The R.O.A.D to a marketing edge in 2013

There has never been a more exciting time for digital marketing. Brands can interact with audiences more immediately and on a deeper level than ever before in 2013 and beyond. Blah, blah, blah etc.  Okay, to cut to the chase. The four elements that marketeers will need to truly get to grips with are: real-time, open API’s, access to coding and data (Big Data). Yes, I’ve turned it into an acronym – it’s all about mastering the R.O.A.D.:

1. Real-time is what we see everyday on Twitter and other social media platforms, the ability to interact and share things with your audience at speed and scale.  In 2013, real-time will be being used by brands to actually solve problems for whole communities as they arise, rather than just to listen and respond on a trivial level.  Low-cost sensor networks will be increasingly adopted by brands to constantly feedback on product usage and brand interactions, allowing greater insights and responsiveness from marketeers.

2. Open API’s are when software can be accessed and used by anyone. For example, instead of playing with a Barclays’ Football app on your mobile, you could actually change and develop the app with Barclays’ blessing.  In 2013, brands will start to let developers get their hands on brand properties more and more; and effectively do the R&D on them.  This way brands will be able to innovate rapidly without employing huge teams, simply by stimulating and liberating the knowledge and skills of the “crowd”.  For example, eBay has APIs that allow developers to access their database so they can create new and innovative ways to buy and sell merchandise.

3. Access to coding entering the mainstream as a top trend for 2013, means brands will be offering up APIs that in a few years even kids who have been brought up using resources such as gethopscotch.com, will be able to use basing coding skills to develop and resell.  What this creates is fans working with brands (and for brands) all across the world because of the joy and utility of being granted open access.

1. Data, or rather “Big Data”. This is the phrase for all the gazillions of pieces of info that are collected on us everyday by brands and businesses; an overwhelming amount of data to do anything useful with, until now.  With more data now recorded digitally, new tools and specialist analysts rising up through the ranks, brands are finally able to sift through the mounds of data for actionable insights that are being used to:

• create controlled experiments to predict the impact of business decisions
• better tailor products and services more precisely to different customer demographics
• drive new product innovations based on concrete data-driven feedback

Has your brand got the necessary talent to harvest the benefits of big data? It better start acquiring them in 2013, as according to McKinsey Global: “we estimate that a retailer using big data to the full has the potential to increase its operating margin by more than 60 percent”.

For more of this chatter on what 2013 holds, checkout the Inkling 2013 Trends Report:

What now for social media specialists?

I sense a certain ennui amongst senior social media pros. A sense that it is all not quite as exciting as it used to be.  This was eloquently expressed by the brilliant Tac Anderson (former Head of Digital Strategies at Wagenner Edstrom), who wrote in a recent post: “To me, all the big social media puzzles have been solved. There’s nothing new anymore, it’s all just variations of the same thing”

I have a lot of sympathy with Tac’s viewpoint.  Like him, I am one of the biggest enthusiasts for social media’s crucial and central in the marketing mix.  The problem is the ways clients are acknowledging this fact has fundamentally changed.  So much of social media marketing now seems derived from client’s fear, not their brand ambitions.

I read client social briefs full of two types of fear:

1. Aggressive fear, shown when marketers want to demonstrate to their superiors that they can simply out do a competitor brand. At its heart, the old keeping up with the Joneses scenario: ‘their videos gone viral, so we want ours to’; ‘they have 50,000 fans; we are going to get 100,000′.
2. Jumpy fear, expressed through a general request to be doing more ‘social’.  When you drill into it the sentiment is usually ‘let’s throw money at social with an agency, so it won’t worry us anymore and we can have some reports to show the boss’.

If you let it, it seems to me that PR / social media agencies could become very dull places if they simply respond to the 99% of PR and social briefs placed on the table these days.

Most social strategy work for brands used to be highly ambitious, fun, honest and experimental (backed five years ago by only the most forward-thinking marketeers). As social media engagement has become de rigeur, the solutions expected have become blander and those commissioning the work have become a nervy middle-management, not the maverick CEOs or in-the-know junior marketeers with a point to prove, with only small budgets and free reign.

So what can social media experts who have flourished during the social media revolution do now that much of the revolution (mind-set-wise anyway), has taken place and those commissioning work are now simply wanting boxes ticked not achieve big solutions from new channels? If you accept, as Tac Anderson argues, that most big brand milestones in social have now happened, then what next? What do you do if you don’t want to start painting by numbers?

As for me, I am now a partner at Inkling, a company with big ideals and passionately held principles, where I’m now part of something more holistic than being wheeled-out as the digital or social media guy.  And while that’s fine and dandy for me, I think all heads of digital might be looking in the mirror and beginning to ask is this their time for a professional mid-life crisis?

I think there are, of course, other ways of avoiding doing “variations of the same thing” beyond joining a company like Inkling:

1. Do something different – if digital experts are needed by brands for increasingly boring purposes, then find a new challenge. Leave the business.  Or create a business that will act as a catalyst for changing the new status quo.
2. Get more techie – the innovations are coming through accessibility to coding now and the bringing about of the cybernetic life, not through the in-depth understanding of social media. Time to create and invent using technology, not just connecting brands with consumers off the back of it.
3. Widen your vision again – most “digital experts” were generalists before they went so tightly down that avenue.  Reconnect with how much you can offer focus brands with their broad business, marketing and strategic challenges and invest less brain time specifically on the social media side of a brief. Instead unlock your potential to be the client’s less definable 360 support and advisor.

In short, get out the box and refuse to get back in.

The difficulty is that involves risk, which may lead to less briefs, so less money potentially.  But in marketing, you simply don’t have principles unless money is at stake to test them against.

And surely creating marketing that makes a greater difference for a brand, rather than a client’s next review appraisal, is worth it?

Advertising is like f***ing

(via helloyoucreatives.com)

This 60s advertising maverick has always very been much on my mind, since I first read his biography.  It takes a special fella to say: “Changing the world is the only fit work for a grown man”; and he really meant it.

DEEP FUTURE, DIGITAL FUTURE

Three provocations were put to me recently about the now, not so distant, digital future.  They really blow my mind:

1.  Transformed sense of place / perception of reality due to the advancement & day-to-day usage of Virtual Reality in a way that hasn’t been experienced ever before (unless you dropped some serious Acid in the 60s!)

2. Cash will begin to die out as mainframes allocate resources around the economy more efficiently

3. Your entire genome will be cheap enough to drop onto a smartphone.   Tailored medicines, profiling for jobs, genetic dating all based on your genome signature

PR: Cigarettes & Potatoes

As strange as it seems, until last night I’d never fully heard the story behind Edward Bernays, the man considered the “father of public relations”.  Bernays combined ideas from crowd psychology with the fundamentals of marketing, to give PR real credibility.  He called PR the “engineering of consent” and raised the following provocation:

“If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits.”^[7]  

When Philip Morris came to him in the 1920s at a loss to get women to buy cigarettes (as it was an imprisonable offence for women to smoke in public) he came up with an inspired solution.  At the 1929

Easter parade in New York City, Bernays rebranded Lucky Strike cigarettes ”Torches of Freedom” and paid glamorous models to hold them. Bernays publicised this event as an expression of women’s desire to claim freedom.  Thus, re-framing cigarette smoking in women’s minds.

This reminds me of the story Rory Sutherland told about King Frederick the Great of Prussia’s successful rebranding of the potato. When his people would not eat potato, as a new staple to supplement more popular bread he came up with a Bernays style solution.  He decreed the potato a royal vegetable, planted a royal field with potato plants and ordered his guards to protect them.  Suddenly all the peasants of Russia wanted to get their hands on the prohibited and so desirable potatoes.

What Bernays and Frederick the Great both realised was that great PR can so often come down to the influence of others and clever contextualisation.

Thanks to my ever-inspiring friend Asad for telling me the story of Bernays.

The sex appeal of dabbling on the dark side of digital PR

“To know nothing about yourself is to be constantly in danger of nothingness, those voids of non-being over which a man walks the tightrope of his life.”
― Athol Fugard, Tsotsi

“Where there is a stink of shit there is a smell of being”

― Antonin Artaud, Theatre of Cruelty

The ultimate challenge and a naughty thrill… is sometimes building social media strategy for the brands people love to hate.  You know the types I am talking about alcohol, gambling, tobacco, banking, insurance and so on.  The ones you wouldn’t bring home to meet the parents.

When I worked as a theatre director I found it amazing the way through slightly changing the context of a scene, or an action on stage, or even the emphasis on a line you could completely change the audiences reaction – even though the script remained unchanged.  So perhaps it is not surprise I find it exciting working out ways that marmite brands can benefit from this type of direction within social media.

However, before you lynch me or peg me for some cynical “spin doctor” I should point out brands from alcohol all the way along the spectrum to tobacco, don’t have much room to manoeuvre within social media to stay within legislation and guidelines from relevant bodies (which of course is reassuring).

Alcohol brands must adhere to guidelines which include restricting Facebook users aged under 18 from accessing official alcohol brand pages, and a commitment to remove inappropriate user-generated content from brand pages on Facebook within 48 hours.

Tobacco brands have to contend with the fact that Tobacco advertising is banned in 161 nations that have now ratified the World Health Organization (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).  Article 13 of the FCTC requires ratifying nations to undertake a complete ban on tobacco advertising and promotion, which is broadly defined as:

“any form of commercial communication, recommendation or action with the aim, effect or likely effect of promoting a tobacco product or tobacco use either directly or indirectly, unless prevented from doing so by their constitution”

And against the broad definition of advertising required by FCTC signatories, social media marketing in some instances could be considered a “commercial” communication and therefore also be banned.

Making successful social media strategies for the types of brands you wouldn’t necessarily want on agencies creds is not easy, because it involves three competing motivations:

a) doing the best possible work to help them retain and possibly recruit customers

b) staying not just on the borderlines of relevant legislation but well within it, for the brands safety, and your own conscience

 c) not selling your soul.

I suppose a marketeer must constantly balance the projects they are proudest of in terms of feel-good factor, with the ones that provide the greatest intellectual challenge.

7 golden rules to create a great company from “the oldest man in new media”

This week, the senior management team of Citizen had the pleasure of listening to a talk given by Mark Collier, the founder of Dare (a sister agency).  A legend in the industry, who self-deprecatingly describes himself as “the oldest man in new media”.  He reflected on the golden rules that he has learned through building an award-winning agency from the ground-up.

The golden rules:

1.  Have a clear mission

2. Have a strong set of beliefs

3. Strong processes that liberate rather than stifle creativity

4. Strong and united leadership

5. Focus on long-term client relationships – a rule of thumb:  ”You are always only three phone calls away from disaster”

6. Embrace PR

7. It’s all about the work (Love it.  Do it right.  Do it smart.  Be obsessive about targets)

This is NOT Mark, he is not really that old

 

A provocation from Rory Sutherland

A thoughtful friend kindly sent me a parcel this week, containing a book by Rory Sutherland - produced by Ogilvy Group UK and given to staff and clients (The Wiki Man).   I think this is one to read tonight and tomorrow night in a hot bath, with a glass of wine, before the mayhem of Mother’s Day kicks in.

The normal person’s guide to creating an awesome social media measurement tool

When I worked at Cake I was part of a team of very bright energetic people working on developing Flightdeck, their proprietary social media monitoring tool. So when I felt a new and different tool was needed for my current agency Citizen Relations, I thought, can I really do this?  Was Flightdeck a one-off moment in time, one achieved by the unique combination of luck and circumstance of having the right minds together in one place? Or could I conceive a tool that would be a game-changer for my current agency?

So after the cliche sleepless night of self-doubt, I set to work and in the process I learned a few things I think are worth sharing, if you want to create a brilliant social media measurement tool:

1) Don’t worry about what will work

Start with your dream scenario.  For me it was a tool that would take all the potential different factors for online success for a brand and combine them: to provide just four separate scores out of hundred and one overall score that even someone who has never looked at social media analytics in their life could understand.  Like the judges scores on Simply Come Dancing – a lot taken into consideration, but a very clear simple output on the surface. Worry about dreaming it up first, the “how” can come later.

2) You need imagination, not a maths degree

During the creation of the Citizen Scorecard tool, I filled out mountains of paper with scrawled formulae, but not because I’m great at maths. My claim to fame as a teenager was doing maths GCSE a year early, only to beg my mum to write a letter to get me out of the maths A-level sessions as I was struggling so much!

I knew the formulae to draw up and work out all the elements required in the tool (like brand advocacy and brand awareness scores), not because of some profound mathematical ability, but because they involved an act of creativity on uncharted territory.  My only guide was an understanding of online marketing and a determination to get to the end result required.  If my formulae and maths were wrong, I quickly found out after a period of trial and error, not because I was Rain Man.

3) Put your balls on the line

I told the agency I was inventing a social media tool that would allow our brands to see at a glance at any given moment how well they were performing online, way before I had any idea if it could be done.  I wanted a tool that would make others agency’s existing tools look old-fashioned, or at least unwieldy.  Big talk, and safe to say, that very big talk focused my attention, to avoid utter humiliation later.   I presented it to certain clients and colleagues well before it was quite ready, constantly forcing me to propel the project on faster and faster.

4) Put it in front of nervous nellies

Nervous nellies are a proprietary measurement  tool’s best friend, as it nears completion.  They are the people that will constantly say “but how can that work? What if x happens?”  Their concerns inform and perfect you work,so they are to be listened to, though not at the beginning, otherwise you will never be intrepid enough.

5) Wheel it out at every given opportunity

Don’t present it to everyone possible for salesy reasons, present it so that you can get as much feedback as fast as possible.  It took me at least five formal presentations of the tool before I truly absorbed how to explain it in a clear and concise way that might chime with brand owners.

Finally, if at any point it is just looking too difficult, then just remember, it is not about creating something revolutionary, it is more about just moving things forward (or even sideways) by just a small step or two.  It is also about having a great and multi-skilled team around you, like @MyLostRomance, @uemitoezcan, @joebycro,  @yasiralani, @laylahatia, @sunday_best

If you want to know what the scorecard tool actually tells you and how it works then give me a shout.

This is Path

The two questions of the month from clients and colleagues have been “What’s Pinterest?” and “What’s Path?”

Pinterest has been explained every which way in tweets and articles over the last fortnight alone, including by my Citizen Relations colleague Jon Cronin.    But, the Path discussion is rarer and there is not too much down in writing for people to refer to.  So…

Path was launched in November of 2010, and now boasts over two million users.  It is a very cool app, beautifully coded and designed – managing to some extent to cover all the basic functions of Foursquare, Instagram and Twitter.  The Path app is designed to help you record your path through life and share that trail just with intimate friends and family (limited to 150)

You leave the breadcrumbs of your daily life by:

• Uploading photos (which you can add filters to Instagram style)
• Tagging people you’re with
• Noting your location
• Noting the song currently playing on your iPod
• Writing a thought
• Logging when you are about to go to sleep and when you wake up (so that you receive inspirational messages when you arise)

Your entries are displayed in a chronological timeline – your Path.

Am I going to be a regular Path user, probably not; but, friends and colleagues of mine who are strongly attuned and committed to “life-logging” probably will be.

To read up on why Path has got itself in a bit of hot water over privacy  recently, you would be wise to take a look at a concise post from the sharp mind of prgeek