Inhabiting Your Vision

I've been preparing for an interactive conversation (my definition of a 3-hour keynote session) on relationships and brand building in the social media age at Social IRL on November 3.

Conversations are markets

My premise is that this will be the conversation we never had about social media and desperately need to have to make sense of what works and what doesn’t. This is the pre-quel to the tactical implementations that have followed in the last couple of years.

There are a few points we'll cover under the premise that why is more important than how:

• How to use social media to build a better brand vision that creates mutually beneficial relationships and trust with customers
• Why strong, resilient, and enduring brands have and will always be the goal
• Why creating motivated, “well armed” brand advocates via social media is infinitely better than trying to recreate mass media through a new venue
• Examples of business that have succeeded at keeping their brand promise focused
• How do you increase value by embedding products and services with meaning?

When you look closely, you'll see that they're all about understanding why things work. The starting point is the business model itself. Every great marketer and communicator has looked in that very same place. And so shall we.

Every good model pays off a vision.

Inhabiting your vision

If you're Apple, then you're an outlier in more than one way, including the company's vision. The business has been built as an infinite loop on top of customer expectations that there will be newer (closed) versions of the product and software updates (pushed) to their systems. Both.

In broader technology terms, the life of a software version is numbered. Devices, games, and apps like Rocky movies -- a progression (or regression, depending on your preferences) over time. Younger generations especially expect it.

Our lives are numbered, too. Is there a place for vision?

I say there is. Vision is what technologists and strategists alike call *core* -- a belief statement that surfaces a set of (typically) non negotiable requirements. To do something by way of something else.

I have a vision statement on top of this site and I look to live it with every action -- in what I do, as well as what I make.

Do you have a vision for your business? Have you written that down anywhere?

When is that statement useful to you? Do you build on it with your actions (expressed as marketing, communications, customer service, operations, etc.)?

Do you inhabit your vision?

 

[image courtesy of Holstee]

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Comments

[Brian Driggs]

I think vision statements should be resolute in their simplicity, Valeria. They need to be simple, yet powerful, so as to be immediately memorable, while providing guidance for decision making at every level over the long term.

That said, ours:

Building high performance machines & lives.

This is both immediately illustrative of the metaphor central to our existence and resilient enough to guide our decisions well into the future.

Our vision is made up up several components, but I find it particularly easy to inhabit this form. True vision does not live in expensive picture frames in lobbies or break rooms - it lives in the hearts and minds of everyone in the organization.