Digital Strategy - Servant of Chaos

Seeing the Trees in the Social Media Forest

Blogging, Digital Strategy, Measurement, Social Media

With each passing day there are more and more case studies, examples and justifications for brands to use social media. There are best practices emerging (or easily found with a Google search), thousands of “how to” blog posts explaining every aspect of social media (or perhaps the same aspect repeated 1000 times) and agencies devoted to social media as their core competency.

But it seems to me that we are beginning to swim (or is it drown?) in data. Because our social media interactions are digital, we can measure plenty of things – the time you spend on our sites, the things you click on, where you have come from, where you are going to, how much you spend, what you liked, rated and searched for and so on. And if you happen to have created a social network profile then we know even more about you – age, work history, relationships, preferences for products, brands, music, movies and so on.

But I have to ask – in amongst all this data, are we missing the trees for the forest?

You see, as marketers and as business people, we have been conditioned to think about after-the-fact aggregated data. We are used to thinking about what people DID based on certain conditions. This then allows us to cut-and-dice, segment and fine tune our customer base. It allows us to build out personas that make sense within the context of OUR BUSINESSES.

This works fine in a model where the direction of business communication is one way. It’s perfect in a world of broadcast – for in a broadcast world we are only interested in the forests (there being far too many trees to deal with). However, in a world where communication is polyphonic – where the authority of the message depends less on how shrill you are or how much air time you can buy – and relies instead on the trusted flow of recommendations from individual to individual, then a strategy which allows you to distinguish a hardwood from plantation pine is essential.

What this requires is for us to stop thinking about ROI.

It means turning our attention away from the R – the returns that come to us or our businesses – focusing instead on the I – what it is we are investing in.

By understanding who our consumers are, what our brand advocates look like, what they do (apart from loving our brands – yeah right!), where they play and so on, we can identify opportunities to engage with them. We need to invest in the RIGHT relationships – those that lead towards returns (monetary and non-monetary). We need to remember that branding is a marathon – that it all takes time – but we also need to work smarter. We need to take our excellent marketing processes and understanding and apply it in a way that enhances the way that we view our audiences. We need to use our knowledge of the forests to make sense of the trees, and only then will we begin to realise not only that social media makes sense for our businesses, but that “social” is the business.

Australian Consumer Online Experience: Earned Media Wins

Digital Strategy, earned media, Facts & Figures, Social Judgement, Social Media, Strategy

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!

Blogging for Small Business

Blogging, Books, Digital Strategy, Personal Branding

I am often asked whether the strategies, ideas and approaches discussed here on my blog can be applied to small business. The answer, in the best marketing speak, is “yes” and “no”.

For while it is easy to get caught in the endless repetition of strategic planning, creating a continuous digital strategy can be quite fast. If you know what you are doing, you can knock it over in a lazy afternoon. Unfortunately, you can also easily fall into the state of “analysis paralysis” – where you are unable to shift beyond one part of a process due to the volume of information you are trying to assimilate. My advice is to start as SMALL as you possibly can.

However, if you really are a small business and you want to get started with blogging – AND you want to do it in a way that is SCALABLE, can help you GROW your business and delivers RESULTS, then my advice would be to check out The Dialup Guide to Blogging.

I wrote this short (43pp), easy-to-read guide to blogging with the individual in mind – but the lessons and approaches apply equally to the small business. No matter whether your brand is personal or business, there is plenty to learn, and the book covers all the bases of digital strategy as well as the all important DOING IT part:

The book takes you through the practical steps of establishing your blogging objectives, creating domain names, signing up for a blog, creating your online "footprint" and writing your first posts. It is a must for anyone wondering HOW to get started.

And the best part – you can get it as a soft cover for those who are interested in “digital” but prefer non-digital books. Oh, and there is a downloadable eBook version too – for those too impatient to wait for delivery.

Branding is a Marathon

Branding, Digital Strategy, Social Media, Storytelling

One of the greatest, and perhaps hardest to quantify, benefits of social media is in the area of branding. But then again, this is nothing new. Trying to quantify the value of your brand is exceptionally difficult – just ask yourself how many businesses actually have their brands’ value represented as line items on a balance sheet?

One of the crowning achievements of the marketing industry over the last 50 years or so is the general acceptance of the value of branding. For despite the slipperiness of brand “valuations”, businesses AND consumers clearly “get” brands and branding. On the business side, solid and established brands provide a ready platform for our demand generation and other marketing activities. And as consumers, we are more than ready to mould our lifestyles around those rare brands that we have come to love – indeed, in some instances brands are intrinsically linked to the way that we create our identities (just think, for example, of the tribes of car fans).

Yet despite branding’s elusive nature, a well planned and executed, continuous digital strategy can create a very real, very tangible brand platform. And this is where social media presents a powerful opportunity. As you begin to execute on your strategy, you create multiple points of conversation across your business ecosystem – what can best be called your “digital footprint”. The more points of interaction that occur across your ecosystem create points of connection and exchanges of value. And as these are personal networks (not broadcast), there is a weighting – with one-to-one relationships the exchange involves trust and reputation. This is FAT VALUE.

And the more Fat Value that is created in an ecosystem, the faster GRAVITY begins to take shape. So every piece of content that you create, every link that you share and every idea that you set loose allows someone else to benefit from their interaction with your brand. And in this exchange of benefit, you are fulfilling your brand promise and creating branded experiences. And if you have your strategy right – this gravity will eventually begin to pull participants towards your brand.

This sounds great in theory, but making gravity takes a great deal of effort. In fact, branding in the social media space is more like a marathon than a sprint – hence the need to beware of those selling or offering quick viral wins. As Amy Mengel suggests, while the lure and attractiveness of a quick, viral hit is great for the adrenaline, the subsequent fall from attention is usually just as fast:

Despite the excitement it generates for a few days, the video your brand launched that “went viral” on YouTube may be entirely forgotten in a few months or weeks and ultimately do nothing for long-term growth.

A great example is Skittles. Remember Skittles.com? For a day or two – maybe even a week, Skittles.com was hotly reported across the web. Blogs were alight with idea that a brand would reflect not itself, but the consumers who were talking about the brand and their products. They did this by featuring their Wikipedia page, Twitter stream or Facebook group. David Berkowitz explained:

Here’s the message Skittles is sending: What consumers say about the brand is more important than what the brand has to say to consumers.

But where do brands go after the high? Freddie Laker at Ad Age wondered what would happen next, and this chart from Google Trends seems to indicate that this great experiment went nowhere. Then again, the Facebook fan page boasts 3.5 million members. It makes me think that FAT VALUE – those brand exchanges that take place between PEOPLE networks happens in places that even Google can’t adequately penetrate.

Now that is a fascinating thought.

Paid or Earned Media – Making Gravity is Hard Work

Branding, Digital Strategy, earned media, Media, Old Media, Social Judgement, Social Media, Storytelling

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.

Commitment Means Context

Digital Strategy, Social Media

UPDATE: Read Charles Frith's excellent thinking on context first.

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?

Digital Strategy, Social Media

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.

The Secret to Marketing

Blogging, Digital Strategy, Enterprise Social, Influence

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?