Open (finds, minds, conversations)...

Embrace complexity

"We're in the complexity business," is a phrase that comes to mind surprisingly often these days.

It's usually triggered by a discussion - with a colleague, client, collaborator (sometimes all three) - about social media that's been rolling for a while until it reaches the point where we have the issue in our sights, clear as day and someone says: "That's really complicated."

That's when I say it - sometimes just in my head if I don't think it's going to help the conversation.

The "complexity business" phrase isn't intended as boastful or macho or even "can do". It's more a calming statement of fact, a reassurance that complex is OK. Complex is what we have to deal with.

It all comes down, yet again to networks, to the online world we're living in. There's no way things aren't going to be complex when the stability, the somewhat misleading simplicity, of mass media and marketing is being blown apart by the reality of life on the web, of living in networks.

When you accept that complexity - massive online networks, a superabundance of stuff, a constantly changing and evolving online world - is not going to settle down soon it all gets a little easier to cope with. When you realise the pace of change in this revolution is not going to slow down anytime soon, you have to start accepting complexity as a fact of life.

What sparked me off on this micro-rant was a post by Mark Earls refusing to accept the simple answers for things like, say, the current financial markets storm:

Sorry - I know we'd all have prefered something more headline grabbing - like it was "Bush what done it". Truth is the world ain't like that. Note to managers everywhere. Note to marketers. Note to myself (cause I'm just as prone as anyone else to trace simplistic cause and effect relationships

In a way, life's a lot simpler when you embrace complexity. You don't have to keep looking for the one simple answer to things that doesn't exist for each challenge.

It's why I feel uncomfortable starting conversations with companies with a questions like: How can we start a community? How do we leverage social networks? How can we support the launch of product X with some social media?

Tactical questions, simple questions that just can't be answered simply. You need to start by understanding the complexity - the speed of growth, the sheer vastness, the revolutionary implications on the behaviours of people like customers and employees - of the your networks.

Equally paradoxical, and pleasingly so, is the fact that some simplicity is what is most needed at a strategic level when you are facing the challenges of a super-complex world.

Principles. Strong, real, heartfelt principles are what you need to guide you in the networks. You set your direction and head out not knowing what you will find but knowing that you'll have the answers about what's best to do if you keep returning to the principles you set out at the start of your voyage.

And it is a voyage...

marketing, complexity

What is Social Media? eBook on Mashable

Really nice to see iCrossing's What is social media? heading the list of free social media eBooks on Mashable. We put a new version out a couple of months ago, and will need to update it again soon I'd imagine.

I'd not read all of other eBooks on the list - some that I've downloaded for reading are:

• American Express's Using Social Media for Business (more of an article than eBook)
• Chris Brogan's Social Media and Social Networking Starting Points
• New Media Consortium's Social Networking, The Third Place, and The Evolution of Communication

Like the story of how the eBook was translated into Chinese, continuing to get referenced like this is one of the reasons we're working on more eBooks at the moment to share via Creative Commons licence, our way of living our mantra of "be useful to your networks".

creativecommons, ebooks, social media, social media

The dawn of the web

Must be video day today... anyhow here's an amazing flashback to the days of the early web, waaaaay back in the 90s, kids. Thanks to the decaying power of VHS (which they were taken from) they look like something fom the 70s...
Via Waxy.org, where Andy Baio has posted more archive video gems today...

history, video, web, internet

Awareness test

Try this out, if you've not see it already.

Speaks for itself. Excellent...

Via Ian Delaney.

video

YouTube stats fun

Digital Ethnography, a great blog by a group of Ethnography students at Kansas State University, has one of those posts that you always want to hand: YouTube Statistics.

I had a feeling that I was a bit out of date with the 100,000 video uploads a day stat that was still my default reference, and it turns out I'm out by 50,000. With a little Google tinkering they estimate that there are currently about 78 million videos available on YouTube.

Now if that's not a stat that helps you spell out the superabundance of content online, I don't know what is...

The guys at Digital Ethnography have also taken a sample (230 odd) of YouTube and analysed them for things like topic (music and entertainment rule with about 20% each, but "how to" is an intriguingly large minority category with 2.8%) and language (Dutch is 3rd after English and Spanish!).

: : Now it's always dangerous when I try to maths, but if Digital Ethnography's estimates were right that would mean that there are currently 2.2 million "how to" videos on YouTube, 4 million-ish about cars and 1.7 million about pets...

: : : Bonus links: Digital Ethnography keeps a Wiki page on YouTube stats, which is worth a bookmark for sure... and if you're *really* interested in YouTube stats then this post on Waxy.org and the debate in the comments are well worth a read.

Anyhow, a YouTube post wouldn't be compete without a gratuitous video celebrating the diversity and delights that only a superabundance of online content can bring a fellow. So here's Richard Pryor on Sesame Street doing the ABC - no really...

web, youtube, stats, data mining, video

CBS blog ad network: worth a closer look

I'm basically a sceptic about most mass advertising models on the web. At best I think slapping banners on high traffic sites is as helpfully random as a bit of sponsorship hoarding at big public event. Might reinforce some brand awareness, catch some eyes, but likely to be lost among the other ads all playing second fiddle to the main action.

What I find interesting are new advertising models that are about being relevant and useful. So I was interested to read about a new model from US TV and radio network CBS on Buzzmachine:

They just announced a new widget ad network in 13 of their local markets (the owned & operated stations with newsrooms). In a week and a half, they’ve put together 80 blogs in the network, many more to come. They are all local blogs around various content interests: news, politics, sports, real estate, entertainment. This is pretty much just an ad network rather than a curated ad-and-content network like Glam. CBS intends to send the blogs some traffic, but unlike Glam, it’s not aggregating and curating their content. They’re looking for decent blogs that are local and are updated regularly, but they’re not yet turning this into a contest where the best quality wins (that day will come, I hope). When I spoke with them, they did add that they’re delighted with the quality of the local blogs they’ve seen.

Jeff Jarvis praises the principles that are clearly present in CBS's approach:

They understand that this is not just about driving traffic to CBS domains but about reaching audience they may not now serve in other places. That’s the attitude.

The numbers behind the model aren't clear yet (in terms of who will earn what and attract how much traffic between CBS and the 80 or so blogs in the network so far), but that's to be expected. CBS is innovating, experimenting, tinkering with its ad models - a smart thing to do.

The image below is an example of the format, carrying a Honda ad for its Dallas/Fort Worth dealerships from the Culturefeast blog. (Excuse the poor formatting, the image on the right is the bottom of the skyscraper banner.)

I like the way that it carries some relevant editorial content at the top as well as the sales message. If you click through on say, the SXSW story in the editorial section you go through to a CBS video site. Unfortunately it plays you an abbreviated Honda ad upfront - which momentarily makes you think clicked on the wrong thing (another sidebar and/or a short ad at the end of the clip).

advertising, brands, marketing, media, networks, social media, ad networks, cbs, video

Why do you widget: O'Reilly analysis of Facebook apps

What are people using Facebook applications for? Tim O'Reilly teases us with some tidbits from a report his company's published The Facebook Application Ecosystem: Why Some Thrive--and Most Don't.

In it Shelley Farnham takes a look at the different apps that are successful on Facebook. Taking a snapshot from a week in November last year, Shelley breaks down the applications people were using by type.

The top 5 categories were:

1. Enhanced communication
2. Social comparison
3. Play social game
4. Social selection
5. Profile enhancement

In her blog post about the report - which damn your effective marketing via blogs, O'Reilly, I am going to buy - Shelley shares the following piece of analysis:

In reviewing the dominant types of applications, it is clear that most of the applications are helping users achieve social goals such as improved communication, learning about the self relative to others, finding similar others, improving self-presentation, engaging in social play, and engaging in social exchanges via gifts and media. Despite its shifting demographics, Facebook is still very much a social arena in the private, personal domain, not the professional domain.

What does this tell us? Now on the one hand most readers of this blog will be, like, y'know, so over Facebook and merrily back to blogging, Twittering and tying it all up with FriendFeed, but the analysis is still a very useful one, if we think of the Facebook community as a sample of a mainstream users of social media, many of them trying out social apps and widgets for the first time.

So apart from when people share your drumming monkey video using other apps, there's little hope of a brand building a Facebook app that gets used unless it is useful for people within the context of the social space. For brands to have any relevance in widget-building, it will take an ethos of understanding your networks, being , useful to people in them and being live to tweak apps and learn from their use.

brands, facebook, marketing, social networks, development, widgets

Shut up! The telepahtic telephonic collar...

So Texas Instruments have come up with a collar that detects your neurological impulses for communication. So with a little training and a TI collar you can think what you want to say....

Like Marc Andreesen says, "...someday, this may be up there with "Come here, Watson, I need you."

They have called it "voiceless communication" - a missed opportunity to put a trademark on thought transmitting telegraphy or similar... They talk about an application being able to answer the phone even when you can't speak. There's got to be a whole lot more that you can do with telepatho-bands or whatever...

Get the full story at New Scientist (canny use of YouTube, guys...).

telecoms, telepathy

Can you spot the revolution happening next to you? How about now?

There's a charming account of meeting the two-men-in-a-booth that was Yahoo! in 1995 on the HBR Editor's blog. Lew McCreary uses the anecdote to reflect on how, distracted by the shiny things of the moment we can miss the true significance of revolutionary changes grinding their way onwards in the background.

In this case, he was fixated by Yahoo! and the consumer web while the biggest revolution was the less glossy, but far more significant transfer of business-to-business processes onto the web.

That fickle cycle continues. Each shiny new thing has its season of fervor, then interest clicks elsewhere. Meanwhile, the more momentous change occurs with far less drama. Don’t misunderstand me—the consumer Web is not chopped liver. But the economic value and enhanced capability produced through migrating every conceivable type of business activity to internet protocols dwarfs that of 1995’s shiny new thing. And most of us didn’t have a clue.

What are we missing right now, I wonder?

business, web, yahoo

Sao Paolo's Ad-Free Photo Laureate Wins Prize

Delighted to hear via Josh Spear that Tony De Marco, the Brazilian photographer who documented the stripping of Sao Paolo's outdoor advertising, has won

And it's another excuse to point to the incredible images, many of which Tony De Marco has posted on Flickr.

For me the images are a constant inspiration. They are a vivid, visual allegory for the "take down" of advertising as a all-conquering marketing medium in our lives - online and elsewhere. I like to think of them asa cautionary tale for marketers in a way - if you can't make advertising be useful people will take own the billboards...

photography, advertising

Love the one who loathes you

In one of the finest installments of In The Thick Of It, The Rise of the Nutters, the Tory shadow minister confronted with a suggestion that he starts a blog looks as disgusted and dejected as anyone could do and in a surrendering tone asks:

I mean, have you ever Googled your own name? It's like opening a door to a room where everyone hates you.

A lot of brand managers would know exactly what he means. But sometime, everyone needs to do it.

In an excellent article for BusinessWeek's Customer Champions issue, Jeff Jarvis asks us not only to Google our brands but to go and embrace those who are doing the hating.

....don't get mad at these people. Instead, help them get even with you. These angry customers are doing you a great favor. They care enough about your product or service to tell you exactly what went wrong. Other customers may just desert you and head to the competition. But these are telling you what to fix. Listen to them. Help them. Respond to them. Ask their advice—and they'll give it to you.

And of course, he's exactly right.

: : Bonus The Thick of It quote - which IMDB reminded me of:

Terri Coverley: [on the phone, about Peter Mannion in the Immigration center] When everyone went out of the office he just Googled his name.
Malcolm Tucker: Yeah, that's always fun. Although I find it quicker just to poke needles in my eyes.

thethickofit

For brands, listening is a first step to being human

Image: A bunch of really good listeners...

In a similar vein to John Hagel's reevaluation of what advertising is and will be in the age of networks, make sure you've caught Umair Haque's HBS article on The New Economics of Brands, which jumps off from the point that the number one brand in the world, i.e., has been built without advertising itself much at all and selling advertising that is inherently more useful...

At the most basic level, instead of carpet-bombing consumers with traditional ads to build its brand – "Google is Search Done Right", a glisteningly plastic spokesmodel tells you ad infinitum – Google makes a revolutionary strategic decision: it doesn't actively advertise much, if at all.

That decision, in turn, opens the path to a second, even more revolutionary decision: to implicitly invest in consumers instead of advertising to them.

How do you invest in customers with your marketing. At iCrossing we're often talking about the importance of listening as a first step.

Listening, really listening, to what people are saying not just about you but what is important to them on topics related to you - whether that's their attitude to companies' efforts to be more environmentally responsible, where to get the best bargains or just what constitutes good customer service - isn't a simple thing. But it is a human thing to do, a social thing to do. Like I say, it is a good beginning. Umair Haque says this of listening:

Listening more is a radically different source of advantage than yesterday's inert, stale brands – those were, remember, ways to compress information to be able to talk to consumers more efficiently. Listening more demands building the capacity for emotion back into the robotic industrial-era firm...

There you have it: listening is a humanising actiivty which can help brands which have sometimes had the humanity engineered out of them to start learning to behave socially in networks.

It reminds me of that brilliant analogy from Nigel Hollis of Millward Brown, who uses a cocktail party scenario a cocktail party scenario to remind us of how our social instincts are the ones to follow in a social media:

....when you first arrive, you gravitate toward the people you know, but as the evening wears on, you end up talking to guests you’ve never met before. You may be introduced by a mutual friend, or you may just introduce yourselves....

You will hit it off with some of these people, but not others. With someone who’s fun and shares your interests, you may want to develop an ongoing relationship. But when you’re caught with the guy who talks, incessantly, about himself or his stamp collection, you’ll probably want to escape as soon as you can. And you may approach a few people who appear promising, but after a few minutes, you conclude that they have nothing to say.

But bringing something of interest or value is just the “price of entry.” A brand needs to reach out to people, not sit and wait for people to seek it out. It needs to initiate conversations, not just react to them. And of course, that’s the trap for most brands. They confuse social media with traditional communication channels, and they do what they know: talk atpeople instead of with them.

Being a good conversationalist is as much about being a good listener as having something interesting to say, in an engaging way. It's certainly the best place for people to start... in fact not listening would be, well, anti-social.

brands, marketing, socialmedia, umairhaque

Online advertising's paradox: the fastest growing part of a declining discipline?

Image: Mad Men - a drama based on the zenith of industrial mass advertising

John Hagel, as promised, is considering the future of advertising. It's a confusing picture, he says, mainly because of the number of different shifts - including people's online behaviour, the superabundance of content and services competing for individuals' attention, the massively more compelling case for effectiveness that online advertising presents, among others - all at a time when recessionary pressures are making themselves felt in the economy:

Here’s the danger: we may become so focused on the recent growth in online advertising that we dismiss any short-term slowdown in spending growth as a purely cyclical phenomenon. In the process, we may miss the longer-term, and ultimately far more profound, impact of the diminishing returns that online advertising is already beginning to experience.

The basic paradox of the Internet can be framed very simply: The very platform that makes advertising both more relevant and more measurable is the same platform that longer-term will challenge and ultimately undermine the basic role of advertising in communicating with customers.

This is an excellent articulation of something that's been troubling me.

I was part of a panel discussion on BBC Radio 4's You & Yours programme on Monday about Jeremiah Owyang's Fan-Sumer concept. It was interesting to be introduced as being from a global advertising firm. Whilst that it is in part an accurate description, I felt it was one of those moments when it was easier for people to explain what I did as advertising: because advertising was - and still is for most people - the prime expression of and a synonym for brand marketing.

But that's not how it is going to be forever.

Advertising, from the world of the Mad Men to recent times, ruled because in the age of industrial / mass / channel media it was the most effective way to sell, to communicate with the mass audience. But it is being displaced as the lead discipline in marketing - and I'm not sure that anything will take the same role in the age of networks.

John Hagel says it like this:

Will advertising go away? Hardly, but it will move from the core of marketing to the edge, challenged by diminishing returns and more robust options for engaging people.

I moved from traditional PR because I wanted to understand digital more deeply, but I was not leaving PR behind so much as taking its principles with me into a new place. PR's emphasis on and instincts for understanding networks and earning attention in networks where what would be successful in a world where online networks become more important than channel / broadcast media.

This thinking gave rise to one of the core principles of the strategy we're developing at iCrossing UK:

Attention online cannot be bought it must be earned.

Even when space online has been paid for, it is only the opportunity to earn the attention of people that has been purchased. And the only way - stop me if you've heard this one before - to earn attention in online networks where people have a superabundance of content to choose from, is to be useful to them (with information they want, entertainment that is attractive, and usually by not assaulting their attention with sales messages when that's not what they want).

A lot of people think this is just about relevancy and context. Online ads become less effective because they aren't tailored to individuals closely enough. Get the personalisation right and the ads will work perfectly well, the logic goes.

Well context is going to help, but it isn't the whole story. Ads still carry nuisance value and the more of them there are the more nuisance value they collectively carry and the more adept people will become at zoning them out or blocking them altogether.

John Hagel also points to an article by Esther Dyson about the future of advertising in which she puts it like this:

This market will get more competitive, and users will be barraged by ads to which they will pay less and less attention. Call that public space, a world of billboards and cacophony. Even though the ads will be more "relevant" than ever, users will increasingly tune them out.

I highly recommend reading and thinking about both of these articles. If you're moving in this direction already with your business you'll find it, as I have, a thrilling endorsement of your strategy and a continuing challenge to avoid complacency and slowing down in your reinvention how things work.

advertising, advertising, brands, johnhagel, marketing, strategy