What Facebook’s Year in Review Reveals About Us

Big Data, Social Media, Storytelling, Trends

facebooktrendsAus The promise of big data is that it can reveal to us the truth in our behaviours, not just our beliefs.

Just think, for example, about your internet use over the last year. Or month. Or even week. What did you do? What sites did you visit? What did you click on? Why did you share a page or two, a link or a video? Now, imagine if we did the same thing for your friends – if we knew what they looked, liked and loved?

facebookstories2 And if we did the same with their friends, and their friends’ friends.

If we could overlay that in some way to create a visual tag cloud, we may just get a sense of what is important to our communities. We may garner some magical insight into what it is like to live in this rapidly changing world.

Well that’s what Facebook Stories is doing. Of course, it works best if you are a heavy Facebook user (I’m not), but it’s an interesting experiment that shows everything from your own personal timeline stories through to the trends that impacted us by country and by category.

But, for me, the most interesting thing that Facebook Stories reveals is where the pulse of our humanity lies. Take a look at some of the trends – you’ll see what I mean.

Five Must-Read Posts from Last Week

5 Must-Read Posts

5MustReads Each week I collect articles that inspire me.

Sometimes that means that I have dozens of extra tabs open in my web browser, and sometimes I rely on the astounding feedly feed reader. In both cases this week, I ended with a surfeit of great articles. Here are the best five of about 20 that could easily been published.

  1. Mark Pollard relentlessly plumbs personal experience to challenge our own stories and behaviours. He thinks the world would be less strange if we stopped making strangers out of men. I think he should write a book rather than a blog 😉
  2. How is enterprise software changing? Ken Yeung sits in on a conversation with some of the innovators who are eyeing up potential disruption in the enterprise market, and the message is clear: end users are the new CIO
  3. Not only do our in-built biases protect us, they also help us move forward, to dream impossible dreams. Maria Popova explains the science of our optimism bias and the life-cycle of happiness. Awesome
  4. Has Facebook lost its sheen for you or your brand? Do you feel you have lost control of your content? The Guardian is ending its year-long experiment in social reading and is moving away from Facebook. Will you?
  5. Ever wondered why your calls to action fall on deaf ears? Eaon Pritchard explains in terms of the diffusion of responsibility. Be sure to read it and make a comment. Be specific.

Should You Work for Free

Jobs, Life, Rant

Almost everyone I know has been asked to work for free at some stage in their career. The question may have come from:

  • A family member: perhaps your parents need help with their computer. Maybe your brother needs a website or some graphic design help. Perhaps your sister wants to shoot and edit a video for school. We’ve all been there
  • A not-for-profit: they do great work but need help from someone with your expertise
  • A startup: cool entrepreneurs bootstrapping their business need a lot of help. Maybe you know something that could help
  • A business: maybe things are not going so well, but with your help they could get through a recent dry spell. Perhaps there’s an opportunity for paid work down the track

It’s great to help people, but where do you draw the line? Are you in business for your self or are you giving your hard won expertise away for free? This great chart by Jessica Hische provides some handy questions that you should ask yourself before saying “yes” to your next free gig.

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The Perfect Gift this Holiday

Activism, Books, Good Works

Way back in 2009, Mark Pollard and I set out to change the online conversation about men’s health, depression, suicide and alcohol dependency. As part of the Inspire Foundation’s Manweek campaign, we collected stories that would help reinvent manhood. We even had author of Manhood and Raising Boys, Steve Biddulph write an introduction.

This is one hell of a book. Born out of a triple j week focusing on men’s lives, and created by its listeners, it’s a remarkable piece of work.

A man’s life, whether he is 18 or 80, can start to go badly. And often, after that, it just gets worse. How to turn your life around is a serious concern. The men who write these gutsy, honest, emotionally vulnerable stories create an excitement and energy in the reader, because they have faced the dragon of their own pain, and won. They got help, they dived in, they didn’t give up, and they trusted the power of their hearts to bring them through.

Every kind of man, every single style of writing, with pictures, cartoons, short and punchy, you will find bits of yourself all over these pages. Read it and weep. It will change you.l

We know that around this time of year – when we celebrate Christmas and head into the holiday season – some men find themselves isolated and struggling. The book, The Perfect Gift for a Man, was written specifically for them. And it remains as powerful and as relevant today as it did in 2009.

Get a free download of the book today.

If you need help with issues like these, please contact Reachout. If you’re in Australia and want to talk to someone, try Lifeline 13 11 14 or Inspire.


The Long Trail of Digital’s Long Tail

B2B Marketing, Case Studies, Digital Strategy, Social Media

For the last couple of months I have been researching the digital marketing automation market – speaking with vendors, watching demos, listening to customers and analysing features, statistics and case studies. It’s a crowded market with a wide variety of feature sets and capabilities.

But if there is one thing that is obvious in all the noise, it is this: while the technology has matured, digital marketing skills, capabilities and processes are comparatively immature.

Marketing automation software delivers impressive outcomes:

  • ROI: Identifying, nurturing and delivering warm leads into your sales funnel gives your marketing a direct line to ROI. This path to revenue provides marketers with the confidence and knowledge to understand what works and what doesn’t when it comes to digital marketing investment
  • Accelerate marketing maturity: marketing automation requires a certain level of process maturity in your marketing. For businesses where process has been lacking or alignment with sales has been ambivalent, marketing automation can deliver a relatively quick win
  • Generate uplift through omni-channel integration: many marketers focus on “last click attribution”. But we rarely make single click decisions – especially on more expensive purchases or when we are in a B2B situation. Integrated or omni-channel marketing has been shown to significantly impact revenue and pipeline.

The presentation below is a case study of one of Marketo’s own omni-channel campaigns. It reveals that the digital long tail is indeed, a very long trail. But careful planning and management can, with targeted content, deliver value across your marketing programs – not only for your digital work.

Interested in marketing automation? If you are interested in my upcoming marketing automation report, contact me here or sign-up for access to the Constellation Research Library.

 

Trend: I’m Fricken Michaelangelo

Rant, Videos

I’m overwhelmed by the sheer number of trend announcements and insights for 2013 that are circulating the web at the moment. It seems that we have an abundance of opinion yet live in the desert of insight.

Almost everyone says the same thing in a different way. Or with a quirky direction. Almost always there is an angle that reflects positively on the writer’s own work or business.

Now, there is nothing wrong with all this. In fact, I am working on my own trends document which I am sure you will gasp and coo about. But it’s not trends that we are talking about really. It’s marketing. We are spruiking our opinions based on an understanding of our markets and our business ecosystems.

It’s not rocket science (unless you are writing about trends in space exploration) but it is hard work. It requires effort, time to think and an ability to articulate a point of view.

And while there are many shifts and changes in our business landscape on their way. There is one that is paramount. I’m fricken Michaelangelo.

We all have opinions and share them for the “5 likes” that they are worth. Just watch this video from College Humor and you will observe all the trends that are taking place in front of our very eyes. Scary but true.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Nn-dD-QKYN4

Five Must-Read Posts from Last Week

5 Must-Read Posts

It seems that we are accelerating towards the end of the year – not winding down. And while last week I focused on posts that kept away from trends and predictions, this week it’s been hard to avoid them. Here are some top quality reads to get your brain in gear:

  1. There is a reason that Seth Godin is one of the web’s most popular and oft-quoted bloggers. This post on the industrialists vs the rest of us really helped me this week. Hopefully it will help you too
  2. Neil Perkin has pulled together a fantastic presentation on digital content trends for 2013. Worth reading, absorbing and acting on
  3. Ever wondered why disruptive technology is so disruptive? R “Ray” Wang provides a great framework for understanding the organisational personas found across the enterprise landscape
  4. We all crave “engagement” … but what does that really mean? Valeria Maltoni explains that there are certain kinds of stories that drive engagement
  5. I loved this provocative rant from Dan Lyons on startups that can’t raise money. Let’s all shed some tears

A Little Joy to Start Your Week

Branding, Financial Services, Videos

Flashmobs tend to feel too smug to be joyous. But this one produced for Spanish bank, Banco Sabadell works wonderfully. As explained:

Earlier this summer, the bank brought together 100 musicians and singers from the Orchestra Simfonica del Valles, Amics de l’Opera de Sabadell, Coral Belles Arts, and Cor Lieder Camera to perform the anthem of the European Union — Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” from his Symphony No. 9. It all happens in the Plaça de Sant Roc in Sabadell, Spain, a little north of Barcelona. Perhaps this will put a smile on your face. Maybe you’ll even shed a tear. One way or another, make sure you turn up your speakers….

Via Open Culture with thanks to Steve Woodruff.

Friday’s Famous Tweets

Fridays Famous Tweets

Each Monday I write up a summary of the best five articles that from the previous week. This curated “Five Must Read Posts” series serves a series of purposes:

  • Improves the signal to noise ratio: I only post the most useful and interesting of articles that I have read or noticed over the previous seven days
  • Stokes creativity through diversity: I am a great believer in the power of random ideas to drive the creative process. Hopefully these posts add to the diversity of content you read or are exposed to
  • Share the link love: Links are the currency of the web. By linking to quality content, I hope to share traffic but also shine a little reputational love on sites and authors who deserve it

However, there is a lot of action that doesn’t happen on blogs each week. Twitter is where the conversational action takes place … so with that in mind, I thought I’d match Monday’s must-reads with Friday’s famous tweets.

Accordingly, here are the five most clicked tweets from the past week:

From Big Data Science to Big Data Action http://su.pr/32pLOs image
The Shift from Mobile First to Mobile Only http://su.pr/9vRLTC image
The Many Colours of Digital Disruption http://su.pr/50IyIJ image
Instagram Co-Founder Mike Krieger’s 8 Principles For Building Products People Want http://su.pr/1Qepmh #flearn image
uh oh! 5 Signs You’re Not As Smart As You Think http://su.pr/1sFgl0 image