Free webinar on social media media measurement

FireShot Screen Capture #271 - 'Free Webinar I Are You Measuring The Right Social Media Metrics_' - www_emarketeers_com_events_measuring-the-right-social-media-metricseMarketeers have asked me to run a free webinar on social media measurement next month.  As you can see from the blurb, this is not a review of all the sundry measurement tools and techniques that are out there at the moment – in fact it will largely be a riposte to our belief in the effectiveness of these things.  Rather I will be suggesting that we first need to work out what it is we should be measuring in order to then work out what tools we should be using to measure it.

Please feel free to sign up, tell your friends etc.  There are no limits on numbers.

Jay Baer: the right questions and the right answers (but perhaps the wrong name?)

I think that many of the people out there providing social media advice are providing the wrong advice.  It is not necessarily their fault – because in essence they are simply providing the answers to the wrong questions.  These questions tend to be a version of “how can we use social media to reach our consumers?” to which the right answer is “you can’t, you have to understand social media as something your consumers can use to reach you, if and when they want to”.  The problem is, the organisations asking these questions don’t necessarily want to pay money to receive this answer, hence the lack of people giving it.

It is therefore great to find other people out there who are providing the right answers and also trying to get organisations to re-frame the question.  One such person is Jay Baer.  I had been vaguely aware of Jay as being “a name” on the social media scene in the US, but had never really checked-out his stuff.  But then, last week, I came across a piece he wrote that was published in Social Media Today.  It was about a brand ‘blowing it’ on Twitter and I hoped I could scoop it up as a case study to put into my training courses – but as I was scanning it, one idea seized my attention.  This was the idea of “listening at the point of need”.  I felt this idea perfectly captures what I try and teach organisations about social media being understood as a behaviour identification and response challenge, rather than a channel and message challenge.

This in turn lead me to check out his latest book: Youtility – why smart marketing is about help not hype.  I am not overly keen on the name Youtility.  I can see why this seemed like a smart twist on utility, but I am not sure who the You actually is, or if even if utility as a concept is the right concept to be riffing with.  Themtility might have been more accurate, but clearly less snappy.  However, I think the ideas he puts forward are spot on and give another perspective on all the key themes I bang-on about (behaviours and response, listening, information rather than content etc).

Here are a few soundbites drawn from his summary of the book on Slideshare.

If you are asking about how to get more attention and how to make your products seem more exciting online, you are asking the wrong question.

See my point at the start of this post. Continue reading →

Big Barbie

FireShot Screen Capture #267 - 'There's a Camera in This Barbie Doll [VIDEO]' - mashable_com_2013_10_08_barbie-doll-cameraHere is a cool thing I have just seen on Mashable – a Barbie doll with a camera in it.

Here is not such a cool thing – a Barbie doll with a camera and an embedded SIM or RFID, and then maybe a microphone thrown in for good measure.  Barbie can now apply for a job at the NSA.  Welcome to the Internet of Things.

Social media and the future of retailing

It has long been my mantra that the social media revolution is all about the separation of information from a restrictive means of distribution.  The interesting thing is how this schism plays out across other areas: for example, the separation of trust from institutions (trust being the information side of the equation and the institution being the distribution side), journalism from journalists, or music from the music business.

A couple of weeks ago I was shopping in John Lewis in Oxford Street, and this caused me to reflect on how this separation was playing-out within high street retailing.  I was aided in this reflection by the recent excellent series of documentaries on the history of British retailing by the BBC’s Robert Peston, the last one of which was examining the whole digital revolution in retailing.  Effectively what Peston was identifying was a growing separation between visiting a store, where we go to experience products, and purchasing those products which we tend to do on-line.

In the pre-digital world the information (the products) had been tied to a means of distribution (the store) and to a large extent it was the nature of the store – its size and location and thus its cost – which determined what products could sit within it.  This mirrors the way in which media, as a means of distribution, has shaped the information that sits within it.  But now retailing information is being separated from its (restrictive) means of distribution – product display is  being separated from product purchase.

The implication in all of this is that information side of the equation can (in fact must) adapt itself to a world where is has no default distribution partner to shape its destiny.  From a retailing perspective this means that certain types of physical store need to move away from their distribution function and shift into becoming providers of information and experience (albeit it you may still purchase items within a store, but probably by doing it using a mobile device and having it delivered to your home, rather than taking an item to a check-out desk and then having to carry it home).

Clearly there will be some types of products that will remain more distribution dependent  – groceries or any other product required for immediate usage or consumption for example – and the stores that provide this are what will form the mainstay of what will become a much reduced retail estate as the non-distribution dependent elements shift entirely into the digital space.

I do love it when a theory appears to have a universal application!

Hoot Suite on the future of social media

Hoot Suite CEO, Ryan Holmes

Here is a good piece from Hoot Suite’s CEO, Ryan Holmes (thanks to Alex Robinson for spotting this).  It demonstrates the extent to which organisations are starting to move into what I see as the second phase of social media: shifting away from seeing it as a channel and message challenge, to being a behaviour identification and response challenge.  (See this I wrote a while back and also points six and seven of my Simplicity Manifesto.)

This is the point where social media becomes understood as a business process, rather than being defined (and measured) in terms of communications outputs (content, reach, frequency etc).

That said, I think there still is a central role – someone I call a corporate DJ (rather than a social media manager) and their role is to to basically listen to requests and source the responses required.  Likewise there is still a centralised function- which is not about producing the content or managing the conversation but in facilitating the process of decentralising social media (training, process management) and spreading it into a business.

 

The EACA Euro Effies: the marketing equivalent of You’ve Been Framed?

A couple of weeks back I got the opportunity to attend the awards ceremony for the EACA Euro Effies.  These are essentially advertising awards (or more precisely awards for advertising agencies) that are not judged by creatives for their creativity, but judged according to how effective they are in meeting the clients’ business objectives.  (Should there actually be any other types of awards I ask?).  The interesting thing was how little actual advertising featured in many of the winning entries.  It reminded me of the sage words of Lou Capozzi , former boss of the MS&L PR network, who – on looking at the changing marcoms landscape – declared  “it is all just become PR with zeros added to the budget.”

Even those winners that were more ad-focused had submissions that were surrounded by a blizzard of ‘social media engagement’ and some of the more memorable appeared to be almost entirely social media-based, with no actual ad either produced or deemed worthy of featuring in the case study presentation of ‘the work’.  Examples here included a campaign for Mercedes-Benz about an invisible car, a stunt recreation of Felix Baumgartner’s famous Red Bull jump in Lego and a campaign to get people to visit Iceland in the winter based around an invitation to visit ordinary Icelanders in the homes.

I found all of this quite confronting, not least because I spend all my time telling people to forget the idea of using social media to reach audiences – pumping out lots of content – yet here were examples of just that, which were winning awards for effectiveness.   Continue reading →

New angle on the BT rural broadband story

There is a lot of fuss this morning about the government’s scheme to deliver (superfast) broadband to rural areas and its failure to manage contracts with BT.  I live in such an area and here is a new angle on this story.

I receive no broadband at all, let alone superfast, so I have to use an expensive satellite to access the internet.  There is no prospect that I will receive broadband in the future – government scheme or not.  This is because my area does not qualify for the government scheme because it sits within an area BT says it can cover as part of its commercial service.  However, despite the fact that BT could deliver broadband here, it won’t – although it has suggested that if the community could stump-up £40,000 it would.

My area is not an exception.  As local councils roll-out their government funded programmes many other areas are being uncovered which sit in this no-man’s land – abandoned by both BT and government.

Neither is my area remote – it is 3 miles outside of one of the largest town in Suffolk.  In fact most of the areas similarly affected are not remote, they are simply areas that BT can’t be bothered to deal with.

BBC types – are you interested in covering this?

Social media and the shift of trust from institutions into processes

This is actually chapter 6 from my book.  I have put it here in order to liberate it from a restrictive means of distribution – so it can operate effectively in the social digital space. The liberation of content from a restrictive means of distribution is, of course, what the social media revolution is all about. Apologies therefore for its reference to other chapters and concepts not similarly liberated (unless you wish to buy the book of course).

Back in chapter two I mentioned that I think one of the most profound changes that the world of social media is heralding is a shift of trust from institutions into processes. The reason this is so important is that trust (and its close cousin influence) is the single most important commodity upon which all societies are built.

We live in a society where trust lives in institutions. We trust banks to look after our money, because there isn’t another way to create the bonds of trust necessary to conduct financial transactions at any form of scale (insert your own joke about trust and bankers here). We trust the media to present to us a representation of the truth (insert your own joke about…). We also trust governments… (say no more). We are, perhaps co-incidentally, at the moment suffering a reversal in our trust of institutions but perhaps this may be more than just co-incidental. Part of the reason may be that we are starting to see other ways to scale the creation of trust, that don’t rely on its management within institutions. There is nothing like a bit of competition to create dissatisfaction with the established order. Continue reading →

Thongs on the internet: the next big internet thing

FireShot Screen Capture #259 - 'Buy Internet Thongs & G-Strings I Personalised I - CafePress UK' - www_cafepress_co_uk_+internet+underwear-panties_cat=100115Around this time last year I was asked by Savas Onemli, the editor of Digital Age in Turkey, what I thought the big thing in 2013 was going to be.  I said Big Data.  Phew!  So recently I was asking myself the question, what might be the big thing of 2014.  I think Big Data is still going to be pretty big, but I think the new thing we will be talking about (which is closely linked to Big Data) is The Internet of Things.

I have just got back from Brussels where I was taking part in a panel discussion on Big Data at the annual get together of the European Association of Communications Agencies (EACA).  One of the issues I raised was that the amount of data out there was about to explode on account of the fact that things, not just people, were now becoming connected to it.  In the Big Data context I called this ‘the kettles that spy on your life’ – for this, essentially, is what happens when we connect things to the internet: they become spies, either on your  life specifically or on life in general.

I was first introduced to this idea about 18 months ago when I saw a presentation by Andy Hobsbawn at the Social Media Influence conference.  Andy was an enthusiastic supporter of the idea and one of the possibilities he suggested was what might happen when jeans, or other items of clothing, acquire an internet identity.  As soon as he said this the thought that flashed into my mind, however, was not ‘how intriguing’, it was ‘oh, my God’.  The whole thing seemed to be a terrifying prospect, not just the ability of these things to become spies but also the multiplicity of issues that might emerge when we start to give things independent identities and personalities that interact with our own.  Does this mean we will have to start giving things rights for example?  We are having enough difficulties dealing with issues like our own rights to privacy and data protection in relation to Big Data as it is (one of the issues also discussed at the EACA event), let alone dealing with our items of clothing – underwear, data and privacy: welcome to the Internet of Thongs.

Joking aside, the fact that things will join us on the internet as producers and quite possibly consumers of data clearly re-inforces what I already believe, which is that we are not going to solve this privacy and data protection thing by looking at initial sources of the data, because otherwise we will end up giving rights to our underwear and asking its consent.  The answer has to lie in controlling how data is used, not by controlling the way in which it is sourced.

However, the reason I now know this will be the Big Thing of 2014 is that I have just heard a piece on it on the BBC’s World at One programme.  It was approached in the same way the BBC and Radio 4 always approach these things which is to damn it with frivolity.  “Goodness me, a rubbish bin connected to the internet, whatever will these (silly) people think of next” was the general tone of the piece.  “Goodness me, a computer that everyone can own, whatever will these (silly) people think of next”.  Whenever the BBC (in fact traditional mainstream media in general) doles out this sort of treatment – you can be sure they are talking about the next big thing.