This Focused Performance Weblog started life as a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective, but is in the process of evolving towards primary content on interactive and mobile marketing. Think of it as about Focusing marketing messages for enhanced Performance. If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Keeping Social Media Real -- This morning my feed reader served up a piece from Inside Facebook on established, but quickly spreading Facebook apps. The part of it that made me simultaneously smile and shake my head was a comment, in "emperor's new clothes" fashion, pointing out that the top movers in the list were essentially useless diversions.
It reminded me of another piece I had set aside earlier this week as potential blogfodder. Scott Berkun, in this piece - Calling bullshit on social media - brings some common sense contrarian commentary to the commotion and consternation* surrounding social media...
For starters: social media is a stupid term. Is there any anti-social media out there? Of course not. All media, by definition, is social in some way. The term interactive media, a more accurate term for what’s going on, lived out its own rise / hype / boom cycle years ago and was smartly ignored this time around - first rule of PR is never re-use a dead buzzword, even if all that you have left are stupid ones. I’ve been involved in many stupid terms, from push-technology to parental-controls, so I should know when I see one.
But he goes beyond the buzziness of the words, and digs deeper on a few often overlooked points and advice to further his case...
We have always had social networks...
There has always been word of mouth, back-channel, "authentic" media tools...
The new media does not necessarily destroy the old...
Social media consultants writing about social media have inherent biases...
Signal to Noise is always the problem...
All technologies cut both ways and social media will be no different...
Be suspicious of technologies claimed to change the world...
Always ask "What problem am I trying to solve?" The smartest thing to do with something new is to ask what is it you need it to do for you. Recognize good marketing will not make up for bad products or incompetent services...
As usual, the "..." in my snips indicate that there is a lot more good detail to read at the original piece.
And, of course, I'm passing this on not to denigrate the creative work in and application of these growing channels. But they are just channels, parts of the whole media/communication landscape. Those of us who work in them tend to get all hot and bothered about the possibilities, but we also run the risk of enabling clients' excitement about sometimes questionable applications. So we do need the occasional slap across the face by a piece like Burken's to keep us rooted in reality.
* Sorry about that. Every once in awhile I fall off the wagon and back into my alliteration addiction.
Banks haven't helped their cause by putting up static Facebook pages without transactional capability. The pages often redirect people to a bank's Web site for even the most basic product information, which analysts say is antithetical to the social networking premise. "In the mind of the consumer that is not helpful. Facebook needs to be a real outpost of the bank; it needs to be tied to products and service," says Andy Schmidt, the research director for global payments at TowerGroup. "Banks need to provide a reason to show up and stay, and banks haven't done that yet."
On the other hand...
"People don't log onto Facebook for banking, but for friends. I just don't think that Facebook will drive business profitability." At best, Jegher says, it's "experimental marketing," but not a viable business strategy. "There are better ways to build and solidify customer relationships..."
…There's also a lack of data to support a business case for Facebook. Jegher says he hasn't seen any data on "stickiness," whether the "friends" on a Facebook page ever come back. What's more, says Shevlin, the numbers that are available can be misleading. He recalls when Washington Mutual put up its Facebook page in 2008 and proudly announced that it had 250 to 300 fans in the first 24 hours. But he did a little digging and quickly found that at least two-thirds of those fans were connected to the Web design team.
And while there are logical limitations to banks and their social media strategies, there may be room to offer more functional services to customers on Facebook. MyMoney is a Facebook application created by Fiserv that lets you use your financial institution to view balances, transfer money, etc. without leaving Facebook. It currently has only a few active users, but as Facebook continues to roll out its payment system, demand for similar applications could increase. Just when you're about to purchase those Facebook credits, you may realize that you need some extra dollars in your checking account.
IMHO, that last comment could be a bit of wishful thinking on the part of folks invested in Facebook as a platform. I think that most people who want to have an online relationship with financial institutions and services are probably nervous enough about privacy and security even when working directly on the bank’s own website. Inserting another middleman layer like Facebook would feel a bit too risky. And like the first comment at the top of this note, money is probably still one area in which there’s a clear line between the "social" and the "personal" or "private" even in the current social "that's more information than I needed to know" environment.
The question becomes more of what a finance-related business can do to keep itself in the social hive-mind. What can they bring to the "conversation" that has enough value to be "followed" or "fanned?" Probably expertise and advice without overdoing the sales pitch.
"In launching txt2go, CBS Outdoor becomes the nation’s very first out-of-home media company to provide a complete text messaging solution for its clients. The add-on feature creates an affordable new avenue for advertisers looking to package into their media features like digital couponing, sweepstakes, direct response and point of purchase. The technology will allow advertisers to track responses to their marketing in real time, and do so on a scale they’ve likely never been able to before."
This combination of the oldest of old school out-of-home, on-the-road advertising and the newest ubiquitous channel should help solidify in the minds of marketers the need to include the unique communication benefits of mobile as part of a complete program of outreach to their target audiences.
You've laughed
At our signs
For many a mile
Be a sport
Give us a trial
Text Burma to Shave
Digital Darwinism - Good article from Booz & Co's strategy+business site on evolution of the marketing and media ecosystem:
"...The marketing and media ecosystem has arrived at an evolutionary threshold. Old structures and ways of working persist but are fundamentally challenged by newer, more dynamic, more innovative alternatives. Numerous developments have brought the industry to this transition point. Consumers have more control and choice. Their media usage has fragmented. Many more advertising platforms exist. And marketers are insisting on greater precision in targeting and accounting for their ad spend.
"The recent economic turmoil only accelerates this evolutionary transition. Companies across the ecosystem have to acquire or develop three dominant traits to survive: relevance, interactivity, and accountability..."
"So just how does a brand use Twitter to further its aims? A few recent anecdotes can help demonstrate how companies need to think about Twitter and its impact on their brands."
"Individually, many of those 140-character “tweets” seem inane.
But taken collectively, the stream of messages can turn Twitter into a surprisingly useful tool for solving problems and providing insights into the digital mood. By tapping into the world’s collective brain, researchers of all kinds have found that if they make the effort to dig through the mundane comments, the live conversations offer an early glimpse into public sentiment — and even help them shape it."
1. Instant, Real-Time Search Results...
2. Monitoring Something You Care About...
3. News Updates...
4. Instant Communication with Friends...
5. Twitter as a Productivity Command Line...
6. Ask Questions, Get Answers...
And from Kottke, there's nothing wrong with a bit of trivial diversion now and then...
"...you'd like to think that most of your daily conversation is weighty and witty but instead everyone chats about pedestrian nonsense with their pals. In fact, that ephemeral chit-chat is the stuff that holds human social groups together."
"Publicity is the act of getting ink. Publicity is getting unpaid media to pay attention, write you up, point to you, run a picture, make a commotion. Sometimes publicity is helpful, and good publicity is always good for your ego.
"But it's not PR.
"PR is the strategic crafting of your story. It's the focused examination of your interactions and tactics and products and pricing that, when combined, determine what and how people talk about you."
If a lot of "PR firms" actually do Publicity, as Godin suggest, then a lot of "Marketing firms" probably just do Advertising, making pretty pictures and websites and getting them out there, but leaving the strategic development of market offers to those who own the offers - the clients. Maybe that's as it should be, maybe not, but should they be calling themselves marketers or advertisers?
And if you're looking for expertise in getting your message out into the world, be sure you ask your prospective service providers 1) how they see the difference between publicity and PR, and marketing and advertising, 2) what bucket they see themselves in, and 3) what in their service confirms their answer.
Craig and his company were early adopters with the Voices of Diabetes "patient blog". [Disclaimer: I was heavily involved with launching that effort from the agency side.]
"There's a growing conversation about the 'rules of social media' and the consequences marketers face should they violate them. But there's only real rule of social media: don't be boring. So long as you do not bore your audience, you are free to try anything. That goes for individuals and brands alike."
[On mobile platforms,] "There’s been no expectation that anything would be free," said David Chamberlain, an analyst with In-Stat, a market research firm. "The telcos have been very careful not to give stuff away."
It may have to do with each industry’s origins. "Information wants to be free" has long been the rallying cry for many Internet pioneers. As the mythology goes, the designers of the Internet envisioned it as utopian and open — two words rarely used to describe the phone experience.
One example of the stark difference between the phone and the computer is the concept of micropayments. Newspapers and other content producers have examined the method — getting people to pay for content with a nickel here and a dime there — as a possible answer to their revenue problems on the Web.
But the phone industry has had a micropayment system for decades. Ever since the local telephone company charged a customer an extra 35 cents to hear a recorded weather forecast, the phone industry has been charging for content.
Entrepreneurial Enabling of Entitlement -- [Rant Mode On] I don't know about you, but I'm getting tired of people whining about things like the insertion of ads or the possible inclusion of "premium" membership in their (and my) beloved Twitter. And then there are the Facebookers who have freely used Zuckerberg's - and his investors' - expensive servers and tools to share their life stories, but are the first to blindly sign up for silly groups called something like "We Will Not Pay To Use Facebook. Need As Many Members Possible To Stop This!".
David of 37 Signals (home of quality - and fairly priced - products like Basecamp, Backpack, Highrise, and Campfire) asks a good question - not of the users who have come to expect everything for nothing, but of the enabling entrepreneurs: How did the web lose faith in charging for stuff?:
"...the startup culture has caught this disease that there’s something unnatural in being profitable from the get-go. That making money early means you won’t make it big later.
"It’s depressing and it’s wrong, but I also think it’s going to change. I think the days of the traditional San Francisco startup approach are numbered. It’ll be flushed down the drain along with CDO’s and zero-down mortgages."
I know that over the years I've happily paid for stuff of value to me - like premium Flickr and Blogger accounts. (Blogger was in the early days, for which I got a Blogger hoodie when they sold out to Google and went fully free.) Also, my contributions to my local NPR station have grown to help sustain all the podcasts that fill my iPod and my commute. And just the other day, a friend ragged on me for buying a particular iPhone app when one with very similar functionality was out there for free. Setting aside a couple differences that beckoned me, there was also something about the willingness to charge that gave me that confidence that there might be more enhancements coming down the line and that the builders were serious about what they were doing. Who knows? Could happen.
I'll gladly cough up more for online product that I value. And builders of such products and services, if they have faith in the value of their offerings, need to have commensurate faith in their users to find that same value and be willing to accept fair pricing - happily.
"...The gap of confidence between small companies and big ones is growing. We used to rely on the security of big companies. That's why we worked for them. And hired them. And put our money in them.
"But with the virtual collapse of AIG, Lehman, Citibank, GM, Chrysler, and many more — now even GE is in trouble — all that's changed. Now it's a risk to do business with the big ones.
"We simply don't trust companies anymore. We trust people. And in big companies, it's hard to even find a person to trust as we scream "operator" into our telephones only to get transferred to another menu whose options have changed.
"That gives small companies a huge advantage...
"Small is the new big. Sustainable is the new growth. Trust is the new competitive advantage..."
Reminds me of my old TOC training, in which Goldratt's premise was that the goal of a for-profit company was "to make money now and in the future". The word "more" was not included in that goal, suggesting that staying in business - sustaining the ability to continually satisfy customers and provide employees with security - took precedence over growth for growth's sake. Growth (and "more" money) would come organically if you took care of customers and employees and managed the market and operations according to a constraint-based Process Of On-Going Improvement (POOGI).
Just rambling here, but maybe the point is that the risks of growth and size include the eventual lack of ability to shift with economic changes, which then threatens employee security and satisfaction, which, as Bregman suggests, threatens customer satisfaction and confidence, which threatens the ability to make money which threatens employee security and so on. Personally, in my career, with only one exception, my own satisfaction seems to have been inversely proportional to the size of the organization within which I've found myself.
The failed bankers on Wall Street have been whining that if they have to cut bonuses and salaries dramatically, they'll be unable to recruit great talent, and they need great talent to fix the situation.
And for years, boards have been claiming that they need to pay CEOs $50,000,000 salaries in order to recruit the very best for their companies.
Jamie Dimon at Chase said, "It's possible someone's going to walk in my office and say, Jamie, I have a family. I can't afford to live that way."
This, of course, is nonsense....
...There's no real effort made to market the jobs, just to race to the top (or the bottom, depending on your point of view) with the easiest marketing signal of all. Price. Yes, it's exactly the same as a retailer trying to improve business by being the cheapest....
...If you are a relentless free market believer, more power to you. If your company is private, pay yourself a trillion dollars a year, fine with me. In fact, we need more private companies that innovate and pay their staff a ton. But if you're owned by shareholders or bailed out by taxpayers, wasting trillions of dollars because you don't have the guts to market your jobs properly is silly.
Lazy marketing is as ineffective and wasteful on the recruiting side as it is on the revenue side.
again mobile - The Blog -- OK, our blog at again mobile has gotten past the "here we are and who we are and look at our new digs" stage and now has its first real live content-filled rant.
Yes, we're focused on mobile, but not exclusively, and not in a vacuum. Mobile is but one tool to include in the quiver of your complete marketing toolbox. Fortunately we know how to strategize and implement other complementary channels as well, so even though mobile might be an effective hammer, at again mobile, we know that not everything is a nail.
"Many investors would likely be very surprised at the scale of the mobile content industry in comparison to online advertising. The mobile content market may even be larger than online advertising right now. Not only that, it is likely that the mobile content market will show sustained growth higher than the online advertising market over the next 5 years. As well, its sheer potential is probably over 10x greater due to the number of mobile subscriptions worldwide (based on stats from IDC)."
It makes sense. Despite the excitement over smartphone capabilities from Apple's iPhone and RIM's Blackberry, not to mention up-and-comers Google (G-Phone) and Palm (with their new Pre), there's still a huge number of basic cell phones out there just ripe for upgrading, and thereby becoming new potential users of mobile web and apps.
Even without relying on full-on smartphones, this week's big Mobile World Conference in Barcelona has news of new moves toward better mobile web browsing on basic phones as well. The trick, however, for publishers of web content will be to make sure that your sites are set up appropriately for the small screen (funny how that used to mean television). Check out your website from your cell phone. If it looks like most, you'll want to get someone mobile savvy involved to help develop the optimum site format for mobile screens. (Having been only a minimal cellphone user until joining again mobile, this bit has been a real eye-opener for me. Never too old to learn, I guess.)
And this isn't only about presentation. It's about content in the mobile context as well. People (potential customers, by the way) coming to your site from their phones probably have a different set of interests than those surfing from their desks or their couches (although the bulk of my own couch-surfing has moved from laptop to iPhone recently). If you throw your entire internet-based web offering at them, it will only complicate the navigation needed to get to the subset of info that your mobile prospect is looking for. Again, a bit of mobile-savvy strategy is called for.
"...this is a moment of decadence in online marketing and the next turn of the screw will root out this baroque, extraneous set of contortions around conversation. Marketing should be dialogic. True dat. But the goal isn’t conversation...
"...what’s so powerful about going online, you can talk back. But it feels like what some marketers are taking away from this is that they should talk to us in conversational tones and should do product placement by getting the video podcasters we listen to to pitch to us in their own voices. It feels like they still want to talk at us and still keep tight control of the message—but just hide that they’re doing it."
[my added links] As in everything new, it's a learning process, and many will take longer to understand and adapt.
Tell Me How You'll Measure My Conversations...and I'll tell you how I'll converse.
From AdWeek, Conversation Quotient talks about the difficulty in measuring the infant social media channel for reaching interacting with your potential customers.
"The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us." - Quentin Crisp
...there are different types of design. The one, we can call it the cynical design, that means the design invented by Raymond Loewy in the '50s, who said, what is ugly is a bad sale, La Laideur se vend mal, which is terrible. It means the design must be just a weapon for marketing, for producer to make product more sexy, like that, they sell more, it's shit, it's obsolete, it's ridiculous. I call that the cynical design.
After, there is the narcissistic design; it's a fantastic designer who designs only for other fantastic designers. [laughs]
After there is people like me, who try to deserve to exist, and who are ashamed to make this useless job, who try to do it in another way, and they try, I try, to not make the object for the object but for the result, for the profit for the human being, the person who will use it.
It's all about the users' needs. Take care of them, and the marketing almost takes care of itself.
Then, again...isn't marketing merely the process of 1) understanding the needs of potential users of your products/services, 2) making sure those products/services truly meet the important needs they're designed to address (the connection between marketing research and product design), 3) crafting compelling offers around the satisfaction of those needs, and 4) communicating those offers where those potential users might be found (where marketing meets advertising and selling, which are different things).
(Of course, putting it all in perspective, this is from a guy whose own site annoyingly takes over the user's browser window size to land-grab the whole screen.)
Another line that grabbed me from the talk…
Nobody is obliged to be a genius, but everybody is obliged to participate.
Not sure why, but it grabbed me nonetheless.
Whole transcript and video version at http://blog.ted.com/2007/12/starck.php, although be advised he rambles off into a more metaphysical direction about us all being mutants, and designing stories for a future we really can't know, and that the best we can do is leave blank sheets of paper and the "best tools" for those who follow us.
DigitalGrit, where I've been since 2004, has, along with it's sister companies at Adverb Media, been bought and combined with the e-mail house Zustek, to form Zeta Interactive, a really full service interactive marketing agency offering one-stop shopping for a unique set of services.
"The company combines the talents and technologies of five interactive leaders to offer marketers complete solutions across all media and channels-from email and search marketing to creative, web development, business and branding intelligence, and more. Zeta Interactive is comprised of Zustek Corporation, an industry-renowned email communications leader, and Adverb Media, a holding company which includes under its umbrella DigitalGrit, a highly acclaimed direct response and search marketing firm, Temel, an award-winning brand strategy and creative agency, and RelevantNoise™, a ground-breaking technology firm dedicated to mining the social Internet for business intelligence."
Met our new CEO, Al DiGuido, yesterday in a kickoff presentation of his background and plans for Zeta. This is gonna be fun.
Web 2.0 Marketing -- Heard a real good podcast recently – The New Community – from Radio Open Source. It features, during the first half, Larry Weber, author of a new book, Marketing to the Social Web, along with the Daphne Kwan, CEO of Expo TV, a video product review community site. Good discussion on getting companies to "let go of control" to build a brand/conversation.
Weber's book apparently goes into "how companies like GlaxoSmithKline have formed expressive affinity groups around dieting pills; how Stonyfield Yogurt has cultivated environmentalists on its site and added a page called "Ask Our Nutritionist"; how Jones Soda in Seattle has built a community conversation that's much more valuable than any use of mass media."
Sounds interesting. (I guess after 3 years at DigitalGrit, this old operations dog is learning new tricks and turning into a marketer.)
(The podcast is also available on iTunes for a quick grab into your iPod – it's the next to last full show before a summer break for the Open Source series.)
Do they have any more feet to shoot? -- Universal does not renew iTunes contract. The music industry just eludes me. What are they thinking - that some thrashing around like a punch-drunk heavyweight in the 15th round might connect? I doubt it.
, along with the Daphne Kwan, CEO of 
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