Aug 25, 2012 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Social media is a jungle, full of vegetation that limits the view, poisionous flowers that look beautiful at first glance, small areas of bright sunlight that somehow finds its way through the foliage, nasty surprises of many types, and gems that can change your life.
Those who know the jungle can pick the nasties from the goodies with little more than a glance, when the reluctant wanderer can barely see any difference, and they seem to be able to find their way effortlessly through the undergrowth whilst we flounder.
That is the nature of our environment, get used to it.
There are many blogs out there that offer information, insight, and advice, use them. Jay Baer’s convince and convert, Mike Stelzner’s Social Media Examiner, and Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation, Jeff Bullas, being four of the best. All offer advice, insight and opinion via a range of means, and will throw a bit of light into the dark corners.
A client asked me recently why he should bother spending the time and money (it is not cheap, it just costs differently to the stuff on the P&L) on social media, and my answer was simple: “that is where your customers are!”
Aug 22, 2012 | Branding, Change, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media
People are always looking for answers in their lives, whilst mostly not being in a position to frame the question sufficiently to enable a search as specific as one on Google. It is a factor in our lives that contributes to the context in which we live where we go, who we interact with, what we buy and where, what we think of our jobs, partners, and future for our kids.
It is not too much of a stretch to think that a picture of these things can be built over time by a personalised version of the search and browse capabilities now available to us. It has been called the semantic web, web 3.0, and a bunch of other things, but it is really a bank of information about us, evolved by emerging AI that reflects out lives.
Imagine you were walking down a street, near a car dealership with a new French model, your semantic web planted in your device knows you like French wine, your current car is due to be changed, you favor sweeping lines in design, your kids have left home, so there is some money in the bank, you always hankered for sporty, a bit “left field” experiences, and you have a bit of time before the appointment that brings you to this location. Bingo, a personalised invitation for a cup of coffee, and a chat about the new model comes to you from someone in the dealership vaguely linked to you via a social network.
It is only a small jump away from where we are now, but changes the way the marketing process will work.
Aug 8, 2012 | Management, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Whilst I hesitate to add to the plethora of words dedicated to the saga of Fairfax, from the stupidity of “Young Warwick” onwards, it seems to me that there are a couple of points that nobody has made.
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- Consumers of media have not changed. They still want to see the news, sports, political analysis, and the latest fashions and foibles of the rich and stupid, and they still want it delivered, and are prepared to pay for it, but they now have options about the delivery not available 15 years ago. Your $60 a month broadband costs are just a different means of delivery of content, the stuff newspapers used to deliver exclusively, for about the same price.
- Newspapers revenue comes from advertising, the literal “Rivers of Gold” that flowed from the classifieds, not from consumers. The price paid at the newsagent (another anachronism of an older world) would not cover the costs of printing and delivering the paper, then disposing of the excess. Newspapers disengaged from the primary source of their revenue and profits, advertisers, whilst their consumers still want, and obtain their news fix, it is just that they can get it elsewhere.
The disruption in the newspaper industry is from the new competition for advertising dollars coming from new channels of content distribution, not from consumers of content turning away.
In all the fluff written about the Fairfax share price, the stalking by Gina, the so called “code of journalistic conduct” and the failure of the Chairman to come to terms with the competing views around the board table, I have seen nothing that points out the basic failure to recognise who is your customer, and who pays the bills and why, outlined above.
The real reason Fairfax is stuffed is that it deserves to be.
P.S. (after 5 years)
It is now April 2017, and Fairfax is saving another 30 million by chopping costs, which means journalists. There is still no recognition of the simple fact that the distribution channels may have changed, but the consumers ares still out there, still consuming media, the challenge is articulating a value proposition that makes it worth their while to part with some money.
Aug 6, 2012 | Management, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
The term exponential is routinely used in engineering, maths, and the sciences, meaning, in lay terms, that the rate of increase in the derivative of a factor increases faster than the increase in the factor itself. “Gobbldy Gook” to most marketers.
Moore’s law is perhaps the most widely known use of this equation, but is only one of many.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil cited many others in a fascinating TED talk a few years ago, in which he points out that exponential growth is a common feature of technological growth, we just have to recognise it when we see it.
Mitch Joels great blog got me thinking.
The growth of complexity in the practice of marketing; new channels, social media, blogs enabling anyone to be a published writer, 100 TV channels at the end of a remote, new industries, the emerging models of collaboration, and all the rest are not linear growth, they are growing by leveraging the principals of exponential maths. The first one is hard, and takes years, the next is much easier and doesn’t take much time, then there is an explosion.
The way we generally think about marketing, and certainly the way the senior management of most large corporations think about it, is still in the linear mode, when the explosion in the opportunities presented by marketing to communicate and connect is an exponential change.
Competitive advantage will accrue to those enterprises that are capable of recognising that marketing into the future will operate in a different dimension if you like, to the C20 notion of accountability dominated by financial measures. Measuring performance by a P&L and Balance sheet mentality that counts what has happened, rather than assessing what will happen, and recognising the opportunities presented by exponential marketing will be leaving huge opportunities on the table.
Jul 25, 2012 | Marketing, Sales, Social Media
Sales people are used to being measured by hard metrics, and management is very used to imposing and managing these metrics, and marketers are more inclined now than just a while ago, to have quantifiable measures.
Therein lies one of the challenges of social media.
To varying degrees, SM is not a great sales tool, but it is a great tool to build engagement, and engagement leads to sales, eventually, and amongst other outcomes. It can take the place of the face to face selling, and potentially much of the role of traditional advertising.
When on the web, searching for information, peoples bullshit meter is working, so their receptiveness to advertising may be no greater than in a normal mass media environment, the huge difference being the ability of web advertising to target information at those looking for it. However, on social media, I contend that the bullshit meter is at a lower level, perhaps turned off, as they are seeking to engage, not just seeking information, so information accepted takes on some of the characteristics of endorsement.
Jul 23, 2012 | Communication, Social Media
The “social” part of social media is a metaphor for a conversation you would have over the back fence, or in a shop, on the street, and so on, it is just electronic.
It makes sense therefore to treat the e-conversation the same way you would treat a personal one, listen, ask questions, be polite and attentive, engage.
From one of the gurus, here is a list of 19 ways, all of which are just the common sense rules of behavior we apply without a lot of thought when we engage in a conversation across the back fence, that should be applied to blogs, and all other forms of social media.
Many businesses appear to miss the point, seeming to think that they can control SM as they do their internal communications, and failing to recognise the totally voluntary nature of social media. It is this voluntary participation that gives SM its power to endorse and inform. Just like over the back fence, we recognise that there is little self interest in an endorsement, and it comes from somebody with whom we have engaged voluntarily, so it carries great power.
