In 2020, I launched a new digital consultancy, NextNow Digital. All of my new ideas and insights can be found at the new site. The Digital Influence Mapping Project has been a labor of love since I started it in 2005. This blog may continue to live on in some form or another.
For now, visit NextNow Digital Insights & Ideas. You will find fresh POVs on digital marketing and transformation to help startups, small and mid-size businesses, as well as continued thoughts for enterprise marketers.
I love reading fiction. Trouble is, I just don’t have that much time to read. I squeak in a bit each day but I am too embarrassed to admit how many pages (paragraphs?) I manage before I fall asleep. I am reading Roberto Bolano’s 2666. It is 893 pages long. Ask me in 2016 if I am still reading it. That’s why I am none too shocked to hear the French culture minister, Fleur Pellerin, admit she hasn’t read a novel in two years. According to the NYTimes,
"As France was celebrating its latest Nobel laureate, Patrick Modiano, the nation’s minister of culture, Fleur Pellerin, shocked the nation’s literati by admitting in a television interview this week that she had not read his novels or any others for the last two years."
Dear France, What Book Should I Read Next?
What a perfect circumstance for Fleur Pellerin to launch a crowdsourcing project to select the next book she will read. By letting the French people nominate books and then have them vote to move them up the reading list, Fleur Pellerin could remedy the problem – the Culture Minister must read French books to represent – and engage the country in a lively book-loving debate.
The list could become cultural homework for foreign students visiting France. It would elevate French authors in the world’s eyes as the crowdsourcing would happen on this lovely international Web we find ourselves on today. It might even jazz up the culture ministry's Web site which interestingly won't tranlsate via Google translate.
Remember when the term “new media’ referred to CD-ROMs and such. I made quite of few of those and remember the term being applied to this new form of interactive media. A few chapters later – the Internet, social media and the shrinking newspaper industry – and new media can be applied to those media companies that are transforming.
I remain sensitive to the pain of news media businesses – especially those that grew up inside newspapers. Still, I am excited about new models of journalism that are coming out of all that. Following Neiman Lab helps in discovering many of these new trends and experiments. I see quite a few media and journalism companies creating new, valuable experiences that transcend the very platforms they deliver on.
BBC World Service
The BBC World Service does 3 things that really energize me and make me genuinely curious to tune in, follow and access online.
Outside Source w/Ros Atkins
I love the pace, the social-connectivity and the global reach of the morning (ET USA) Outside Source radio show that I listen to most days. First off, the hosts (Ros Atkins is my favorite) run the program like fast paced jockeys – pulling in reporters from the World Newsroom (above), interviewing people – regular people – on the ground in Gaza, Edinburgh or Iraq, and moving quickly between sources. As the program name suggests, they are trying to curate and expose us to many sources of information. The bias of the non-reporters shine through but that only makes the program richer. This caters to my ADD-like brain.
They connect very closely with social media. Ros is frequently driving people to individual reporters’ Twitter feeds, pulling off a report from Twitter and driving folks to get more information online. This inter-connectivity is not forced. It is natural. I started with radio and am now connected online with @BBCRosAtkins and @BBCOS.
A team of folks at BBC World Service comb through trending topics in social media and build stories (#BBCTrending). Their radio story about the Lady Alba videos supporting #YesScotland drove me online to learn more. Sure, sometimes it seems as they are late to the party. I had seen the Spiderdog videos a few weeks prior but BBC Trending told us more about the polish creator of this and other provocative video series (like the creepy Slender Man).
While this practice of mining social media for stories may seem mundane in today’s world, I rarely see it as a built-in practice for news programs originating in other media. BBC Trending just does a great job. They have their ‘trend journos/hunters’ actually tell the stories during the radio program. Sure, their web site is dated but they probably suffer from the same IT-stranglehold that many big organizations suffer from.
A pair of reporters are driving across the US as we speak to capture and tell the stories of the mass of people who actually live in the ‘fly-over states’ that make up the heart of our country. I don’t care if it’s a bit “stunty.” I love road trips. I love grassroots storytelling. I love the town hall they held in Boulder, Colorado to ask people form the community what stories they ought to tell.
BBC video journalists Matt Danzico and Benjamin Zand are also telling their stories on Tumblr. And that blog looks like it will be gorgeous as they accumulate stories. This effort stems from the BBC Video Innovation Lab. Here’s a bit of why they chose to go on the road to Boulder:
“In the 21st Century, creating video for television from cities like Washington, New York and/or Los Angeles is definitely an effective way of reaching traditional media consumers in those markets. But if you’re also trying to reach younger generations in Colorado, for instance, why not create gripping video from the state that’s of interest to a global audience?
And now you’ve not only provided interesting programming to your traditional audience but you have also sparked the interest of an entirely new community as well.
Do that for one month at a time. Post your videos to local social media. Move cities. Repeat.
Yes, BBC News has 44 foreign bureaus in a heap of cities around the world. But the world has nearly 3,000 cities with a population over 150k. So why not create a mobile bureau that can embed itself in a community and then relocate easily?”
Like I said, I love a good road trip. And I love interesting storytelling from people who seem so genuinely curious about the world.
The 2014 Cannes Lions is coming up. Bono will speak as will a host of others (happier to have seen Lou Reed last year, personally). Beyond the frenzy of awards, late night parties and an unhealthy dose of "fomo", there are tremendous innovations in marketing revealed each year. I attended last year and was surprised at how much terrific work was shown there. Unlike most of the folks in attendance, I spent hours browsing through the case studies on display in the basement of the Palais.
This year will be no different. While advertising awards shows can be criticized as overly self-involved events where agency motives sit squarely on winning at any cost, they can still be terrific showcases.
What to expect at Cannes Lions 2014
Digitas LBI France has put together a terrific look forward - what to watch for at Cannes 2014. Not only have they collected some of the most interesting case studies of likely award winners, organized them in their view of trending categories, they have also created an awesome slideshow with built-in videos.
Browse through this show to view some of the most interesting innovations in marketing this year.
Loads of analysts are taking a look at the $19 billion ($16b in cash & stock; $3bn in restricted stock) acquisition of the 55-person messaging company, What’s App. It’s a lot of money. And despite the stories of a deal brokered over chocolate-covered strawberries at Mark Zuckerberg’s kitchen table, no one expects such a purchase decision was made lightly.
Some of the most valuable analysis I have found are here:
“Knowledge@Wharton asked two Wharton experts — Kartik Hosanagar, professor of operations and information management, and Lawrence G. Hrebiniak, emeritus professor of management — whether they believe the move ultimately will pay off.”
“Similarly, the size of a virtual network is dictated by its carrying capacity, only that capacity is measured by utility instead of physical resources. An online social network can only grow as big as it remains useful, and the usefulness of a social network can be measured as the ease with which users can connect and share with friends and (sometimes) potential friends.”
“When Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, it, too, was assailed for a supposedly bad investment. But today, with Instagram thriving and beginning to sell advertising, that deal looks like a bargain.”
Some key points most are touching on:
What’s App is growing faster than Facebook and doing so internationally. Fast growth is always good for public companies. Also, Facebook may face increasing competition from services anchored elsewhere. The explosive growth of China’s WeChat being a great example.
Daily use of monthly actives is higher on What’s App (70%) than on Facebook (61%). Messaging services are that much more essential to their users than even Facebook with a greater frequency of use.
Facebook seems to have learned that their future may be as a “house of brands” vs. a single monolithic service provider under the Facebook “app.” Their launch of Paper, their cultivation of Instagram and now their purchase of What’s App seem to indicate that they do not expect every service they own to be rolled up under the Facebook name and interface. This clearly is a “hedge” against phenomena like the 11 million young users who have allegedly moved off Facebook since 2011.
At $1 a year in fee, What’s App has a different business model and source of revenue. As Knowledge@Wharton reported: “Despite the strong revenue numbers, Saikat Chaudhuri, executive director of the Mack Institute for Innovation Management at Wharton, warns that Facebook has to be careful that its growing ad load doesn’t alienate customers. “Ultimately, Facebook will need to find more subtle ways of engaging beyond News Feed ads,” he says.”
Between What’s App, South Korea’s Line, China’s WeChat, the trending growth of messaging services is clear. Facebook simply would not want such a service to become Google’s (the other recent suitor for What’s App).
There’s another factor to consider that supports What’s App as a good hedge or investment in the future and it has to do with the importance of trust in advertising.
What it may mean to advertisers: leveraging trust
Remember the research around close ties and weak ties? This explains the dynamic happening between users in social networks and how it maps to some enduring characteristics of what we all get from our closely held relationships (the 5 or so people closest to us) and those that are more casual and extended (think 300+ friends on Facebook.)
All friends are not created equal. We trust our close ties and the recommendations they make more than our weak ties. That makes sense. Our family and closest friends know us better. When they tell us we might like the Ford Fusion or the service experience at Lowe’s or the quality of the independent insurance agent in our town, it means more than a comment by our 290th friend on Facebook. Conversely, weak ties are great for exposing us to more new things. That’s how many of us break out of the rut of homophily (only being exposed to the narrow set of similar things that our closest friends will provide)
Facebook is a lot more about weak ties. What’s App is more about close ties.
The marketing world continues to try and learn how to drive authentic customer advocacy. How do you get customers sharing meaningfully about their positive experience with a brand? How do you get more people to share valuable content via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more? How do you trigger people to share about a brand via their trusted social graph?
Meanwhile, brands are often abusing the same social network channels by publishing un-engaging content (clutter & spam) or reducing everything to a promotional offer (cultivating deal-hungry, here-today-gone-tomorrow customers). There are limits to how much advertising can be pumped into social networks before we poison the well as what happened early on with email marketing (spam). And even then, our, on average, 300+ friends are not the most trusted network. Our close ties hold stronger trust.
The challenge for a network like Facebook is farmed up by Jeff Stibel, Chairman and CEO of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp., in HBR Blogs,
“The most important element is clutter in the form of a sloppy interface, advertisements, and unwanted connections. The site’s utility goes down every time a user gets annoyed, and that annoyance is the biggest threat to Facebook’s survival. Too many users equals too much clutter. Think of the ant colony: if you threw some Candy Crush invites into the nest, or subjected the ants to the chatter of members of other colonies, they’d probably go postal… right before the colony completely collapsed.”
What’s App connects a smaller group of people who know each other more closely. When a brand delivers a relevant offer to one user and she passes it along to her messaging address book, it will perform better. It will be more instantly relevant. It is more trusted coming through a close tie. It will drive action at a higher rate.
I spent some time with the folks from LINE, a What’s App competitor late last year when I was in Asia. They were very bullish about their advertising prospects in comparison to Facebook. They owned the bottom of the funnel and can measurably drive people to retail or ecommerce in ways that Facebook could only dream of (this is them talking). Brands connecting with users via LINE send out a relevant offer to a customer/follower and that person goes into store at a much higher rate. I am sure Facebook sees the value of close ties and the possibility to drive real commerce not just engagement via What’s App.
As Jeff Stibel summarized when discussing the premature reports of Facebook’s demise,
“Determining what users find most relevant, and providing that and only that, is both Facebook’s greatest challenge and its greatest opportunity for making it through the breakpoint. If it succeeds, Facebook’s network curve won’t look like what happened to MySpace or polio, rather it will stabilize like other successful networks.”
(thanks to Mobile Brain Bank for the terrific image from their study)
Next week is our second annual
Social Media Matters conference in Hong Kong. Last year, Thomas Crampton and
our Social@Ogilvy team worked with event organizers from All That Matters to
create a regional event designed specifically around the interests of brands in
digital and social media.
I have the good fortune of introducing
our Global Brand Advocacy Study (supported by CIC, Salesforce, Visible) and provoking a great panel of brands including
IHG, Shangri-La International and IMAX. The study looked at what people share and
care most about from brands in China, Brazil, the UK and the US. Since I am a fan of all three brands, I look
forward to hearing how each goes beyond simple social network engagement to
cultivate their best advocates.
This year’s highlights at Social
Media Matters are brand and platforms. Coca-Cola, Ford, Philips, Nestlé,
American Express and Unilever, among others will all be in the house.
Platforms including RenRen, Sina, Twitter,
LinkedIn, and Facebook among others will also be there.
And, of course, great partners
like CIC, SocialBakers, and Visual.ly and more.
One ride through town with its mix of seemingly chaotic traffic and rough street-level living contrasted to the tree-lined streets and high-rise enclaves elsewhere only makes a quick understanding harder. I am grateful for people like Karthik Srinivasan who heads up the Social@Ogilvy team in the region and Ashwath Ganesan who heads it up in Mumbai and have a deeper view of their own culture.
Fast Growth
By 2015, India will be the largest Facebook “nation” on the planet. Facebook usage has growth 47% from 2012 to 2012. LinkedIn has grown 36% over the same period.
Social media users seem to be younger with 75% under 35. But that is not an uncommon early trend.
A Country is Not Just Numbers
But these are all numbers. The real questions are whether the use of social media will continue to rise and spread and affect purchase behaviors as it has in so many other markets; how quickly will reliable Internet connectivity to the home spread or, more importantly, how web-enabled phone usage will continue to grow; and whether ecommerce will continue to grow.
I am guessing that the answer is yes to all with a simple caveat of 'how fast.'
I also suspect that the 1%-5% that India’s marketers reportedly spend on social media marketing today remains far below consumer behavior especially when you consider the fast-growth trajectory.
I look forward to learning more this week. Especially if it means getting out of the air conditioned tower I sit in now.
We examined brand advocacy across 23 brands in 4 categories.
We looked at over 7 million mentions across China, Brazil, the UK and the US.
We wanted to understand what drove brand advocacy – what do people really talk
about when they share about brands. This is all found in the Social@Ogilvy Brand Advocacy Study: How to Build a Global Passion Brand
And there were some surprises along the way. Apparently
there is a broad social advocacy gap for many brands. For all the “brand
satisfaction” racked up by hotels, for example, they are only driving 1 in a
100 customer stays to an actual brand mention.
Most brands have a lot of work to do to close this gap.
Know what people love
One of our key findings surprised us. In the US especially,
I think we all believe people talk about advertisements a lot - especially the
funny or provocative ones. And people clearly do share about ads.
“We looked at advocacy mentions of ads, benefits, features,
costs and customer service. In all markets, features (e.g. the characteristics
of skin cream) were the most often mentioned. In comparison, mentions of
ads/commercials typically garnered the fewest mentions.”
It turns out, there are big differences across countries,
product categories and individual brands in terms of what people are most
likely to share about.
The table compares discussion breakout vs. category averages
for the two highest advocacy passion brands: Kimpton and Kiehls (US only).
Kimpton Hotels over indexes in the hotel category on
benefits and customer service. Conversely, they under index on advocacy
associated with the more rational based features and advertising. Conversely,
Kiehls over indexes in the skincare category for Features.
The value of brand advocacy is becoming clearer everyday.
Intuitively we believe in the positive mentions and the passion people share
about brands they care about is key to purchase decision and loyalty. The
evidence is mounting that our belief is well placed.
“Brands that do not generate substantial advocacy will need
to pay more for reach and consequently have costs substantially higher
than those brands that drive high advocacy. In an environment where costs to reach consumers continue to escalate, this advantage could make the difference between a
company with outstanding shareholder returns and one that fails to
perform.”
This past year, I had the good fortune to speak at the
EuroPCom Conference on Public Communication held adjacent to the European
Parliament in Brussels. This happened concurrent with a EU leaders session and
immediately after the Nobel Prize announced that the EU would be presented with
the Nobel Peace Prize for 2012. One thrill was not only meeting great leaders
like Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission, but inspiring her
to take photos of my presentation from my return monitor.
My POV - Government communicators can learn a tremendous
amount from the brands, agile non-profits and scrappy start-ups all innovating
in digital and social media. Too often,
government communicators feel their circumstance is ‘terminally unique,’ that
nothing can be learned from the Nestle’s and Ford’s of the world.
Brands are spending billions to figure our how to engage
people via social media. Investment firms invest billions in start-ups attempting
to build businesses and disrupt the way we get things done via digital. It
would be a shame if public communicators and leaders turned a blind eye to all
the learnings from these efforts.
The result? Well, hopefully a good session overall. But more
importantly, I walked away with a fresh understanding and appreciation for the
innovations and efforts of the folks working for the European Commission, the
European Council, and the European Parliament.
Learning is a two-way street. Who will you learn from this year?
I will be speaking during the closing session at EuroPComm
2012 this week in Brussels. Hundreds of communication specialists from all
levels of EU governments will be there for the third year. This time the agenda
focuses on four areas:
"restoring public confidence
communicating Europe
e-communication and social media
dialogue with youth, senior citizens and ethnic groups"
Apples need to learn from oranges
Too often, government communications experts see their job
as unique. The legislative, regulatory and political conditions under which
they operate drive them to tune out lessons they might learn from the commercial
sector. What can the Ministry of Health in France learn from how brands like
Nestle or Unilever are using social media? What can it learn from the Diabetes
Foundation? How about from SparkPeople?
Brands are spending billions of dollars understanding how to
use social media to drive behaviors. Driven by expediency, the world’s nonprofit
organizations are experimenting with the effectiveness of digital and social
communications to push their missions forward. And startups around the world
are gearing up to disrupt how we used to get things done. In this case, it’s time for us to stop insisting
that the public sector is so different that it cannot find valuable lessons in
a number of directions.
If I break down some of the conference goals and topics, I
find us all convening around:
Building trust between government and citizens
Deepening engagement with citizens
Driving people to action and advocacy
Listening to better understand needs
Understanding efficacy of communication efforts
While there are terrific examples from the government sector
around the world, my job will be to draw connections to the work of:
B2B and B2C brands committed to innovating via digital and social
media
Non-profits like Greenpeace and Amnesty International who are
mastering social media for greater efficiency (see this infographic on the top nonprofits in social media from Craig Newmark)
Start-ups who use technology to solve problems in new ways
How can public communication specialists find valuable
lessons in this world and maintain a steady flow of new ideas worth
considering? I will be interested to hear how 700 of the European Union’s top communications
experts manage innovation in social media.
