Here is a great presentation on social networks by Paul Adams (with thanks to Rachel Beaney). Complete with slides and speaker notes, the presentation steps through the marked differences in our behaviours online and off.
It’s the perfect primer for those who are just coming to grips with the world of social media – and a nice reminder for those who are more conversant with topics such as:
As you go through the presentation, think about your clients and think about your customers. Think about the topics from their point of view – and then also think through your own behaviours. Think about how you use social media/networks at work and at play – is there a difference? Should there be? Will you change what you do based on what the presentation reveals?
I looked at lead generation, community, ROI, discussing:
What works
How to sustain it
What to expect
Along the way, I pick up on the recurring themes that I write about here on my blog. Topics such as how audiences are changing (the new B2C), the Auchterlonie Effect and why it is the future of your brand, continuous digital strategy, influence and fat value. And now, if you weren’t able to make the conference, you can watch it online. My session is below. Hope you enjoy it!
Ameel Zia Khan has a great summary of the event speaker by speaker which you can view here.
There are some great conversations happening at and around the ConnectNow conference. And something keeps plugging away in the back of my mind. It’s about conversations, audiences and transformation. What do we do when we are faced with a “no”. What happens with, say, social media, when you run up against a brick wall? But more – what if this same thing applies to other aspects of your business?
I have never been a fan of trying to change the mind of a naysayer. It’s hard to convert a fanatic. I have always been more interested in dealing with people who are impatient, the ones who want change and want it enough to make it happen. And I think this was instilled in me a long time ago – when I read the British playwright Howard Barker:
"Because you cannot address everybody, you may as well address the impatient" (49 Asides for a Tragic Theatre).
Essentially I am always getting started with social media. And I would say this to you – remember that we don’t make decisions on our own. We do so in a social ecosystem. You don’t need to deal with the naysayers – step aside and work with those who influence the naysayers at an arm’s length remove. Go further into the network. Let those networks work for you.
And because not all audiences are created equal, they will lead you in directions that you are not expecting. Go on. Give it a try.
I was asked to set the scene for the three days of presentations, panels and workshops focusing on the convergence of social media, emerging technologies and enterprise.
In my talk I used a ball of string, passing it through the audience to kick start our thinking around what it means to be connected. It was also a metaphor for communications, marketing and social media that helps us think through what we say and how we say it – and what it means to actually participate in the creation of value with and through an audience.
My slides are available on slideshare – and as you can see, are a crystallisation of many of the concepts that I have been writing about here for the last three or four years.
If you aren’t able to make it to the conference for the remaining days, you can follow along via Twitter using the #cnow hashtag, and join in the discussion over at the ConnectNow group posterous site.
And if you ARE at the conference, be sure to say hi during one of the breaks – or better yet, come to coffee morning on Friday. Details are here.
I am working on a project at the moment which has influence at the very centre of its strategy. But as soon as we mention the word “influence” it brings a whole hierarchy of associations along for the ride. For example, I’m sure that you, reading this, have already leaped ahead 10 steps – and that is the challenge. Many of you will have read Gladwell’s Tipping Point and will, no doubt, be thinking about the way that a small number of influencers can create the kind of network effect that drives consumer behaviour. But as I have written previously, when it comes to social or digital strategy (in particular), we can’t just focus on reaching the tipping point. We need to go well beyond this – to impact behaviour, create lasting and beneficial change and deliver against business and organisational objectives.
Yet, in doing so, we have no choice but to work with “influencers” – after all, we are working with people, not numbers. I was reminded of this great post, Curating Resonant Agents, by Katie Chatfield on the work of Duncan Watts, and the presentation that came along with it. Take a read, it provides a context for the type of thinking you will need to undertake to be able to apply the concept of influence to your business or brand.
So, where does this leave us? I like Katie’s focus on resonance. When Stanford’s Eric Sun conducted research into Facebook “dispersion chains” – the length of connections through which a message/story would travel across a cluster of connections – he found that resonance and resonance agents are important. More important than sheer numbers. Influence, it seems, does not accrue to a particular person or even a particular group of people – certainly not, at least, when you are focusing on changing behaviour. Influence accrues to those resonance agents willing, able and (perhaps) predisposed towards sharing that message/story.
Where do you find them? Clearly they are not the people with the loudest voices. They are those individuals who facilitate the “weak links” between clusters. They are the connectors. And they sit in the cubicle next to you. They are often, as non-descript as a face in the crowd. How do you find them? You just have to listen.
We often forget, when we are launching a product, that we don’t just want sales. Sure, they are great. But for a launch to be successful, it means not just getting your product or service “out there” – you’ve got to keep it out there. You’ve got to ensure that it has fuel enough to sustain it until it does, in fact, reach a stable orbit.
In a social media world, this means launching a movement, not a product. In this presentation, the folks from We Are Social show how they went about launching Marmite XO. What can you learn from this approach?
Compare and contrast this with KD Paine’s new product launch checklist. What are the overlaps? What would you do differently?
I was watching this video from the Kaiser’s Toilet on Twitter and Google’s new Buzz – and it got me thinking. Much of the discussion that we see around social media, marketing and new technologies relates to yes/no decisions. The conversations are framed in terms of scarcity – of time, resources, budget and so on. But one of the fundamental transformations that the social web has driven is that of abundance. Of information, knowledge and connection.
So we are seeing a fundamental disconnect between the way that we VIEW this emerging world and the way that it OPERATES.
The idea of VIEWING a website or social platform is a behaviour that has created a world view. It comes from 50 years of broadcast TV. It places us, “a user” (and therefore a dependent) in a passive mode. The newer, social web places us, the PARTICIPANT at the centre of a hub. It requires choice, it engenders responsibility, and presupposes action. It PLAYS to the concept of abundance and see scarcity as outmoded, traditional, passe.
But as Mark Earl’s Herd has taught us, it is behaviour which changes thinking, not thinking that changes behaviour. So perhaps, surreptitiously, our engagement with the social web may have wider implications. Or maybe the social web is more chaotic, playful and unpredicatable than our marketing and IT “use cases” would suggest.
This interesting article by Alan Wolk shows how the #thuglife meme has made Twitter into a purely experiential platform. More importantly for marketers, perhaps, is the scale of this type of participation – which far exceeds the early adopter circles that characterise much of the social media debate:
It's an interesting use of the medium, and the people participating in these hashtags seem to be getting as much value out of them as the Twitter-Is-a-Serious-Business-Tool types who busily append words like "Genius!" to their retweets of a fellow blogger's "Top 10 Reasons Location-Based Services Are the New Twitter."
What we are seeing is the logical extension of YES. We are seeing the “crowd” embracing abundance and participating in a way which is consciously unselfconscious.
What would happen if we did the same? What if we said YES to Twitter? What would happen if we followed everyone? Would our world change? Maybe not. But maybe WE would.
In amongst the pitches and requests that speed from my Inbox to the Trash, sometimes, just sometimes, comes something worth pausing over. An email from Todd Denis from Jawbone.tv made me curious enough to take a moment to check out the story – and I am glad I did.
Not only does Jawbone cover niche news topics in an engaging way, there is always a storytelling aspect to the content that they feature. For example, this article on Significant Objects is not just interesting in itself, but goes into the detail of how storytelling has been used as the basis for a social experiment – where a worthless object is transformed into something desirable (and valuable). Take a read.
What the experiment shows is that objects become valuable when a narrative or story is attached. That is, objects (yes, even social objects) are worth more to us, the readers, when it comes with a story. This is something that BTL advertisers and promotional marketers have known for years. The question here is how you and I can turn storytelling, objects and even events into an experience that our customers will pay for.
Right about now, most marketers will be starting to set their budgets for next year. We are looking at what worked this year, what didn’t, and thinking about how we can capitalise on the positive momentum and new product/feature launches that are planned for 2010. For some this means buying media. For others it means looking at earned media.
One of the very first things I do is to look at where my customers are playing. And by “playing”, I mean, where do they spend their time. How do they break down their days? I am looking for an understanding of their BEHAVIOUR. I am looking for opportunities to ENGAGE, not chances to interrupt. I’m seeking participation.
For me, it starts with data. I feed this into my continuous digital strategy process (regardless of whether it is digital or not). I look at the Google Trends data and I cross pollinate it with my own web analytics information. What do I see? I see the phenomenon that Ian Lyons is seeing. On the Datalicious blog, Ian suggests that Australian Brand Sites are Losing to the Social Web:
We are hanging out in social sites where relevant content finds us through our friends rather than searching out brands
Content is being pushed off-site through mechanisms such as RSS Feeds, Twitter, YouTube Channels and Facebook Fan pages
Ian shares a number of graphs to to demonstrate (take a good look at the post for more), but this one above clearly shows a significant fall in the number of daily unique visitors to all Australian online media properties. The most dramatic fall belongs to NineMSN.com.au. The important thing to remember with this, is that consumers haven’t suddenly lost half of their time or attention – they are shifting attention (their precious resource) to other places. And clearly consumer behaviour is not shifting to brands or even brand websites – it’s shifting to our friends, connections and family – online.
Facebook is the big winner. It’s winning because the future of your brand is social. It is winning because the decisions we make are now social. And as consumer behaviour and action continues to shift, as people continue to rely on social judgement as a means of filtering the thousands of advertising and branded messages they encounter each day, brands are going to struggle to remain relevant or even interesting.
It’s time to think about what I call the Auchterlonie Effect. It’s time, as Ian suggests, for brands to think of themselves as (niche) publishers. And it’s time to think about shifting that media budget of yours away from SPENDING and into INVESTMENT. Remember, on the web, content lasts forever. Use that insight to your advantage!
Whether you are walking down the street, watching the TV, surfing the net or even driving a car, you are the subject of some form of advertising. From the branded cap on the boy walking down the street to the billboard behind him – marketing is hard at work trying to capture your attention. Constance Hill and Bruce Henry suggest that we see around 3000 marketing messages each day. But no matter whether we see 100 or 10,000 messages – clearly we are exposed to a significant number. But how many do you recall? How many seep into your unconscious, adding a negative or positive neuron to your thoughts around these brands?
Now, add into this mix the dozens or even hundreds of blogs that you read and the tweets that you view on Twitter each day. Combine this with podcasts, music streams via blip.fm, videos on YouTube and email – and suddenly you have an abundant media stream that can appear overwhelming. As Sean Howard says, “In today's world everyone is a publisher, everyone has some level of influence, and everyone has a network of influence that is difficult to define let alone measure”. It makes the life of the media consumer rather complex.
As a marketer, however, you do have a specific objective. What you are aiming for is MAKING GRAVITY. With paid media you are using your marketing budget to have your content inserted into spaces that your audience inhabit. It is an expense which you measure in terms of how many people you have reached with your communication.
Earned media (or what Craig Wilson calls engagement marketing), on the other hand, is both different in nature and in measurement. Rather than being an expense, it is an investment. Its effectiveness is directly related to what you DO rather than what you SAY, and the value that is exchanged is not currency, but trust. As I have explained previously – it is about changing behaviours:
Every time we forward on a link, retweet a message read on Twitter or any other type of social network interaction, we are CHOOSING to act. We are not just using our network of connections to FILTER the noise, we are using it to SHAPE our experience. It is a choice. And understanding this distinction places us in a context where STORYTELLING emerges as vitally important?
Paid media has been an effective marketing approach for hundreds of years (if not longer). But it thrived in a time where attention was abundant and our media consumption choices were limited to a set number of channels. These days, media is abundant but our attention (and maybe more importantly, our respect) is scarce. Graham Brown has an excellent five minute piece on the challenges presented by these changes.
But the fundamental difference with paid vs earned media is the refocusing of effort. No longer do you spend your creative energies (and budgets) on producing executions that gain attention – you spend it on building trust and creating Auchterlonie Effects (stories that can be easily shared). Indeed, in the best traditions of storytelling, earned media propagates itself – becoming promiscuous in the process.
The reason that promiscuous ideas are important to your brand is that you WANT them to be shared. In social media, every shared idea, link or concept creates an exchange of value within a PERSONAL network – so the act of sharing is a recommendation of sorts. Over time the person who “adds value” to their network builds an abundant store of social capital. It is like branding – we can’t necessarily point to a PARTICULAR item – but to the recurring and ongoing sense of positive exchange relating to that person.
When YOUR brand story or content is the subject of that exchange, you are effectively providing a reason for connection between people in a network. And as these connections grow, as they are passed from person to person, you are creating points of gravity around your brand ecosystem. Your challenge then is to work with a continuous digital strategy to “share the message” but “own the destination”. The thing is, gravity can only be earned. And while you can employ paid media to complement your earned media – you need to make sure you have a compelling story to tell and to share.
Here is a great presentation on social networks by Paul Adams (with thanks to Rachel Beaney). Complete with slides and speaker notes, the presentation steps through the marked differences in our behaviours online and off. 
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