On October 17, 2005, my first post on the Servant of Chaos blog went live. It was a poem and a position. It was a statement of intent. My aim was to write 999 theses – small entries each day. Obviously this has changed – and it comes down, largely, to those who read and comment here. I am constantly amazed by the smart, generous and passionate voices that I read and humbled and excited to when given the opportunity to meet in the flesh.
Four years on, and my first post seems just as pertinent today. Thanks for reading, commenting and sharing your thoughts.
We begin with a rant. A rumble. A shout. There is more in the mind, more on the fingertips, more spilling from the edges of our quivering lips than can fill the words of a thousand weblogs. The diaries of the insane, the newly repossessed, the righteous, the deluded, and yes, even I. The daily diatribe of the left, the right, the religious and informed brooks no argument. But we will give them one. You and I. We will give them one. There are more to the words of consumers than the corporations expect. We huddle in groups, in chat rooms. We explode on the keyboards of a million call centres. Our imagination is unheard of. Our thoughts cancel out the process. We are your hearts and your minds. We are everywhere, all places, all over the shop. In your blood, at your workplace. Serving you tea. Writing you emails. Escape? We don't really want to, for this is who we are. One. More. A new opportunity opens every day. It opens with the page. The pen. Another rant. In control? Hell no! We are in slavery to the chaos of our lives. This is the manifesto of one.
Right about now, most marketers will be starting to set their budgets for next year. We are looking at what worked this year, what didn’t, and thinking about how we can capitalise on the positive momentum and new product/feature launches that are planned for 2010. For some this means buying media. For others it means looking at earned media.
One of the very first things I do is to look at where my customers are playing. And by “playing”, I mean, where do they spend their time. How do they break down their days? I am looking for an understanding of their BEHAVIOUR. I am looking for opportunities to ENGAGE, not chances to interrupt. I’m seeking participation.
For me, it starts with data. I feed this into my continuous digital strategy process (regardless of whether it is digital or not). I look at the Google Trends data and I cross pollinate it with my own web analytics information. What do I see? I see the phenomenon that Ian Lyons is seeing. On the Datalicious blog, Ian suggests that Australian Brand Sites are Losing to the Social Web:
We are hanging out in social sites where relevant content finds us through our friends rather than searching out brands
Content is being pushed off-site through mechanisms such as RSS Feeds, Twitter, YouTube Channels and Facebook Fan pages
Ian shares a number of graphs to to demonstrate (take a good look at the post for more), but this one above clearly shows a significant fall in the number of daily unique visitors to all Australian online media properties. The most dramatic fall belongs to NineMSN.com.au. The important thing to remember with this, is that consumers haven’t suddenly lost half of their time or attention – they are shifting attention (their precious resource) to other places. And clearly consumer behaviour is not shifting to brands or even brand websites – it’s shifting to our friends, connections and family – online.
Facebook is the big winner. It’s winning because the future of your brand is social. It is winning because the decisions we make are now social. And as consumer behaviour and action continues to shift, as people continue to rely on social judgement as a means of filtering the thousands of advertising and branded messages they encounter each day, brands are going to struggle to remain relevant or even interesting.
It’s time to think about what I call the Auchterlonie Effect. It’s time, as Ian suggests, for brands to think of themselves as (niche) publishers. And it’s time to think about shifting that media budget of yours away from SPENDING and into INVESTMENT. Remember, on the web, content lasts forever. Use that insight to your advantage!
I am often asked whether the strategies, ideas and approaches discussed here on my blog can be applied to small business. The answer, in the best marketing speak, is “yes” and “no”.
For while it is easy to get caught in the endless repetition of strategic planning, creating a continuous digital strategy can be quite fast. If you know what you are doing, you can knock it over in a lazy afternoon. Unfortunately, you can also easily fall into the state of “analysis paralysis” – where you are unable to shift beyond one part of a process due to the volume of information you are trying to assimilate. My advice is to start as SMALL as you possibly can.
However, if you really are a small business and you want to get started with blogging – AND you want to do it in a way that is SCALABLE, can help you GROW your business and delivers RESULTS, then my advice would be to check out The Dialup Guide to Blogging.
I wrote this short (43pp), easy-to-read guide to blogging with the individual in mind – but the lessons and approaches apply equally to the small business. No matter whether your brand is personal or business, there is plenty to learn, and the book covers all the bases of digital strategy as well as the all important DOING IT part:
The book takes you through the practical steps of establishing your blogging objectives, creating domain names, signing up for a blog, creating your online "footprint" and writing your first posts. It is a must for anyone wondering HOW to get started.
And the best part – you can get it as a soft cover for those who are interested in “digital” but prefer non-digital books. Oh, and there is a downloadable eBook version too – for those too impatient to wait for delivery.
I am a little out of sync after the energy and excitement of the MarketingNow! conference in Melbourne (I will be writing up my thoughts over the next few days – so make sure to check back).
But here are five excellent posts that I missed – and thought I’d share with you:
The Plague of Plagiarism – what happens when your blog posts and ideas start appearing across the web – without attribution? Peter Kim delves into the subject and creates a dynamic conversation around this tricky and touchy topic.
Mack Collier looks at Seth Godin’s launch of his fancy brand-version of Squidoo – or what Mack calls the “fast food version of social media engagement”.
As if to prove that the future of your brand is social, Google unveils SideWiki – a new tool that allows ANYONE to comment on your website. Jeremiah Owyang explains why it changes the game (and if you have it installed, you can see the message that I left for you on my home page!).
Francois Gossieaux suggests that we should look more deeply at the behaviour of our customers – and tap into the signals, symbols and rules to promote engagement.
Gordon Whitehead goes from rant to activism in his efforts to get people voting in the NSW AMI election. If you are a member, check out Gordon’s voting recommendations!
Whether you are walking down the street, watching the TV, surfing the net or even driving a car, you are the subject of some form of advertising. From the branded cap on the boy walking down the street to the billboard behind him – marketing is hard at work trying to capture your attention. Constance Hill and Bruce Henry suggest that we see around 3000 marketing messages each day. But no matter whether we see 100 or 10,000 messages – clearly we are exposed to a significant number. But how many do you recall? How many seep into your unconscious, adding a negative or positive neuron to your thoughts around these brands?
Now, add into this mix the dozens or even hundreds of blogs that you read and the tweets that you view on Twitter each day. Combine this with podcasts, music streams via blip.fm, videos on YouTube and email – and suddenly you have an abundant media stream that can appear overwhelming. As Sean Howard says, “In today's world everyone is a publisher, everyone has some level of influence, and everyone has a network of influence that is difficult to define let alone measure”. It makes the life of the media consumer rather complex.
As a marketer, however, you do have a specific objective. What you are aiming for is MAKING GRAVITY. With paid media you are using your marketing budget to have your content inserted into spaces that your audience inhabit. It is an expense which you measure in terms of how many people you have reached with your communication.
Earned media (or what Craig Wilson calls engagement marketing), on the other hand, is both different in nature and in measurement. Rather than being an expense, it is an investment. Its effectiveness is directly related to what you DO rather than what you SAY, and the value that is exchanged is not currency, but trust. As I have explained previously – it is about changing behaviours:
Every time we forward on a link, retweet a message read on Twitter or any other type of social network interaction, we are CHOOSING to act. We are not just using our network of connections to FILTER the noise, we are using it to SHAPE our experience. It is a choice. And understanding this distinction places us in a context where STORYTELLING emerges as vitally important?
Paid media has been an effective marketing approach for hundreds of years (if not longer). But it thrived in a time where attention was abundant and our media consumption choices were limited to a set number of channels. These days, media is abundant but our attention (and maybe more importantly, our respect) is scarce. Graham Brown has an excellent five minute piece on the challenges presented by these changes.
But the fundamental difference with paid vs earned media is the refocusing of effort. No longer do you spend your creative energies (and budgets) on producing executions that gain attention – you spend it on building trust and creating Auchterlonie Effects (stories that can be easily shared). Indeed, in the best traditions of storytelling, earned media propagates itself – becoming promiscuous in the process.
The reason that promiscuous ideas are important to your brand is that you WANT them to be shared. In social media, every shared idea, link or concept creates an exchange of value within a PERSONAL network – so the act of sharing is a recommendation of sorts. Over time the person who “adds value” to their network builds an abundant store of social capital. It is like branding – we can’t necessarily point to a PARTICULAR item – but to the recurring and ongoing sense of positive exchange relating to that person.
When YOUR brand story or content is the subject of that exchange, you are effectively providing a reason for connection between people in a network. And as these connections grow, as they are passed from person to person, you are creating points of gravity around your brand ecosystem. Your challenge then is to work with a continuous digital strategy to “share the message” but “own the destination”. The thing is, gravity can only be earned. And while you can employ paid media to complement your earned media – you need to make sure you have a compelling story to tell and to share.
I remember reading John Naisbitt’s Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives years ago and being struck by the concept of high tech/high touch. That is, the more high tech our lives became, the greater our demand for high touch elements. This could account for everything from office design through to the interest in gadgets, and surprisingly, books. And everywhere I looked I could see evidence.
Then, as eBooks began their steady march forward, there were many who suggested that the book publishing industry was on the brink of collapse. We now know this is not true – and that book publishing may well be in the healthiest shape that it has been in for decades. BookExpo America indicates that there were over 130,000 active publishers in 2008 – an increase of 27%. And virtually all this growth occurs in the small publisher category. Clearly it would take something seismic to destroy a $40.3 billion industry.
But despite the growth of blogs and other forms of social communication, books continue to hold a prominent position in our culture. Think about the recent conferences you have attended – how many of the keynote speakers are authors? Think about the way we still continue to revere books. Perhaps it is the lure of storytelling or something more primal. Bruce Temkin suggests that part of our biological makeup, fundamental to evolutionary success, is the way that stories transform our brain’s responses:
People relate to stories because it is part of their evolutionary makeup. Stories cause our mirror neurons to fire at similar experiences, helping us remember and relate.
In my own experience, as the author of The Dialup Guide to Blogging, and more notably, publisher and contributor to The Age of Conversation, extreme care is taken whenever a word is laid out in print. We take more care with words when they are perceived as more PERMANENT than the digital variety, and we pay more attention to their context when they are given physical presence. Yes, a potential employer may Google your name before an interview, but they may throw a quote back in your face. Words really can eat you.
But on the consumption side – as a reader – books are also becoming status symbols. Up until recently, our book collections or libraries signalled our own tastes, follies and predilections to a private audience – those who are invited into the inner sanctums of our homes. (I don’t know about you, but when I visit a friend’s house, I scour their bookshelves for insight and maybe even scandal.) These days, however, we wear our libraries as badges of social honour – with sites such as BookTagger.com, Amazon and Shelfari bringing our reading list into the social networking space.
Nowadays, books are indicators of our conscious attention decisions – when we choose to read a book, we choose to immerse ourselves in its world and the imaginings of the author. Kyle Mitchell, agrees:
But books go beyond this too. When we read a book, we are making a statement to others as well as to ourselves. We invest in an unwritten contract where the rewards on offer can only be reached via our own commitment. As readers, we delay our gratification until the very last page. It’s like a slow dance with an uncertain ending. It’s like sex – or more precisely – like seduction.
There is much that marketers can learn from publishing in this regard. How do we capture the inbuilt Auchterlonie Effect provided by books (allowing others to tell their story about OUR story)? How do we mimetically reproduce that high tech/high touch aspect that is bound up in hundreds of years of publishing history? I think Jeremy Lebard, creator of BookTagger.com points us in the right direction:
Reading provides a quiet solitude seldom found in our busy world. It invokes in me a quiet chamber of the mind that shuts out external distractions and focuses on the story at hand. From that quiet room I get the best view of the world no matter where I am. The view is like no other; I watch a story unfold through the eyes of the author. The author’s words become the script and I the producer and out springs a living breathing story within the walls of my imagination. I am forced to interpret that with which I am unfamiliar. Every story I read takes my imagination for a workout. Reading forces you to become a producer that even with the merest budget it takes to buy a book you can compete with the latest commercially produced multi-million dollar production. Don’t believe me? Just listen next time a book is turned into a movie. More often than not you’ll hear “It’s not as good as the book”.
I must admit to quite liking this early-in-the-week recap. And while there is plenty of material out there to be read, it goes to show how difficult it can be to create reliably compelling content. This week’s must-read posts each had something that stayed with me long after the initial scan. Hope you like them.
Julian Cole explains why there is much interest (and opportunity) in Facebook with a nice case study about his own use of a Fan page to promote the band, Grinspoon
David Armano reveals social media’s 10 dirty little secrets. Go on, own up to your own 😉
Zoe Scaman shares “living pixels” – outdoor media made of living plants. Perfect for brands such as the Toyota Prius
Great banner spotted by Ashley Ringrose – by IBM. Seriously.
Interesting post by Iain Tait reminding us to think about the tone of voice that we use in our writing – and how it can sometimes, unexpectedly, change
I remember reading this great post by Ruby Pseudo late last year and thinking it was a great way to understand social media in general (as well as teens specifically).
One of my favourite of the ten commandments is this:
10. Finally, with Facebook and MySpace etc, please remember that you’re in their (digital) space: they didn’t ask you to be there, and they can’t very well ask you to leave, so talk nicely. And if you haven’t got anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all …
Interestingly, “if you haven’t got anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” sounds like something my Grandma used to say. I have a feeling she would have gotten on well in the social media world.
Much is made of “expertise”. Take a look at various TV shows, websites, blogs, and even LinkedIn profiles and you will see the word “expert” bandied about. When you pre-fix this with the words “social media” and you can end up with a potent mix. LinkedIn, alone, ponies up over 50 pages of “social media experts” within my own network — so it would appear that social media expertise is far from a rare skill.
The reality is, in my view, somewhat different.
We are living in a time where the acquisition of knowledge is occurring at ever increasing speed. Thanks to search engines like Google and to personal knowledge networks like Twitter, we can all find, relatively quickly a preliminary answer to the trickiest of problems. For example, if I want to know how to write a social media release, I will find good quality links to Todd Defren, Lee Hopkins, a case study by Geoff Livingston and even a webinar by Des Walsh. I could also comb back through my own del.icio.us bookmarks (or those of others), or I could reach out to my personal knowledge network (aka Twitter) — or just enlist the charming Connie Reece.
None of this makes me an expert.
I could repeat the same process with a different challenge — say managing an online community. There would be new names, great insight and plenty of links. But again, this does not an expert make.
Because while I have searched through all these links, spent hours reading and analysing and determining a plan for action, the world has changed. There are new services, new offerings and new approaches being launched. There are new web applications unveiling themselves. And it all happens in what seems like a matter of hours. Sites come and go, find favour and fail … within incredibly short time frames. The flux seems never ending.
How then can I, in all honesty, advise clients/companies/anyone about “social media”?
What I do have is experience, access to people who are way smarter than me, an openness to learning new things and an ability to bear a certain amount of risk. I try before I buy. Oh, and I have failed, and even embarrassed myself.
I claim no expertise in social media … I am continually learning too much (and working on shifting ground) to consider myself anything other than a charlatan. And I have taken the words of Connie Reece to heart — “If someone tells you they are a social media expert, run”.
“If someone tells you they are a social media expert, run” — Connie Reece
In this great podcast, the Podcast Sisters (aka Heather Gorringe and Anna Farmery) interview the effervescent Connie Reece about social media and where and how it fits within an overall marketing strategy.
There is an excellent discussion (at 6:30) about the emerging interest of corporations in social media — with Anna asking whether small businesses should step back and leave social media to the corporations. And as Heather points out, there are more than 109 million blogs now online (Heather quotes precise figures — 😉 ), Connie rightly points out that the aim of your marketing (or social media) strategy is not necessarily to be the number one brand worldwide, but to be the number one brand/business in your category in your locale.
Plenty of good insight delivered in the way that only Anna and Heather can. Remember, you can subscribe via iTunes here.
years ago and being struck by the concept of high tech/high touch. That is, the more high tech our lives became, the greater our demand for high touch elements. This could account for everything from office design through to the interest in gadgets, and surprisingly, books. And everywhere I looked I could see evidence. 
