Welcome to the Age of the Social Consumer

Audience 2.0, Social Business, Social Media, The Social Way

Names can be confusing – especially when it comes to that ever shrinking membrane between businesses and their customers. Variously we call them customers, clients, stakeholders and consumers. Sometimes these people – for they are always people – are also our employees, partners, shareholders, suppliers and even executives.

The lines have blurred.

Let me just say that this has always and forever been the case. It’s just that in the past we have been happy to jump between roles – to change our mask as we pass security and to leave it at the door as we enter our homes. But over the last 20-30 years there has been an erosion in the compact that we make with businesses that once allowed this play acting to continue. We no longer have a job for life. And we are equally likely to discard one brand for a competitor’s at a moment’s notice.

The casualty in all this is, of course, trust.

This introduction to the Q3 refresh of the Outlook on Australian Social Business in 2012 reveals the trend – that we are already, always connected. And that we are – now more than ever – digitally connected. And no matter whether we see ourselves as employees, customers, shareholders or executives (or anything in-between), we are all Social Consumers.

The updated report is divided into three sections:

  1. The new face of doing business looks at social consumers, their expectations and how these play out at the membrane of the brand
  2. The business value of customer intimacy investigates the style of interactions and engagement
  3. The hidden power of enterprise social media focuses on the types of behaviour, systems and processes that are being used behind our business firewalls

You can purchase and download your copy of the report today.

In Every Presentation, the Story Starts With You

Conferences, Storytelling

Over the last month or so I have done a lot of public speaking. It can be one of the most terrifying activities that you ever willingly put yourself through. Or you may find it exhilarating. But no matter whether you fall into one camp or another, you will quickly realise that you face a challenge – and that is to tell a story.

How do you do it? Where do you start?

Simple.

You start with you.

Samantha Starmer has created this great presentation on the nuts and bolts of presentations. She suggests you start with your own story – why are you speaking and what do you want people to remember. From there it’s about understanding the environment for your presentation and getting a feel for the space and the audience; structuring the presentation well and rehearsing.

Sounds simple, right?

The reality is much more challenging. But if you follow this approach, you’ll be well on your way.

The Social Power of YouTube Search

Social Judgement, Social Media, Strategy

Creating a YouTube channel for your brand is a no-brainer. As the second largest search engine – and especially influential with younger audiences – YouTube can have a significant impact on the effectiveness of your digital strategy.

But just as we must optimise our blog posts and website pages to achieve decent ranking on Google’s search engine, we also also optimise our videos for effective search results on YouTube.

The interesting thing for me, however, is the focus and importance that is placed on the social dimension of the YouTube search algorithm.

Take a look at this great infographic from Martin Missfeldt – showing how it’s not just about the number of views or keyword relevance that are important. Other elements that impact your ranking include:

  • Sharing – through social sites like Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and Google+, as well as the number of sites that embed and link to your videos
  • Reactions – the number, type and style of interactions have a massive impact – including votes, responses, playlist additions, comments, reactions and so on
  • Audience retention – how to your videos rate competitively, do they hold your viewers throughout the clip?

This social dimension means that – when combined with the overall strength of your YouTube channel (authority, trust, subscribers etc) – your success with video is largely reliant on your ability to create a vibrant community rather than casual video viewers. And that means really understanding your audience – not just uploading a ready-made TVC. And it makes me wonder whether this is Google carrying A/B testing on their search engine … because for ages I have thought that the future of search is social. This may be one of the early steps.

youtube-video-seo-ranking-factors-infographic

Help Make a Life Bridge One Coffee at a Time

Good Works

I’ve never run a marathon in my life. And I never intend to. But some people not only run real marathons, they run them metaphorically too.

Imagine if your mind and body could combine to make a life bridge – that you could use your brains and brawn in such a way as to change a life. Save a life. Make a difference.

That’s exactly what Matt Jones wants to do. He wants to raise awareness of global child mortality and he is crowdsourcing support for a project one coffee at a time. He’s going to run 10 sub-marathons in 10 cities across 10 countries all in one month. By supporting his project, you will help create Life Bridge: the book, a design forum in each city, an actionable list and a co-created three year plan to help alleviate child poverty by 2015.

How does it work? Here is what he recommends:

1. Go ahead and make my day. Support me for $4: The cost of a coffee. Come on- join me on the journey!

2. Consider the $33 reward ’10 Postcards Sent With Love’: This includes a signed copy of the ‘Life Bridge’ book. Let me share my journey with you personally by sending you 10 postcards along the journey. There will be inspiration, and there will be rawness of experience. Sent with a lot of TLC.

3. If you can afford it, chose the $240 reward ‘Hardcover Edition’ with postcards: This will be a rare and beautifully published hardback edition of the ‘Life Bridge’ book, signed with a dedication from myself. I will also be sending you 10 postcards from along my journey while I am digging deep and giving it my all.

I’ve joined in – and it would be great if you could too. It’s just $4 – the cost of a cup of coffee – a small contribution to a large problem. Please consider supporting this Pozible project.

 

Setting a Social Media Agenda–Courtesy of Randi Zuckerberg

Conferences

1345079821At the Australian Business Chamber of Commerce conference in Melbourne this week, I have been fortunate to hear the ideas and insight of a number of overseas speakers, including Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Randi Zuckerberg. And while I have done my best to share this insight via Twitter using the hashtag #acbc12, the stream does not do justice to the energy, insight and passion of the speakers. For no matter how much we write, we are always caught in the trap of writing – it’s just words and doesn’t pack the punch of an on-stage, in-your-face presentation of ideas.

Before kicking into  trends, Randi Suggested that there are some personas that we don’t want to adopt, including:

  • The crazy cat lady
  • Obsessive food blogger
  • The humble bragger
  • The depressed broadcaster
  • The old person who doesn’t get it. The person who uses Facebook as Google
  • The fruitless celeb tweeter
  • The cheesy motivation tweeter

And while we may all wink knowingly at these, she also advised that there were TEN key trends that we needed to be aware of:

  1. Luxury living without luxury spending
  2. Loyalty program of the future – make your fans famous
  3. Using platforms for customer service
  4. Mobile first
  5. People as curators – become the expert in your field
  6. Have a sense of humour
  7. Crowdsourcing
  8. We are all media companies now
  9. Video and livestreaming
  10. Gamification

Now …. we may see these trends and behavioural manifestations in our audiences … but what does that mean for your business. Let’s think about that strategically. And let’s turn this into a social business. Together. I call it the Social Way – but you may call it the cost of doing business.

Here’s to Your Strange Heart

Activism, Age of Conversation, Smart Bloggers, Story of the Week, The Social Way, Videos

Many, many years ago – back in my early days of social media, I connected with a very strange person. His name is Mike Wagner. He was a boldly creative and generous spirit that leaped at me out of the vast sea of social media chaos. I loved his energy and his thinking.

But the thing is … he stood out. We connected. We conversed. And after many years of connecting over social media, we met – face-to-face – in Des Moines, Iowa – and I felt like we had been friends for years. I thought it was about some deeper truth related to social media. But I was wrong.

And now I know how he did it. He used his STRANGE on me.

In this great TEDxDesMoines talk, he talks about the positive power of strangeness – and how we can tap into our strangeness to connect with the people who can help us solve the problems of our world.

So how do you feel today? I’m full of Johnny Cash today, but tomorrow I expect a touch of Ray LaMontagne. Rock on with your strangeness today.

Five Must-Read Posts from Last Week

5 Must-Read Posts

5MustReads The last week has been a bit of a blur – and I was just not able to finish off the five must-read posts last week … so I’m jamming two weeks together now. Slightly early … and maybe you’ll find this an antidote for insomnia on Sunday evening – or an inspiring way to start your Monday. Either way – I trust you will enjoy these five great reads.

  1. Trevor Young hits it out of the ballpark with his great post I’ve Seen Marketing’s Future and its Name is Amanda Palmer. Superb thinking and connecting of the dots
  2. Kate Carruthers looks at the big shifts between the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries – focusing on the digital economy and the digital revolution
  3. Any marketing practitioner will know – often through bitter experience – that our jobs are infinitely harder than they used to be. But Bill Lee says the evidence is clear – Marketing is Dead
  4. The climate change deniers can deny all they like. But Bill McKibben says you just need to follow the figures to realise just who the real enemy is – Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math
  5. I’ve been saying it for years – share the message but OWN the destination. But Ray Wang pulls no punches –> Brands are dumb if they drive traffic to Facebook. Read it and weep suckers!

How to Listen with Free and Paid Social Media Monitoring Tools – Pharma and Healthcare

Digital Strategy, Social Media, Strategy

Yesterday I spoke at the 2012 Digital Pharma Seminar hosted by Princeton Digital and VIVA!Communications. The topic was “building a digital roadmap” … or more precisely, where to start with digital strategy for pharmaceutical companies.

In highly regulated and competitive industries like pharmaceuticals, there is, however, a greater level of attention paid to the area of “listening and monitoring”. And the Medicines Australia code of conduct, edition 16, explicitly addresses social media in section 12.9 as follows:

Information provided to the general public via any form of social media must comply with the provisions of Section 12.3, 12.4, 12.5, 12.6 and 12.7 of the Code.

The focus, essentially, is on the provision of accurate and scientifically reliable information – not promotion. So I thought it may be useful to modify my How to Listen Infographic specifically for pharma. It also includes a small selection of tools that can be used to support your monitoring efforts – including free sites like SocialMention.com and Google Alerts – as well as “for fee” and “freemium” platforms like Radian6, NetBase and HootSuite.

Be sure to let me know if you have improvements or other suggestions!

The @MarsCuriosity Rover Has More Personality Than Most Brands

Branding, Infographics, Social Media, Storytelling

When NASA’s Curiosity Rover hit the ground on Mars, it was minutes before we knew its fate (see infographic below). It takes some time for light and data to travel the 35 million miles between Earth and Mars. And yet we sat glued to the streamcast of dozens of people sitting at desks at Mission Control – hanging on every disembodied word from the flight controller – effectively living moments that had already happened.

Meanwhile, across the twitterstream, the @MarsCuriosity account was brimming with enthusiasm and pithy one-liners. One of my favourites is below.

It makes me wonder … why can’t brands adopt social media with such passion and interest? Why can’t they embrace an attitude that engages their audiences?

But it’s not just Twitter that NASA has mastered. They have open sourced their imagery and data – allowing anyone to design their own NASA-focused infographics (aka the social media expert’s tool of choice). After you have created your own infographic, you can then upload it to be shared with the NASA audience – giving you more than just a touch of space nerd celebrity.

At a guess, NASA have followed this path for a strategic reason – to drive a powerful emotional connection with a global, passionate and technically-literate audience. And at some point – around budget time – that audience will be called upon to help sway the thinking of penny-pinching politicians.

And if NASA – can orchestrate this type of sophisticated global engagement program – why can’t brands?

MarsCuriosityInfographic

When Your Brand Tells My Story – P&O’s 175th Anniversary

Digital Strategy, Social Media, Storytelling, Strategy, The Social Way

About four years ago I started looking at the future of brands. I wanted to explore in a series of articles what I felt was coming down the track – and to think through the implications from a branding point of view. I decided back then, that there were five key aspects that marketers would need to address:

  1. Play – how do we bring a sense of playfulness and engagement to brands – particularly in the “digital” space
  2. Micro – understanding the power of small interactions and the way these customer interactions crush the slow moving “big idea”
  3. Performance – what does it mean for a brand to “live” in a digitally-connected, always-on world
  4. Content – how content is at the heart of your brand (whether you know it or like it – or not)
  5. You – the personal dimension of branding – and what I now call “the social way”

Interestingly, I still hold these elements in my mind when I look through various campaigns and digital programs that flash across my various screens. And for better or worse, most advertising or the digital equivalent leaves me cold, detached, emotionally vacant. Every now and then I do, however, see cause for hope.

The P&O microsite celebrating 175 years of cruising history is one such ray of hope. There’s a touch of playfulness (and even some elements of the P-L-A-Y content model), micro interactions in the form of passenger stories and images, the potential for commentary and interaction, and a nice easy-to-use microsite.

Edge_P&OCruises_175 Years_Image3 copy

But this is still seems to be a brand under management rather than a truly “social brand”. Surely there are thousands of stories of P&O passengers that have already been shared on social sites like Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr or YouTube – could it have been possible to tap into what already exists? Perhaps orchestrating the permissions etc was beyond scope or budget … and yet, I wonder how a more open platform might have seen the number of submissions leap ahead – or generate more buzz around what is a great storytelling idea.

ThisIsSydneyNow

Contrast this, for example, to vibrant immediacy of the visual storytelling offered by This is Sydney Now. Drawing on the Instagram API, it shows in real time what is being tagged and shared on that photography-inspired platform. It’s voyeuristic, messy and highly addictive. To have your photo appear, all you need to do is to take a photo on a smartphone and include the geo-tag location information (a simple on/off option in the Instagram app).

Now imagine if there was 175 years of that sort of storytelling available? Now that would be a story to blow your mind.