Category: Strategy

Why social media is made for people with mild personality disorders

FireShot Screen Capture #237 - 'Idea Storm' - www_ideastorm_comOne of the great things about the social digital space is that it allows people to cultivate their obsessions while benefiting society as a result.  Before going any further, I should stress that there are, of course ways in which obsessions can also be cultivated in this space that do great damage to society, but I don’t think this fact should be used to obscure the positive advantages of obsessional behaviour – for they exist.

Here is an example, which features prominently in the e.book  (Social Media and The Three Per Cent Rule) I have just published.  There is a chap out there called Kachi Wachi Continue reading →

Social media: why P&G, Coca-Cola and Facebook might have got it wrong

Book cover 6x4Is it possible that organisations such as Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola (and even Facebook) are headed in the wrong direction when it comes to working out social media?  Instead, could the very fact that such organisations are so accomplished in the practices of traditional marketing, mean that they are inhibited from developing an effective response in this new social media space?  Could it be that this new space is not really a media space at all?  Could it be that the idea of ‘reaching out’ and creating ‘engagement’ with consumers is a total waste of money and that value in the social digital space is created in an altogether different way?

These ideas and many others are explored in an e.book I have just published called ‘Social Media and The Three Per Cent Rule: how to succeed by not talking to 97 per cent of your audience‘.  Central to the book is the idea that traditional marketing is an activity designed for audiences because the media it has always worked with is an audience-based media.  The reason media is audience-based (mass media) is because it is expensive.  Social media is free.  It has liberated information (content) from an expensive means of distribution and this has also liberated marketing from the need to talk to audiences.  In fact it has created a requirement for all organisations to understand how to create cost effective relationships by talking to individuals or small groups.  However, very few organisations have grasped this, preferring to see the challenge as that of building audiences within the social digital space, so that audience-based approaches can continue to work.  This is because they have become wedded to audience-based relationships and are supported in this marriage by an entire industry which therefore has an interest it wants to preserve.

There are now two worlds: the world of the audience and the world of the individual.  One world is not going to replace the other; rather organisations have to work out how to operate in both worlds at the same time, because consumers, customers and citizens have no problem doing this.  And organisations cannot operate in the world of the individual by treating individuals as very small audiences, serving them up a diet of ‘engaging content’ or any other activity that comes from the world of mass marketing and communications.

The world of the individual is a very different space.  It is a world where people put trust in transparent processes more than they trust opaque institutions (including brands) and trust individuals with strange pseudonyms more than they trust their own friends.    It is a world where ideas benefit from the oxygen of probability, rather than the oxygen of publicity.  It is also a world where the belief that a platform such as Facebook can be worth $80 billion is not sustainable in the long-term.

Despite its strangeness, this is not a world which it is difficult to operate within, as I hope I spell out in the book. But it does involve letting go of comfortably familiar approaches and embracing new ideas: something many organisations and institutions (the big ones especially) are often reluctant to do.

The three per cent rule: why social media is no good for reaching 97 per cent of your audience

3 per centAt the end of last year I was teaching a session on social media in a masters of communication course at the London campus of the European Communication School.  In total I was lecturing to 30 students in two groups.  Most of the students were French or Belgian and in their early twenties.  At the start of the course I conducted an exercise designed to define how  people actually use Facebook, based on the students’ own experiences.   What this exercise revealed was that everyone used Facebook to keep in contact with their friends and that this activity constituted the vast majority of the time spent on Facebook.  No real surprise there.

I then looked at engagement with brands.  Of the 30, only three confessed that they used Facebook to have any sort of contact with brands and of these three, two only did this in response to some form of incentive – getting freebies, entering competitions etc.  And only one person said that they used Facebook to follow brands in any proactive way – albeit time spent doing this was very small, compared to time spent keeping in contact with friends.

I also suspect I am being generous here.  The group I was talking to (early twenties graduates) comprised people who are probably the most engaged with social media generally.  If we were talking an audience more typical for most consumer products we would more likely find that one in 30 (i.e. three per cent) coming in at somewhere closer to one per cent.  This is, of course, just one sample – but I expect that the numbers I was generating hear are not wildly out of line with a more general case.  In fact, I am tempted to do a bit of work to try and bear this out.

These are not especially surprising results – I suspect they would resonate with almost everyone’s personal usage of Facebook (possibly with social media in general).  However, another way of looking at these results is to say that while 100 per cent of your consumers may be on Facebook, you could only ever use Facebook to reach 3 per cent of them.  Or to put it another way, a Facebook page is a way of not reaching 97 per cent of your audience.  Just imagine creating a new campaign and your media agency then coming to you with a plan which didn’t reach 97 per cent of your audience.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with reaching less that three per cent of your audience – provided what you do with this three per cent generates significantly more value per contact, that the type of value we are accustomed to generating when we are seeking to reach 100 per cent of our audience.  In fact all effective social media strategies are defined by the fact that they are focused, at any one time, on individuals or very small groups and fractions of a total audience.

This is all obvious stuff – but it is not apparently obvious.  Most organisations are still approaching Facebook, and social media generally, with approaches that are designed for audiences, rather than individuals.  They still believe, for example, that the name of the game is content – forgetting that content is a concept that only works with an audience.   They still believe that it is a good idea to run competitions in Facebook, because this activity is proven to create the most Facebook engagement, forgetting that there is no point in running a competition that more than 97 per cent of your audience will never see.  But perhaps if brands are so keen to export traditional marketing approaches into social media, if we also export traditional media planning approaches into this space (i.e. advocating the design of campaigns that reach basically no-one) – this is a way of highlighting the errors of this thinking in a way which people can understand.

P.S. I first published this, in error as a page – which I will keep (but remove from navigation) in order to preserve its link, which several people RT’d

 

The above is what I think. This is what I do

http://richardstacy.com/advanced-social-media-training

Why social media is a dangerous concept

There is a hidden danger in the term social media.  It is dangerous because its name implies it can deliver all the benefits of media, but now with the added engagement opportunities that come with being social.  Media gives us scale, social gives us engagement – put the two together and we can now do engagement at scale.  Fantastic!

There is a problem though.  Unlike conventional media, social media does not have scale built into it and we can often forget this relatively obvious fact. Continue reading →

Eurostar: good traditional customer service, poor social customer service

FailureI use Eurostar in many of my social media training sessions and presentations as an example of an organisation that (still) hasn’t really got social media.  The reason for this is that while their traditional customer care may be quite good, it hasn’t yet worked out how to do real-time customer care, using social media.

I use a couple of examples: one is an instance of lack of response to some rather poor food I was once served (see this post) and the other is in relation to a horrible delay I experienced nearly a year ago.  The issue, in both cases, is that fact that Eurostar are not doing the number one thing any organisation needs to do first in social media: listening to their customers and responding in real time. Continue reading →

Big Data: gold mine or fool’s gold?

(This was published in the print edition of Digital Age in Turkey earlier this month.  It also appeared as few days later as a Digital Age blog post – if you want to read it in Turkish!)

There is a lot of buzz about the concept of Big Data.  But it is really the potential gold mine that some are suggesting?

Back in July I was at the Marketing Week Live show in London participating in an event organised by IBM.  We were looking at data and consumer relationships within fashion retailing, using high-end women’s shoes as the example.  The big issue fashion retailers face is that everyone walking into a store is a stranger.  The sales assistants know nothing about them, other than what they can deduce from their appearance and any conversation they can then strike-up.  We therefore asked ourselves the question: how might it be possible to use data from the digital environment so that potential customers were no longer strangers?  How might we be able to create a digital relationship so that when a potential consumer walks through the door the sales assistant would be able call-up this relationship history and pull this on-line contact into an off-line sales conversation?  One of the IBM analysts put it thus, “we need to be able to identify the exact moment a potential consumer starts to think about buying a new pair of shoes, identified from conversations they have with their friends in social networks and be able to then join those conversations”.

Welcome to the world of Big Data.  In the world of Big Data it is theoretically possible to know as much about your consumers as they know about themselves: to be able to anticipate their every thought and desire and be there with an appropriate product or response.  It is a world of ultimate targeting and profiling Continue reading →

The blessed trinity of social media behaviours

Blessed Trinity of Social MediaI have written before about the blessed trinity of media (the Bought, the Earned and the Wholly Earned) and why this definition may not be sensible or useful.  I also think there is a blessed trinity which relates to the three activities that correspond to the principle behaviours of people in the social digital space.  These behaviours are:

  • Talking to friends
  • Looking for information / asking questions
  • Complaining / protesting

If you think about it these behaviours account for probably 90+ per cent of what is actually going on in social media (think about how you use social media yourself).  The interesting thing, from a marketing perspective, is that responding to these behaviours does not correspond to 90 per cent of what most brand’s social media activity is about.

Talking to friends is a space that is virtually impenetrable to brands and you can’t enter it by trying to turn yourself into ‘a friend’ of your consumers.  A person will never have the same relationship with a brand as they will with a friend.  This leaves the other two spaces and it is astonishing how few brands are really aligned against responding to these behaviours in a way which is likely to generate any significant, sustained and measurable value – despite the relative ease of doing this.

Isn’t it time brands mapped their use of social media against the way it is being used by the people they wish to ‘engage’ with?

The great thing about advertising is that no-one takes it personally

The great thing about advertising is that no-one takes it personally.  This is not a criticism or prelude to a lament about how advertising is now redundant – it is not.  The very greatest advertising, like any performance or show, creates a sense of audience participation: the viewers experience a sense of collective engagement with the ad and (usually but not always) the brand that lies behind it.  Critically, they also receive assurance that the brand is popular and successful and that, as a consumer, they are not alone.  An audience is a necessary part of the performance that is advertising.  It is a bit like a rock concert.  If you are a Coldplay fan you want to see the band perform and be together with your fellow devotees watching Chris Martin in all his pomp whilst holding aloft your electronic gizmo thingy that apparently now come supplied as alternatives to cigarette lighters at all Coldplay gigs.  If you were the only person standing in the arena it wouldn’t be the same thing.  In fact you would probably be tempted to tell Chris to give it a rest and jump down off the stage and have a beer and a chat.

And herein lies the problem for advertising and social media, especially any social media platform whose revenue model is dependent on advertising.  The great promise that social media dangles in front of advertising is targeting, but the issue with targeting is that after a while, you narrow things down to the point where you stop having a group large enough to constitute an audience and end up with a group of individuals. The sense of participation is gone.  In effect you cross over a form of social digital divide beyond which people don’t want to be part of a crowd, they want to take things personally.  And by definition, advertising or any other form of one-to-many mass communication is not going to work on this side of the divide.  You are in a place where people want information (or conversation), not performance.

This doesn’t herald the end of advertising or other forms of one-to-many marketing campaigns.  People will still want brands to perform and find ways of reassuring consumers that they are not alone.  In fact, it is probably this latter function, the reassurance of statute and success, that will become the primary function of advertising and marketing campaigns in the future – a return to the days of the “as seen on TV” reassurance.  The only problem for ad agencies is that this is now not the only thing brands need to do, thus the only thing that is failing is the business model that currently lies behind the supply of advertising, not the form itself.  In many ways, social media could be the saviour of advertising.  It will liberate creatives to deliver what it is that advertising does best – a brand show freed from extraneous information baggage.  It is just that they can’t expect to earn quite so much money doing it.

 

Social media is failing so lets forget it

I have noticed an increasing trend of late for articles and comment to emerge declaring that social media is failing.  This example from The Telegraph is a case in point.  These are not #socialmediafail pieces – i.e. examples of silly things organisations have done in social media, rather they are declaring the failure of the whole medium or more precisely the failure of the medium as a space for marketing activity.

The question we have to ask, of course, is what is it that is actually failing here.  Is it a failure of social media, or is it a failure of marketing to adapt itself to work within social media.  In my view it is the later.  As I never tire of saying, social media is a completely different space with a new set of rules.  You cannot drag traditional one-to-many mass marketing approaches into social media and expect that they will work.  Cue favourite analogy: if tradition media / marketing is the land then social media is the sea.  It is perfectly possible to operate in both environments provided you understand the difference. You can make a car that floats, as Top Gear are fond of showing us, but it is never going to be as effective in the water as a boat.

I think we can expect to see much more of the ‘social media doesn’t work’ sentiment going forwards.  It is simply more evidence of the fact that the adoption of social media is tracking the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technology (see left).  It demonstrates that we are entering into the Disillusionment phase.

Some have reacted to this by taking the extreme view, which is to declare marketing dead (as per this Harvard Business Review article).  This is as misguided as the idea that social media is failing.  Traditional marketing is simply become less effective as other alternatives emerge.  It is not going to die, rather we are starting to understand the boundaries of its competence.  Traditional marketing is actually a channel and message identification challenge defined by the ability to place single, concise messages in front of large numbers of people.  Within the social space, the challenge is defined by identification of behaviours (not messages and channels) – i.e. the ability to reach exactly the right people, at exactly the right time, with exactly the right response – based upon what those people are doing, rather than who they are, or within which channels they sit.  Both are valid approaches – you only get into trouble if you try and crunch the two together.  The trick is work out how to use both approaches in a complementary, rather than supplementary, way.  And it also means we are right to question whether social media should actually fall within the realm of marketing at all – a conclusion that this article in Forbes is edging towards.  It is only when we fundamentally understand the difference between social and traditional media and develop a process (and probably department) that is adapted to work in the social digital space, that we will start to head up the Slope of Enlightenment.

 

Creating permission to get personal: why marketers need to listen to The Spice Girls

A couple of weeks ago I took part in an interesting experiment at the Marketing Week Live show at London’s Earls Court.  The instigators of the experiment were Collaboration Matters and IBM and the purpose of the experiment was to try and dramatise the role of digital community in influencing retail behaviour.  The set for the experiment was a stand at the show ‘selling’ top-end fashion womens’ shoes, constructed as part-catwalk, part-high street store.  The slightly more commercial purpose of the experiment was to try and create a presence that was markedly more engaging to those attending than the bog-standard trade show display.

As an experiment, it certainly worked in the later aspect but it also highlighted some important truths about the role and relevance of consumers and digital community.  In my opinion, these were:

  • The consumer cannot be considered as simply an individual any more.  The consumer is now a connected individual whose decisions are influenced by the communities of which they are a part.
  • These communities can vary from close and fixed communities of friendship, communities defined by providing answers to specific questions, through to very loose ‘Google communities’ where we tap into collective intelligence.
  • Brands cannot expect consumers to join brand communities, rather brands have to understand what role they have, if any, in participating in consumers’ communities.
  • The role for community, with a brand, is to create an internal community based on fostering the behaviours necessary to have an effective relationship with the connected consumer.

The whole ‘story’ of the event was pulled together by Mike Morrison on Storify – you can see it here.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should

It was good to be at the event and see the experiment in action, and also to talk to some of the other participants and organisers; Marie Wallace from IBM’s social business unit, Mike Morrison, Will McInnes from Nixon McInnes and Rooven Pakkiri and Dale Roberts from Collaboration Matters.

One of the discussions stands out.  Marie was talking about the goal for technologists, such as IBM, and brand owners or retailers.  This was the possibility of extending the environment within which brands can have contact with a consumer – reaching backwards to whatever triggers an interest or desire in a product and forwards, beyond purchase, into creating brand loyalty and repeat purchase.  Essentially, this was an examination of where social technology can be overlaid onto the classic consumer journey, opening up many more opportunities than those which exist with the traditional one-to-many marketing process.

From a retail perspective we were focusing on what needed to happen to ‘seal the deal’ i.e. make sure that the retailer was able to create an environment that would lead to a purchase decision, either through increasing the numbers of people through the door with a high propensity to purchase or through the ability to supply information that would help the retailer convert a sales prospect.

As we sat there, we were starting to imagine a future world where a woman would walk into a shoe shop, and she wouldn’t be just another person off the street, she would come surrounded by a digital cloud which would interact (or had already been interacting) with the digital persona of the shop itself, such that the shop assistant would be able to have the pair of shoes she was interested in, plus the two alternatives her friends had suggested, ready and waiting for her.  Or alternatively, said shop assistant would be able to weave information about the prospect into the sales conversation, based on knowledge about what celebrities she may admire, what bands she followed etc.

All very exciting stuff and certainly something which is coming within the technical competence of organisations such as IBM.  But as I sat there, I started to wonder if the real barriers to be overcome here were not technical ones, they were social ones.  While it might be technically possible to know and analyse a huge amount of data about an individual, is it socially possible to use this information?  It is not a case of what you know, it is how you got to know it.

Here is an analogy from dating.  Within the world of dating there are established rules and processes that are basically designed to help two people find out about each other and thus work-out if they have the basis for a relationship.  Interestingly, it is possible for any one of the protagonists to find out much more about the other besides the relatively restricted palette of ‘data’ which might be offered-up on a date.  They could spy on them through their windows with a telescope.  They could go through their rubbish bins.  They could follow them around for a while and see what they do and who they hand-out with.  But while this is behaviour which is technically possible, it is behaviour which is socially unacceptable.  And even if you can do it without detection, to reveal knowledge of information thus gleaned is to court social disaster.

It seems to me that a lot of what we are talking about here is basically the equivalent of digital stalking.  Brands are proposing to use technology to find out information about people for which they have not been granted social permission.  And the reaction of the consumer is not going to be “hey, how amazing that X brand knows so much about me that it can offer me such a uniquely personalised brand experience” it’s going to be “go away and stop spying on my life”.

The great thing about advertising is that no-one takes it personally

We need to redefine the rules of permission within social marketing.  Within traditional marketing these were relatively clear, in that we actually had permission to be crass and intrusive.  Interrupting a TV programme with an ad is pretty intrusive, but consumers accepted that there was a trade-off here.  Also, consumers could accept such behaviour because it was never intended to be taken personally.   However, as soon as you create personalised approaches, you can’t be surprised if consumers start to take it personally.  In the world of personalised behaviour a whole different set of rules therefore apply – social rules.  Marketing has never been social, indeed the term social marketing could be seen as an oxymoron.

It is interesting to note, as this piece by Doc Searls points out, that digital advertising becomes less efficient, the more targeted it becomes.  It seems as though at a certain level of personalisation, advertising stops working.  It is as though a boundary has been crossed.  On one side of that boundary a consumer will accept advertising on the basis that this is designed as a piece of communication intended for them as an anonymous individual who is part of a large group.  On the other side of that boundary, people are in effect saying now you have crossed this fence new rules apply.  Your advertising either has to be hugely more relevant (in a way that probably means it can no longer be classified as advertising) or else you have to have a proper relationship with me as an individual.  The intrusive rules and behaviours of mass marketing are simply not acceptable if you want to make it personal.

I think that studying and understanding this boundary is the single most important thing marketers need to do and the role of the technologists should be to help them do this, rather than providing them with the tools that help them spy on their consumers.  There seem to be two issues here.  One is establishing how and when a brand has the permission to recognise a consumer as an individual and the other is helping a brand adopt appropriate behaviour once that permission has been granted.

Understanding the new rules – what marketers should learn from the Spice Girls

I think the most important recognition principle is that the consumer has to give an explicit indication that they are willing to accept a personalised approach.  At one level this could be very obvious in that they have posed a question directly to a brand and are expecting a specific response.  This is the sort of thing that basic monitoring capabilities can currently pick-up.  However, the area of probably the greatest opportunity, but also difficulty, lies in interpreting the more subtle and sophisticated signals a potential consumer may give-off.  But the key is recognising that this cannot be a deductive process – i.e. because we know that you as a consumer have done A, B and C that therefore means you have given permission for D.  A consumer cannot be surprised, pleasantly or otherwise, by an approach – they will need to be able to make the link between cause and effect.

It is also important to recognise that just because a consumer is giving the right signals, this doesn’t mean they have surrendered the right to anonymity.  To return to the dating analogy, just because someone has agreed to go out for a drink doesn’t mean they have given permission for the content of their bins to be examined.  Consumers will expect to retain control over what information they surrender and even if a brand has already been able gather data about them, the consumer will not expect to see this data coming up in the conversation and might possibly end the relationship if they see it appearing.

This brings us onto the issue of behaviour and also onto the Spice Girls.  Back in 1996, when the Spice Girls were telling us what they wanted (what they really, really wanted) .  They said “If you want to be my lover, you gotta get with my friends”.   What they were really, really saying is that they can no longer be treated as an individual, they are now part of a community.  Power comes through connection – Girl Power in this instance.  And the explicit instruction to those that wished to be their lover was that they had to ‘get with’ that community.  The Spice Girls also gave further instruction.  “So what do you think of that now you know how I feel, can you handle my love, are you for real? I won’t be hasty, I’ll give you a try, but if you really bug me then I’ll say goodbye”.

I think all marketing directors should pin those lyrics above their desks .

The net effect of this may well be that there is a big consumer space that will become a DMZ – a de-marketingized zone – into which brands cannot go except with very explicit permission and subject to very stringent rules of respect for community behaviour.  If they can’t handle that, if they are not for real and if they bug people, they will get thrown-out.  In this space, the individual consumer is almost beyond direct reach – they can only be accessed through the communities which act as their gatekeepers.

This takes us to the role of brand communities.  Brand communities will have a very, very tough time trying to establish themselves in the DMZ.  This is not to say that they won’t exist, but their role has to be 100 per cent focused on supporting what it is that consumers want a community to do.  In reality, and this is something that the experiment at the show demonstrated, the most powerful role a brand community can fulfill is as an internal community within the brand’s business that helps create appropriate external behaviours.

I suspect that the social enterprise tools that will become successful will be those that help businesses understand and operate within the communities of their consumers or customers.  Rather than exploit the ability to crunch data about individual consumers, they will exploit the ability to develop and share intelligence about collective consumer behaviour.  They will help brands understand the community in order to understand the individual.