Social Media is NOT MEDIA AT ALL
November 18, 2009
I’m amazed I haven’t really considered this before, but what we all call Social Media is actually the exact opposite of media.
Derivation of the word Media: Latin: medium is the neuter form of the adjective medius, meaning “middle”; as well as, a neuter noun meaning, “the middle”
The singular, medium, early developed the meaning “an intervening agency, means, or instrument” and was first applied to newspapers two centuries ago.
Conversely, “Social Media” is a set of tools for people to communicate between themselves, platforms for interaction and relationships, not content and ads.
What do these social tools (Facebook etc) do?
They disinterMEDIAte of course!
“Who said this is media? Consumers weren’t trying to generate media. They were trying to talk to somebody. So it just seems a bit arrogant. … We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it.”
Ted McConnell, General Manager-Interactive Marketing and Innovation at Procter & Gamble Co
Advertising is dead? Depends on your definition.
March 27, 2009
Some clever people think that advertising isn’t working on the internet.
In a sense they’re right. Advertising is broken and needs to be re-invented. We need to create discussion. We need to add value. We need to do things that matter.
I was reminded by a tweet from @faris that advertising is an old word and has not always meant what it does now.
Originating from the Latin Ad Vert, it originally meant: “to turn one’s attention”.
Since people are increasingly ignoring traditional advertising, we have to find news ways of “turning attention” on the web. The way to get people’s attention in this most Darwinian of environments is to earn it be creating genuine value. This can be usefulness (think Google Maps and the value it brings to so many other sites) or simply great, entertaining content that stands out even in a content cesspool.
Where does it leave the media who have relied on the ad break to fund their content? Well, maybe they have to become the creators of the adverts, just as Saturday Night Live did.
When I tune in to that show, I don’t want to be interrupted by ads that are less funny, but I am interested in their take on advertising Pepsi. Would this work again? Does this constitute a “sell-out” on the part of the show? I’m not sure yet.
Another example is National Geographic. They have great content, and awesome content creators (especially their photographers). and a bunch of different ways to bring that content to life across multiple channels (print, tv, web, even now an awesome retail space). But I learnt recently that they also have a “creative services” unit, which will help harness these multiple content possibilities and media formats in association with the right brands. For a price, of course.
So are professional content creators the ad men of the future? How else do they monetise their skill-set when no one wants to see ad breaks anymore?
So ad breaks and banners may be in trouble. But Creating value including compelling content together with the true professionals, and “adverting” people’s attention in a more worthwhile way is here to stay.
How to do Social Media Marketing without access to the internet.
February 18, 2009
Social Media Marketing is an an interesting mix of marketing, PR, sales and customer service, and is about engaging with communities. Famously, Dell now does this well, and are no longer in Hell. My friend Mr Whatley does a great job of this for SpinVox, IMHO. To do this, of course you need access to the internet.
But there is another way. It just takes doing something brilliant, like making your store front completely kick ass.
So you make something that rocks, ahem. Then you add the extra piece of genius, which is to make the dials go all the way to 11.
The design and the comic flourish disrupts expectations and connects with a shared passion.
You have created a piece of Social Media without access to the internet.
Then someone takes a photo and puts it on Flickr. And you have yourself a piece of awesome internet marketing without even turning your computer on.
Job done.
Pro-active Customer Service
February 2, 2009
A couple of years ago, a LSE study called advocacy drives growth showed that a 1% reduction in negative word of mouth resulted in £24.8 million additional revenues. Also, a 2% reduction in negative word of mouth correlated with just under 1% growth of the company.
With all this talk about Social Media Marketing, I wonder if actually Social Media is best used for Customer Service (as Dell have been doing well after their previous hell - that’s a lot of rhymes) rather than blogger outreach of the PR kind. Just because it is called Media doesn’t mean it is an advertising channel.
Most of the time advertising agencies just want to use Social Media as a channel to promote the microsite that they are building. Instead, the opportunity is really in getting to customers when they are just beginning to get frustrated and engaging with them in an open social way in their spaces before they have really felt the need to complain. Even better is energizing existing customers to become an army of volunteers who will answer questions for behalf of the company.
And then when it comes to marketing communications, a thorough understanding of the actual consumer issues should help identify what needs to be communicated. People are discussing brands online, so this should be the bedrock on which any advertising is based. Most of the time it is not, and instead we are treated to rather random insights which have no connection to creative which makes for ineffective advertising. Great advertising should be rooted in known consumer wants and needs, should have KUDOS and should be made with propogation in mind.
But at the very least, I wonder how many calls to customer service centres are for similar problems that could have been solved pro-actively?
disrupting expectation + topicality
January 11, 2009
Burger King launches a new campaign on Facebook: you de-friend ten people to claim your free whopper. As they put it on the promotional web site: “You like your friends, but you love a whopper”
This works because it has Conversational Capital. Its playfully harsh approach disrupts the expectation we have of campaigns on Facebook: We are so used to Facebook applications asking us to spam our friends, that being asked to actually remove friends really shocks the system.
Also, this campaign comes at the right time. Topicality is essential to conversation – something that major brands often struggle with if they use 6-9 month processes to create campaigns. But this campaign taps into a trend for reducing and simplifying the friends lists that have got frankly out of hand:
“Social graph shrinkage: Sure, the total population of social media users will continue to grow but with the rise of mososo and a resurgence of in person networking, many consumers will scale back on both the number of accounts they maintain AND their number of so-called “friends” and “followers.” We’ll start using online social platforms to stay connected with the people we actually know and care about. Suddenly, being Facebook friends with your mom will seem less ridiculous than following 4,000 strangers on Twitter.” Greg Verdino, in Peter Kim’s Social Media Predictions 2009
Amen to that.
2009: The Year of Mobile Social Media.
January 6, 2009
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As far as predictions go this one is fairly obvious: 2009 should be a breakout year for Mobile Social Networks: Always-on, Context-aware devices + microblogging behaviour comes together to create possibilities far exceeding those of PC-based media.
This feels so wrong and uncool, but I have a confession to make: I prefer microblogging my status on mobile Facebook than on mobile Twitter.
In fact, I’m hooked and check status regularly on Facebook mobile (m.facebook.com). No special app, just the mobile site. First thing I see is a list of statuses (stati?). Most of my Nokia colleagues are on Facebook, and are doing the same. Even though Facebook was clearly not set up as a mobile network, it is working just fine for us.
I spoke to Christine Perey about this when she visited us at Nokia HQ. She somewhat patronizingly said it must be that Nokia Employees do not know about the “better” mobile social networks and the technical enablers that are available. That is rubbish of course, partly because we’re building some interesting ones.
What this actually proves is the power of the network. Metcalfe’s Law. The value of a telecommunications network proportional to the square of the number of people in the network.
One distinction is that whereas telecommunications networks are, apart from the people in them, basically otherwise identical, virtual social networks do have differences in terms of User Experience and features etc. Perhaps we can add in the quality of the user experience into the equation, since this does impact the value too.
Value of a Social Network to an individual =Uex(N)2
Where Uex = the quality of the User Experience and features to the individual, and N = the number of people in the network… or at least the number of people the individual cares about.
Since more people I care about are spending their time on Facebook than on Twitter, it appeals to me much more, even if it is not designed with microblogging in mind. (Although the fact that you can comment on a status seems much better than having to put @someone, which seems a very clumsy way to communication to me: wastes valuable characters and means you can’t easily see a conversation stream).
I mentioned once to Jyri Engeström (founder of Jaiku, former Nokian and all around nice fella) in Helsinki that the barrier to entry for microblogging has been going down as people realise that it is after all just like updating your Facebook status. People don’t think they are microblogging, but they are regularly updating their status (especially if they check Facebook from their mobile device). Now Jyri is hoping to move the industry forward by achieving an interoperable microblogging network, which would get over this need for people to be using the same service as each other. Then the value can truly be in the Uex, and we can get back to building remarkable social services, without the size of the network being the determining factor in people’s decisions.
