Tagged: social media

US Mid-terms: the role of social media in the Republican’s success

I would not consider myself to be a fan of the Republican Party, but I am a fan of this comment by Lori Brownlee, social media director for the Republican National Committee (RNC).  Commenting on the success of their recent campaign she said “rather than simply using Twitter and Facebook as a broadcast tool,  we centered our plan around using social as a strategic listening and data collection tool.”

Check out this article just published in AdAge for more details.  There is so much that brands could learn from this approach – especially the ability to understand, in real-time, what people are talking about or asking.  Social media is a real-time game and it requires that a brand design real-time processes to play it.  This is not a game where you sit down and plan your content in advance – you plan your process in advance and this will then tell you what content you need to have out there right now.  A content strategy needs to be seen as a process that matches brand answers to consumers’ questions in real-time.

Neither do you plan your influencers in advance, people become influential because what it is they are doing or saying right now, and you therefore need to identify them in real-time.  Someone who is influential today, is not necessarily going to be influential tomorrow.

And key to this process are tools and people.  Listening and analysis tools (such as Sprinklr, mentioned in the article), but then places (such as newsrooms or command centres) where the tools can be plugged into people who can then process and share the information and make decisions about what to do.  Rather than spending time and money simply filling up channels with ‘brandfill’, brand should spend time and money creating (and then staffing and managing) command centres.

Edelman Brandshare2014: a manifesto for brand survival, but will brands take heed?

Edelman has just released its latest Brandshare report. It has the rather uninspiring title ‘How brands and people create a value exchange’. It is, however, a very important report: one that every single marketing director should not just read – but read and actually think about – because it presents credible evidence that explains how the relationship between brands and their customers or consumers is changing. In effect, it lays out a framework for what it will mean to be a brand in the future – even if the report itself doesn’t quite go so far as making this claim.  Perhaps more starkly, it makes it very clear that what it is that built brands in the past will not be relevant in building brands in the future.

 

The report starts with the assertion that “people’s needs have changed due to an increasingly complex and interconnected world.” Fair enough – but I think a better way of phrasing this is to say that the world has changed and this is creating new opportunities (indeed requirements) for brands to better meet people’s needs: a fact which ‘the people’ are now starting to realise. The reason I think it is better to phrase the issue this way is that believing that ‘the people’ are changing can often result in an attitude which seeks to blame or resent ‘our consumers’ for spoiling the brand party. Not the right mind-set. People have not really changed (they rarely do), what has changed is the world around them – and it is this that brands need to understand and react to. The people are not the problem here. Anyway – a small quibble.

Edelman then introduce the concept of ‘the value exchange’ and demonstrate that consumers now feel they are not getting sufficient value in this exchange, which I took as ‘strategy talk’ for saying that the relationship between brands and consumers is breaking down. The report identifies three reasons for this:

  • Brands are not really giving consumers what they now want (“there is little value for the consumer in the current value exchange.”)
  • Consumers want actions, not words (“emotional and rational needs are merging”)
  • Being seen as a good corporate citizen is becoming more important (“meeting societal needs delivers real business value”)

More specifically, consumers want brands to:

  • Respond quickly to concerns and complaints
  • Provide ways to ask questions and give opinions
  • Communicate openly about how products are sourced and made
  • Invite people to be a part of the development and refinement process
  • Have a clear mission and purpose at the brand core
  • Use its resources to drive change in the world
  • Let people know the company’s mission and value for the future
  • Take a stand on issues consumers care about.

These points clearly fall into two distinct groups – the first four relate to process and delivery and they are very functional. No BS here about wanting to be ‘surprised and delighted’ by brands or wanting ‘rewarding brand experiences’ – just very clear instructions that are essentially all rooted in listening and responding.   The remaining four cover the more emotional territory – but are equally explicit. They are an exhortation for a brand to demonstrate that it stands for something other than simply the creation of profit.

I think these eight points represent a crystal clear manifesto for what a brand needs to deliver against if it still wishes to be a brand in the future. However, the interesting thing is the extent to which conventional marketing activity  delivers against almost none of these points. For example, customer service has been seen as an issue that is peripheral to marketing and indeed peripheral to corporate activity in general: a cost that should be minimised by outsourcing it to India. Likewise what Edelman identifies as ‘societal needs’ have been marginalised in CSR or CRM activities that are similarly peripheral to marketing and corporate activity rather than being something that is seen as being at the core of the brand.

Perhaps it is worth restating this conclusion more bluntly: what it is that built brands in the past will have almost no relevance to what will build brands in the future. Edelman has not been as explicit in stating things this way – but this the inescapable conclusion of what the evidence collected actually demonstrates.

Of course, brands have paid lip service to these issues to date. Customer service has long been talked about as being an important component of social digital strategies, but very few brands have actually done much about it. It is incredibly easy to address all of the four functional needs through the creation and management of online customer communities – but why do so few brands have them? Most brands still make it incredibly difficult for a consumer to do any of the things the report shows that they want to do (ask questions, get responses, provide opinion, access relevant information). Why? Dell showed the way with its Idea Storm site seven or eight years ago. Why have so few followed its lead?

The ‘strategy du jour’ these days is all about content marketing. But rarely is this content actually aligned against responding to complaints, providing answers to questions, or giving transparency about how products are made and sourced. Rather we have organisations like Coca Cola (my current bête noir in the content space), telling people how to make cups out of crayons. Why?

I guess the answer to this question goes back to the conclusion that what built brands in the past won’t build brands in the future. Perhaps it also helps explain why Edelman stepped back from putting this conclusion centre-stage. What built brands in the past represents a huge set of vested interests that define the world of brands and agencies as we know it. While it may be acceptable to recognise the problem, it is much harder to embrace a solution that addresses this problem. Instead it is far more seductive to believe that the solution is content, or ‘reaching out to consumers’ (rather than responding to them), or creating ‘engagement’ (whatever that means) because this is a solution that doesn’t upset the brand and agency apple cart.

Personally, I take great heart from this report. It gives me the hard evidence to support what I have been saying for a long time: namely that social media strategies need to be based on listening and response, that content strategies should be seen as a process that matches brand answers to consumer question in real time rather than strategies designed to fill-up the channels with brandfill, that the social digital space is a medium of connection not a medium of distribution, that communities will become the new media, that marketing people should forget trying to target consumers and recognise that they need to get consumers to target their brand.

As a brand owner I guess you can take this report in either one of two ways. You could brush it aside as just another one of ‘those’ reports by a consultancy telling me I need to change my business. Or you could see it as a message from your consumers, telling you what you need to do if you still want to be relevant to them in the future.

Advertising is just a big, pink, inflatable, pointy finger

2014-10-10 10.16.29I spent two days last week on the Slovenian ‘Riveriera’ attending the Golden Drums International Advertising Festival (basically Cannes, but for eastern Europe). Slovenia has almost no coastline and therefore appears to have turned all of it into the edge of one gigantic Adriatic swimming pool, complete with chrome steps and handrails, interspersed with a couple of pretty fishing villages. You can almost hear the tourism pitch idea now, “hey, this is not much as a coastline, but as a swimming pool it could be pretty impressive!”

These events are always interesting to see how the practice of creativity and the practice of marketing are currently entwined. Two things stood out for me. First was the familiar problem of category confusion. It was impossible to put most of the best ideas in any one category. For example, there was an idea for the Belgrade State Theatre (I think) which placed actors as drivers in taxis wired up with hidden cameras. In true taxi driver style, the drivers began a tale of lament about their lives, drawing the passengers into the narrative. At the end of the journey they then reveal their true identity and that the story was actually the plot of a Shakespeare play, currently playing at their theatre. Very funny to watch (in the show reel) especially once you were wise to the format and were trying to identify the play.

But the problem was that this ‘event’ was forced into the category of film (because it was filmed) and sat there alongside conventional 30 second ads. However, the event wasn’t in any way a conventional ad. In fact it became compromised by the requirement to render it into the restrictive frame required to create something that can sit in paid-for TV space and that is seen a number of times by a ‘target consumer’. It worked as a show reel (but consumers never get to see the show reel) or it worked if you could get consumers out of expensive advertising space, to a space (i.e. YouTube) where you had sufficient time to tell, or even interact with, the stories properly.

This leads to the second problem – one of scale. Most of the best ideas were small scale ideas, or rather ideas which were not naturally adapted to working at large scale. This was either because, as in the case of the theatre example, it was difficult to fit them into a distribution medium which would give them scale (i.e. a TV ad) or because their strength was in their relevance – often local or cultural relevance – which by definition has limited scale. The most decorated agency on the night was an independent Russian agency called Voskhod. Their stand-out ideas (i.e. the ones I can remember) were all small scale. Actually, they were all PR ideas. For example, they created a poster for a local steak restaurant that featured a picture of a raw steak. One night they ‘grilled’ the steak by actually burning strips into the poster. Result – the restaurant was booked out the following week. And they did a campaign which linked an up-and-coming band with a single fashion shop. Very geographically and culturally specific stuff. And this stuff is the anti-thesis of the generic, international campaign that forms the bread and butter of most big brands and major agency networks. An impending problem there me-thinks.

Of course all of these ideas were surrounded by clouds of ‘social media’ – i.e everything was YouTubed, Facebooked, Tweeted etc. etc. In fact, these ideas lived much more comfortably in social media than in traditional media. But social media isn’t a channel. Just because something is ‘in’ social media, doesn’t mean it actually goes anywhere – unless you then invest significant time and effort driving people to that social space. Which perhaps provides a clue to the future of advertising and creativity. As I have posted previously, one of the principal consequences for brands and creativity of the social media revolution (which is the separation of information from distribution) is the separation of creativity from the means of delivery. Ideas have to sit above any particular delivery channel. Ideas have to define the channels, rather than be defined by the channels.

The channels themselves only have relevance in-so-far as they have a specific purpose and quite possibly the purpose of advertising in the future is not to actually carry, or even illustrate, brand ideas, but simply to be the big, pink, inflatable finger which points at brand ideas. Advertising is a distribution medium, so that is what it should focus on – bringing attention (scale) to an idea which lives in a (social) space which doesn’t naturally have scale attached to it. And these ideas will in most instance have a degree of specific geographical or cultural relevance that, even with advertising attached, will limit their ability to achieve international scale. It also points to what I have previously talked about, which is that the challenge for brands is to convene an audience, not to target it.

The overall winning idea came from Romania, and it involved connecting a young, relatively photogenic shepherd to the internet via a smart phone, thus allowing him to share his life with the world (or at least that bit of the world which might be interested). Quite a lot of people (in Romania) were interested as it turned out and said shepherd became an ‘internet celebrity’. I think this says more about Romania than it does for the practice of marketing generally. One thing is for sure, we are not going to be handing out awards for this type of thing in five years’ time (except perhaps in Turkmenistan). The brand was Vodafone. Although it could have been almost any mobile network, technology or sheep-related brand.

images_iman_highres__mg_7473Or it could have been Coca-Cola, since pretty much anything can be a ‘Coca-Cola story’ in these halcyon days where the focus has shifted from creative excellence to content excellence.  This, incidentally is what I was there to talk about – our obsession with content marketing, otherwise known as brandfill.  Here I am, in action.  I think I will use this as my new social profile pic, since it pretty much sums up my professional life – waving my hands around telling people what not to do.

There was also one other stand-out. What is it with creatives, beards and jackets which are at least one size too small?

What is local news? Can it exist as a form of media?

Two weeks ago I had just returned home from football training with one of my sons. As I got out of the car I heard some distant thunder-like rumbling. But the rumble kept repeating itself in a very regular way. It was therefore clearly not a natural phenomenon. It was something that was very big or explosive (a bit worrying) but also very distance and not seeming to get closer (more reassuring).

So I wanted to find out what was going on. Did I listen to the local radio station? Did I look at the website of the local newspaper? Of course not. I simply punched #Norfolk #Suffolk #boom into a Twitter search. Hey presto – I found someone else with the same question and shortly we were joined by another with the answer – which was some uncommonly noisy military exercises taking place at the army’s Stanford Training Area (Stanta), some 20 miles way in Thetford Forest.

Now the issue here is not whether the local radio station or newspaper could or should have been giving me this information. Or that their inability to do so therefore represented a unfulfilled need or opportunity for a more (hyper) local variant of their kind to fill this supposed ‘gap in the market’. Radio and newspapers are constrained, and defined by, (and named after) the medium within which they have to operate (radio, newsprint). The expense of using this medium sets a floor, in terms of required audience, below which they cannot go. But this constraint also applies to the type of content these forms of media produce – which is something we tend to forget. We have lived in a world where information is married to distribution (content to media) and where distribution wears the trousers (i.e. defines what content can live within it).

The social digital revolution is all about the separation of information from distribution – the removal of the constraint upon content which expensive distribution channels once imposed. But the removal of this distribution constraint has not, as many assume, made it possible for the content form (as distinct from distribution form) that is local media to break through the glass floor and now operate at the hyper local level. At this level (or within the social digital space) the concept of content ceases to have any meaning – because content is a creation of the world of channel (distribution). It requires containment in order to be content.

What happens at the hyper local level (or in the hyper-relevant social digital space more generally) is that the form of content we call news stops being a finished product (i.e. content) and becomes a raw material. It becomes a component within a process that will allow individuals to define their own news. In the example I have highlighted it has become a conversation – which is a form of process. And when you aggregate conversations, what you end up with is a community.  And the question you also have to ask is that, when you remove the glass floor, do you find you have also removed a glass ceiling – such that process and community based ‘news’ migrates upwards and eats even more of the space currently occupied by traditional news content.  Yes is probably the answer.

The future is therefore pretty bleak for what we currently see understand as local news.  It cannot make itself more local because hyper-local news can never exist, or be aggregated within, the distribution form we associate with media.  And the hyper-local, or hyper-relevant, processes associated with information sharing in the social digital space (the world of the individual, rather than the world of the audience) are likely to migrate upwards and eat even more of its, already relatively impoverished, lunch.

October engagements: Shel Holtz (#smwisoc) and Golden Drums

FireShot Screen Capture #180 - 'Strategic_digital_engagement_seminar-earlybird_pdf' - www_isoc_com_files_pages_Strategic_digital_engagement_seminar-earlybirdI have a couple of engagements in October I would like to flag.

First, social media guru Shel Holtz (@shelholtz) is going to be in the UK from 27-31 October for the week-long strategic digital engagement seminar organised by ISOC.  Since the poor man can’t be asked to provide an entire week’s worth of seminars, some others (Paul Marsden, Janet Murray and myself), have been hired as support acts.  I am going to be responsible for the future, as in Social Media and the Next Big Things: the Forces that will Shape the Social Digital Space in the Next Few Years.  It will focus on Big Data and the world of the algorithm in the morning and rise of communmity and why community may become the new media in the afternoon.

Should be fun.

Places on this one are pretty limited and also have a £2,200 price tag attached, so if you are interested please sign up here.

Second, although firstly chronologically speaking, I will be speaking on October 10 at the Golden Drums in Slovenia.  The organisers have allowed me to run a session (actually pitched as an EACA masterclass) called “An alternative look at content” which I am going to use as an opportunity to expose those guilty for filling the social digital space with Brandfill and reveal why they are doing it.

I think it unlikely you will travel to Slovenia just to listen to me, but if you do happen to be going anyway, my session is at 14.00 on Friday – and you will have the choice between me and Johan Jervøe, Group Chief Marketing Officer, UBS AG who will be answering the question “Branded content: has social media changed the world of creative excellence?”.  Not that I want to influence anyone, but I will also be answering that question.  In fact I can give you the answer now: yes, branded content and social media has changed the world of creative excellence, but only in-so-far as it is causing us to forget what creative excellence really is.  This is because most branded content is simply tediously long-form advertising, with all of the things that made advertising effective taken out of it.

I will also be giving away T-shirts.

 

 

 

Convening an audience: the new challenge for marketing

sermon_mount2I believe there are now two consumer worlds: the world of the audience (the world of ‘traditional’ media and marketing) and the world of the individual (the world of social media). These worlds are very different, not least because in the world of social media consumers will expect to be treated as an individual and will tend to resent or ignore attempts to treat them as just another member of an audience. This doesn’t mean that consumers don’t ever want to be treated as a member of an audience, just not when they are in the social digital space.

This presents two problems for brands. First, almost everything we know about marketing (including digital marketing / media) comes out of the world of the audience. Marketing, to date, has essentially been audience-based marketing. But putting audience-based approaches into the social space just doesn’t work, because it can’t support the potential for creating high-value relationships with individuals. Traditional marketing is a high reach but low engagement business and there is no point in putting the low engagement techniques of traditional marketing into the low reach environment of social media.

Audiences are very hard to find or create in the world of social media. This is because when people are in this space they are looking to create connections and you can’t create connections with an audience, only with individuals or within groups. The social media space is a medium of connection, not a medium of distribution. When a brand operates within the social space it has to accept that it can realistically only talk to very few people at any one time so it therefore has to (and can) create relationships of far higher value than anything that is associated with traditional marketing. But you only do this by recognising what it is that people want from you in this space, which is real-time individualised response and recognition, answers to questions and information.

However, this fact is not stopping many brands from trying dump audience-based, low engagement approaches in the social digital space. Content marketing is the latest iteration of such an attempt. Continue reading

Privacy: let’s have the right conversation

The whole social media, Big Data, privacy thing is getting an increasing amount of air time. This is good, because this is very important thing to start getting our heads around. However, I don’t think we are really yet having the right conversation.

The pre-dominant conversation out there seems to be focused on the issues concerned with the potential (and reality) of organisations (businesses or governments) ‘spying’ on citizens or consumers by collecting data on them, often without their knowledge or permission.

Our privacy is therefore being ‘invaded’.

But this is an old-fashioned, small data, definition of privacy. It assumes that the way to gain an understanding of an individual, which can then be used in a way which has consequences for that individual, is by collecting the maximum amount of information possible about them: it is about creating an accurate and comprehensive personalised data file. The more comprehensive and accurate the file is, the more useful it is. From a marketing perspective, it is the CRM way of looking at things (it is also the VRM way of looking at things, where the individual has responsibility for managing this data file).  It is also a view that then gives permission to the idea that if you detach the person from the data (i.e. make it anonymous) it stops it being used in a way which will have consequences for the individual concerned and is therefore ‘cleared’ for alternative usage.

But this is not the way that Big Data works. The ‘great’ thing about Big Data (or more specifically algorithms) is that they require almost no information about an individual in order to arrive at potentially very consequential decisions about that individual’s identity.   Instead they use ‘anonymised’ information gathered from everyone else. And increasingly this information is not just coming from other people, it is coming from things (see Internet of Things). The great thing about things is that they have no rights to privacy (yet) and they can produce more data than people.

The name of the game in the world of the algorithm is to create datafied (not digitised) maps of the world. I don’t mean literally geographical maps (although they can often have a geographical / locational component): from a marketing perspective it can be a datafied map of a product sector, or form of consumer behaviour. These maps are three dimensional in that they comprise a potentially limitless numbers of data layers. These layers can be seemingly irrelevant, inconsequential or in no way related to the sector of behaviour that is being mapped. The role of the algorithm is the stitch these layers together, so that a small piece of information in one layer can be related to all the other layers and thus find its position upon the datafied map.

In practical terms, this can mean that you can be refused a loan based on information concerning your usage of electrical appliances, as collected by your ‘smart’ electricity meter. This isn’t a scary, down-the-road sort of thing. Algorithmic lending is already here and the interesting thing about the layers in the datafied maps of algorithmic lenders is the extent to which they don’t rely on traditional ‘consequential’ information such as credit scores and credit histories. As I have said many times before, there is no such thing as inconsequential data anymore: all data has consequences.

Or to put it another way, your identity is defined by other peoples’ (or things’) data: your personal data file (i.e. your life) is simply a matter of personal opinion. It has little relevance to how the world will perceive you, no matter how factually correct or accurate it is. You are who the algorithm says you are, even if the algorithm itself has no idea why you are this (and cannot explain it if anyone comes asking) and has come to this conclusion based in no small part, by the number of times you use your kettle every day.

The world of the algorithm is a deeply scary place. That is why we need the conversation. But it needs to be the right conversation.

Converged media: is it the Next Big Thing?

Blessed Trinity of mediaHere is a lift from a Sprinklr blog post about its recent purchase of TBG Digital – a “top global social paid solution company”.

With the obvious and inevitable decline of organic reach, paid is increasingly the only lever that can predictably control brands’ reach across channels. It’s absolutely critical that brands learn to coordinate messaging across paid and owned.

I look at this and feel conflicted. At one level, what Sprinklr are saying here is absolutely true. It is certainly true to the extent that brands are starting to recognise that what Sprinklr call ‘organic reach’ just doesn’t happen at any scale in the social digital space (for brands at any rate). It also is validation of what I have been going-on about for some years now – namely that there are no audiences in social media and therefore social is not a reach and frequency (channel and message) game.

I am also aware that ‘the conversation’ within the social digerati of social media managers and consultants has been shifting back towards a greater emphasis on paid social solutions. This is a conversation that is heartily sponsored by the likes of Facebook and Twitter of course because it supports their agenda of discouraging organic (i.e. free) usage of their platforms and encouraging paid usage.

But here is the conflict. Why is it that we therefore think converged media is the answer and is the concept of ‘paid social’ really a contradiction in terms?

I first wrote about this almost exactly two years ago where I argued the point that converged media is really a construct of convenience for those that have an interest in traditional media and mass, audience based marketing. It is a way of trying to preserve the relevance of traditional approaches within the new social space. From the consumer / customer / citizen perspective however, media is going the opposite way. It is diverging and creating two very different media spaces, what I call the world of the audience (traditional media) and the world of the individual (social media). I also questioned the relevance of the Holy Trinity of media (Bought, Earned and the Wholly Owned), suggesting instead that media is now better understood as a spectrum, with participatory media at the social end and non-participatory the traditional end.

It seems to me that what has been happening in the last couple of years has been a growing realisation that most brands’ social media strategies are not working. Rather than try and deal with the fact that this is because these strategies were all about trying to make social work as a traditional, audience-based space (so that traditional audience-based marketing can continue to work) the response has been to try and converge ‘organic’ social with a steroid injection of paid social.

Therefore, converged media is really just the next step along the wrong road. Brands will only hit the right road when they realise that the challenge in the social space is not defined by reach and frequency, channel and message – it is defined by behaviour identification and response. Social ‘media’ is a connection medium, not a distribution medium. You deal with much smaller numbers of people at any one time, but the value from these connections is much greater, largely because they are based upon what your customers want from you, rather than what you want your customers to have.

adidas spills the beans on its World Cup campaign: they went #allin but what did they get?

BtJkpzZIUAAB77oOn Tuesday I was at one of Sprinklr‘s #social@scale events in London. These are always good because a series of big brands (who happen to be Sprinklr clients of course) basically spill the beans on what they are up to in social media.

The stand out presentation (no offence to the other presenters) was adidas who spilled the beans on their World Cup programme. It was fascinating because, firstly it was adidas, secondly it was the World Cup (the biggest potential brand exposure platform there is, especially for a sports brand) and thirdly, what an astonishing tin of beans it was.

To give you a flavour: the strategy had three elements, mobilization, anticipation and reaction. On the mobilization front they set up a social media command centre in Rio with a team of 80 people. 80 people! To put that into perspective the England national team only brought an entourage of 72 people – and that was the largest party England had ever assembled. From this command centre adidas were running a broadcast/content operation that was probably more extensive (in terms of its usage of channel and variety of output) than any of the traditional media broadcasters, although they didn’t trump the BBCs’ 272 people in terms of numbers. But I don’t think anyone trumps the BBC in terms of the numbers of people turning up at these sorts of parties.

In terms of anticipation adidas went there having prepared what they called a content bible: actually a vast library of material ‘in the can’, so that they could react in real time to almost any scenario. They also did something that was super-clever in order to get around the fact that they didn’t own the rights to any of the content from the games themselves, which was to have an animation facility on tap that could produce stylised video representations of the key moments of play which could then be put out as vines or assembled into montages for YouTube. In many ways these were even more ‘engaging’ than the real video clips because they challenged the viewer to match the clip and the players featured with the actual moments of play they were recreating. Making your audience work for the punch line always gets bigger laughs than just spoon-feeding them jokes.

And to give an indication of the speed of reaction, the Bazuca ball had its own Twitter identity. Come the infamous ‘was it over the line’ incident, ‘the ball’ tweeted that it was a goal before even the referee made his decision. Whether or not you think giving a ball a Twitter identity is a good idea you have to take your hat off to the speed of reaction.

Basically the whole thing was totally awesome in scale and organisation. In fact it was probably the most totally awesome way in which you could use social media, if you wished to use social media in a totally awesome way. Indeed this may even set a never to be repeated high watermark for social media awesomeness.

Why never to be repeated? Well here is where it gets interesting. The objective for all this awesomeness was simply to “have the loudest voice at the World Cup” according to @KrisEkman who was giving the presentation. So at the end of the presentation I asked the question, “why was this the objective and how did you measure it – was it just with respect to the share of voice of competitor brands or was it with respect to the whole World Cup conversation on social media?” The answer, it transpired, was basically to be shouting louder than Nike. This was because Nike was perceived to have ‘won’ the last World Cup and adidas wanted to out-gun them this time. And then came the killer question from Jessica Federer (@jjfeds) from Bayer. “How did you justify this expenditure to the bosses, in terms of what it did for sales or brand reputation” she said. The answer was startling. “We didn’t have to do this”, said Kris. Basically the team had been given an ROI pass: the whole thing had been declared an ROI-free zone. All they had to do was rack-up was more engagement stats than Nike.

Wow. Is that enlightened or just plain crazy? Not only were adidas spending a huge amount of money on a hunch, they were unable to have any basis for comparison for what a campaign vectored almost exclusively in social media was delivering versus what a traditional media based campaign would have delivered. Wow.

This seemed to me the equivalent of a football manager saying “you don’t have to score any goals, just make more passes than anyone else.” I tackled Kris in a coffee break on this one. Of course, it wasn’t a totally measurement free zone. The fact that they were using a platform such as Sprinklr to manage all the listening and response channels meant that they had control over a lot of the data. For example they could track contacts in social media through to online sales, albeit as Kris acknowledged, this was really only a small part of the picture. Now while Sprinklr does a good job on measurement, its main function is for real-time management and control. It can provide you with data you can plug into measurement processes if you want to, but, as far as I was aware, the Sprinklr data wasn’t really being plugged into anything.   Ultimately, adidas will also be able to look at uplift in sales and compare this to that generated by previous World Cup or Euro campaigns. Perhaps they already have this picture. None-the-less, this was a pretty big leap of faith.

As an aside, measurement is my big beef with many brands’ usage of social media. For example, everyone is spending big bucks producing loads of ‘content’ but no-one can measure the value the individual pieces of content created. Therefore you neither get a decent ROI calculation nor do you have an editorial framework that allows you decide which types of content you should be creating, i.e. which bits create the most value.

For myself, I didn’t quite know what to make of the adidas campaign. I was blown away by the awesomeness, but fear it may not have won the battle of sales, even if it won the battle of shouting. I always carry on about there now being two worlds for brands: the world of the audience (which is what traditional marketing has always been about) and the world of the individual (the new space where social media plays). Audiences don’t really exist in social media and to the extent to which they do, they are quite hard to create. For an event like the World Cup, which is probably the biggest audience-based event on the planet, is it therefore appropriate to show-up with an approach that, no matter what awesome levels of investment you throw at it, is always going to struggle to reach an audience as big as that which is available through more traditional channels? (Remembering, of course that social media isn’t really a channel or form of media, it is an infrastructure).

For sure, social media must form an important part of any campaign. Social media is a participatory media, it allows you to do things with groups of consumers or individuals that are not possible when you are simply ‘performing’ in traditional media, or ‘reaching out’ in competitions, promotions, events etc. But what it delivers in terms of participatory opportunity, it tends to lack in terms of reach.

It was interesting to note that very few of the 50 or so people in the room had seen the elements of adidas’s campaign. I must confess that I hadn’t encountered any of it. Put together all the elements in a show-reel and it looks totally awesome – but no consumer ever gets to see the show-reel. This is always a challenge, even if you are creating a campaign that has a higher dependency on high-reach media. But the way you solve this is by having a well-defined central creative idea, such that when a consumer sees just a bit of the campaign, it reinforces or creates the pathway back to that central idea. The idea acts as a multiplier to the individual tactics. Without this, you just have a bunch of tactics.

What then was the adidas idea? The tag line was ‘All in or nothing’ but this is a one-line expression of an idea not the idea itself. The difficulty I think adidas faced is that it is hard to make social media conform to the strictures of carrying an idea. You can use it to help create an idea or to involve people in aspects of that idea, but traditional forms of broadcast channel or conventional audience-based marketing activities are almost always better vehicles for actually driving an idea. Social media is also relentlessly real-time: a fact that adidas’s approach was set up to deal with. But it is hard to exert the creative precision necessary to sustain an idea, when you have only seconds to react. It is a bit like being asked a question, but then having to frame your answer in rhyme and also sing it as a jingle. Quite possibly adidas’s reliance (over-reliance?) on social media actually ended up eroding the focus on a creative idea (because singing all your responses in rhyme and in real-time is just too creatively challenging).

So I was left with the question: are adidas simply doing the wrong thing, brilliantly? At heart, it was a conventional broadcast strategy that used social, rather than traditional, media channels. But as we all know by now, social media is not about broadcast (it’s not even really media). You may well be shouting louder than Nike, but social media is not a medium for shouting.

And this is why I suspect this awesome display may represent the high-water mark: for adidas and perhaps all brands. For sure, they went #allin and whilst they didn’t get nothing, when they look at the sales lift, did they get enough?

 

Content and the 90:10 rule: why you should only spend 10% of your content budget on actually producing content

Brands have always produced content, it is just that back in the old days, they couldn’t afford to produce very much of it. This wasn’t because it was expensive to produce, but because it was expensive to distribute. There was a rough rule-of-thumb which said that maximum 10 per cent of your content (advertising) budget was spend on production and 90 per cent was spent on distribution (buying the media space). Now the great thing about social media is that you don’t have to buy it. “Fantastic,” has been the reaction of brands, “that means we can now spend 100 per cent of our social content budget on actually making the content.” It is as though something that was once expensive and desirable has now become virtually free and everyone has gone on a binge as a result.

However, we have forgotten that while it is easy enough to produce content and put it ‘in’ a social media channel, this doesn’t mean that the content is actually going anywhere or doing anything valuable for the brand. In fact the vast majority of brand content just sits in these channels like so much undigested brandfill. Content is only ever going to go anywhere, or do anything, if you socialise it – i.e. apply a process to the content you produce. In fact I think the 90:10 rule still applies: for any content strategy, only 10 per cent of the budget should be spend producing the content and the other 90 per cent needs to be spent ‘socialising’ the content you produce.

What is socialisation? Socialisation (like all things in social media) is a process and it has two components. The first involves finding out what content your consumers actually want and this has to start with establishing an effective listening and insight process. As simple and obvious as this step might sound, it is often either ignored or proves to be an almost insurmountable obstacle for some brands. This is because it reveals that the content (or conversations) consumers’ actually want is very different from the content (or conversations) the brand wants to have with consumers. In fact, consumers may not really want that much content at all. Rather than accept this rather unpalatable truth, brands often react by trying to provoke or entice (through promotion or gamification) consumers into becoming willing consumers of their content. Indeed Coca-Cola has stated its objective is to “provoke conversations and earn a disproportionate share of popular culture”.

What brands find when they listen to their consumers is that what they really want is answers to questions, either in the form of direct responses to real-time issues or through the ability to access relevant information, preferably where some form of peer endorsement process has been put in place. The place many turn to, of course, is Google and it never ceases to amaze me just how few brands have based their content strategies on an assessment of what questions their actual or potential customers are asking Google,  for which they as a brand can (should) provide an answer.

The second part of the socialisation process involves what you do with the content once produced. The reason content rarely goes anywhere in social media is because there are no audiences there to view it and such people as are there are not necessarily motivated to want to spread the content for you. Even if you have identified what Google spaces your content is relevant to, content left to its own devices is unlikely to attract sufficient attention to make it very far up the Google rankings. What needs to happen is that the content needs to be inserted into relevant conversations, matched to the spaces where the questions for which it is the answer are being asked.  This, of course, involves listening and responding to these conversations in the first place (step one again). This is a time intensive business and while you don’t necessarily need to attract a huge level of response to your content to attract the attention of Google (provided your content is designed appropriately in the first place), it will require some significant attention before the process of normal social interaction will provide it with sufficient Google juice to remain buoyant. Some content, of course, will never make it – so you have to start either the process again, or accept that there just isn’t a market for it.

The value of this approach is that, once you have given a piece of content sufficient buoyancy, it will remain relevant and useful for a long time, rather than simply being disposable. This is one area where brand-produced content is different to the content of traditional media. Traditional media content is designed to be disposable so that it produces an income stream. And traditional media outlets know exactly the value of the content they produce because there is a direct connection between volume produced and revenue (advertising or subscription) generated. This is one (of the may) reasons why it is foolish for brands to adopt a media model in thinking about how they approach content.

If brands applied the 90:10 rule the amount of content they produce would reduce dramatically, either because they couldn’t afford to invest sufficient time in socialising a large amount of content , or because they realised that there is no demand for the much of the content they thought they need to produce. They would also start to get a handle on what content creates value and thus have an editorial process that can focus on this rather than a process geared to generating a stream of disposable and /or unwanted brandfill.

For example, take this piece of content on ‘Spring picnic essentials’ from Coca-Cola. What process can you imagine might have been in place to determine that producing this content was a valuable or useful exercise and what process was then in place to insert it into relevant conversations such that it was likely to retain any sort of visibility or sustained relevance?   I don’t know what this process was, except that it must have been a very strange process. Or else there was no such process – which I suspect was probably the case.

It is a bit like old-fashioned press releases really. You didn’t measure the effectiveness of your PR programme by the amount of press releases you issued, but by the coverage you generated as a result. And you generated much of this coverage by the knowledge you had of the media you were targeting, the relationships you created with journalists and by not flooding these journalists with irrelevant content.

Perhaps there is much new-fangled ‘content marketing’ could learn from old-fashioned media relations.