The further ahead you look - the faster you go | davidpcushman AT gmail.com | These are my views and my views only.
Showing posts with label interruptive skill sets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label interruptive skill sets. Show all posts
Monday, July 14, 2008
Paint the whole sky, we'll still ignore you
Have added a new post on /message about the arms race of interruptive advertising.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
All the rest is spam
Scott Karp's post Why Traditional Advertising Formats Fail on the Web paints a bleak picture for those who would continue to interrupt.
What we seek, we want. All the rest is spam.
At the guts of this issue is a big question facing media: What do you do when you don't control the user experience?
Scott quotes Jacob Nielson:
"... when people go online they know what they want and how to do it... This makes them very resistant to highlighted promotions or other editorial choices that try to distract them."
Yep. It's time to think of the ad as content and the content as the ad. It's time to think of models which are a better fit with the networked world, rather than the broadcast one.
What we seek, we want. All the rest is spam.
At the guts of this issue is a big question facing media: What do you do when you don't control the user experience?
Scott quotes Jacob Nielson:
"... when people go online they know what they want and how to do it... This makes them very resistant to highlighted promotions or other editorial choices that try to distract them."
... all the rest is spam.
Users don't put up with being interrupted or distracted. They find a way around the control you would impose. It's a network, not a one-way street, stoopid.
Yep. It's time to think of the ad as content and the content as the ad. It's time to think of models which are a better fit with the networked world, rather than the broadcast one.
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
The death of death
We like a good death.
Death of the 30-second spot, Death of newspapers, Death of interruptive advertising, Death of the website (url), Death of Mass Media… etc...
Perhaps we should start thinking, instead, about life – in all its evolutionary glory – to reveal what’s really going on as the network disrupts everything it touches.
Life; in the disaggregation that digitisation has wrought, in the explosion of distribution of content and services we witness.
Life; in widgets’ freedom to explore and evolve. An explosion of new fauna and flora while the hamstrung dinosaurs of ‘websites’ lumber around hoping their food will come to them.
Life; in the freedom of nodes to connect one to another, one-to-many, one to whichever they choose.
Life; in the way conversations evolve.
Life; in self-forming, non-directed, rapidly-evolving, fuzzy-edged communities of passion and purpose. Out of chaos emerges new beauty, massive energy.
Life; in how groups form and reform online in ways THAT WERE NOT POSSIBLE in the physical world of the atom. Life; in ways the one-dimensional view of the node in Reed’s Law must underestimate.
This is the Columbo Moment.
Walks towards door. Pauses. Turns. Raises hand and eyebrow.
“Er… just one other thing.”
“These conversations of ours. The ones creating all the value. They couldn’t happen before could they?”
Lieutenant, you have me. No, they can only happen in a digital world. The Power of the Network relies on something more than a series of tools returning us to our ‘normal’ social selves – the We Species that Alan Moore refers to. The very fact that these tools are digital, that they function on/with/through the web, makes a fundamental difference.
The Power of the Network goes beyond returning us to our communal ‘we species’ roots. It pours Miracle Grow on those roots, blitzes them with mutating isotopes and carries out multiple cross pollination while harvesting and experimenting on the results ALL AT THE SAME TIME.
Every time I move desk I get a new perspective on the business I work in. I have conversations with people who are now much more conveniently placed for me than they had been previously, new people. New nodes, more connections = greater value emerging (one extra node doubles the value of your network).
In the digital world I can be next to everyone, all at the same time. There is no restriction imposed by atoms. Self-forming groups of passion and interest, ever forming and reforming, ever evolving, swirling around the world with fuzzy, permeable edges… these could not exist when conversation relied on two or more people being in the same physical space at the same time.
The self-forming networks of trust evidenced by blogrolls is one great example. But they don’t quite hit the ‘in real time’ (synchronous communication) spot.
Twitter, offers our latest best illustration.
Here’s what it does:
1. Nodes can connect without the limitation of sharing the same physical space. It’s your global, everywhere-at-once hotdesk.
2. It enables real-time, drop-everything-to-join-in conversation.
3. The group involved in the conversation has permeable edges (anyone can follow anyone else – being led to relevant people through their own networks of trust, anyone can spot someone else they might like to follow, referred to by someone else they are already following etc etc). There are no structural limitations imposed by reliance on personal data ownership. They are fuzzy. Facebook’s are more sharply-defined, for example.
4. Since the groups have permeable edges they can (must) constantly form and reform, pursue new interests, break-up, reform around a new purpose etc. They are about flow rather than focus.
5. The distributed micro-blogging nature of Twitter means the conversation can start from any node in your current self-formed fuzzy-edged group. The conversation itself can evolve rapidly thanks to rapid iteration and amplification, creating more opportunities for value to emerge, drawing in and ejecting contributors as it evolves.
Conversation, the great intersection of ideas, is the driver of value of the network. Now it is enabled to evolve in complex adaptive ways, just as the economy does, just as the internet itself does.
New stuff will emerge.
The digital world is not about death. It is about evolving and amplifying ideas through groups who could never have come together before. It is about life. New, amazing forms of life.
The evolution has begun.
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
What next for advertising and marketing?
The following is an excerpt from a white paper. I thought I'd share this summing-up to see what you think and perhaps entice you to read the full version (Marketing and Advertising Models for a Networked World, see left-hand navigation).
All contributions to the conversation actively encouraged.
Understanding how the world has changed and looks set to continue to change – how we are rejecting interruption and embracing participation, how we are moving away from control from the centre to the dominance of communities, what should we do?
I see three immediate routes and believe each is worth pursuing. Each represents a significant shift from traditional, interruptive advertising. Each represents something other than business as usual.
1. Widget Marketing: Make use of the current advertising space and populate it with ads which follow the best practice of virals and widgets.
2. Engagement Marketing: Involve communities in the building of the brands they use – connect them to your authentic voice.
3. No Marketing: Instead, apply the new mode of production the web enables. Communities as producers of that which they desire. No ‘marketing’ required.
Widget Marketing:
Widget Marketing is the easiest to achieve right now.
It fits with the how advertising is currently done – creatives can be done, space booked and paid for.
But we will need new measures of success – not necessarily how many times your ad is seen, or how many clicks it generates (though these will still be important). A further key measure will be engagement – how many people use the tool you provide and to what effect, how many people play with it, shape it as their own, and as a consequence forward it, or display it on their own webspace? While the url remains a significant element of web architecture, route 1 will retain strong economic value.
What should we do?
Create widgets instead of standard display adverts – no matter how in-context and related you can make them. (I appreciate you’ll need a period of both, I’m not suggesting you ditch all that in-context stuff over night).
These widgets must speak in the authentic voice of the people who make the products you are selling. That means involve those people in the ‘creative’. Don’t interrupt the conversation with your own spin. They make the pots, let them sell them.
Each widget should allow a personal outcome. That is, offer tools so the user can personalise, add to, subvert, so that it becomes something they actively want to pass on.
Example: The Pampers campaign in the US at the end of 07.
Because your ad is a widget, the user can place it where-ever they wish – on their own profile page on social networks, for example. In doing this they offer their own endorsement and share it with their network of trust – the people they connect with who share their passions and interests.
It is trust which makes recommended-by-a-friend work – not simply discovery (and it is perhaps the trust element that was missing in the friendspam of facebook’s initial poke at SocialAds).
Engagement Marketing:
This can be harder. It’s certainly harder than selling or creating for display space.
First, sort your head.
Start listening. Let the community take control.
Er, and that’s it really. Everything flows from this change in mindset.
Your brand is not your own. It is ours.
Cornflakes are a breakfast cereal not because that’s what Dr Kellogg ‘made’. Kellogg was in fact out to create a food which would suppress your sex drive.
That’s not what the community of users have decided it is!
Lucky for Kelloggs that they chose to allow that development of the brand!
Engagement marketers work on the assumption that they are dealing with converged individuals – people who are rather more than simple passive consumers – of product or message.
An engagement marketing approach would open up the creation of our widget marketing to the community in the first place. A competition with rewards for the person who makes the most-engaged-with widget promoting a brand, for example.
Further, an engagement marketer would be sitting down around the campfire with the community to help decide whether a widget competition was the right thing in the first place.
Simple rules:
1. Put the community first
2. Listen
3. Change
No Marketing:
In this model there is no ‘advertising’ or ‘marketing’ as we have understood it during the mass industrial interruption.
It has nothing to do with supply chains, value chains, or chains of any kind. It is about webs – of supply and value.
It takes advantage of the match between the way in which both the economy and the web work to create extraordinary efficiencies and ultimately greater value.
To take advantage you must create platforms which bring together co-creating communities who share a purpose and offer them the tools of collaboration.
We're getting better and better (and will get better still) at delivering the right commercial messages at the right time and to the right people, by focusing on communities and making use of social data analytics. And perfecting this has big wins for ad agencies, marketeers, commercial enterprizes and media... and this is a fantastic leap forward compared to the interruptive advertising that has gone before.
But the ultimate wins are about people taking control of the creation of the product they want to own.
If a community is involved in the co-creation of the products and services it has decided it needs to call into existence, this has two key impacts.
1. It has the potential to be a perfect fit. The people who’ve been involved in the co-creation of the product or service that results will love it and 'buy' it (that which we create we embrace, as Alan Moore likes to say). They will also rave about it – recommending it to other like-minded people, attracting more with the same passion/purpose to join their niche global community of collaborators.
2. Doesn’t co-creation of this kind imply a perfect fit between supply and demand? What's the need for traditional ads. The community does its own marketing - and it's powerfully peer-to-peer and with all the ramped-up trust that implies.
What is required to make this function?
1. Communities (what makes great communities?).
2. Tools which allow communities to self-form into groups of their choosing around purposes of their selection.
3. Tools which allow them to share and collaborate to produce.
White paper now available here.
All contributions to the conversation actively encouraged.
Understanding how the world has changed and looks set to continue to change – how we are rejecting interruption and embracing participation, how we are moving away from control from the centre to the dominance of communities, what should we do?
I see three immediate routes and believe each is worth pursuing. Each represents a significant shift from traditional, interruptive advertising. Each represents something other than business as usual.
1. Widget Marketing: Make use of the current advertising space and populate it with ads which follow the best practice of virals and widgets.
2. Engagement Marketing: Involve communities in the building of the brands they use – connect them to your authentic voice.
3. No Marketing: Instead, apply the new mode of production the web enables. Communities as producers of that which they desire. No ‘marketing’ required.
Widget Marketing:
Widget Marketing is the easiest to achieve right now.
It fits with the how advertising is currently done – creatives can be done, space booked and paid for.
But we will need new measures of success – not necessarily how many times your ad is seen, or how many clicks it generates (though these will still be important). A further key measure will be engagement – how many people use the tool you provide and to what effect, how many people play with it, shape it as their own, and as a consequence forward it, or display it on their own webspace? While the url remains a significant element of web architecture, route 1 will retain strong economic value.
What should we do?
Create widgets instead of standard display adverts – no matter how in-context and related you can make them. (I appreciate you’ll need a period of both, I’m not suggesting you ditch all that in-context stuff over night).
These widgets must speak in the authentic voice of the people who make the products you are selling. That means involve those people in the ‘creative’. Don’t interrupt the conversation with your own spin. They make the pots, let them sell them.
Each widget should allow a personal outcome. That is, offer tools so the user can personalise, add to, subvert, so that it becomes something they actively want to pass on.
Example: The Pampers campaign in the US at the end of 07.
Because your ad is a widget, the user can place it where-ever they wish – on their own profile page on social networks, for example. In doing this they offer their own endorsement and share it with their network of trust – the people they connect with who share their passions and interests.
It is trust which makes recommended-by-a-friend work – not simply discovery (and it is perhaps the trust element that was missing in the friendspam of facebook’s initial poke at SocialAds).
Engagement Marketing:
This can be harder. It’s certainly harder than selling or creating for display space.
First, sort your head.
Start listening. Let the community take control.
Er, and that’s it really. Everything flows from this change in mindset.
Your brand is not your own. It is ours.
Cornflakes are a breakfast cereal not because that’s what Dr Kellogg ‘made’. Kellogg was in fact out to create a food which would suppress your sex drive.
That’s not what the community of users have decided it is!
Lucky for Kelloggs that they chose to allow that development of the brand!
Engagement marketers work on the assumption that they are dealing with converged individuals – people who are rather more than simple passive consumers – of product or message.
An engagement marketing approach would open up the creation of our widget marketing to the community in the first place. A competition with rewards for the person who makes the most-engaged-with widget promoting a brand, for example.
Further, an engagement marketer would be sitting down around the campfire with the community to help decide whether a widget competition was the right thing in the first place.
Simple rules:
1. Put the community first
2. Listen
3. Change
No Marketing:
In this model there is no ‘advertising’ or ‘marketing’ as we have understood it during the mass industrial interruption.
It has nothing to do with supply chains, value chains, or chains of any kind. It is about webs – of supply and value.
It takes advantage of the match between the way in which both the economy and the web work to create extraordinary efficiencies and ultimately greater value.
To take advantage you must create platforms which bring together co-creating communities who share a purpose and offer them the tools of collaboration.
We're getting better and better (and will get better still) at delivering the right commercial messages at the right time and to the right people, by focusing on communities and making use of social data analytics. And perfecting this has big wins for ad agencies, marketeers, commercial enterprizes and media... and this is a fantastic leap forward compared to the interruptive advertising that has gone before.
But the ultimate wins are about people taking control of the creation of the product they want to own.
If a community is involved in the co-creation of the products and services it has decided it needs to call into existence, this has two key impacts.
1. It has the potential to be a perfect fit. The people who’ve been involved in the co-creation of the product or service that results will love it and 'buy' it (that which we create we embrace, as Alan Moore likes to say). They will also rave about it – recommending it to other like-minded people, attracting more with the same passion/purpose to join their niche global community of collaborators.
2. Doesn’t co-creation of this kind imply a perfect fit between supply and demand? What's the need for traditional ads. The community does its own marketing - and it's powerfully peer-to-peer and with all the ramped-up trust that implies.
What is required to make this function?
1. Communities (what makes great communities?).
2. Tools which allow communities to self-form into groups of their choosing around purposes of their selection.
3. Tools which allow them to share and collaborate to produce.
White paper now available here.
Friday, November 09, 2007
How to be a stepping stone manager
An interesting discussion on Euan Semple’s The Obvious blog has inspired me to think about how managers might become the stepping stones to more networked companies.
He has come to the conclusion that: “Management is becoming about noticing and enabling rather than driving and controlling.”
He advises: “Get yourselves a big melting pot of different social tools that engender different conversations and expressions of intent from your staff, watch like a hawk, spot the cool stuff, fan the flames and then protect the baby shoots from your spoilers.”
Jon Husband contributes this piece of mantra magic to the conversation by describing the notion as “Champion and Channel”.
And all this inspires me to think about the skill sets this suggests for the new leaders in organisations.
I have long been an advocate for a Communities First mantra. I think it describes and guides both what we should do and how we should go about doing it.
For example; Allow self-forming teams to follow their passions and we just might deliver products and services with a better fit with the networked world.
Teams that derive from an understanding of the power of the network ought to deliver results suited to success in the networked world. It’s an edge-in rather than centre-out solution. That’s the theory.
But most organisations remain silo’d and hierarchical. And we labour under command and control restrictions and structures. Letting go of all that all at once – well, let’s be honest, it would risk a certain level of chaos...
The networked company is the ideal; the current regime is the reality.
I think Euan’s insight is to offer relatively safe and secure stepping stones between the two.
The stepping stones are leaders of traditional hierarchies who have both the insight and the tools to harness the creativity of the Net Gen that wikinomics describes, Stowe Boyd's Edglings and Communities Dominate Brands' Generation C; people who expect to (are gagging to) join in the process of creating value in a networked way because that’s the way they’ve been brought up and it’s what they are used to.
So not only do managers need to provide (ands USE) the tools for their teams (wikis, forums, face-to-face discussion groups, facebook groups, whatever social tools they want to engage with) but they must also engage in the process with the insight to Champion and Channel – from the position of someone ready to champion and channel rather than one who might ‘drive’ or ‘control’.
So what skill sets does the stepping stone manager need?
I think Communities Dominate Brands offered a useful starting point when it described the role of the new marketeer.
Alan Moore & Tomi Ahonen wrote:
"What does it take to succeed in interruptive advertising? To be visible and heard, loud and eccentric, creative and brave, to crowd out the competition, gain attention of the audience - even annoy.
"This breeds an arrogance of "We know what is best, we won the awards, we have the training, we have the track record."
"This means many rogue marketeers break rules, live by their own rules, force their opinions upon others.
"What does it take to succeed in engagement marketing?
"To be humble, to listen, to empathise, to care, to be innovative, to be flexibile and adaptive, to live by other people's standards and rules. Subjecting one's own ego and ideas to the opinions and desires of the community: "They know best."
"To repeatedly readjust the existing and "own" ideas to the feedback of the community. My idea was not perfect, of course it should be revised again and again until my contribution disappears."
Euan reminds us to “Watch like a hawk, spot the cool stuff, fan the flames and then protect the baby shoots from your spoilers.”
Providing the tools and leaving ‘them’ to it is a luxury you can allow yourself only if you already have a well-functioning network of a company.
But if that were the case, you would want to be using them rather than leaving ‘them’ to it.
So I guess it follows that if you - the stepping stone manager - wants tohelp create a successfully networked company you HAVE to engage.
You have to be the stepping stone. You have to engage with the tools in order to “watch like a hawk, spot the cool stuff, fan the flames and protect the baby shoots”.
In Michael C Jackson’s Systems Thinking Peter Fryer’s Humberside Training and Enterprise Council’s experience is referenced.
“Forms of dialogue, aimed at ensuring win-win rather than win-lose outcomes were introduced to help overcome barriers to communication.”
That’s about culture and ‘permission to speak’. It has to come from the top that it’s alright to share, shape and contribute. In fact. It’s very welcome. It earns you brownie points with the boss. It is not a waste of ‘company’ time (what ever that is).
While all these messages should pervade your culture, the critical one in the enabling of the stepping stone is ‘everyone is responsible’.
This starts with the stepping stones themselves. The managers must set the tone. They are responsible for engaging with the internal (and external) social tools they make available.
But as the idea becomes more widely accepted – up and down the hierarchies and across silos - it becomes the responsibility of all – the entire network – to “watch like hawks, to fan flames, to spot cool stuff, to protect the baby shoots”.
The role of the stepping stone is to show the way and plot the path. But everyone must cross the water. When they all have, you have your network.
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Facebook's SocialAds: Jam today and tomorrow
SocialAds. The clue is in the name. What they do is the simple thing we see replicated elsewhere - serve the right ads to the right people at the right time.
That's a given. It's a big, big step in restoring response rates against the swan-dive of interruptive advertising.
But SocialAds have added something extra. Something, er, social.
They get that word of mouth is the single most effective sales pitch there is - accounting for between 60 and 70 per cent of all purchase decisions, depending on where you find your stats.
So an in-context, related ad is great. But an in-context related ad from a friend? Well that's a different league.
Ratings and recommendations of products from people you trust. Blyk understands this and we'll see exactly how it deploys that understanding as it rolls out its mobile model.
The idea makes use of the self-forming networks of trust that social networks create.
This is particularly effective when you add the understanding that people now have more trust in their peers than they do in brands, authority... the centre.
Recommended further reading on this:
Jeremiah Oywang at Forrester (Here).
Doc Searls (Here)
Now, I could argue that google's adsense does all this. It is in-context, related and served to the right people at the right time (if I'm searching for X and an ad for X is served against it - I'm the right person at the right time). What about the social bit? Well, my friend could forward me a link to a bit of content - that comes with his recommendation. I follow it and get served the ad when I see the content. It's kind of arrived in front of me with his recommendation.
However - there's no automation in that process. In SocialAds there appears to be.
The other element of their new business proposition is Facebook Pages, which allow businesses to have their own facebook profiles (and they are free) - so you can interact with consumers (fan-sumers as Jeremiah describes them - though I feel that underplays their role somewhat). I guess this is the equivalent of google's blogger?
They don't appear to have a way in which users of products create their own ads to share, or get invited into co-creating communities. Pity.
But these could be precisely the things that spin out of brands making wise use of the the two-way flow Facebook Pages are able to deliver.
The Facebook play is based on sound strategy for two reasons:
1. SocialAds are an easy sell for the current marketing mafia. They 'get' in-context related ads. They hear that social networks create trust. They know that trust begats sales. Where do I sign?
2. Facebook Pages offer more engaged (enlightened or willing to experiment) brands an easy opportunity to touch the network themselves (rather than simply witnessing its exponential value generation and handing over their cash). As they learn what it's like to be part of the communities which define brands, they will better serve the co-creational aspirations of Generation-C, Net Gen, the Edglings... the people who are inheriting the earth. Along the journey they should discover that these people want to help rate, shape, create, co-design, engineer and market. And they'll want rewards and ownership. Facebook Pages offer them an easy intro to the new business ecology and in an environment where connecting is made easy.
So it offers both a wedge of cash from the old guard right now (SocialAds) and a ticket to the future for the new (Facebook Pages).
It sounds like a winning combination to me.
This from the facebook blog (I would point you to the link, but it would only work for you if you were a member of facebook... as google's adsense may wish to point out)
What they say: My first reactions in red:
"Today we announced an entirely new advertising solution for Facebook. Right now, we want to make clear what's changing—and what's not—for you.
"First of all, what's not changing:
Here's what is changing:
Behind the scenes, we've instituted a system that tailors ads to you and your interests, which should make ads more appealing. Advertisers never have access to who is seeing their ads, personal information about you, or even what social actions accompany their ads. In other words, all of this completely respects your privacy, while providing you with a better Facebook experience.
Hmm wonder what kind of social data analytics they have going on at the back? Can they discern the most viral within each community, and offer them for sale?
You now have the option to bring actions you take outside of Facebook back in. Just as Facebook shares your on-site interactions with your friends through News Feed, we now give you an option to let News Feed share your off-site actions with your friends as well.
For example, adding the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to your queue on Blockbuster.com might be something you want your friends to know about, so you can have a marathon. As usual, you have complete control over this information. Affiliate websites always notify you of any stories they want to send, and you'll have two opportunities—one on the website, and one on Facebook—to opt out of that story. Facebook always gives you the choice to decline a story the next time you log in.
They've watched and learned from the likes of the Visual Bookshelf and Blogfriends apps.
We want Facebook to reflect and enhance all your real-world relationships—the movie you see this weekend as well as the friends who are seeing it with you. If you have any questions or suggestions for how we can improve this, let us know.
Well yes I do: Take a look here.(How Facebooks SocialAds should work, but probably won't)
That's a given. It's a big, big step in restoring response rates against the swan-dive of interruptive advertising.
But SocialAds have added something extra. Something, er, social.
They get that word of mouth is the single most effective sales pitch there is - accounting for between 60 and 70 per cent of all purchase decisions, depending on where you find your stats.
So an in-context, related ad is great. But an in-context related ad from a friend? Well that's a different league.
Ratings and recommendations of products from people you trust. Blyk understands this and we'll see exactly how it deploys that understanding as it rolls out its mobile model.
The idea makes use of the self-forming networks of trust that social networks create.
This is particularly effective when you add the understanding that people now have more trust in their peers than they do in brands, authority... the centre.
Recommended further reading on this:
Jeremiah Oywang at Forrester (Here).
Doc Searls (Here)
Now, I could argue that google's adsense does all this. It is in-context, related and served to the right people at the right time (if I'm searching for X and an ad for X is served against it - I'm the right person at the right time). What about the social bit? Well, my friend could forward me a link to a bit of content - that comes with his recommendation. I follow it and get served the ad when I see the content. It's kind of arrived in front of me with his recommendation.
However - there's no automation in that process. In SocialAds there appears to be.
The other element of their new business proposition is Facebook Pages, which allow businesses to have their own facebook profiles (and they are free) - so you can interact with consumers (fan-sumers as Jeremiah describes them - though I feel that underplays their role somewhat). I guess this is the equivalent of google's blogger?
They don't appear to have a way in which users of products create their own ads to share, or get invited into co-creating communities. Pity.
But these could be precisely the things that spin out of brands making wise use of the the two-way flow Facebook Pages are able to deliver.
The Facebook play is based on sound strategy for two reasons:
1. SocialAds are an easy sell for the current marketing mafia. They 'get' in-context related ads. They hear that social networks create trust. They know that trust begats sales. Where do I sign?
2. Facebook Pages offer more engaged (enlightened or willing to experiment) brands an easy opportunity to touch the network themselves (rather than simply witnessing its exponential value generation and handing over their cash). As they learn what it's like to be part of the communities which define brands, they will better serve the co-creational aspirations of Generation-C, Net Gen, the Edglings... the people who are inheriting the earth. Along the journey they should discover that these people want to help rate, shape, create, co-design, engineer and market. And they'll want rewards and ownership. Facebook Pages offer them an easy intro to the new business ecology and in an environment where connecting is made easy.
So it offers both a wedge of cash from the old guard right now (SocialAds) and a ticket to the future for the new (Facebook Pages).
It sounds like a winning combination to me.
This from the facebook blog (I would point you to the link, but it would only work for you if you were a member of facebook... as google's adsense may wish to point out)
What they say: My first reactions in red:
"Today we announced an entirely new advertising solution for Facebook. Right now, we want to make clear what's changing—and what's not—for you.
"First of all, what's not changing:
- Facebook will always stay clutter-free and clean.
- Facebook will never sell any of your information.
- You will always have control over your information and your Facebook experience.
- You will not see any more ads than you did before this. See anymore ads? I didn't 'see' any in the first place. I appreciate they were there, but they didn't register.
Here's what is changing:
- You now have a way to connect with products, businesses, bands, celebrities and more on Facebook.
- Ads should be getting more relevant and more meaningful to you.
- You now have the option to share actions you take on other sites with your friends on Facebook.
Engaging with businesses and buying things are part of your everyday life. Advertising doesn't have to be about interrupting what you're doing, but getting the right information about the purchases you make when you want it. We believe we've created a system where ads are more relevant and actually enhance Facebook.
Ah, so they get the engagement over interruption thing. But I'm afraid this IS just about serving the right people with the right ad at the right time. Yawn.
You now have a way to connect with things you are passionate about. We've launched Facebook Pages, which are distinct, customized profiles designed for businesses, bands, celebrities and more to represent themselves on Facebook.
We noticed people wanted to connect with their favorite music, restaurants, and brands; but there was no good place for these types of affiliations to exist. Now, there is a place for them and you can become a fan of whatever pages you choose in order to interact with your passions in new ways. You can post reviews for a local restaurant, buy tickets to a new movie, or be the first to get a heads up about new promotions.
Ads will be getting more relevant and more interesting to you. Instead of random messages from advertisers, we've launched Social Ads. Social Ads provide advertisements alongside related actions your friends have taken on the site. These actions may be things like "Leah is now a fan of The Offspring" (if I added The Offspring to my music) or "Justin wrote a review for Sushi Hut" (If Justin wrote this review on the Sushi Hut page). These actions could then be paired with an ad that either The Offspring or Sushi Hut provides.
Ah, so they get the engagement over interruption thing. But I'm afraid this IS just about serving the right people with the right ad at the right time. Yawn.
You now have a way to connect with things you are passionate about. We've launched Facebook Pages, which are distinct, customized profiles designed for businesses, bands, celebrities and more to represent themselves on Facebook.
We noticed people wanted to connect with their favorite music, restaurants, and brands; but there was no good place for these types of affiliations to exist. Now, there is a place for them and you can become a fan of whatever pages you choose in order to interact with your passions in new ways. You can post reviews for a local restaurant, buy tickets to a new movie, or be the first to get a heads up about new promotions.
Ads will be getting more relevant and more interesting to you. Instead of random messages from advertisers, we've launched Social Ads. Social Ads provide advertisements alongside related actions your friends have taken on the site. These actions may be things like "Leah is now a fan of The Offspring" (if I added The Offspring to my music) or "Justin wrote a review for Sushi Hut" (If Justin wrote this review on the Sushi Hut page). These actions could then be paired with an ad that either The Offspring or Sushi Hut provides.
A sample Social Ad.
Behind the scenes, we've instituted a system that tailors ads to you and your interests, which should make ads more appealing. Advertisers never have access to who is seeing their ads, personal information about you, or even what social actions accompany their ads. In other words, all of this completely respects your privacy, while providing you with a better Facebook experience.
Hmm wonder what kind of social data analytics they have going on at the back? Can they discern the most viral within each community, and offer them for sale?
You now have the option to bring actions you take outside of Facebook back in. Just as Facebook shares your on-site interactions with your friends through News Feed, we now give you an option to let News Feed share your off-site actions with your friends as well.
This is the notification you'll see whenever another site wants to send a story to Facebook.
For example, adding the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to your queue on Blockbuster.com might be something you want your friends to know about, so you can have a marathon. As usual, you have complete control over this information. Affiliate websites always notify you of any stories they want to send, and you'll have two opportunities—one on the website, and one on Facebook—to opt out of that story. Facebook always gives you the choice to decline a story the next time you log in.
They've watched and learned from the likes of the Visual Bookshelf and Blogfriends apps.
We want Facebook to reflect and enhance all your real-world relationships—the movie you see this weekend as well as the friends who are seeing it with you. If you have any questions or suggestions for how we can improve this, let us know.
Well yes I do: Take a look here.(How Facebooks SocialAds should work, but probably won't)
Monday, November 05, 2007
Why you can't expect business as usual
I spent the morning with Alan Moore (Communities Dominate Brands) today. Alan and I agree; where the network touches, it disrupts. Expect to see him publishing more on that before too long.
It's not just about new ways of making content. It's about new ways of making. Everything.
It's not just about new modes of advertising. It's about new modes of production.
But the ultimate wins are about people taking control of the creation of the product they want to own.
Advertising, so far as I can understand, is about closing the gap between the supply of that which is created and the demand for that product. This has profound implications. Implications that are regularly shied away from by the 'business2.0' brigade.
Perhaps they have a fear of biting the hand that feeds? If your pitch is to the suited business community the view from around the curve, if taken to its extremity, is a scary place indeed.
What is disintermediated by truly co-creational processes? The owners of the means of production.
Apply? Who are the mediators in business: Corporations? Companies?
Now, I'm not about to predict the end of the company overnight - just as it's unfair to completely write off mass media. But it is reasonable to understand that just in the same way that mass media has been disrupted by the network (leading to the emergence of a new global mass-niche focused community-driven approach) so the story for corporations must change, too.
Media is having to reinterpret itself (Why Media IS the New Business Ecology, is my stab at this). So must the corporation.
Looking far enough ahead may help us steer the right course. What do you see?
It's not just about new ways of making content. It's about new ways of making. Everything.
It's not just about new modes of advertising. It's about new modes of production.
(Got an example of how/where the network will disrupt - from education to politics and beyond? Add your contribution to A Shared Vision of a Networked World here.)We're getting better and better at delivering the right commercial messages at the right time and to the right people, by focusing on communities and making use of social data analytics. And perfecting this has big wins for ad agencies, marketeers, commercial enterprizes and media... and this is a fantastic leap forward compared to the interruptive advertising that has gone before.
But the ultimate wins are about people taking control of the creation of the product they want to own.
Advertising, so far as I can understand, is about closing the gap between the supply of that which is created and the demand for that product. This has profound implications. Implications that are regularly shied away from by the 'business2.0' brigade.
Perhaps they have a fear of biting the hand that feeds? If your pitch is to the suited business community the view from around the curve, if taken to its extremity, is a scary place indeed.
What is disintermediated by truly co-creational processes? The owners of the means of production.
Apply? Who are the mediators in business: Corporations? Companies?
Now, I'm not about to predict the end of the company overnight - just as it's unfair to completely write off mass media. But it is reasonable to understand that just in the same way that mass media has been disrupted by the network (leading to the emergence of a new global mass-niche focused community-driven approach) so the story for corporations must change, too.
Media is having to reinterpret itself (Why Media IS the New Business Ecology, is my stab at this). So must the corporation.
Looking far enough ahead may help us steer the right course. What do you see?
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Describe the last three TV commercials you saw
Scott Karp at Publishing2.0 (see recommended blogs, left) has some interesting comments on Nielson's new engagement panel.
It finds that only a third of the 1000-strong membership can recall a TV advert they've seen - while 79% could recall the shows they'd seen.
Personally I guess that depends on the time frame. I can't remember ads I saw last night - that's because I didn't watch TV last night. I can recall the Cadbury's Smash commercials of the 70s. That's because I did watch TV then. An extreme example - but you get the point.
The issue reminds me of one of my favourite questions of the moment:
"Describe the last three TV commercials you saw".
Can you?
It's a simple illustration that the value of interruptive broadcast media models has collapsed.
It finds that only a third of the 1000-strong membership can recall a TV advert they've seen - while 79% could recall the shows they'd seen.
Personally I guess that depends on the time frame. I can't remember ads I saw last night - that's because I didn't watch TV last night. I can recall the Cadbury's Smash commercials of the 70s. That's because I did watch TV then. An extreme example - but you get the point.
The issue reminds me of one of my favourite questions of the moment:
"Describe the last three TV commercials you saw".
Can you?
It's a simple illustration that the value of interruptive broadcast media models has collapsed.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Here it comes: Google Adsense for mobile!
Regular participants in this conversation will know I've long been an advocate of the idea that the long tail will shake the mobile internet dog (much earlier, and therefore acquiring significantly more influence, than it did on the fixed line web).
Google Adsense was the critical driver in the explosion of content on the fixed line web (it's one thing to create content left right and centre - quite another to get paid for it).
So the wait for google adsense or its equivalent to deploy on mobile has been pregnant with anticipation.
Well, now it's here.
A very reputable source told me on Friday (July 13, 2007) that in fact it had been available for a couple of weeks. And a quick scan around the blogosphere this morning reveals it is just starting testing with invited mobile content publishers (try here).
In my view, this is a very significant moment (please share what you think by adding a comment).
In combination with the arrival of the I-Phone and Youtube going properly mobile (in June) I think we'll end up looking back at the middle of 2007 as the tipping point of the mobile web.
Admob has already shown how taking the marketplace approach and making their code easy for publishers to deploy - gives long tail content creators a way of earning revenue for their efforts. As a result they are busily co-creating the new value emerging from the mobile internet (4billion ads served so far and currently adding around 1billion more a month).
And their biggest revenue earners are the likes of peperonity, itsmy... in other words User Generated Content in the classic long tail model.
But Admob can't serve in-context related ads. Yet (I'm told a version 2.0 is on its way...)
It's very hard to do for all sorts of very interesting technical reasons. So that makes their ads, despite their text-link design, more interruption than engagement. (though, to be fair to Admob, you can select which sites you want to serve on - and with increasing specialisation (into niches) that may well give a decent approximation of engagement).
However, if google adsense has cracked in-context, related (as it does on the fixed web) then there will be a better match between the 'advert' and the content. It closes the gap between the two. It makes it more engaging.
Both Admob and Google Adsense learned an early lesson many website operators would do well to consider - banners don't work. Text links do. They become part of the (albeit stilted) conversation. Translation: Interruption doesn't get response, Engagement does.
So now we have the staggering marketing power of Apple and the I-Phone, PLUS the global call to action (get a fixed rate data plan - get a 3G phone) of youtube to speed up the charge to mobile (pervasive if you prefer) computing.
AND on top of that there's now an easy-for-everyone AND engaging revenue model, too (Adsense).
Just watch mobile internet go now!
Make sure you are looking in the right direction (towards UGC) or you won't see it coming until it's way too late...
Google Adsense was the critical driver in the explosion of content on the fixed line web (it's one thing to create content left right and centre - quite another to get paid for it).
So the wait for google adsense or its equivalent to deploy on mobile has been pregnant with anticipation.
Well, now it's here.
A very reputable source told me on Friday (July 13, 2007) that in fact it had been available for a couple of weeks. And a quick scan around the blogosphere this morning reveals it is just starting testing with invited mobile content publishers (try here).
In my view, this is a very significant moment (please share what you think by adding a comment).
In combination with the arrival of the I-Phone and Youtube going properly mobile (in June) I think we'll end up looking back at the middle of 2007 as the tipping point of the mobile web.
Admob has already shown how taking the marketplace approach and making their code easy for publishers to deploy - gives long tail content creators a way of earning revenue for their efforts. As a result they are busily co-creating the new value emerging from the mobile internet (4billion ads served so far and currently adding around 1billion more a month).
And their biggest revenue earners are the likes of peperonity, itsmy... in other words User Generated Content in the classic long tail model.
But Admob can't serve in-context related ads. Yet (I'm told a version 2.0 is on its way...)
It's very hard to do for all sorts of very interesting technical reasons. So that makes their ads, despite their text-link design, more interruption than engagement. (though, to be fair to Admob, you can select which sites you want to serve on - and with increasing specialisation (into niches) that may well give a decent approximation of engagement).
However, if google adsense has cracked in-context, related (as it does on the fixed web) then there will be a better match between the 'advert' and the content. It closes the gap between the two. It makes it more engaging.
Both Admob and Google Adsense learned an early lesson many website operators would do well to consider - banners don't work. Text links do. They become part of the (albeit stilted) conversation. Translation: Interruption doesn't get response, Engagement does.
So now we have the staggering marketing power of Apple and the I-Phone, PLUS the global call to action (get a fixed rate data plan - get a 3G phone) of youtube to speed up the charge to mobile (pervasive if you prefer) computing.
AND on top of that there's now an easy-for-everyone AND engaging revenue model, too (Adsense).
Just watch mobile internet go now!
Make sure you are looking in the right direction (towards UGC) or you won't see it coming until it's way too late...
Monday, October 30, 2006
Measure for measure. Why google doesn't publish audience figures
Here's one for those in the business of selling ads (at least until we work out better ways of engaging...)
It's from Web2.0: Click here
See also Famous for 15 people is better than famous for 15 minutes
It's from Web2.0: Click here
See also Famous for 15 people is better than famous for 15 minutes
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Marketing - new skill sets required? Editorial - lessons to learn?
In previous posts I've supported the claim that interruptive advertising is increasingly ineffective (and if anyone wants some solid evidence of how that translates online, come and check my google ad click-thru rates compared to the banners and buttons on the soon-to-be updated LRO.com).
I've also backed the idea that engagement marketing is the way ahead.
And that raises a number of questions, not least among them is the new skills marketeers will need, to be successful at engagement marketing.
And that's kind of where Communities Dominate Brands (see recommended blogs), leaves it.
But I think the lessons waiting to be learned in marketing can equally apply in editorial style and, in particular, tone.
I'll quote a bit of what CDB has to say about the shift in skill sets required in marketing, and see what you think - how much of it could also be applied to what we do/think/plan/deliver editorially?:
"A revolution in marketing skills
"What does it take to succeed in interruptive advertising? To be visible and heard, loud and eccentric, creative and brave, to crowd out the competition, gain attention of the audience - even annoy.
"This breeds an arrogance of "We know what is best, we won the awards, we have the training, we have the track record."
"This means many rogue marketeers break rules, live by their own rules, force their opinions upon others.
"What does it take to succeed in engagement marketing?
"To be humble, to listen, to empathise, to care, to be innovative, to be flexibile and adaptive, to live by other people's standards and rules. Subjecting one's own ego and ideas to the opinions and desires of the community: "They know best."
"To repeatedly readjust the existing and "own" ideas to the feedback of the community. My idea was not perfect, of course it should be revised again and again until my contribution disappears."
Communities Dominate Brands
I've also backed the idea that engagement marketing is the way ahead.
And that raises a number of questions, not least among them is the new skills marketeers will need, to be successful at engagement marketing.
And that's kind of where Communities Dominate Brands (see recommended blogs), leaves it.
But I think the lessons waiting to be learned in marketing can equally apply in editorial style and, in particular, tone.
I'll quote a bit of what CDB has to say about the shift in skill sets required in marketing, and see what you think - how much of it could also be applied to what we do/think/plan/deliver editorially?:
"A revolution in marketing skills
"What does it take to succeed in interruptive advertising? To be visible and heard, loud and eccentric, creative and brave, to crowd out the competition, gain attention of the audience - even annoy.
"This breeds an arrogance of "We know what is best, we won the awards, we have the training, we have the track record."
"This means many rogue marketeers break rules, live by their own rules, force their opinions upon others.
"What does it take to succeed in engagement marketing?
"To be humble, to listen, to empathise, to care, to be innovative, to be flexibile and adaptive, to live by other people's standards and rules. Subjecting one's own ego and ideas to the opinions and desires of the community: "They know best."
"To repeatedly readjust the existing and "own" ideas to the feedback of the community. My idea was not perfect, of course it should be revised again and again until my contribution disappears."
Communities Dominate Brands
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