If you have ever been in a meeting about digital media, at some point you will have heard the words "Facebook strategy". It probably came after my other two favourite words “viral vieo”.
Now, the reason that these words are so needlessly bandied about is that marketers understand one thing – the need to reach an audience. So with any number of reports indicating that people are switching off their TVs and turning on their PCs, there is little wonder that social networks hold us all in their thrall.
As a result, we are seeing individuals, businesses and agencies developing campaigns designed to do deep-dive into the socially-networked world (check out Julian Cole’s very handy list of Facebook campaigns). These executions bring brands up-close-and-personal – often employing the mechanisms (such as “friending and un-friending”) used by Facebook as part of the engagement strategy – see the Sacrifice 10 Friends for a Whopper campaign by Burger King.
A core component of these campaigns is the concept of “co-creation”. That means that content is produced by the participant (ie the holder of the Facebook profile) and the brand and/or Facebook. But a recent change in the Facebook Terms of Service sounds a potential death knell to such projects.
As Chris Walters explains:
Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later. Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.
This has huge ramifications for individuals who regularly upload photos, personal movies and so on to Facebook – after all, you will no longer be able to OWN your content. How would you feel about seeing your newborn child’s face on some advertising for Facebook? How would you like your wedding photo being used to promote a Dating application? I am sure you can see where I am going with this …
Now flip it over. How will marketers react when told by their agency that the content from a recent campaign is being used in unsanctioned ways? What happens if there is a retraction required (after all, the content remains the property of Facebook in perpetuity)? How will your brand and reputation be managed well into the future?
And what about bloggers who use a variety of applications to post their RSS feeds? Sure, like me, you may license your content under Creative Commons – but this changes everything.
This change in the Facebook Terms of Service is a significant about face in the way in which Facebook treats its members. It may be too late for the content that I ALREADY have on my profile, but I will clearly be more SELECTIVE about the content I upload in the future. Because I won’t just be uploading, I will be GIVING it away.
Often when I tell people the name of my blog, Servant of Chaos, they take a step back. It seems that the word “chaos” carries with it connotations of danger or disruption. And yet, this is not the case – the “chaos” of which I speak is not anarchy. It is more aligned to chaos theory which is, in reality, about “finding the underlying order in apparently random data”.
By recognising the patterns within data – whether that data is demographic, technological, individual or corporate – we are able to bring sense to what we see. We can do so, because the interconnected patterns of data provide direction – allowing us to anticipate trends and potential outcomes. And this approach can be applied to understanding changes in individual or group behaviour, society or even global economies undergoing significant change or crisis.
In this fascinating article, How to Bring the Edge to the Core, John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, explain how this works:
We believe there is a sense-making pattern that can help us understand how change takes place in the economy. This pattern is "edge transforms the core."
Applying this thinking to marketing and social media, there are clear parallels. When we look across the marketing landscape, we can see disruption occurring on a number of levels:
Content production – user generated content is challenging the might of established publishers for relevance
Content filtering – with trust evaporating, populations are exercising social judgement, turning to networks of loosely connected individuals for trust-based decisionmaking (eg purchasing, recommendation, trial etc)
Distribution – peer-to-peer, digital and a plethora of user instigated distribution channels have invalidated the modes of distribution that have held sway over the last 50 years
Context – our view of the world is increasingly framed and reframed by the networks and communities in which we have invested trust and social capital.
These changes are occurring most profoundly in areas that can be loosely called “social media” – right on the edge of marketing practice. And what we understand instinctively, but are yet to adequately process, is that this social media edge offers a transformative opportunity for brands. Edges really are important:
They represent fertile seedbeds for innovation as unmet needs and unexploited capabilities tend to surface first on the edge. Edges also tend to be filled with people who are risk takers. Edge participants tend to connect more readily with each other because they all confront significant challenges in addressing the growth opportunities. Since there is so much growth potential for everyone, they are more willing to share insights and learning. Edges also have limited inertia since most of the large institutions, installed base and current sources of profitability are in the core.
The opportunity on the edge is, however, what attracts the core. Those established, core brands see the volatile and seemingly chaotic communities building via social networks as marketing’s holy grail. However, not ALL of these edges offer growth – they have uneven potential for growth. What is the difference between a “promising edge and a dead-end fringe” – and how do you tell? Apparently there are tell-tale characteristics:
… significant headroom for performance improvement and a large potential user base. Ideally, they also require modest investment for participation at the outset and offer the prospect of significant short-term returns …
In practical terms, this means that an INTEGRATED strategy is required. It means bringing “the core to the edge” – taking 10-20% of your MEDIA budget and investing it in “edge” activities. It means participating – not just with money, but with time, creativity and enthusiasm (or as Todd Defren suggests – holding an extended block party).
Social media will transform marketing, because we are seeing these shifts now (think of the recent announcements that advertising spend will drop in 2009, but digital/social related investments will rise). We are seeing new ways of producing, filtering, distributing and contextualising content. We are seeing real maturity in practices accelerating from the edge towards the core with the daily emergence of case studies, practical suggestions, innovation and leadership. (And if you are in any doubt, take a look at Todd Defren’s new eBook which goes a long way towards explaining exactly what is social media and how it can be used effectively – all in about 40 pages.)
The emerging patterns are no longer unclear. It is the edges that will deliver the innovation craved by markets – but perhaps most importantly – it may change the very nature of “marketing”. For the edge takes on new meaning:
Not only in their ability to help us recognize new ideas but, perhaps more importantly, in the power they give us to escape the old ones.
When we are looking to plan and execute a digital campaign, increasingly there is a need to look at not just WHERE we place our campaigns, but the context into which we place them. This is not just being driven by the rise of the “social web”, but by a transformation in the way that we view the relationships between agencies, clients and consumers.
In this interesting presentation by Don Epperson from Havas, he looks at the way in which their agency is transforming. In effect, they are following the model that has worked so well for Google.
By working from a single source of analytical data, Havas is able to aggregate a a whole lot of data based on actual behaviour. The trick is, rather than collecting data on a campaign level, the data warehouse captures information at a cookie level; meaning that the micro-transactions can be measured, tracked and aggregated. Then, by using an online advertising marketplace, the individual preferences of the people interacting with the system (banners/placements etc) can be auctioned to advertisers in a very granular way. This is what Don claims, is the agency of the future:
The agency of the future is going to act very much like the large ad networks today … we have to have scale in terms of reach, we have to be able to turn … data into knowledge …
All this, in turn (I am sure), feeds into their planning process – meaning that campaigns and activations become more targeted, more valuable to the consumer, and more meaningful to the client. It’s much like the potential on offer with Pure Profile.
As Matthew Mantey explains in this excellent post, Banners – Do They Work?, there is a mountain of data and insight to be found in even the simplest digital advertising campaign – so imagine what happens when you magnify this by a factor of 10, or 100, or 100,000:
Run one with even cursory tracking and analytics and you can find a mountain of insights. Obviously click-based conversions is the unrealistic grail you'll see, but if you set a cookie window, you'll see all of the view-based actions as well. You'll know the optimal exposure frequency level. You'll see the search patterns, branded and unbranded. You'll see format and message trends. You'll see geographic detail. And you'll probably find out that who you were targeting aren't the same demo that are interested in your stuff and coming to your site.
Is this the agency model of the future? Using technology to combine insight and targeted content within a permissible context sounds like the holy grail. The challenge would be putting the right pieces and partnerships together.
However, as I delve more into the concept of social judgement, I have a feeling that this sort of opportunity is just the tip of the iceberg. After all, taking this insight and opening it up to a social component during campaign activation could be where the REAL opportunity lies.
The words leap from your mouth. Eyes widen. Smiles broaden and the room comes alive. And as the heartbeats quicken and the enthusiasm begins to mount, you know that THIS project is going to rock. A love affair is beginning, and yet you don’t even notice it.
When we turn our attention away from strategy and planning and take a deep dive into implementation, the challenge is to maintain a focus and direction – to guide and channel the creative energies of your team. After all, we all have ideas; and we all like to “contribute”.
And when it comes to digital projects – whether you are considering a web based advertising campaign, a social media activation of some kind, or even building your own community – you will never find yourself bereft of ideas. But if you want to drive success for your project (and I am sure you do), you need to focus on simplicity – and the best way to do so is to focus on your market. Think about the PEOPLE who you will invite into your campaign or project. Think about the value that they will find, be surprised by, and share. And one of the best ways of doing this, is by STOPPING a focus on functions and functionality.
Ashley Ringrose shares these 15 tips for growing a community courtesy of Ben Huh from I Can Has Cheeseburger. And while the focus of the article is on taking communities to a new level, the same applies to almost any team-based endeavour. Think particularly about your next digital creative project or any Enterprise 2.0 efforts that you are considering (or engaged in), and then read item 5:
5. Stop Engineering and Start Thinking About the Market People who work in the technology industry tend to over engineer things. Don’t complicate your problems, simplify them. If you need to add a commenting system to your site don’t build it from scratch, download one. Whatever you do, do it quickly.
To an extent, we all fall in love with the projects we work on. Just make sure you don’t overcomplicate it. Keep it simple. Let it connect. Because in the end, true love isn’t about you, it’s about someone who loves you back.
Way back in March 2007, I decided to run a Twitter experiment. How could we turn “conversations” into “collaboration”. So I setup an account with the aim of producing a collaborative/crowdsourced poem.
The result, almost two years later is this poem (unfortunately you need to read backwards). We have over 230 updates and 350 followers.
But I think we can do better, you and I. Why don’t you login and add to this poem. You can either:
Log into the TwitterPoetry account: Use the username TwitterPoetry and password twitterpoetry and contribute a line to the growing poem.
Follow TwitterPoetry: Become a "follower" of TwitterPoetry and see how the poem grows as and when someone else contributes to it.
Oh, and if you figure out how to flip the twitter stream around, please let me know!
From a single creative impulse, a legion of additions, modifications and transmutations can spread in minutes, hours, days and weeks … What this means is that our ideas are constantly in a process of reinvention.
So when it comes to creating great marketing content that will be talked about, shared and spread across the networks of our lives, the challenge is to isolate the promiscuous idea – and then to set it free. This is where insight and clever planning can help. But it must also be build into the EXECUTION of your projects.
That’s why I love this interactive YouTube game. It may not be fancy … but imagine the possibilities for marketing your products or services. Imagine how, with some tweaking, that this concept could tell the story of your brand. As Wisey explains, it is both addictive and the potential is huge. I think my friend Todd Andrlik with his penchant for video will really get a kick out of it.
Over the past few weeks I have noticed a spate of demands for social media proponents to share their case studies. Michael Watkins asked whether anyone is doing anything with social media other than just talk, and Laurel Papworth responds by listing her favourite Australian social media projects. But the issue runs deeper.
On the one hand, as Mike Zeederberg of Profero explains, “… one of the key strengths of the social media space – if you're not part of the target audience, you'd never even know a campaign was running … no wastage, no mess, no fuss”. But many agencies (and the clients they work for) are often restricted from publishing details of their campaigns – competitive advantage being what it is. At best, such details are disclosed during conference presentations or worst, during closed one-on-one pitches for new work. All this leaves most of us guessing at the effectiveness and ROI.
So what’s an agency to do?
In this interview with Michael Kordahi, Heather Snodgrass, Greg Brine and Iain McDonald explain how an idea was transformed by a Twitter conversation and spawned a great online competition. In the process, the competition demonstrated the way that SEO and social media (in all its guises) can quickly and convincingly produce measurable results for an brand/product/service – or even an imaginary dinosaur – the Velociroflcoptersaurus.
As it turns out, the competition was fanned by Happener’s Markus Hafner and ultimately won by Nick Homes a Court (click here to hear how Nick’s strategy was developed and executed). A quick Google search yields almost 7,000 search results for a word that previously did not exist. Not bad going for a competition that started at the beginning of January 2009 and ended two weeks later.
It goes to show just what can be done (and demonstrated) when you approach it creatively. Nice.
Mark Pollard shares this excellent presentation given to the IgniteSydney crowd recently. In it, Mark talks about his experience of running a large, interesting, and influential website, Stealth Magazine … well, it started out as a magazine, but is really a meeting place – a community – for hip hop. Since 2002 there have been 128,000 posts, 11,000 topics and almost 2000 members. Clearly this is a vibrant (and viable) website – and in this presentation, he shares his Seven Things to be Learned from Hip Hop. You can read through the background notes here.
What was particularly interesting to me was Mark’s conception of community – and his point that “anonymity is the antithesis of community”. This,in turn, generated some debate with Julian Cole and Matt Moore driving alternative points of view. Of course, like any definition, “community” is also hard to pin down.
My interest in community is mostly around the way that communities move (and can be moved) in relation to human behaviour. Whether we know it or not, almost every interaction we have with another person leaves a trace of our identity. Think Gattaca on a physical level and think language/nuance on an emotional level. Think style in terms of our visual footprint. The thing is, we are pre-programmed to be social – so we betray ourselves even with our best attempts at subterfuge. And for all the chaos and noise of our daily lives, it is remarkably easy to find the holes in “fake identities” only because it is incredibly difficult to be consistently somebody else. And this was made abundantly clear to me recently when I was the subject of an experiment in chaos, courtesy of Marcus Brown.
Taking a lead from this speech by Heath Ledger as the Joker, flipped a coin and decided to unleash a little chaos. On me/my site. It appeared that he had learned of some flaw in Feedburner that opened a door … or so he claimed, and I was being singled out as “Mr Age of Conversation” – yet another . But he paused before moving ahead. He published a poll asking whether chaos should be directed at me, or at his own site. He gave us a choice. By coincidence, this all happened during a week when I was disconnected – on holiday and with very limited Internet access … so I did not really know what would happen and what the outcome would be.
I waited for the votes to come in. I checked my email each couple of days, but could not see much action. I visited Marcus’ site a couple of times but the voting looked pretty close. Eventually, the votes were counted. I had received an enormous number of votes – and I thank everyone who supported me. As Marcus explains:
People will do anything to save Gavin Heaton. What surprised me most was how devious they were about doing it. I know for a fact that most of the people (there were about 700 of them) came into vote off the back of an email. It was brilliant to watch because they were keeping so quiet. There were only a couple of tweets about it and the volume was very low. It was fascinating to watch.
What Marcus was watching via voting patterns combined with web analytics, was the activation of a community. But more interestingly, it was a swift and directed course of action set in train by a single request (as Marcus explains, most voting was triggered off the back of a single email – sent not by me). And this is where community comes into play. While the “network” could have been used – such as Twitter or a blog post – that sort of open dynamic can also invite additional chaos and randomness into the mix. That means, that for every positive response (on my behalf), there could well have been additional random responses which could go either way.
In my view, community is about belonging. It is about the actions and interactions over time which build a web of mutually reinforcing reputations. These repeated patterns of micro interactions allow us to create a “social judgement” about the people with whom we interact – even if we don’t know their names, we know them by the traces left in the consistency of their actions, in-actions and communications. I was “saved” from chaos by the orchestrated mobilising of a community to which I belonged – by the people in whom I had established a bond. And at the heart of this, at the very centre, was trust. As Valdis Krebs explains:
… people are loyal to what they are connected to and what provides them benefits. People stick with established ties they trust. Interacting with those we know and trust brings a sense of warmth and belonging to the virtual communities we visit via our computer screens.
By activating a community (rather than a network), response could be directed.
As I have said before, Marcus is one of the foremost practitioners of social media creation. He inhabits and creates a storyline like no one else I know, and activates it with an intensity that turns our gaze around on ourselves – making us ask the question – will he do it … or will I? That is, he forces us into a state where non-participation is also an act of engagement.
When I read the lead-up posts on Marcus’ blog, I was wondering who he was targeting. But by the end of the first post, I had an inkling that he was talking about me. There were clues scattered throughout that were pointing in my direction. And yet, even when he did announce that I was the target, it still sent a shiver down my spine. My intuition had read the signs, but I had not yet comprehended this – I was caught by the story, and had not yet brought it into my real world. But I was reading superficially. I was reading what was SAID, not what was MEANT. I was ignoring the mind reader’s toolkit.
What does this all mean?
Clearly “authenticity” is hard to fake – but we ARE easily swayed by a compelling story. It’s why headlines work so well – they set the parameters for the narrative that follows. For in the story – and in this case - a live unfolding of events, we are in-effect practising SOCIAL JUDGEMENT. And while, in real life, we are able to use a variety of cues to determine the trustworthiness of certain situations and/or individuals, in an online environment, we are still finding our way. As David Armano asks, do you know who you are talking to?
The thing to remember, however, is that trust trumps story.
On reflection, I realise that over the last few years I had followed, almost to the letter, each of Mark Pollard’s seven steps … but it was the last THREE steps (pass the mic, let the community self-regulate, get off the computer) that were the catalysts for action. And this is important – because my interest is in driving behaviour and creating the conditions for participation.
And as we move into the meat of 2009, and your marketing plans firm (or shrink), I want you to consider this. Think about how “social” your media plans will be. Think about the directions you want to move and how you want to get there. Determine the conditions through which you can create social judgement. And most importantly, ask yourself – who do you trust – and who trusts you?
I have been a member of the Qantas Frequent Flyer program for years. I joined about ten years ago when I realised there were benefits available by consolidating all my business travel with the one airline. Later I found that I could transfer the points accrued on my credit cards over to my Frequent Flyer account – and use the extra points for free travel.
And despite the occasional issue with seat bookings, it has worked very well. For me at least.
Late last year, however, I received a message from my credit card providers explaining that soon it will not be possible to transfer my points balances over to the Qantas Frequent Flyer program. Well, with American Express at least, it is possible – but with higher fees or charges.
And now that deadline is drawing near.
The “It’s Time to Choose” campaign, by M&C Saatchi, launches on Monday. Inspired by the recent political campaigns of President Obama and Prime Minister Rudd, the simple message aims to remind us all to transfer our points while we still can.
Steve Woodruff entertains the marketing blogosphere with a 5am shot of good reading each and every day. Today, to give him a sleep-in, I have volunteered to deliver a 5-shot steaming good blogosphere reading. Enjoy!
1. I care and I think you do too. By Bretienbach and Brown. Social media commentators talk a lot about community. I know I do. But what happens when real life community fails us? What happens when we feel isolated, alone, broken? And can a simple act of caring – a blog post, a picture – change one person’s outlook on life? This is YOUR chance to find out.
2. Trend Blend 2009+.By Jen Stumbles. In case you haven’t seen Richard Watson’s excellent trend map, Jen reminds us where to find it.
3. So Easy, A 7-Year-Old Can Do It. By Mike Wagner. Want to think about your customers in a new way? Mike takes a lesson in customer experience from his seven-year-old grandson.
4. How to be an Exciting Brand without Offending Anyone. By Mike Arauz. Think it’s possible? Mike (another Mike), sets us all straight. Damn straight.
5. My Biggest Fear in Life. By Mark Pollard. Mark shares. Now go back to shot 1 and start again! Thanks for reading.
This has huge ramifications for individuals who regularly upload photos, personal movies and so on to Facebook – after all, you will no longer be able to OWN your content. How would you feel about seeing your newborn child’s face on some advertising for Facebook? How would you like your wedding photo being used to promote a Dating application? I am sure you can see where I am going with this …
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