Bryan Kramer: The Art Of The Share
For influencers to be effective, they must, at once, work for public relations, digital marketing, and demand generation—“the triad of marketing powers”—according to PureMatter CEO Bryan Kramer.
Bryan Kramer is all about the art of the share. At next week’s Adobe’s Summit, the social business strategist, author, speaker, and president/CEO of Silicon Valley digital agency PureMatter will be speaking about sharing as a competitive advantage. He will explore what he believes is a new way to deliver value in this experience-based world, as well as what prompts us to rethink how, what, why, and where we share ideas to influence our global tribe.
CMO.com caught up with Kramer last week to get a glimpse into his session. (Click here to view the Summit agenda and register. Enter code CMDC17 for an additional $200 discount.)
CMO.com: “Shareology,” the title of your latest book, is a very interesting topic. Could you give me the elevator pitch—how you describe it succinctly?
Kramer: Sure. The concept behind “Shareology” is how sharing powers the human economy. It’s basically the what, why, when, where, and how people and brands share. “Shareology: How Sharing is Powering the Human Economy” is actually my second book. My first book is called “There Is No B2B or B2C: It’s Human to Human.” The new book is actually more of an in-the-trenches book about how to share. So they are kind of companion books, although you can read one without the other.
CMO.com: How did you latch onto sharing being so important? You even talk about it in terms of the “global tribe.” Where did that idea come from originally?
Kramer: Well, originally, I wanted to prove to myself that sharing socially was something that could enhance a brand or a personal brand. So I interviewed hundreds of people on social and got eventually over 350,000 social followers. And those social followers turned into this whole premise of how sharing can reimagine what you’re working on or how you are doing things.
So that led to a TED Talk, and the TED Talk really was to prove that sharing can change your destination or your future. So, literally, from the stage of the TED Talk, I asked everybody in the audience to take a picture and share what they could share that could change the world. It trended globally, and we soon had more than 21 million impressions. We documented all of this great, rich data about where the shares went and realized that it really could do some pretty impressive stuff, which I’m going to get into in my talk at the Adobe Summit. I’m going to show exactly what happened. So a lot of that really proved the model of how sharing can branch out from just one room or one person and reach somebody on the other side of the Earth. How that message travels is really fascinating to me.
Back to your question: Why did I choose it? I think it’s fascinating how a share can travel around the world and touch certain people at the right times in the right place. So after the TED Talk, it basically grew from there.
CMO.com: Did you immediately recognize that sharing worked equally well in both personal and business situations?
Kramer: Yes, it was immediately apparent. The epiphany was when I realized that, when people share, there’s usually a cluster of people in any given topic that are talking around that topic.
So what the model proved is that there are people who have strong influences who can influence any given topic, which then goes to prove the idea of influence in marketing.
And influencers, right now, are some of the strongest, most powerful things that you can have on social media as a marketing communications tool. Your influence in marketing is a hot topic right now. That’s because these people, I believe, can spread things faster than companies can.
I also believe personal brands have a stronger brand than do company brands, in most cases. It’s the person or the human behind each brand that brings the brand up or down, and there are countless people in every company who you can think of who have that effect on each brand. Usually, they are executives. But, case in point, personal brands are starting to become—and are, in most cases—stronger than company brands.
So back to the original point: Influence is much stronger, and what it proved is, if you don’t have the power of a TED stage, you want to go find the top five or 50 influencers, and with them you can get your message heard just as quickly as buying an ad at the Super Bowl.
CMO.com: So does this go beyond the way marketers have been thinking about shares and influencers and such?
Kramer: Yes, because this is the first time that the triad of marketing powers—that’s the first time I ever said that, by the way—have come together. And what I mean by that is public relations, digital marketing, and demand generation. Each of those within a company or a marketing group typically operates separately. This is the first time a tactic has to work for all three together.
CMO.com: What should the attendees of your Adobe Summit session think about before they come, and what can they expect to get out of your session when they leave?
Kramer: A lot of people are wondering: What is going to happen to my marketing job in the next five or 10 years? Is it going to be automated? Is artificial intelligence going to take over? What’s happening with augmented reality and virtual reality, and what does that mean to my job?
If you’ve noticed, even on LinkedIn, they released the top 20 most relevant jobs, and marketing wasn’t one of them. So what does that mean to me?
That’s the question that I would be asking if I were coming into this session: What does that mean to my job as a human in the next five to 10 years, and how can I stay relevant? What they are going to be leaving with is the answer to that.
