The world of personal finance is unnecessarily complex and overwhelming. In November, I wrote about Simple, an up-and-coming startup that hopes to turn the banking industry on its head. This week I wanted to highlight a few other startups that are simplifying and humanizing the way we perceive and interact with money.
Need to split up the restaurant bill? Need to write a check to your roommate for rent? Venmo makes transactions between friends fast, seamless and effortless. Add your bank account, and then start sending and receiving payments. Pay a friend back by simply replying with a text message or do it through the app.
My savings account has been collecting dust. For the past two years, I’ve gotten calls from my bank encouraging me to invest my money in a mutual fund.The jargon, opaque fees, over salesmanship has led to inertia. Until recently.
A couple of months ago, I stumbled upon Betterment, a new service that makes investing transparent, simple and painless. You don’t have to be a certified accountant to use Betterment; they translate the jargon and use normal, everyday language. You don’t need to have a lot of money to start investing; there are no minimum balances. Plus, you can make deposits and cash out whenever you want – without paying extra fees.
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Three months ago, I quit Facebook (and wrote about it on this blog). I had my sister change my password, so I couldn’t log into my account. It was a social experiment to understand the value that Facebook brings to the way people connect to each other.
After a two-and-a-half month hiatus, I am back on.
What inspired me to log in again was my birthday. Engagements, graduations, and birthdays are the only times when all 500+ of your friends simultaneously will write on your wall or send you a message. You get a highly concentrated level of positive feedback in a short period time.
Birthdays aside, surprisingly, I didn’t crave it or fear I was missing out on anything. There were a few friends abroad whose messages were left unread, but for the most part, my social life continued on as normal. For personal communication, I used email, text and chat; for broad communication, I used Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram. For the most part, my online social habits have stayed the same.
Facebook currently serves as a personal directory for my “weak ties.” I seldom post updates, comment or check the newsfeed; I use Facebook to add and accept friend requests, receive messages, and view wall posts. And I only have it on my mobile browser (I still don’t have my password), so I check it about once a day. Even though it does not serve as my primary social channel, Facebook is still a significant utility in my life.
While Facebook has enhanced the way people around the world connect to each other, there are clearly social gaps that it fails to fill. Facebook’s recent acquisition of startup darling Instagram signals its ambition to become a more mobile, photo-sharing space. Social communities, like Instagram, offer a much more intimate, curated look into people’s lives. While people do over-share and promote on Instagram, there is a level of consideration you rarely find on Facebook.
And some would go so far to say that the over promotional nature of Facebook can be detrimental to your mental health. A new study shows that spending too much time on Facebook can lead to depression, while others have suggested it can also lead to loneliness. Because Facebook gives the illusion that people lead perfect, happy lives, people can feel like they are not living up to their peers.
A recent piece on Read Write Web called “Now is the Time to Quit Facebook” discussed people’s growing desire for more meaningful, authentic forms of engagement. I agree with them, but I’m back on The Book for now.
Melissa Andrada is a brand and content strategist at Wolff Olins New York. She’s passionate about the intersection between technology, social good and brand. @themelissard
Melissa Andrada, Wolff Olins NY strategist, is a contributor in this week’s issue of Three Thoughts On, a site that invites guest writers to share three thoughts on a topic that interests them. Its most recent issue features Melissa on “Brand as Action,” as well as other POVs like “On Execution” by Charles Lee, CEO of Ideation and “On the Little Things” by Josh McManus, Curator of Little Things Laboratories.
Here’s an excerpt for your enjoyment, but you can read the whole the piece and discover other thinkers here.
BRAND AS ACTION
When most people define brand, the first things that come to mind are logos, catchy tag lines and advertising campaigns. But brand is much more than communications; it’s a platform for action. Brand should sit at the heart of what companies do, driving everything from their business model to their communications to their internal culture. To stand out, reach people and grow, companies will need to use brand as a tool for impact.
Lead with purpose.
The best businesses put purpose at the center of what they do. For example, GE’s brand purpose “Imagination at Work” has helped bring together its 310,000 employees across the globe and increase profits. What we’ve seen is that purpose is a powerful tool for bringing employees together, connecting with consumers and driving growth.
Make people’s lives better.
More than just a super bowl commercial, the strongest brands enable people to do more.
Earlier this week I went to a Creators Project talk by the developers and designers behind Bjork’s Biophilia.
During the presentation, media artist Scott Snibbe spoke about the “casual relationship” people now have with music. Digital technology has revolutionized the way we experience music, giving us access to an unbelievable breadth and depth of songs – with just one click. This means we don’t spend as much time dwelling on one artist or album. We skip from song to song; we go from one artist to the next. In the past, we’d buy a 45” from the record store, examine the album cover, sit down on the floor and listen to the whole album from beginning to end. The sharing, splicing, and remixing of music via mobile and web has made listening to music less physical and intimate, isolating listeners from artists.
According to Snibbe, multimedia experiences like Biophilia, give you the experience of falling in love.Marrying the sonic with the tactile and visual, multimedia experiences provide a level of intimacy that immerses user-listeners in the artist’s process, making you take step back and get lost in time and space.
Multimedia experiences, like Biophilia and Arcade Fire’s Chrome Experiment, represent a new creative frontier for music and design– a new way of making people fall in love with music again.
How successful is social media’s impact on a socially responsible company’s bottom line?
This is the leading question framing a Social Media Week panel I’ll be speaking at this Thursday.
We know that social media has had a tremendous impact on society, but to what extent does it translate into real dollars? There are many metrics we can use to track engagement: number of followers, number of people writing about us, number of visitors, etc. However, it is still difficult to correlate the impact of social media on a company’s bottom line; it’s often an ecosystem of small, unordered interactions that lead to a click, a purchase, a donation.
However, for some organizations, the correlation is much clearer. There are many companies that would not exist without social media: Mashable, Kickstarter, Pinterest, Groupon. These platforms are social media, thus their entire business models are predicated upon it.
While not all companies can exist as social media, what we can learn from these startups is that social media has a greater impact on a company’s bottom line when it is treated as an integrated part of a company’s brand strategy, rather than just a marketing afterthought.
Social media should be less about platforms, more about people and purpose.
Being “social” means creating a brand of listening. It means creating a brand that engages in in dialogues rather than monologues, a brand that empowers people to do more. It means creating a brand that is driven by purpose rather than just the latest trends.
Your brand purpose, based upon the intersection between what people need and what’s special about you, should shape how and where you engage with your audience. Your purpose should be a unifying force that drives your entire business – from social media to business model to operations.
When social media is contextualized within the big picture, your brand presence on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms seems more authentic, human and individualized. When it is viewed as another tool for driving impact and profit, the correlation between a tweet and a new business prospect is much clearer. When social media becomes an embedded part of your company’s DNA, it becomes an even more powerful – and sustainable – force for good.
Here are a few guiding questions we ask our clients to ask themselves:
Given our brand purpose, what are the most appropriate channels for engaging with our audience?
How can we empower our customers to do more?
If we are trying to translate social media into real dollars, how can we connect the dots between action and impact?
As part of Social Media Week, on February 16, WONY strategist Melissa Andrada (@themelissard) will join a panel on “Doing Well by Doing Good,” hosted by SCENEPR in association with Design for Social Innovation (DSI) at SVA. With Brian Reich, SVP/Global Editor at Edelman, and others from Purpose, Roadmonkey Adventure Philanthropy, and Mark & Phil, the panel will explore how purposeful businesses can use social media for both impact and profit. Sign up to attend here: http://dogoodsmw.eventbrite.com/
Social media is a powerful booster for brand authenticity and personality, but how successful is it in converting a good cause to sustainable dollars? In an atmosphere where customers’ trust and loyalty is increasingly earned through transparency and engagement there are new paths to the bottom line.
As part of Social Media Week, on February 16, WONY strategist Melissa Andrada (@themelissard) will join a panel on “Doing Well by Doing Good,” hosted by SCENEPR in association with Design for Social Innovation (DSI) at SVA. With Brian Reich, SVP/Global Editor at Edelman, and others from Purpose, Roadmonkey Adventure Philanthropy, and Mark & Phil, the panel will explore how purposeful businesses can use social media for both impact and profit.
A few months ago, we attended a class called “Making Something People Love” taught by Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and director of marketing at Hipmunk. In his intro, Alexis admitted that the class was like a Branding 101 class, but he didn’t want to use the word “brand.”
Brand is a dirty word to many entrepreneurs, but their skepticism comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what brand is.
Brand is a lot more than just your name, logo or visual identity.
A strong brand should crisply encapsulate the role your organization plays in the world, and it should act as a filter to guide your business decisions. While a clever name and logo can set you apart from some competitors, a strong brand is what gets you your funding, builds your engaged community of users, and creates a focused vision for the future.
Brand is a platform for action, not a marketing afterthought.
Too often we hear of startups who are so busy getting their products out the door, they don’t have time to develop a purposeful brand. A recent Fast Company piece points out that in the past, “brands were simply too hard and too expensive to create.” Today, expectations for startups have changed and there’s growing acknowledgement that brand creation can no longer be considered an afterthought.
If we look at some of the most successful startups that have emerged in the past ten years, a strong, purposeful brand is the common link that drives their success. In a world saturated with ecommerce sites, Etsy has set itself apart from the competition by building a brand that stands for craft, creativity and community.
Similarly, Zappos has differentiated itself by cultivating a brand that delivers happiness to itsemployees and customers. Mint crafted a brand around the idea of simplicity—an idea that guided its name, UX, visual identity, and voice. In all of these cases, a clear and focused brand maximizes the potential of a great productidea by creating a coherent universe around it.
In today’s increasingly crowded startup space, a single product is no longer enough tomake you stand out. Your product, UI, look and voice need to be unified with a common purpose that resonates with your users. Brand is that strategic glue. It should guide your every venture and help it stand out to funders and to the world.
Join Wolff Olins for the Brand Strategy Lab, a four-part workshop series at General Assembly in NYC this March. This series is an in-depth introduction to the fundamentals and tools of brand strategy, developed specifically for a startup audience. We’ll teach you the tenets of brand strategy and facilitate workshops to guide you as you create your own brand. The series will culminate in presentations and critiques so you can test drive your new brand and refine the direction it will take in the world.
Last weekend, I did the unthinkable: I got off the world’s largest social network.
My sister changed my Facebook password, so for at least 30 days, I’ll be off the grid. This means no status updates, no news feeds or even Instagram integration.
It’s a social experiment I’m conducting to understand the value that Facebook brings to the way people connect with each other.
As Facebook gets ready to go public, Mark Zuckberg wrote a letter to prospective shareholders, sharing his mission and ambitions for the company. One of his goals is “to strengthen how people relate to each other.” To what extent can Facebook actually do that?
Malcolm Gladwell argues that “the platforms of social media are built around weak ties.” While I disagree with Gladwell’s critique of social media’s ability to create social impact, there’s some truth to what he says. The people I really consider my friends communicate with me through email, IM, text message, or in person. Of course, if you’ve lived in many places, Facebook is an effective way to keep in touch with friends who live in other parts of the world. Or, if you are seeking to promote your personal brand, it’s useful for staying on top of mind for your former bosses, clients, coworkers and employees. If you’re not on Twitter or Tumblr, it’s also useful for keeping track of news and inspiration through the pages you like.
But the user value tapers off there. If we are really honest with ourselves, we spend a lot of time on Facebook seeing people on our feed we really don’t care about: the middle school classmate we haven’t talked to in 10 years, ex-boyfriends and girlfriends, your old boss you never got around to de-friending. Even by curating your friends’ list, it’s impossible to game the Facebook newsfeed to see the friends you really want to see.
I thought getting off Facebook would be the equivalent of quitting smoking, but surprisingly, I don’t yet feel like I’m suffering from FOMO (“fear of missing out”).
My questioning of Facebook’s social value is actually part of a larger trend in the world. What I’ve observed is that the backlash against the “weak ties” we maintain on Facebook and other social media platforms has led to a demand for channels that create more meaningful, personal connections. We’ve recently seen this manifest itself through online communities like Path, a more personal network that limits your friends to 150, and Stamped, a sort of “stranger-less Yelp” that lets you keep track of the restaurants, books, movies, and other things your close friends have stamped with approval.
As people increasingly turn to other online networks and activities to keep “close ties” with the people they really care about, I know I’m not alone in questioning where Facebook currently belongs in my life. I’m not suggesting that people will soon stop using Facebook—last year Americans spent more time on the social network than any other website out there. But with its purpose and role in people’s lives always changing, it’s important that Facebook now focus on growing with its users and not against them. If it doesn’t, it could lose them, potentially for more than 30 days.
I’ll write a follow-up post once I’m back on Facebook, so stay tuned for post-fast thoughts.
Melissa Andrada is a brand and content strategist at Wolff Olins New York. She’s passionate about the intersection between technology, social good and brand. @themelissard
Do you have a hard time defining the vision behind your visionary idea—to VCs, or even to your mom? Is your elevator pitch standing a bit too awkwardly in the elevator?
Your startup needs a stronger brand to stand out, and well, start up.
In recent years, more bike lanes and racks have emerged in New York. The changes in infrastructure and rise in bike riding got me thinking about what the urban retail environment might look like in a five years. Could bike riding transform consumer habits in New York City in the way that cars and freeways did in California in the 1950s? How might you build a retail experience if New York City were designed for cyclists?
Melissa Andrada is a brand and content strategist at Wolff Olins New York. She’s passionate about the intersection between technology, social good and brand. @themelissard
Join Wolff Olins for the Brand Strategy Lab, a four-part workshop series at 
