Feb 14, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Social Media
20 years ago you could block book advertising across three TV channels, a few newspapers, and radio stations, and be pretty sure you would catch almost everybody.
Not now.
No matter how much you spend, you simply cannot block book all the channels that now attract our attention. The last 20 years has created communication channels inconceivable a generation ago.
Like time, attention is a non renewable resource, there is only so much of it, and unlike 20 years ago, there are almost infinite opportunities for us to spend our attention.
Marketers therefore have to reverse the order in which they approach gaining your valuable attention, as no longer can they easily access mass attention by intrruption. Now they have to earn the right to communicate, person by person, as just turning up and interrupting you will not work. Even if we happen to be there to be interrupted, we will ignore you without a very good reason to give you some of our valuable attention.
Feb 8, 2013 | Branding, Small business, Social Media
Like most bloggers, I watch how many people visit this site, how many pages they access, how long they stay, and how many “likes” the posts get, and it feels good when the numbers go up.
However, these superficial measures do not really mean much.
What make the real difference is how much I write gets amplified, by reposting, commenting, and the number of click-throughs to the links included that occurs.
“Likes” are generally just passers-by, casual visitors, or “like-counters” who want you to reciprocate and “like” their site, when what you want is engagement, people who are touched or motivated in some way by the posts.
I would rather have one of those engaged visitors than 10 who just visit and leave. In Australia, there is an old expression, ‘Wombat”. Calling somebody a “wombat” is rarely complimentary, as a wombat is a slow, sometimes destructive native animal that eats roots and leaves, not complimentary when you add comma’s. Most visitors to your site that just tick the “like” button without thinking about what you have written, often not even reading it, are just “wombats”
Jan 29, 2013 | Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Groups, networks, friends, and even loose 2nd and 3rd party connections via social media all have similar characteristics when viewed from a distance. Groups of people interconnected in some way.
However, the real value of a group is its density, how close they are, and how mutual are all the links, how much they share, and of crucial importance, how much they contribute rather than just being conduits.
A small group is able to self regulate easily, there is little tolerance of free-riders, there is a high degree of “density” among the members. However, a large group is poor at identifying and excluding free-riders. The number and strength of connections between individuals in the larger group are much less, and weaker, there are those in the group who have no connection with each other beyond membership of the group: the density of the group is much lower.
A high density enables stuff to get done, the group can co-ordinate the actions of its members. But there is a paradox here, a large group can also co-ordinate, and in a short time, but only in the negative, it can be somewhere to stop something, to protest, a very simple, single purpose, but it cannot map a course of action and follow it. A dense group can map a course, follow it, and if dense enough, accommodate changes in direction.
Consider how easy it is for a group of three friends to agree to go to the pictures next week.
They agree a time and film to see that suits them all.
Now consider the added complications of adding an extra three friends to the party, all that extra schedule matching, as well as the varying tastes in film. How much more difficult this would all be if the added three are just acquaintances of one of the original three, unknown to the others.
Density, not numbers is the key to social success, in media, as well as in life.
Jan 17, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Social Media
The value of Facebook has tanked since the IPO last year, largely because after the hype, people wondered how the returns would be delivered when the obvious source, advertising, does not really work on Facebook.
However, Facebook is in the throes of launching an extensively re-engineered search facility, “Graph Search“. This facility will enable placement of extremely focused advertising in situations where the search being conducted is for things other than friendly e-conversation. This change potentially removes the barrier to successful adverting on Facebook, the disinterest in anything commercial when interacting with friends.
This Wired article on Graph Search offers detail, but essentially, the new search facility reflects peoples networks as a graph, or network chart, and the search capability can interrogate the network, and answer questions, with extensive auto-complete suggestions based on your previous activity.
Google cannot get at the data held by Facebook, that is a huge resource of people, networks, preferences, links, and reviews that can now be leveraged in searches conducted from within the Facebook community.
Similarly, the power of Linkedin is the connections between people and their work. Want to see who is connected to someone at a competitor, supplier, potential customer, and so on? now Facebook will be able to do it, perhaps better than Linkedin, particularly for the under 35’s.
An underutilised aspect of Twitter is the search capability, when used well, it is an enormously valuable addition to a Google search, and contains links that enable a deeper dive from any starting point in a topic. Other services like Pinterest also now chase the available advertising dollars, making media choices a complex nightmare.
Graph Search makes the battle for on line advertising even more interesting, and will add some extra lead into the saddlebags of newspapers as they try to monetarise their offerings. News Corp is in the middle of splitting their operations, separating newspaper film and television assets globally, restructuring to enhance revenue generation options, already having paywalls in place for their newspapers. Fairfax is expected to introduce some level of paywall sometime in the next few months in an effort to stem the bleeding.
As the search capabilities improve, and paywalls emerge, the attraction of free sources of information will increase, with the minor irritation of the presence of advertising. Facebook now appears to not only to be in a position to cash in on their huge network, but to potentially extensively disrupt the current web and remaining legacy media advertising options.
Jan 16, 2013 | Change, Personal Rant, Social Media
As a kid, I built a series of model planes, mostly WW11 fighters, flown with 2.5 – 5 cc motors, on the end of a set of wires. Loved it.
I experimented with primitive radio controlled, built a Spitfire, and put some radio gear in it, some I had scrounged from older enthusiasts, a bit I had bought, at relatively huge expense, as the only money I had was earned refilling shelves in the local supermarket , 2 afternoons a week after school. The Spit’s first flight was a disaster, literally, and it ended as many real Spits did, as a burnt patch in the grass, ending the passion, although by that time I had started to see girls through different eyes, and the supermarket flying money suddenly had competition.
Well, a lot has changed from then, in the 60’s.
Chris Anderson, one of the great writers (Editor of Wired, writer of “The Long Tail“) and innovators, has commercialised what are now being called drones, but are really only modern versions of my Spit, with cameras onboard, and in the case of military versions, I suspect a bit of a bite. The stuff on his site, DIYdrones , is reviving the itch of a boy, but the 61 year old marketer is seeing enormous commercial and nefarious potential.
It seems to me that many familiar things from years ago are making a comeback in modern form, from the VW bug, to Malibu surfboards, and my “spit”. Only difference is the new ones outperform the old by a geometric factor.
Jan 15, 2013 | Personal Rant, Social Media
The institutional response to what they do not understand is usually to ban it, and prosecute, just in case. The US Attorney has some form in this regard, as do the US legislators, they respond without adequate regard to the whole picture.
The suicide of Aaron Swartz is a sad example of this disregard, and the post below makes the point. It is another sad lesson that what you do not understand is not necessarily dangerous, so spend the time to understand before you condemn.
The Truth about Aaron Swartz’s “Crime”.
As I said yesterday, Vale Aaron.
Clay Shirky on Jan 30 posted this thoughtful piece that should be required reading.
PS. July 18 2014.
There has been a movie made of Aaron Swartz’s life, a chronicle of an amazing, and way too short life. This is a link to the movie, and my thanks to Mitch Joel for providing the information in his blog that led me to this PS.
