The social media bum steer

There is a fairly straightforward way of understanding how 'to do' social media. It starts with content, leading to conversation, forging connections, enabling collaboration (see left).

Which would be fabulous if the outcome was something other than making some more content. But the bum steer given by naming this stuff social 'media' has led many to conclude this is the virtuous circle they should follow. It goes a bit like this (left). And because of the 'media' bit the focus and majority of effort stays at the top of the circle - in the content and conversation zone: Make entertaining high quality creative ideas - get them to talk about it; Or broadcast using the 'channels' of social media - as we might otherwise describe it. Marketing done to people, not so much with them.

I prefer to introduce a fifth element (a fifth c, as it happens), which moves us away from media and towards creating something more than content: co-creation.

This places the focus on the lower half of the circle - and creates a central hub that emphasises the point of all this conversation and connectedness: to bring us together to do/make something we care about.

Making things together is what the web is for. It's also what the tools and techniques of social media are for.

Making things together because all involved care about the outcome.

I came across an example recently that helps clarify this for me. I'm reading Macrowikinomics currently. Just done the chapter on Universities.

And there is much good research discussed and good thought given to reshaping how Universities could and should function in the networked world.

What struck me as missing, or at least, misaligned, was the focus of the output . The output for education appears to be considered at the micro or individual level - how does student A get a better education? Crudely - how do they get a better CV?

But isn't the output of education a larger, more interdependant networked thing - a global problem solved, a situation improved, an efficiency achieved? Universities/Education could be (self) organised around problem solving/shared issues rather than meeting individuals' specific requirements, for example.

Using this shared output approach can help us understand how best to use the tools and techniques of social media to greatest effect for all the parties in supply chains (or supply webs) - with the intent of creating value for all parties.

Social is rarely about a win for one, more a win for many to share in.

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We have to get over fame before we learn to connect

If you aren't a regular follower of Marketing Week (the UK mag for the Marketing industry) you may have missed my latest leader - published at the end of last week.
I wouldn't want to miss out on the opportunity of making connections - which are frankly more likely here than on the fame-hunting pages of MW so, the column is repeated below...

Does social media satisfy an urge for fame left as a hangover of the broadcast age? An urge we must get over before we achieve connection?

The use of the term social media has done many marketers a dis-service. Actually, it's led them up a garden path to a place where the trees don't quite bear the fruit they may have hoped for.

There are two reasons.
First: including the word 'media' made us believe this was all about communication. It is. But only as a means to an end.
The second: the hangover of our mass communication era concepts of fame.

The latter assumes people are broadcasting in social networks (etc). Those who believe that will point to the idea that when we use (eg) Twitter we are shouting out into the ether in order to acquire an audience.

And that would be the case if this was a broadcast model - an example of one to many.

But it isn't.

It's many to many. When we tweet (or express metadata - stuff about ourselves, our lives, our issues and concerns) we are not seeking an audience, we are seeking connections.

It's an important distinction.

I'm not saying that there aren't plenty of people seeking their little bit of fame through the use of the tools of social media. There are.

What I am saying is that they misunderstand the true value of a network over a broadcast model - that a network brings you connections.
And it's time we all got over that fame thing.

Unless we do, marketers will continue to make the mistake of seeking to gather audience when what they actually want - and need - is connection.

A recent example? I received an email from someone in the industry begging me to 'like' one of his clients facebook pages. If it acquired a certain (big) number of likes then the client would give a (big) cheque to Children In Need. Each like (should the target be reached) would have cost the client £2.50. That's a reasonable cost per acquisition I suppose - If you think audience has value.

The reality is if I 'like' your page only because I want to help a third party (in this case Children In Need) or for any other reason than genuine shared purpose/belief, then my eyes and ears are closed to you.

£2.50 down the drain.

A community without connection is just an audience with its eyes and ears shut.

Connection discovers and brings together people who care about the same things and gives the opportunity to do something about them together.

Connection means we join together to make things - products, services, co-created campaigns.

Social Media is more about connection and less about communication than is too often assumed. Letting go of our old world concepts of fame and audience reveals the real ROI of the web: A place for making with others - not taking from or broadcasting through.

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The 90:9:1 rule reveals ability, not willingness, to participate

I hear a lot about the 90:9:1 'rule' (try working in collaborative co-creation and not hearing it dragged up from time to time.)

You know the one:

1% of people create content, 9% edit or modify that content, and 90% view the content without contributing.

I suspect its assumptions are used to calculate all kinds of 'propensity of your market to join in social media estimate'. I'd hazard a guess Forrester applies it to this, for example (corrections welcome). (Image courtesy Chris Devers.)

Let me say I don't think this is a rule about willingness to participate - it is one about ability to participate.

And that is a critical, critical difference.

It means (and assumes) for example that everyone wants to participate and that it is the lowering of barriers to participation that will surface this.

The barriers could be cultural, technical, linguistic, financial, logistic

Whatever the case, don't kid yourselves participation is for a small elite. It's for whoever you are prepared to help overcome the barriers the rest of us face. It is up to you to lower those barriers.

Afterall, it's a rare human being who doesn't want to join in a conversation that matters to them. You just have to find ways to help them join in.

Will I see you at Being Social?

I'll be attempting the equivalent of the Reduced Shakespeare Company tomorrow when I'm one of four keynotes speaking - very quickly - at Being Social.
Don't be late (we kick off at 1:45pm, registration at 1pm) - and don't blink - you may miss me. I'm talking about The Death of Advertising (at least a 7min summary of it).
Seriously; scheduled time for my speaky bit is 2pm. I'm then part of a panel straight after with my good friends Antony Mayfield and Chris Thorpe et al. We'll be talking about “How Social Media is changing how we communicate”.

The full slides in support of my speaky bit (in case you need to go back and fill in the blanks) are as below. Tommorrow I'll be focusing on the end section - discussing the need to change the focus of innovation.

The Death Of Advertising: Omexpo Madrid 2010

View more presentations from david cushman.

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Discounts on Social Media In Business and Being Social

I'm speaking at a couple of London events in May. And, as is traditional, there are some discounts available for those of you who'd like to come along beyond the usual book-early stuff.

Social Media in Business - educating businesses in using social media - is on at Paypal's HQ in Richmond, London on May 21, 2010.

I'll be talking about the whole Using + Social Media = Fail thang.

Anyway. Loads of good people are lined up for it, check the agenda etc out here. Follow that link and you can also land a 15% discount if you use the code: SMIBUBNK

And then there's Being Social on May 13. Another great line up of folk - many of whom I appear to know... I'm speaking on... well that's still TBA - but favourite at the moment is What Replaces The Failed Experiment of Advertising (on a similar theme to that which we presented in Madrid).

The Death Of Advertising: Omexpo Madrid 2010

View more presentations from david cushman.

I've got 10 25% discounts (on top of the earlybird discount) to give away. Once they've gone, they're gone. Use this link and use this code: SPEAKERS_BS10

Hope to see you at one or both.

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Time to end the failed experiment of advertising

As promised, here's the slidedeck Jamie Burke and I presented in Madrid last week. By way of disclosure we were in Madrid for the official launch of 90:10 Spain - and took the opportunity to present our thinking at the OMEXPO.

The slides ask the question, if advertising didn't exist today, would you reinvent it? We think too much digital tech, innovation and effort has been focused on making a better message when what is better for all parties is that we should work together on making better things.Platform thinking that delivers value innovation.

It's time time to end the insanity of repeating the failed experiment of advertising. Time to start creating platforms for change.

Video will follow later this week...

The Death Of Advertising: Omexpo Madrid 2010

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We want more than incrementally better messages

There's a rule about new technologies - bleeding edge tech doesn't equal bleeding edge demand. I'm old enough to remember Betamax.

Electronics companies have a track record in this kind of failure. Famously (and quoted in Blue Ocean Strategy) Phillips CD-i was a commercial flop because it tried to do too many things - and customers weren't sure what value it could add to their lives.

That and the fact the games were rubbish.

Phillips added and added technical functions and spec. With all this 'special stuff' - the execs were convinced the market would lap it up. But they forgot to ask what the user would find useful.

Innovation is only any good if it's useful to people. The more people it is useful to, the better the outcome.

Often the focus of innovation is on ourselves - how can we make things better for us. Or it's on showing off how technically clever we are (our spec's bigger than your spec).

And isn't that what a huge chunk of digital marketing has been all about? Sharper and sharper focus on tracking and responding to online behaviour - cleverer and cleverer tech, more and more spec?

All the better to serve the right ad at the right time with.

All the innovation focused on building a better advert.

What we're talking about here is a technological arms race in pursuit of incremental improvements in quality or relevance of messages.

Which is the answer you'd come up with if you asked advertising and marketing teams what they wanted from digital innovation.

But is it what all elements of the route to market actually WANT from the best-ever ability to connect with people that digital technologies enable?

Is a better advert what the manufacturers and service providers want from digital technology? Is it the best they can expect from our growing ability to form communities of purpose at the drop of a hat?

And is a better advert what 'consumers' want?

Oh, I know, the right information at the right time becomes really 'useful' so you could argue the more effective you are at this the more effective your 'adverts' for all parties. There is some truth in this. Ads that take this approach attain much higher click-thru rates (but all those that don't get clicked must still be counted as spam).

More importantly, this is defaulting to the belief that what we all want is better messaging.

What if that isn't true? What if what we all actually want (manufacturers and service providers -
customers, too) is improvement in quality or relevance of products and services?

More potential 'customers' for advertising would find that useful.

So the role of advertising and marketing may just be in deploying your skills and relationships to improve the quality and relevance of products and services.

How do you innovate that using digital tools? Well that's pretty much what I'll be talking about at OMEXPO in Madrid tomorrow.

Expect references to the best set of tools to bring us together (the social technologies which form the web) being wasted on gathering eyeballs - and how platform thinking can put them to their best use: innovating better and more relevant products and services.

See you there (slides will follow :-)

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If advertising didn't exist would you feel the need to invent it?

I'll be in Madrid for the OMEXPO on Feb 24-25. I'll be presenting alongside Jamie Burke (CEO at 90:10) on the, obviously, non-controversial subject of: The Death of Advertising.

This is how our 45 minutes is being sold:

90:10's Jamie Burke and David Cushman confront you with the end of business as usual.

They'll examine how everything you thought you knew about traditional advertising will fail you in the rapidly emerging and increasingly dominant networked world.

They'll explain how the shift from a broadcast world to a network of peers disrupts content creation, distribution and user experience.

And they'll ask what lessons Spain's advertising industry can learn from the peer-powered disruption tearing the UK's media landscape apart.

If you landed in a world without advertising today, would you reinvent it?

And, of course, I'll be making the slides available via slideshare shortly after. Expect some conclusions involving platforms, naturally.

Jamie and I arrive around 1pm on the 24th and leave on the evening of the 25th. If you'd like to meet with us while we're there, please drop either of us a line: david AT ninety10group DOT com or Jamie AT ninety10group DOT com.

How to make more pegs, more round, more often

Providing things that people need/want is at the core of any business. If there are round holes, you provide round pegs. That's the plan.

Trouble is, life is a little more complex.

The holes are rarely consistent in size or roundness. The pegs become best approximations.

So we take the hammer of advertising and marketing, mass media lowest common denominator comms of all forms, and bludgeon away. (image courtesy)

Sometimes some of the pegs even appear to fit. Hit enough, hard enough and long enough and - hey presto! Demand met.

Ahem.

Ok, more like supply supplied, then. All very wasteful. And noisy.

The fitness landscape of any complex adaptive system (from evolution to the economy) requires something, well, more adaptable.

It requires something more maleable - more open to change - to make a better fit.

If the pegs can be reshaped to fit the holes, they just drop in. No mass media hammering required. No energy wasted.

Businesses have always used the tools available to them to make the best approximation of those round pegs - market research, focus groups, the black-sweatered CEO's gut feel.
Those whose approximations are closest to round, find they need less hammering.

Now we have access to better tools - the social technologies that enable groups to form. That is, better access to people.

Now groups can form to wikifix a problem they share - such as your peg not fitting their hole.

Now you can let them, together, reshape your peg so it drops beautifully into place.

But it will only happen if you accept that the best people to shape a product or service to any fitness landscape you encounter are those who make up that landscape.

Advertising isn't (just) the tax you pay for being unremarkable (some products inspire such excited human interaction that the fitness landscape changes to accommodate them) it is also the tax you pay for trying to fit square pegs in round holes.

Hang up your hammers. Start opening your doors.

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Mobile: My Remote Control for Life

Need a lesson in mobile marketing and communications? I can't think of a better place to start than this training day run by people I know, admire and respect; Alan Moore, Jonathan Macdonald and Alex Meisl.
It's on October 28 at London's Hospital club. More about why you should take my word for it, here.

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Internet marketing is not a specialism

Twitter has made me accutely aware of how many 'internet marketers' there are out there.
That I have 'social' + 'media' in my bio seems to attract a steady flow to follow my Twitter account. In that respect Twitter has surfaced the volume of people in this game to me.
I was not looking for Linda... (for Pat Kane fans).

It strikes me as more than a little odd that Internet Marketing is regarded as a specialism - a career even.
I appreciate you can become adept in the mechanics of some tools.

But EVERYONE is an expert Internet marketer. It's a peer to peer realm. My peers are those best placed and equipped to market most effectively to me. That's true for you, and everyone else, too.

Perhaps ALL our Twitter bios and Linkedin profiles should read: Internet marketer, web publisher, online advertising expert, distribution doyen.

And as we understand the power we have wrested from traditional media, we'll add new areas of 'expertise':
Team building (as leader and participant), R&D, new product and service development, self organiser etc

Perhaps, instead, we should start telling people the more specific value we all add?

Update: After discussion below perhaps that question can be couched as "What can you do better than my friend?"

Internet marketers are going to have to become much clearer about what they can do that all of us can't. And fast.

Update: They aren't alone - any mediator faces the same challenge.

The message is, it's not about the message

Great to see Mark's Herd referenced in this deck (now available as a paperback, btw). You get to it just before the end. Paul's decks are consistently good and bang on the money as far as I'm concerned.

I've long agreed (believed) we must be part of co-creating interesting things for people to do together.

Marketing: Advertising: Products: Services.

It's not really about the messaging any more (if it ever was?) - that's the message. It's about the doing.
Not to them, with them. With us.

I often say: We're trying to change the world, not report on it. That's not a media thing. It's a people thing.

What's Next In Marketing And Advertising (2009)

View more documents from Paul Isakson.

Via Neil Perkin

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Euan tells his own story

The people at Guruonline.com have interviewed Euan Semple (who I'm pleased to say I've worked with in the past and will be happy to work with in the future).

Watch the clips here.

He answers in his own laid back,clear, jargon-free, very human way:

• Why should businesses get involved with social media?
• How should businesses get involved with social media?
• What common elements are there to social media?
• How practical is social media to business?
• How does social media effect business culture?
• What attributes in business make people more likely to succeed with social media?
• How do I justify social media in terms of ROI?
• What difference does social media make to business effectiveness?
• What are the changing expectations of staff regarding social media?
• How do I get the right mix of tools to help people be productive?
• Does social media work for everybody?
• What are the perceived risks to using social media?
• Is social media just a passing fad?
• How are the tools changing the marketing message?
• How do I start on the social media journey?

Shame I can't embed any of the videos to share here...

Listening: expectations, realities and incentives

Now that we have tools to make everyone a publisher, a distributor and a marketer, many of those of us who employ those tools are raising our expectations.

When we publish we expect our voices to be heard by companies, organisations and brands we are publishing about - where-ever and when-ever we publish.

If we publish a moan about service we are coming to expect that service provider to hear us.

And we expect action, real change, as a result. (image courtesy josephgilbert.org)

But for them to even listen requires the employment of good listening tools and expertise (and many businesses have not tackled this first step) AND quite fundamental shifts in thinking.

They have to raise how they value what customers think and say to new, empowering, highs.

They have to see you as much more than their customer. Few have taken that leap.

So, often the power the citizen thinks they weild (and should be weilding) when they use social media to publish, lacks the effectiveness they hoped for and intended.

Their friends will hear them ( and that will hurt your business of course) but the intended receipients remain deaf to the message.

Two fundamentals about social media:

• We want to be heard
• We want to make a difference.
  

With these two notions we can start to build tools to connect more silo'd businesses and orgs with the citizens of the networked world in a way that brings value to both parties.

It's in the interests of the business because listening and responding to people who care about your products and services brings huge value for:

• R&D
• A/B testing
• Marketing
• Market Research
• Reducing Churn
• Recruitment
• Etc (please do add your etc in a comment below :-)
  

And it's in the interests of the networked citizen because we want to be heard by the org to effect change.

Outward facing orgs are ready to reach out. Great listening tools and a willingness to engage with the conversations they discover give them their launch pad.

More inward facing orgs, those a little more disinclined to relinquish control, have a workable alternative:

Create and maintain a set of social tools around yourself where those who care about your products and services can interact one with another and with you.

Create a conversation-about-you portal; complete with an aggregation of related conversations-about-you RSS feeds.

If you build it, they will come? Perhaps. Some. But you will also need a listening strategy to find those who care.

And their incentive to have their conversation on your portal?

• They want to be heard
• They want to make a difference
  

Guarantee that and they may come. Dell ideastorm guaranteed that.

And to improve the value exchange still further, offer rewards for contribtions that do make a difference.

Make it so the people who publish and distribute and market where and when they like, see value in publishing about you to your face.

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Trust can't be broadcast

Trust in the banks is down. I believe the expression is 'no shit, sherlock?'

Much more interesting than the bleeding obvious to me is the accelerating collapse in trust in advertising and traditional mass media.

(Image courtesy.)

This from Edelman's 2009 Trust Barometer release:

• Trust in nearly every type of news outlet and spokesperson is down from last year.
• Trust in business magazines and stock or industry analyst reports—last year’s leaders— decreased from 57% to 44% and from 56% to 47%, respectively.
• Only 13% trust corporate or product advertising—down from last year’s low of 20%.

Let's say that again. Only 13% of people trust the ads now. That's assuming they are still accepting the interruptions.

Even more staggering, the figure for the UK is down to JUST 5%!

So let's assume you overcome our studied ignorance of ads in social media. Those whose attention is snared by them (remember folks, it's a 0.01% click-thru rate), of these, only 13% (5% in the UK) trust what they see, hear and read. So they're hardly likely to act on them.

Peer-to-peer recommendation however, of the kind we see inspiring purchases of products and services every day in social networks, in conversations between friends, is not interruptive and it is trustworthy.

• Britain trusts media less than any other of the 20 countries surveyed (30%)
• Traditional sources of information are on the wane and at an all-time low
• Newspapers down 10 points at 19%;
• Radio news down 20 at 33%
• There is a Trust Bust in conventional Corporate Comms
• Only 5%trust corporate/ product advertising; 15% for corporate website, press releases, live speeches - Edelman Trust Barometer, UK
  

More reason to explore models like this.

Trust in banking and business is down because of some very unusual economic factors.

Trust in mass media is down because of something much more fundamental. We've found ways to connect one to another - there is a new model which places trust in new places - in each other, in the edge - not the centre.

Trust can't be broadcast.

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