Tagged: social media

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 →

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 →

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 →

The BBC Culture Show, YouTube and the future of TV

FireShot Screen Capture #248 - 'BBC iPlayer - The Culture Show_ 2013_2014_ YouTube - The Future of TV_' - www_bbc_co_uk_iplayer_episode_b039r4s9_The_Culture_Show_2013_2014_YouTube_The_Future_of_TVI have just watched the latest programme of the BBC’s The Culture Show.  It looked at the phenomena that is young people creating ‘programmes’ on YouTube that are attracting audiences as large as those associated with conventional TV programming.  It therefore posited the question “Is YouTube the future of TV?”

On one level it was an interesting and well produced programme – but on another it was naive and deeply flawed, exposing the familiar inability of traditional media to understand social media.

The first flaw was the idea that social media only starts to become serious when it produces something that looks like traditional media.  The artists and programmes featured may well be generating large audiences, but they none-the-less represent only a tiny fragment of the content or usage of the platform that is YouTube.  It is of course this other usage of the platform, that The Culture Show did not feature, which is having by far and away the greater cultural, social and economic impact.  But because this didn’t look like TV, it was ignored.  This is a usage, incidentally, which YouTube itself is also ignoring, because you can’t easily grow advertising dollars within it. Continue reading →

Note to marketing department: there are no audiences in social media

audience(Here is my column for publication in this month’s Digital Age).

Organisations only start to create measurable value from the usage of social media when the senior management of those organisations really understand what social media is all about.  Unfortunately, the journey towards this understanding is often a long and difficult one.

The first mistake senior management usually make is to assume that social media must fall somewhere within the remit of the marketing or communications department.  This is an easy mistake to make because this thing is called social ‘media’ and media is something that marketing people are paid to understand.  Marketing people themselves are usually keen to assume responsibility because it seems to present opportunities to create this thing called engagement with their customers which sounds good.  They will also find that the agencies they deal with are already knocking on their doors trying to sell them social media solutions and they are not knocking on the doors of any other departments.  Therefore having the marketing department take responsibility for social media seems such a logical decision that it barely generates any consideration at all.

However, there is a fatal flaw in setting off in this direction.

Marketing depends for its success on the identification or creation of an audience. Continue reading →

I am an anti-social-media expert

I am an anti-social-media expert according to Steve Henry (one of the founding ‘H’s in HHCL – voted Campaign magazine’s ‘Agency of the Decade’ in 2000).  I quite like this.  I think the key lies in the punctuation (as in eats, shoots and leaves) in that the hyphens imply that I am anti social media experts as distinct from an antisocial expert.  Although Steve’s description of me as someone who – mentally – is a drinker in flat-roofed pubs that welcome Rotweiler owners, leaves room for plenty of ambiguity.  (Key in that one is the word ‘mentally’ I believe).

But I guess you only have to look at some of my recent posts to see plenty of push-back against the establishment of social media folk who – mentally – drink in the child-friendly gastro pubs.  Socially, of course, I go for child-friendly gastro so perhaps Brian Solis has a Rotweiller and a pair of Doc Martens in the cupboard.