What’s the connection between social media and woolly mammoths?

The business of marketing as we know it is a creature of the ice age.  It has evolved to adapt to set of very limiting conditions in the way that a woolly mammoth evolved to adapt to, what we now see as, the very limiting conditions of cold temparatures.  Until recently, we haven’t been able to see what marketing’s limiting conditions have been in the same way that woolly mammoth’s didn’t think it was especially cold.

However, we can now see that marketing’s limiting condition has been the high cost of distributing information.  This has meant that the evolutionary path of marketing has been about efficiency of message – packing the greatest amount of information into the smallest space in order to make the most of the precious resource which is the ability to harness an expensive distribution channel.  Continue reading →

2010 – the year of building

2009 was a unique year in the fledgling history of social media, in that it was a year that contained no new “Big Thing”.  The year obviously belonged to Twitter, but Twitter itself really broke into the mainstream at the end of 2008.  There were a number of things launched that received a lot of attention amongst the digerati which may very well go on to become “Big Things” – Google Wave for example – but nothing that created the sort of mainstream attention that Facebook, or Twitter, or even Second Life did when they first broke. Continue reading →

links for 2010-01-06

Embrace the noise – its where the influence is

A parting post for 2009.

I was recently sent this by  Influencer50, an organisation in the business of influencer marketing.  It makes some interesting points about failures in on-line influencer measurement and the many organisations claiming to have offerings in this area.  However, this report itself fails because it falls into the same trap as many of those approaches it is also criticising – namely the belief that influence is all about “screening out the noise” and finding the “needles in the haystack”.

That was the way influence was organised.  What the social media revolution is doing is shifting influence away from institutions and individuals even, into the processes of connection that are generated within a crowd of individuals.  Far from being screened out, the noise is what we should be looking at because it is where influence is moving towards.   Expertise will no longer remain the preserve of experts – as James Surowieki has shown in his book “The Wisdom of the Crowds” (a book that is not explicitly about social media, but is essential reading if you want to understand social media).

Bad news for Influencer50, obviously, because its business is set-up around identifying a small number of influential individuals and connecting with them off-line.  It’s why, in a recent blog post, one of the report’s authors states that, “Frankly, I think there’s a lot of tosh and assertion on the importance of social media in influence”.  A sutiable epitaph for this organisation’s tombstone I feel, for this is not an organisation that will be around in five or 10 years time.  Of course, social media doesn’t excert influence when you have determined in advance the rules through which influence must be excerted (i.e. through individuals and institutions).  But when you realise that the rules of influence are changing, and when you look at influence as a process not a person, and when you realise that this is being driven by the social media revolution – then the picture starts to look very different.

So an exhortation for 2010 – embrace the noise, celebrate the “Pointlesss Babble”, revel in the “endless narcisism of the blogosphere”.  It’s where the future is.

links for 2009-12-16

  • The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model | Magazine
    This is very, very interesting. It is a case study in the future of content – switching from content of mass appeal to content of individual relevance. Its about the switch from buying media (distribution) to making media. Its about cutting production costs to match content value, rather than trying to increase content value to cover production costs. Its about the life time value of content, not its one-off utility. Every organisation should apply the Demand Media approach to their business and start making this type of high volume content to populate their content warehouse and their relevat digital space. If you don’t do it – Demand Media will.

Social media failures – are consultants to blame?

One of the staples of the ‘social media conversation’ is the social-media-consultant-as-snake-oil-salesman thing.  (See this most recent offering from Business Week)  A meme, in fact, is what I think it could be called.  This often goes hand-in-hand with the whole social-media-show-us-your-metrics-or-go-away meme.  The confluence of these two memes is the conclusion that unless a social media consultant can point to campaigns they have done and show you his or her  metrics – they must be snake oil salesmen.  And, by extension, all the social media car crashes out there (Toyota Matrix, Motrin Mums to name the two cited in the Business Week article) are therefore the fault of social media consultants.

Fair enough, there are a lot of people out there spouting nonsense at the moment, but is it really social media consultants who are to blame?  Are social media consultants “leading clients astray” as the Business Week article suggests?  I think not.  Lets see whose fingerprints are actually all over most social media failures. Continue reading →

Should you proofread a blog?

I have just had the following comment posted by Jim on my ‘biography‘ entry on this blog.

Please proofread your website.

It doesn’t detract from what you’re saying, but I did find the spelling errors and grammatical mistakes a little annoying.

How to respond?  Obviously, I first checked the comment for typos – no such luck.  Should I delete it?  It is, after all, the only comment on this ‘not-particularly-for commenting-on-page”.  Well that wouldn’t really be in the spirit of social media. Continue reading →

Einstein’s Twitter stream: quality content or pointless babble?

In the old world content had to live within a particular means of distribution – a newspaper, a book, a website.  In effect, content had to find its proper place.  Short form written news information could only really live within a newspaper.  Stories tended to gravitate towards books.  Video could only live on the television.

When we talked about content we therefore talked about newspapers, books, the TV etc.  We made the assumption that each type of media (means of distribution) was a type of content because what it was and how it was published, were locked together.

This assumption breaks down when you look at social media – especially Twitter.  Continue reading →

Social media – when the listening has to stop

One of the mantras of social media is the need to listen.  Listen to your customers, consumers, to conversations, etc. etc.  etc.  However, I am now starting to see organisations caught in a listening trap.  These organisations have, sensibly enough, been monitoring social media for some time and have now reached the point where they are asking “where next with our monitoring?”  They are looking to get ever more precise measures, crunch ever greater amounts of data, analyse the influence of the sources they identify in greater depth, develop better quantitative analysis.  To them this seems both possible and necessary because the social media space is vast and growing, with so much data within it, so many opportunities for number crunching.

However, there is a problem.  This is a road with no ending.  Continue reading →

links for 2009-11-23