Servant of Chaos

Commitment Means Context

The idea of social media holds great fascination for many marketers. But the reality often does not live up to the hype. Take Facebook for example. How many marketing efforts have you seen run in Facebook, and how many would you consider successful? Same with MySpace.

As Paul Chaney suggests, “social media advertising, when introduced to sites like Facebook, has not demonstrated satisfactory ROI”. Paul goes on to suggest that the missing piece in all this is CONTEXT. When we go to sites like Facebook or MySpace, the context in which we find advertising (in most instances) is the context which we have helped create (our own social experiences and interests). So advertising into this space is, in the main, out of sync with the experience that we expect.

But rather than seeing this as yet another social space which brands can seek to interrupt with advertising (and yes, we could easily claim that our lounge rooms are social spaces), we should rethink our approach to establishing and creating context. Reality TV does this well – bringing interactive voting into the home – which serves to connect the content of the show with the context in which viewers can participate. But again, this needs to go further – and the same applies to Facebook and other social media efforts. Using continuous digital strategy as a framework, we can see clues as to where we can go next.

We have a footprint that (should) connect audiences with your content – and with each other. You have produced content which helps create a shared experience that will allow the Auchterlonie effect to take hold. You have seen conversations begin to rise, fall and spread – and then you are into the hard part of the cycle – commitment.

The real gold of the cycle is your commitment to evolving the context in which these conversations and interactions can take place. This means injecting your own personality into the situations (as appropriate). It is about guiding the conversations in directions (and to spaces) which is most conducive to the type, style and manner of the conversation. For example, if a discussion about a TV commercial kicks off on Facebook, then it may be worthwhile pointing out links on YouTube or Vimeo.

In some instances, it may also mean thinking about how you can best aggregate these conversations. How do you make it easier to find out what is going on? How do you bring information from OUTSIDE YOUR BRAND into the mix? The only way to know this is to participate – to listen, act and react – and to turn this all into something of value to those who are involved.

And this is what is meant by commitment – to understand the emergent needs of the people who participate in your brand conversations and to provide them a service that they can find nowhere else. It sounds obvious, but it is hard to do. Good luck!

Who Gives a Hoot About Twitter?

One of the challenges of marketing and branding in the online space is that change is a constant – just when you feel like you are coming to grips with the plethora of tools, platforms and approaches, along comes something new that may (or may not) provide you with yet another way to reach, entertain, engage and delight your customers. Or it could just be a waste of time.

The challenge is knowing where to invest your time and effort … and this is where Twitter comes in handy for me. My network of friends, acquaintances and followers helps me filter the large volume of knowledge that is available online. Explaining this to someone new to Twitter is difficult for a number of reasons:

• Neighbourhoods are hard to find: When you are new it is hard to find people that you are interested in – and the conversations appear closed or the etiquette unclear
• Scaling is difficult: Once you find some people with whom you find an affinity, it can be overwhelming to consider engaging with ever larger numbers of people
• Sweating the details: New participants are turned off by the minutiae of some interactions. It is easy to become annoyed or frustrated at the “over sharing” that takes place online.
• The only rule: There is only one rule on Twitter and that is – if you don’t like what you hear, un-follow.

As I have explained previously, there are three stages to Twitter commitment, and those who don’t make the effort to FIND value in their newly forming networks will often ask “who gives a hoot about Twitter?”. But for brands (and individuals) there are some significant opportunities.

In his talk to the National Library of Congress, Professor Michael Wesch described the four elements of social media as user generated content, distribution, commentary and filtering. However, I feel that it is “context” rather than commentary that is important in understanding social media. After all, value is created when we each create a lens through which the people in our networks can more readily make sense of the torrent of information, knowledge and emergent behaviour displayed online.

It is the VALUE exchange which is important – and Twitter plays a role in each of the four elements of social media. It can be used to create content, to filter and distribute it, and via hash tags and groupings, it can create context. Those who have more deeply engaged with Twitter find value in each of these areas … and appear to do so intuitively.

But how does this play out statistically? How should this fit within a continuous digital strategy?

Here are some graphs from my own usage of Twitter. I started using Hootsuite to track the click throughs from my Twitter messages (tweets) in February 2009 and in three months I had generated 15,581 click throughs. This is 15,000 site visits that would never have happened had I NOT tweeted.

Interestingly, only one of the top 10 destination sites was my own – so clearly those in my network are more interested in what I say about others than what I say about myself. And, of course, there are many re-tweets in amongst these figures (where others re-post your message) – meaning that the original message is spread further (or virally) into weakly-linked, adjacent networks.

Is this important for individuals and brands? I believe so. The ease with which Twitter can be used across the four elements of social media, and its capacity to AMPLIFY your other social media efforts and activities, makes it (at this moment) a uniquely useful part of your marketing mix. You just have to make the effort to create value before you think you can extract it – and if you are smart you will find they are one and the same thing.

Kill Your Website Mark II

A few weeks back, David Armano suggested that it is time to kill your website:

Your website should provide value to all of your users. If you can get them to participate, then do what ever it takes achieve that. In other words, it doesn't matter if your site looks more or less like a blog, what matters is if you're doing something to transform behavior from the passive to the active. Participatory behavior leads to better interactions between people, brands, businesses etc. So the real question is—are you designing for participation? Your answer should be, yes. If your Website doesn't do that, kill it. Then bring it back to life into something that does.

Interestingly, the folks from BooneOakley (via Daria)have transformed their website into a YouTube channel, using some of the interactive features of YouTube to provide the sort of participatory behaviour that David was referring to.

Take a look. BooneOakley are an agency with a sense of themselves and a sense of humour. I love the way they encourage P-L-A-Y . Listen to the “actual” tone of voice used. Think about your own website. Is there something you can learn here? Something of value you can take away? It looks to me like they understand the secret to marketing.

The Secret to Marketing

I read the Cluetrain Manifesto when I was in my first official marketing role. I had been “doing” marketing for years before this – building marketing plans according to the rules, following branding guidelines, keeping and enforcing the exclusion space around the logo to a consistent 36 points.

But the Cluetrain was astounding not because of the challenge it presented to existing marketing - it was astounding because there was no CONTEXT in which it could brought within business practices. The conversations that we were having between the MD and the marketing department – and between the Board and the marketing department - went something like this:

Me: “we need to re-do this website”
Everyone else: “what’s a website?”

But soon, this conversation changed. It changed because the website project I was heading delivered results. We got something done and it changed the way that our employees thought about the company and it changed the way that our customers thought of our employees. And perhaps, more importantly, we measured what we did and we focused our continuous digital strategy around the outcomes that we set up-front, and refined along the way. We did this not because it was expected, but because we wanted to know what worked and what didn’t (hey, no one even really thought a website was important, so measurement was not on the agenda). But this conversation seems to be re-occurring – just replace the word “website” with the word “blog” and add water.

These days, the Cluetrain IS the context through which we conceptualise marketing innovation.

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.

These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked.

So, if we take this at face value, we would think that company or corporate blogs would be on the must-have list of every marketing director across the country (or across the world for that matter). But this is hardly the case. Why? (Check CK's blog for some ideas.) While a number of companies may use a blog to publish news, they are not really “blogging”. In fact, Mike Hickinbotham on one of the Telstra blogs has a theory:

My working theory (based on anecdotal stories) is that generally the greatest push to explore the use of social media comes from the middle versus the top end of most Australian corporations/organisations.

This, I think, is one of the secrets of marketing – and that is getting things done. You see, for years those who wanted to DO things - to make a difference in the way that we talk or engage with customers or partners or employees – knew that words and actions go together. And “getting things done” takes some effort in a large organisation. It takes a level of seniority – but you can’t be too senior. It is the role of the Business Designer that I wrote about here:

The Business Designer does not sit in a creative studio. Rather, she operates across business units -- touching marketing, customer service and new product design. The BD has a finger on the pulse of finance and lives cheek-by-jowl with the legal team. There is the touch of the management consultant in the way that the BD navigates the org chart -- but also the fervour of the evangelist. She may be T-shaped. She may be a green egg. But above all, she is an experienced business professional. That's right -- she knows how to get things done.

But “getting things done” is not the only secret to marketing. There is one other. You have to “get emotional”. You have to tap into the emotions of the people around you – whether they are customers, bosses or the dreaded legal team. Mike says you need to “seek like-minded people out” – and he is right, because they will be on that same emotional wavelength as you – but you also need to go beyond that. You need to find the secret of the secret – the trigger that opens the flood gates.

As Clay Shirky explained about his own emotional involvement with the mini-crisis that was tagged as #AmazonFail:

When a lifetime of intellectual labor and study came up against a moment of emotional engagement, emotion won, in a rout.

And that’s the secret in action. Emotion wins everytime. Hands-down. A best-kept secret is just that – and it will do no one any favours. Isn’t it time you pulled a rabbit out of your hat?

The Landscape of Influence

Earlier this week I attended a lunchtime seminar hosted by the Insight Exchange. There were some fantastic presentations on the nature of influence from:

• Brian Giesen – Ogilvy PR 360 Digital Influence
• Cliff Rosenberg – digital entrepreneur
• Howard Parry-Husbands – Soup + Pollinate

Ross Dawson has a great summary of the presentations and the following conversations that freely jumped between audience and panel. Ross also shared his Influence Landscape framework which seeks to visually represent and connect the way that people think, behave and spend. It is a handy visual tool that disassociates the simple causal link between “social media” and “influence” – showing that there is much more at play.

And reinforcing this complexity, Beth Harte has written an excellent post on influence, reminding us that it is not the strong links between people that create movements, but the weak links. This strength of weak ties actually goes a long way to explaining why “viral” marketing is hard to predict. However, it is the work of Duncan Watts and Peter Dodds that shows why marketers may, in fact, be looking in the wrong direction. As I have written previously:

The findings of Mark Granovetter's research into social networks demonstrated that it is the WEAK ties that lead to action. If this is the case, then influence may only play an important role in the very early stages of branding efforts -- to facilitate AWARENESS. But as consumers begin to engage with the brand messaging and various forms of communication, it appears that the power of the social network lies not in the level of influence of any select group but in the susceptibility of the audience to contagion.

Why is this relevant? Because on some level, our role as marketers, strategists or activists is not simply to raise awareness. Our job is to change the way that people think, or act -- we want to prompt a change in perception or in behaviour. As marketers then, perhaps our best efforts -- and probably our strongest DIGITAL STRATEGY lies in activating the weak links and leaving influence to the mass/traditional media (or to those bloggers who have mass audiences).

It is why we should forget the influential and embrace the curious. And maybe, just maybe, we use Ross’ map to help us surface them.

Strategy Drives Decisions

It is easy to think that once you have set your strategy, that a button is flicked and that the focus switches to execution/implementation. But this is rarely the case. Think about it – if you work in an agency, it is unlikely that your original pitch idea will be completely aligned with the work that is actually released for a client. And if you are client side, chances are that your expectations will transform (and be transformed) as the project is sold-in to your business sponsors and stakeholders. The are always, always, competing priorities – and what may appear to be strategically necessary one day will be out of favour the next. This is frustrating, time consuming and expensive for all involved.

The opportunity, however, is to focus on a flexible approach to strategy – and this means using strategy not as a way of aligning messaging or building a campaign or a brand. It means using strategy to drive decisions.

How does this work?

As you build your continuous digital strategy, it is important to establish a “strategic guiding principle”. This should be a clearly articulated strategic direction that can be applied to any business challenge at any step in the process. It should encapsulate what you do and why and it should be “big picture” enough to apply to apply to the decisions of your executives and granular enough to provide guidance for the rest of your organisation. By way of example, the strategic guiding principle for General Electric was, for years “be number one or number two in any industry, or get out”. Such a principle provides a practical, outcome oriented, but simple framework for strategic decision making that can be used at all levels, from executives determining whether an acquisition should be completed to team leaders planning the skills development of their teams.

When it comes to digital and social media, I have taken a leaf out of the GE’s book. I often apply a repeatable guiding principle that can be shared with my project sponsors, development and creative teams – share the message, own the destination. This strategic guiding principle is used to help guide the answers to the many questions that arise during a project’s lifecycle. By simply asking whether the choices being made contribute to (or detract from) this strategic principle, we are all able to work autonomously yet achieve a level of coherence throughout the project. It also means we are able to accelerate the process of refining the strategy as we cycle through the components.

And one of the best parts of this approach is that it allows all participants to feel a sense of ownership in the strategy. And by bringing that very human sense of responsibility to your project, you lay the foundations for success.

Continuous Digital Strategy

 
For the last three years or so I have been writing various articles on branding, strategy, social media and general marketing. And I was thinking that I was contributing to a body of knowledge about HOW to go about the hard work of using digital spaces to change the way that people behave. After all, if there is one thing that we, as marketers strive for, it’s changing behaviour.

But then, when I looked back through my digital strategy archive, I was surprised that I could not find anything about continuous digital strategy – or the way that I actually go about the business of creating strategy. You see, for me, strategy is an ever-evolving process which is revisted across the lifecycle of any project. So, perhaps it is more of a spiral than a circle as shown above … but really the key point is that each of these steps are to be touched on in rapid iteration in the planning, execution/implementation and evaluation phases of any project. And the faster you cycle through, the more agile and responsive your work will be.

Let’s take a look at how it fits together.

Objectives: You have to have serious objectives. Your insight process will have delivered you a challenge, and out of that you or your client will have laid out some objectives which need to be met. They may be “fluffy” objectives like “awareness” or “reach” or they may be harder – like “increasing sales 20%” or “200 new customers”.

Audience: Once you know what the company or client expects, it’s time to turn your attention to the need states of your audience. What do they want? What do they expect? What do they aspire to? What is unmet? What do they look, smell and taste like? It’s time to get up close and personal with the folks who pay your bills!

Footprint: Now that you know your audiences in their pungent granularity, you now need to understand their behaviour. Where do they go? What do they do? Where to they spend time and why? This is about walking a mile or two in their shoes. But it also a chance to match the footprints of your brands/products. What overlaps? What doesn’t? Where are the opportunities. And where are the touchpoints that will become valuable as your project grows. You need to map out and understand the nuances of these as they will become launchpads for your conversations (or perhaps, as David Armano would say, they are the places where the skimming stones cause a ripple of influence).

Content: As you may have guessed, for me, this is storytime. Here you start to look at the structures of storytelling that will bridge the gaps you have identified in the earlier steps. What can you do to emotionally engage and entertain? How can you use P-L-A-Y to activate, surprise and delight your audiences?

Converse: This is where your strategy becomes one of amplification rather than shouting. In the two-way or polyphonic space of the web, your strategy needs to help you turn great content that YOU produce into great stories that others TELL on your behalf. This is the Auchterlonie Effect that I have discussed in other posts. It is where social capital (or what Tara Hunt calls whuffie) is both created and spent, accumulated and shared.

Commitment: Once we begin conversing – between the people behind the brand and those who consume it, a whole lot of human strangeness steps in. What happens if we like these people “over there” (on either side)? What are the rules of engagement? How do we get serious about progressing our relationship – moving from transactions to experience – and what does that take on both our parts to come to a mutual understanding?

Measurement: We often think that measurement is difficult. It’s not. What is hard is committing to the numbers and to the metrics. If we have done the hard work of aligning our project objectives with the overall strategic objectives of our businesses, then much of this falls in place. But we also need to follow this through each of the other steps. For example, which audiences are important (or are influential) for your brand/product? Measure it. How much time do they spend on the web and on which sites? Measure it. Which pieces of content will drive engagement (and which pieces need to change and evolve as your project grows)? Measure it. How far do your conversations echo across the web? Measure it. What are the intangibles – and what can be substantiated via research? Measure it.

Now, once you have an iteration complete, race through it all again. Pool your learnings from each stopping point and drive them back through the process. Make your brand better. Make your customer experience more profound. Refine, substantiate and evolve.

For me, this is what digital strategy is all about – not the technology – but getting to people. Making it messy. But making it real.

Hey Jude, It’s All About Joy

People who join and sing in choirs get it. People who perform in musicals get it. Bands get it. Record labels (used to) get it. David Armano gets it, as does almost the entire Chinese nation. And perhaps, more importantly, WE get it.

Music, and singing in particular, taps something primal in us. It allows us to transcend the barriers of language and culture. It allows us to see beyond our own prejudices and to become emotionally involved with others. And when we do this en masse, when we sing with a group of others it can be transformative. As Richard Huntington says, “life’s for sharing”.

This is why brands have had a long association with music. It is why finding the “right” song for your campaign is essential – it is a fast-track to engaging with an audience emotionally. Not only that, you draw upon the collective good will (or social capital) of the artists who created the work.

So what happens when you combine all this in a single, large scale public spectacle? What happens when you put the microphone (literally) in the hands of everyday people? And what happens when all of those people start to tell the story of your branded event?

Mortgage Lenders in Freefall?

As interest rates continue to drop here in Australia, many of us struggle to understand how a decrease in official interest rates are not passed on to borrowers in full. And while there are, no doubt, solid, economic reasons and explanations for this state of affairs, consumers tend to disregard such information, relying instead on emotions and “gut reactions”.

This places financial services brands in an unenviable situation – not passing on rate cuts risks the ire of their customers – while passing on the reductions would further erode margins and shareholder returns. But as with any crisis, there are also opportunities.

I have looked on with dismay as one bank after another clumsily executes a so-called social media strategy. It has been disappointing because social media is, arguably, the most effective way for financial institutions to combat falling levels of consumer trust – if it is done well, that is. By aligning with its customers’ desire paths, banking brands can begin to experience the benefits that come with social judgement. Thus far, financial institutions have shown little understanding of these social processes – but the latest online campaign from the folks at Amnesia are helping Aussie Home Loans take a STEP in the right direction.

Building on the Aussie Guarantee TV campaign where a mortgage broker jumps from a plane in search of a home owner who needs a better deal, the FreeFall Challenge replaces the TV commercial actor with a real, authentic mortgage broker, Duane Brown. So, come April 6, Duane will be strapping on a parachute and a tandem skydiver and taking to the skies. Where will he land? Well, the answer to that question could win you $3000. In a digital form of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, you have the chance to mark Duane’s landing site on a Google Map.

Knowing Iain MacDonald’s and Heather Snodgrass' fondness for social objects theory, a digital campaign from Amnesia would not be complete without an in-built object. In this case, you can use codes that have been distributed by social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and blogs to improve your chances of winning the $3000 prize (try using ib2lW2). You can also check out Duane’s YouTube channel.

There is much to like in this campaign, but as Tim Burrowes points out in the comments to this article, this is still deploying social media from a channel point of view – with the entry codes acting as a social object designed to bring cohesion to the whole. However, it is, as Joel Pearson suggests, nice to see some experimentation happening – especially in an industry not known for it. Next time it would be great to see the digital and social media folks involved at a strategic level so that there is a greater level of integration.

You Can't Touch Twitter

A couple of months ago I was surprised to see a name appear on my Twitter timeline. It was Stephen Fry. He was, in fact, the first celebrity that I would be interested in following.

Then a short time later, another celebrity name started people buzzing. The questions were asked “is @mchammer the REAL MC Hammer”? And as this appearance on Mike Volpe’s Hubspot TV shows, @MCHammer certainly uses Twitter personally – listening, interacting and promoting his new project, DanceJam.

But as Twitter starts to mainstream and the user base grows, it becomes ever more difficult to manage those who you listen to and interact with – which of course, depends on your stage of Twitter Commitment. If you are starting out, you can learn much from Amber Naslund’s excellent guide. But imagine that you are MC Hammer who has about 125,000 followers and is following over 25,000 people in return. How do you cope with the torrent of digital information that streams past you at an astonishing rate? How do you interact, engage or dare I say it, converse? As Cath points out, Twitter is not a gateway drug – you only get out what you put in – and clearly, MC Hammer is deriving value from Twitter not only as a broadcast tool, but as a way of interacting with people. How does he do it and still see value?

I have a much smaller volume of data, links and followers to contend with – and yet it can appear, at first blush, overwhelming. With around 2700 followers, I also follow-back 2300 or so people – this generates thousands of messages each day. To cope with this, I have an iterative strategy – process->tool+process. This is how it works.

Process

As I have mentioned to Iain McDonald previously, I have what Anne Zelenka calls a bursty process. I work very well with the flat knowledge networks afforded by twitter and other online tools at my disposal and have found a way of making discontinuous productivity work in my favour:

We used to talk about two steps forward and three steps back, and so on, but today it’s more like 50 steps sideways and 2000 steps forward. Networked, social-based opportunities are so explosive today than when we pursue them we’re flung forward at pace.

Tool+process

For sometime I have been using TweetDeck. It provides the functionality that Twitter itself does not yet provide. But I use TweetDeck in a particular way.

The far left column contains the messages from all 2300 people that I follow. It refreshes approximately every four minutes; so as you may imagine it flies by at quite a pace.

The second column is labelled “smart folks”. These are the people that I know and/or whose judgement I trust. These people help filter the twitterstream for me. This column refreshes more slowly.

The third column captures all instances of my twitter handle – servantofchaos. So I see when someone replies to me, or mentions me. It only refreshes every 10-12 minutes.

The fourth column is for direct messages and it refreshes every 15 minutes or so. And additional columns carry particular search terms that are important to my work. They change from time to time, but are an incredibly useful way of monitoring any mention of your product or service.

With my bursty work ethic, I take notice of direct messages as they arrive. This normally works out to be once an hour or so. I quickly also check replies and the smart folks for topics that may be useful or important for me. Once an hour, usually at the top of the hour (or when I need a break from a task), I scan the first column. I look for trending topics and repeated retweets and also scan my search terms. If while scanning I notice that someone asks a question that I can answer, then I do so. Sometimes I retweet a message or respond.

That’s It!

By working in this way, I am able to effectively manage a relatively large network (by my personal standards). I also am able to derive significant value from my interactions with this community. But does this touch what MC Hammer has to deal with? I doubt it. But I hope it helps you @TransformerMan.