I understand the reluctance of the companies who are hesitant to allocate big budgets to any one channel, mobile being the least “tested.” But the world – and consumers – aren’t waiting around for them to dig up the willingness to make that leap. They are losing out on the ability to target consumers with relevant and timely messages delivered at moments of maximum influence.

So while Wal-Mart’s CEO may be a tad late to the party, I’m hoping that those words from the head of the world’s largest retailer will reassure gun-shy marketers enough for them to take some necessary risks.  Let’s see.

All Work and No Play: Can American Workers Get Their Lives in Balance?

Last week was one of the most hectic I’ve had in quite a while. My PR agency, ThinkInk is on a growth tear: we opened an office on the West Coast on June 1^st and we’re about to relaunch our website any moment now.  There was also a trade conference going on here last week and a sick daughter to take care of. I barely had a second to breathe – or sleep.

So I spent most of the weekend working to catch up, and to get ahead of the coming week. Amid the nonstop bustle, something jumped out at me - I was sending emails to both clients and employees throughout the entire weekend. And they responded immediately. Does anyone really have a life anymore?

An article on the Harvard Business School website got me thinking about the ongoing trend of Americans working more and more hours, either to keep up with the bills because their wages are stagnant or because they are afraid of being replaced if unwilling to be available for work at any time. Let’s face it, given the jobs crisis we’re battling, with widespread pay and benefit cuts, workers are doing more for less because they are terrified of losing their jobs. And their employers know it: squeezed employees mean bigger corporate profits. Add to that the slow, steady decline of the country’s organized-labor movement, and you’ve got millions of workers with fewer options.

Another (significant) factor that is making it more difficult to get away from the office, even while at home: our ubiquitous mobile devices.

The vast majority of us are carrying around at least one Internet-connected device at all times, and we are increasingly reluctant to be away from them. Think about it: how many times have you been off work, either on a weeknight, a weekend or holiday, and made a firm resolution to not check your work email or answer calls from the office only to break it because you just can’t stop yourself?

That’s what I thought. The same happens with me.

This isn’t good for us, people. Studies have shown that the more hours we put in beyond a normal workday, the more at risk we are for developing depression. Which makes sense: more time spent working – and worrying about work – means less time to spend with friends and lovers, less time to catch up on sleep and physically take care of ourselves and less time pursuing our other interests (if our jobs and families allow us time to have any!). European countries understand this.

We may need to have to start having more experiments like the one mentioned in the Harvard article. The researchers worked with teams of Boston Consulting Group employees to make sure they took periodic evenings off their mobile devices. Not surprisingly, the consultants ended up saying they were much happier with their work-life-balance and…drum roll, please…with their own job performance and that of their co-workers in the experiment.

This, of course, is kind of a no-brainer. We all know balance is important. It’s just a question of trying to work as much of it as possible into our lives. There will always be room for improvement.

Tablets will soon be top, driving engagement and consumer relevance

This article originally appeared on Mobile Commerce Daily by Vanessa Horwell, Chief Visibility Officer of  ThinkInk on 06/12/12.

Make no mistake. The prediction business is a precarious game. According to the late astronomer-professor Carl Sagan, ancient Chinese court astrologers whose predictions proved wrong were executed. Less lethal are the quotes attributed to those who thought they knew what was coming but did not. I have been known to get a few wrong myself.

Whether it was Popular Mechanics’ no-longer-profound statement that “Computers in the future may weigh no more than one-and-a-half tons,” – an iPhone comes in at 4.9oz, an iPad under 1.5lb and my BlackBerry at 4.3oz – or BusinessWeek’s 1975 call that the paperless office would arrive before the close of the 20th century, both predictions, while bold for their time, could not entirely free themselves from the prism of their time.

In other words, envisioning a computer that weighed less than 3,000lb was impossible and the paperless office was as much inspired by Jetsons-era imaginings as it was based on the factual advance of the microchip.

Nevertheless, the guessing game continues.

Bet’s on
Marketers make predictions about mobile commerce’s 2016 dollar value, research firms postulate a laptop-less world, and the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes draw thousands of errant betters.

But if predictions are precarious, here is a safe observation I can make: when it comes to tablets and their ability to engage consumers and entice them with marketing messages, we have not even scratched the surface. Repeat, we have not even scratched the surface.

But since this article is about pushing the prediction envelope, here is a riskier call: in the tablet versus smartphone battle, tablets may ultimately win out as the go-to mobile Web interface and social media communicator.

There’s no denying that the tablet has had a rocky road, taking some 17 years to mature from the poorly received Newton Message Pad (remember that?) to having a category all its own.

But with the massive success of three iPad roll-outs over 29 months and competitors such as Samsung, Amazon and others locked in an aggressive game of catch-up broadening the consumer market, pushing their capabilities – retina display, Flash and NFC – tablets have become mainstream.

And like the modern smartphone whose arrival came shortly before it with BlackBerry in the late 1990s and the iPhone in 2007, the potential for marketers to reach and engage potential and existing consumers via tablets has never been greater – poised to have as great an impact on mobile marketing in the unfolding second decade of the 21st century as smartphones had in the closing years of the first decade of the new millennium.

On second thoughts, make that greater.

Tabulating the numbers
From what I can see, part of tablets’ success lays in the adoption rates – a fact, which began landing front-page ink and Google search hits back in January 2012.

One of my blog posts earlier in the year made note of the impressive statistic that in the span of a few weeks, the number of U.S. tablet owners nearly doubled to 19 percent from 10 percent. As it turns out, this was no Christmas gift fluke.

In April 2012 it was reported that global tablet sales tripled in year-over-year shipments. Some sub-groupings such as doctors saw adoption rates as high as 62 percent. Sound familiar?

Those were the same type of eye-popping data points surrounding iPhone purchases last October when just over a third of U.S. consumers owned one.

While it is important to remember that a tripling of anything is easy when you start with lower numbers, I do not think that is truly what is in play here.

Pardon the pun, but tablets have finally come out of their shells.

With smartphone adoption rates now at nearly half the United States population – and rising rapidly – consumers already expect high-speed mobile Web access. Tablets deliver a similar experience but deliver it better. Why?

Let us start with the larger screen that gives marketers greater “screen real estate.”

In other words, more space to engage and sell more stuff.

There are also indications that tablets, because of their larger size, ironically have greater market flexibility.

Apple might be today’s dominant tablet maker, but others such as Samsung continue to find their niche by designing so-called “hybrid devices” – smartphone and tablet combined.

The Galaxy Note, which launched in October 2011, is an excellent example.

While I am still married my BlackBerry because I can knock out articles such as this one with its miniscule 

keyboard in the back of a taxi or while I am between flights and so on.

As they say, old habits die hard but I am very close to committing device adultery. The device comes with a 5.3-inch screen, makes phone calls, stores music, runs Adobe Flash and comes with a stylus.

But the Galaxy Note is just the beginning.

Jablets, wablets, phablets?
So successful has Galaxy’s entry been into the “midsized” tablet market that a new term is rising up to define the industry segment. Enter the Phablet. And no, I did not just bite my tongue.

Phablet describes the combination of a phone and a tablet. These devices, being launched by HTC, LG and Huawei, are set to enter the market later this year and shipments are estimated to top 208 million units by 2015.

Their launch timetable may coincide with the rumored release of the “iPad mini” – another example of the specializing tablet landscape.

By contrast, smartphones are limited in their ability to adjust their size much further. Too small and the notion of hunting and pecking for touch-screen button and key strokes takes on a new, almost absurd notion. Any bigger and they bump into tablet turf.

“Tapping” into a whole new touch-screen audience
Referencing the term “midsized” tablet is reminiscent of the evolving family car.

Nearly all cars go from zero to 60 in similar-enough amounts of time, measured in second differences, offering similar performance, but nevertheless, the average size of the American car continues to grow, clipped only at brief interludes when high gas prices forced a downsize.

Arguably, cars got bigger because marketers could pack more amenities into a larger space and consumers soon expected the added room.

The technology under smartphones’ digital hood is no different than my car comparison and very similar to the technology behind the tablet.

iPhones have proven touch screen and retina display viable technology. But for marketers, a 3.5- to 4-inch screen space is no longer enough for customer engagement.

Tablets and phablets and whatever other names they will eventually be called bridge that gap while relying on the same anywhere and everywhere connectivity that 3G- and 4G-enabled smartphones presently deliver.

Already the National Retail Federation has found that nearly half (49 percent) of retailers say their tablet customers spend more per mobile purchase and account for 3.2 percent of Web purchases versus 1.5 percent for smartphone Web sales.

Think of tablets like digital shopping carts. Like cars, shopping carts have also expanded, along with aisle width, bricks-and-mortar square footage and the number of products per shelf.

Seen in this light, the digital shopping cart – the tablet – it is not surprising that half of retailers would report such findings.

Just imagine a 10th generation iPad that produces a three-dimensional holographic image of your favorite store. With the tap of a screen you can walk through an immersive environment of your choosing wherever you happen to be.

But before I leap into prediction mode, let us stick with the present.

If customer loyalty is all about engagement, then Apple’s 2048×1536 pixel retina display is critical. I have used it myself and agree with reviewers who describe its visuals as so rich and vivid that images appear “painted.”

While shoppers cannot gain a complete experiential marketing moment, touching and inspecting an item, nor has 3-D fully matured, but retina display, like HDTV, gets customers so very close to the actual bricks-and-mortar experience.

Combined with burgeoning Near Field Communication technology that promises a future of mobile wallets and location-based marketing via Bluetooth and WiFi – attracting shoppers when they are in-store or in proximity of a store – tablets are becoming a much larger picture – and screen – of the marketing landscape.

Future awaits – no matter how it is predicted to unfold
Back in September 1993, Peter H. Lewis, a writer for The New York Times, said this about the Newton:

“Apple promised too much and failed to deliver a useful device for everyday executive chores. 

[However,] the Message Pad practically hums with untapped potential, and six months…to a year from now it is likely to be a popular executive tool.”

Ha! Mr. Lewis’ prediction that the Newton tablet would be commonplace proved incorrect. But like the technology that began the tablet torrent 17 years ago, he was correct in his understanding of the device’s potential.

Almost a generation later and tablets are finally coming in to their own, un-tethered from PCs, laptops and, of course, smartphones.

For marketers and consumers, that is not a prediction – it is a fact.

Ultimately, predictions are not just made for the sake of it. Nor do they rely solely on existing technology. Predictions are a healthy amalgam of insight, foresight, facts and dreams. So was it foolish for BusinessWeek to envision the paperless office? No. It was quite daring.

The BusinessWeek article evaluated what was already possible in 1975 and extrapolated what was probable in the decades ahead.

In that leap-of-faith spirit, here is my final tablet truth: what tablets 2.0 – next-generation tablets – really need is for them to be as compact as today’s smartphones but be able to “unfold” to the size of a tablet.

Demonstrating what’s already possible, Atmel, a California-based semiconductor company, continues to promote its flexible touch screen technology, which uses thinner sensors than existing screens and has better battery life.

Such examples may not be the full realization of a Jetsons-style flying car that folds into a suitcase, but it is anyone’s guess – or prediction – of what is possible in the decades ahead.

As for me, I think it is an upgrade for which marketers should be on the lookout – before the still-hot traditional smartphone market folds. And I am not talking about in the flexible screen manner.

This article originally appeared on Mobile Commerce Daily by Vanessa Horwell, Chief Visibility Officer of  ThinkInk on 06/12/12.