All That Is Good

Notes From The Blog

A few of the threads that run through the writing: how social content earns the right to sell, how customer value is measured, and why some familiar metrics mislead.

01

Giving Your Social Content “LEGS”

31 January 2014 · #socialmedia #strategy

Gary Vaynerchuk's Jab, Jab, Jab, Hook argues that selling in social media fails without first softening the target up. The post takes that idea and sets out a four-part model for social content.

• Listen — understand people before you speak to them
• Engage — build the relationship
• Give — offer something of value first
• Sell — only once the groundwork is done

Read the post

02

Social Customer Lifetime Value

23 September 2010 · #strategy

Textbook Customer Lifetime Value is the present value of the future cash flows attributed to a customer relationship. The post argues that this leaves out something important: customers are now publishers, influencing each other.

• SCLV = CLV + CRV
• CRV combines Social Capital and advocacy likelihood
• Referral value sits alongside the sale value

Read the post

03

Quality Time, Not Quantity Of Time

30 November 2011 · #strategy

“Time spent on site” is a classic digital marketing KPI, but it is usually a poor measure of effectiveness. The post draws on European digital marketing for Nokia's Nseries, where reducing the number of language versions changed dwell time for reasons that had little to do with engagement.

• Dwell time can rise because of confusion
• Success rates and customer satisfaction are better measures

Read the post

Social media has a way of making everything feel urgent, as if the only thing that matters is whatever is trending in the next hour. The truth is quieter and slower. The posts that actually build something are rarely the loudest ones. They are the ones written by people who understand what their audience cares about and who are willing to keep showing up long after the novelty has worn off. Consistency, patience and a genuine point of view do more for a brand than any clever campaign that burns bright for a week and then disappears.

Every time someone tells me a brand needs to be on a platform, I ask a simpler question first. What would you actually say there, and who would care? Being present without a reason is just noise dressed up as strategy. The channels change constantly, but the underlying question does not. Find the people you want to reach, work out what earns their attention, and then decide whether a given network helps you do that. Sometimes the honest answer is that it does not, and that is worth saying out loud.

Content is often treated as a volume problem, when it is really a clarity problem. More posts do not fix a muddled message, and a busy calendar does not compensate for a missing idea. The pieces that travel are usually the ones where someone has taken a genuine position, explained it plainly, and resisted the urge to say everything at once. Editing is underrated. So is the discipline of asking whether a piece would still be worth reading if nobody was measuring it. If the answer is no, it probably needs another pass.

Advertising and social have an uneasy relationship, and much of the friction comes from treating them as the same job. Advertising interrupts, while social is supposed to invite. When a brand brings the interruptive instinct into a space built on conversation, people notice, and they usually respond by scrolling past. The better approach is to earn a place in the feed rather than buy one and hope. That means making something people choose to watch, share or argue about, and accepting that the most effective work is often the least forceful.

Measurement is where good intentions go to die. It is easy to count things, and much harder to know what any of those things mean. Impressions, clicks and followers all describe activity, but activity is not the same as progress. The more useful questions tend to be about relationships and value over time: who keeps coming back, who brings other people with them, and who would notice if you stopped. Those answers are messier to gather, but they tell you far more about whether the work is actually doing anything.

Customer value is one of those ideas that everyone nods along to and few organisations genuinely act on. It asks you to look past the next transaction and consider the whole relationship, including the parts that cost money and the parts that take patience. Brands that understand this stop treating every interaction as a chance to sell and start treating some of them as a chance to be useful. That shift is uncomfortable, because it means accepting that not everything has to convert immediately. Over time, though, the returns tend to look after themselves.

Demand is often described as something you generate, as though attention could be manufactured on command. In practice it is closer to something you cultivate, sometimes over years, through a steady accumulation of small impressions and useful moments. The brands that seem to appear out of nowhere usually spent a long time being quietly present beforehand. That is why chasing the latest tactic rarely works on its own. Without a durable reason for people to care, any spike in interest fades quickly, and the effort has to start again from nothing.

Creativity in agencies and in-house teams is frequently strangled by process rather than by a lack of talent. Endless rounds of feedback, safe compromises and the pressure to please everyone in the room tend to sand down the very edges that made an idea interesting. The best creative work I have seen came from small teams with a clear brief, real trust and permission to be wrong occasionally. Structure has its place, but it should protect the idea rather than smother it. Knowing the difference is most of the job.

Pitching and interviewing have more in common than people admit. Both are performances of confidence under uncertainty, and both reward preparation over polish. The strongest pitches are rarely the ones with the most slides; they are the ones where someone has clearly thought about the problem and can talk about it without hiding behind a deck. The same goes for hiring. A good conversation reveals how someone thinks, not just what they have done. Listening carefully, asking honest questions and being willing to say you do not know are undervalued skills in both rooms.