Nov 7, 2012 | Branding, Change, Communication, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
“Change behavior, before you try and change attitudes”.
These were the wise words delivered to me by Hugh McKay, 30 years ago, and I have never forgotten them, and am constantly reminded as I see people justify something they have done that is different, unexpected, or inconsistent.
Behavior is easier to change than attitudes, so get to the behavior first, then again, and slowly, attitudes will alter to accommodate the altered behavior.
Therefore if you want to have effective advertising, focus on which behaviors you want to change, and worry about attitude later, but generally, you need not worry, it will take care of itself.
People are the same as they were 50 years ago, 500 years ago, the things they own and want have changed absolutely, but what motivates people has not. Just look at the behavior that Shakespeare wrote about, greed, jealousy, love, ambition and regret, they are still all with us.
The net is just like an electronic yellow pages. When you know you want something, you go to it to find the best buy, what meets your specs, etc, but you do not create demand in the yellow pages, similarly, you do not create demand on the net, the best you can do is generate awareness of your offer.
Make sure that the two fundamental purposes of advertising are not mixed.
The first is to create awareness,
The second is to create demand.
These two things are not the same, and the communication strategy used must be consistent with the potential of the medium and the manner of the message to achieve it.
Nov 4, 2012 | Communication, Social Media
Mitch Joel writes one of the more thoughtful blogs dealing with the changes in our digital environment, he seems to be able to articulate what others amongst us just feel as a vague itch.
In this post, from 2011, he considers the implications of us now all being publishers, what responsibilities do we undertake, and how can we do better? After all, 140 characters does not constitute an article of any real value.
Similar questions, and a number more, were asked by Mark Colvin, Colvinius on twitter, during his Andrew Olle lecture on Friday evening.
Essentially, the publishing environment has undergone a huge disruption, and there is more coming. How we deal with the changes, personally, socially, and economically impacts on every one of us, so it is worth some thought.
Colvin is a great Australian journo, wedded to the facts, yet able to mix the facts with a humanity that is all too rare, as he explains and reports. Thanks to the wonders of our new digital world, his thoughts can be shared, and re-shared, and we will all grow just a bit as a result.
Thanks Mark.
Nov 2, 2012 | Change, Collaboration, Social Media
I have a new email address, one that allows me access to an enterprise social network, run off the “Yammer” platform that has been deployed by an occasional client.
This is an innovation that will turn the time people spend on their social networks into hugely productive time for employers.
The client concerned has a far flung empire, not big, but very spread, delivering a specialised service. Last week they urgently needed someone with an unusual skill to address a crisis in a client factory, a skill that up to now may have taken weeks to identify, if it was around. Instead, the engineering manager stuck the request on their yammer network, and it took minutes for a young engineer in Perth to respond, he had skill required, developed with a previous employer.
The opportunity to use internal social media, Yammer, Chatter, the Salesforce.com equivalent, and others, is opening a door to collaborative work such that we have brely dreamed about before. Forget the complicated, time consuming, and mostly wasted project update meetings every second day, replace it with a daily SM update, create forums to address problems and spread news and ideas.
This is not just socialising business, this is a revolution in cross functional/geographic collaborative management.
That’ll scare some folks!
Oct 31, 2012 | Social Media
Mike Stelzner’s “Social Media Examiner” on line magazine, rather than blog, is about the best of a good bunch of sites that offer insight to the blogging process.
These 21 tips, assembled from a group of pretty smart operators are gold.
Thanks Mike!
Oct 29, 2012 | Change, Management, Marketing, Social Media
One of the many paradoxes of our on-line social life is that to engage, we give up a part of our personal life, we become available to anyone else who cares to look for us, within the boundaries of increasingly better privacy hurdles in social media tools.
In the past, our personal lives were almost all we had, simply because of the inconvenience, inefficiency, indeed, impossibility, of telling everybody, anything much about ourselves.
The earlier incarnations of social media removed those barriers, and suddenly we realised that we had created a monster, a perfect environment for stalkers. All sorts of unsavory and undesirable people, and those we had no desire to know suddenly had access to our details, and so we started designing out the access, but it is a binary process, a filter is “on”, or it is “off”, no “maybe”.
So, how do we design it out? We design back in some of the elements of the inefficiency we had until a decade ago, put in hurdles that need to be crossed before you get to the personal stuff. Clay Shirky, one of the great minds thinking about this stuff does it again in this Zeitgeist presentation from 2008. I only just found it, but the message is as relevant now as 4 years ago, perhaps more so.
Oct 26, 2012 | Communication, Marketing, Personal Rant, Social Media
Millions of “writers” are now publishing blogs, and as a result there are many sources of “how to” write a better blog, and get it seen.
However, it seems to me that most of the advice is rehashing pretty basic stuff, and focusses way too much attention on the medium of publishing, the web, rather than offering advice on the writing. If there is any merit in the idea that a well written blog will outperform a poorly written one, perhaps we should ignore most of the new-age advice, and go to the experts on writing.
Having an ability to write, to express an idea memorably, with clarity, and in a manner that creates understanding and an action from the reader is not a result of the net, it is just as hard as it always was, it is just that now the good stuff has far more visible competition for attention from the crap.
David Ogilvy is an acknowledged expert, the original Mad-man, who wrote some of the best advertising of all time, also wrote this internal memo advising his employees how to write.
The advice holds for those trying to write blogs, tweets, and advertising copy today, as much as it did of O&M employees in 1982.
