Digital Strategy - Servant of Chaos

How Well Do You Listen and Engage With Your Customers?

Customer Experience, Digital Strategy, Infographics, Social Media, Strategy

Increasingly, businesses are turning to social media as part of their marketing mix. There is a smattering of Facebook, a Twitter account – and maybe even a YouTube channel. Some will have a social media monitoring solution in place, others a bunch of Google Alerts bombarding their inbox with messages and updates. But there is often a gulf between the listening and doing – between the monitoring and engaging.

And perhaps, more alarmingly, there are precious few businesses who have done the work to put social media into a framework or business context. That’s why I advocate continuous digital strategy. It’s why I think a social business maturity model is important – so that you can actively work to transform your business relationships, systems and processes in such a way as they deliver sustaining value over time.

Social Business Maturity Model

View more presentations from Gavin Heaton

Unfortunately, many of us only take on transformative challenges when we are forced to – often because our competitors beat us to the punch.

Wouldn’t it be nice to lead and set the agenda instead?

The Dell Social Listening questionnaire gives you valuable information from seven relatively simple questions. Based on Forrester industry data, it allows you to model your own business (or your competitors’ business) and have it visualised as an infographic. Here is one I did for a medium sized tech company. Makes for interesting reading … but it can also be a useful way of laying out your strategic challenges – especially if you are also working in a medium sized tech company.

How do you compare? Where are the gaps? And what are you going to do to close them?

You see, it is important to listen to and engage with your customers. But that’s not the end result. It’s the start. Get to it!

Saying is Momentary, Doing is Forever

Creativity, Digital Strategy, Innovation, Social Media

Over the past couple of weeks I have been doing workshops and talks and entertaining people with what I call “the magic quadrant of getting shit done”. It’s this chart of “walkers, talkers, stalkers and baulkers” – the four basic behaviours that people exhibit when presented with some kind of change.

This tends to get people talking – which is great. But more importantly, it provides us with a shared language. It helps us identify, from a 1000ft point of view, what is happening for the people who are involved in our projects – and allows us to name a behaviour. It allows us to identify individuals and then develop a plan to shift their behaviour (or to amplify their best efforts as appropriate).

Now, changing someone’s behaviour is never easy. It requires focus and commitment (from you). It requires a plan and often a great deal of time (also from you). Remember, the person, the organisation or the brand you are trying to change has little incentive to change – so the onus is on you.

While I have worked in marketing for years, most of what I actually do comes from the world of corporate “change management”. It just so happens that brands and branding are a great way of curating an ongoing narrative about change. I learned this early on and continue to bring this into every strategy I produce and every tactic that I use.

When I was recently asked about the difference between “talkers” and “walkers”, I realised that sometimes the talkers actually think THEY are the walkers. This is not just a case of drinking your own kool aid – it’s a lack of understanding of the principles of change management.

The talkers believe that simply identifying a gap or a problem is enough. They may even go so far as to point out a solution (which may or may not be obvious). In some cases they can even provide a connection – a person, a business or a recommendation to help. But this is not enough. Success means that even the most articulate and passionate talkers must at some stage shift mode and become walkers (or at least hire or surround themselves with some).

Saying is momentary, doing is forever. In the words of The King – what we need is a little less conversation, a little more action.

My Kingdom for a Horse

AgencyWorld, Digital Strategy, Strategy

A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!

I have always loved Shakespeare’s Richard III. It’s an epic experience – no matter whether you see it live in performance or whether you let those words loose in great emptiness of your cognitive surplus. The line comes at the point in the play where Richard – the evil and arrogant king – is about to meet his doom.

Like many of Shakespeare’s best lines, it has found its way into our everyday speech. Accordingly, we use it in a variety of situations – where we are exasperated, challenged or just down right desperate.

But there is more to it. Increasingly I am hearing this in the world of business.

When dealing with strategy and the challenges of social media, many CEOs, CMOs and their compatriots on the agency side are heard uttering these same words. But they are not asking for a horse. They are asking – nay demanding – that you pay attention not to their words, but to the source of their problem.

Any Tom, Dick or Harry can show up with a fistful of Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts. But the true strategist will look beyond the words to the insight – seeking to understand the root cause, understand the behaviour driving the need and develop an approach which will solve the problem. Sometimes it will indeed be a horse.

Rob Campbell suggests that many agencies have been trapped by a form of creativity-by-the-numbers. Rob places the responsibility on the shoulders of the creative and media agencies:

… because clients tend to judge their effectiveness by the level of media exposure they’ve achieved [R&F] – rather than by specific business goals – media agencies are basically being encouraged to push for creative work that can be placed in measurable media channels because it help ensure they get their fees.

But I think clients – the CEOs, the CMOs and all their direct reports also carry some of this responsibility. You may think it is a horse that you need, but that’s applying logic to the problem. What you want is creativity.

If someone had delivered Richard a cannon perhaps history would have had a very different shape. Next time someone calls for a horse, don’t give them what they ask for. Give them what they need.

Beyond TV – ‘Go Back’ is a Must-Have Experience From SBS

Digital Strategy, Innovation, Social Media, Strategy

As a rule I don’t watch a lot of television. It’s often not challenging enough or emotionally engaging. But last night as I was prepping for a little writing after an already long day, I spotted a number of tweets about a show that sounded compelling.

SBS’ Go Back to Where You Came From takes six ordinary Australians on a reality TV style adventure – living like refugees for 25 days. In this first episode (with two others to run over consecutive nights), the scene is set, participants are eased into the process, hearing the personal, confronting stories of former refugees now living in Australia. Spending three nights living with these families begins the long process of cracking the hard core of prejudice that many of us blithely live with. But how confronting will this get for the participants – and for us the audience?

In true reality TV fashion, events are orchestrated to emotionally and physically test the participants. We often say that truth is stranger than fiction – and it is clear from this first episode that the reality of being a refugee contains more drama, fear, risk and challenge than many of us, cocooned in the comfort of our armchairs, could have imagined. Just when you think that the participants have been pushed to the limit, they are plunged to a deeper level of discomfort.

And while the show itself is brilliant, there’s also some seriously good social media integration around it. You can view the show online (which was perfect for me as I missed the first few minutes). There’s no waiting 24 hours etc. I think there is a problem with viewing via iPad, but the immediate availability of the show allows late-comers to still engage. Brilliant work from SBS.

Then there is the Asylum: Exit Australia simulation, an interactive quiz, interactive school resources, teachers packs and feedback forums.

It’s not just must-see TV – it’s a model for the future of what content publishing should be.

The Shift to Inbound Marketing

Digital Strategy, Infographics

Since the dawn of the advertising era, our marketing efforts have been directed towards broadcast. We wanted to get our product messages out, make people aware, encourage their interest, stimulate their desire and drive them to convert this to sales. We have built models, processes and systems that are the bedrock of marketing courses the world over.

But the social web has changed all this.

The early internet promised to level the playing field. It brought large scale publishing and commercial capability to any size business. It meant that a local retailer could have as much “presence” and online processing power as a national retailing powerhouse. Yet while the level playing field was set, not all businesses were ready for it. The innovation in the consumer market had not filtered into the businesses – the place where change is notoriously difficult to drive, measure and achieve.

Yet before businesses could catch their breath, the social web shifted the goal posts on the level playing field. You see, suddenly the barriers to entry dropped away and it wasn’t the small businesses that claimed the high ground. It was the consumers. The customers. The people like you and me when we’re not at work 😉

These days what counts isn’t how many people you reach and how frequently you do so (that’s an expensive and oh so 1990s way of doing things). Now it’s about how your business and digital strategy gravitate towards, recommend and choose your products/services in a hyper-competitive market. We call that “inbound marketing” – and if you haven’t considered its role in the future of your business, just take a moment and check out the infographic from MDG advertising. Check out the thinking, tools and practices that can help you ride the wave of this shift. Figure out how you can use this with your continuous digital strategy – and align your own business goals with the posts that shift – before they do again.

mdg_marketing_infographic-475

Don’t Waste Your Search Budget Like the Easter Show

Case Studies, Digital Strategy, Good Works

As the Chair of not-for-profit youth media organisation, Vibewire, I know the budgetary, sponsorship and resourcing challenges faced by groups who are dedicated to what I call “good works” in our society. So whenever I look at the work of not-for-profit organisations or community groups, it always disappoints me to see them wasting the resources that they have available to them.

So when I started looking for information on Sydney Royal Easter Show, I was disappointed to see paid search being thrown away as follows.

Considering the strength of the organic placement (I used a clean browser for this), this paid piece is like throwing money away. It’s like they ticked the box for “paid search” and moved on to the next piece of their digital presence.

Clearly the Royal Easter Show folks could have spent the paid search budget on the iPhone app that is advertised on their site (can’t be found in the App Store) or in a beefed up community presence on Facebook where the links between website activities and show-based events/promotions could have been easily orchestrated.

While it is great to see people explaining how mums can download colouring-in pages from the website and take them along for entry in a competition – these on/offline activities are the no-brainers that drive loyalty and action. They simply make life easier for your event participants.

And that should be the goal of any digital strategy. Because ease of use drives action. And the best action is ticket sales.