thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

I was on Twitter a couple of years ago and terminated my account after a few days as there was no one the network. I should have kept my account but who could have foreseen what has happened.

Twitter has had a huge rise in popularity in the past 6 months as celebrities and wannabes flock to jump on the bandwagon.

Despite the usual reservations that go with engaging in another layer of communications it is worthwhile setting up a twitter account to keep an eye on some of the players in your patch.

In a business context having access to a partially qualified SMS style list of “followers” which are like subscribers certainly has some attractions.

I’m told by some Vodafone customers that twittering via their phones is possible / I thought that was an SMS function but might be a different way.

I use Twitterrific which is a mini application on an iTouch and that keeps it all away from the desktop.

From my experiences the real time aspect works best when there is instant feedback on an idea or a question. There is always crossover between business and personal and many of the best tweeters can mix both.

Especially after work hours it becomes more of a social water cooler and can be an instant alert if for example something is on teev that is amusing or there are some good guests on Jon Stewart for example.

Updates or “tweets” that I hate the most are ones which are “something interesting here go to the link. ” Yeah right you’re off my list buddy.

Originally there was a reciprocity concept – if someone follows you you follow them back but now there are so many time wasters on the system that it is better not to “follow” them.

Note: If you don’t follow someone you won’t see their updates.

Because of the 140 character limit it is mostly impossible to know what that link is and also it it way better if the tweet offers some instant information such as “a status” which is what it was designed for.

One person who has written two very useful summaries on the topic is Lance Wiggs so here they are:

How NOT to Twitter if you are a corporation
(VodafoneNZ account got hijacked by an idiot for a project)
and
How to twitter if you are a corporation
Lance is on the money with both posts but check the comments also as this is a fast moving river.

How to take advantage of Twitter

The real power of Twitter is the 1-1 interactions, and yet there are only so many people that sit in corporate relations units. Moreover their job should not be to look after every tech nerd’s customer complaint, nor to understand every bizarre happening on the internet”

Some NZ related tweets you may want to check out are

@lawgeeknz / Rick Shera

@TeamXero / Team Xero

@VodafoneNZ Vodafone – could be safe again if Paul Brislen has that account back but see How not to link first.

@lancewiggs / Lance Wiggs

@bernardchickey Finance – Interest rates

@gnat / Nat Torkington – conference maestro

@dialogCRM Jason Kemp which is me by way of comparison. As a media watcher my tweets are fairly random and wide ranging whereas most of the others on this list are more business focussed.

Many people operate corporate and private twitter accounts. Best to read the Lance Wiggs posts and comments to find out if that works.

Thanks for comments by Piero – check his stream out below.

@piero_ / Piero – strategic planner http://www.thewhispershop.co.nz/

Looks like you have visited before, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks again

Back in the late ’90′s the ClueTrain Manifesto* was perhaps the first widely read document on the future of marketing as a (two way) conversation.

*The manifesto is still a good read today – look at the 95 theses first or over here for more background.

The discovery and invention of new ways to engage both suppliers and customers at the same time in conversations about what is relevant to the participants now,  can generate very powerful outcomes around what  is ultimately delivered to the market.

The “marketing as an ongoing conversation” idea seems incredibly obvious now but to place it in context for 1999 most media was all “push” and the closest similarity to conversation was “letters to the editor” or early forums  like “The Well” which weren’t that easily accessible at the time.

Of course, all  those letters were filtered and with tighter publishing logistics then it was less easy to facilitate ongoing market based conversations about anything other than extremely popular topics.

Over the past 10 years online media, blogging and web 2.0 styled tools for annotating, enriching , slicing and dicing content have extended both richness and reach

All good so far but we are now fast approaching another tipping point where the noise outweighs the signal.  Some would argue that social media has become part of the problem and that may be true; but it is really just another phase on the ongoing marketing journey.

Some marketing departments have mistaken  messaging for meaning and getting the balance between what the company thinks it provides and what the consumers want to pay for is an ongoing challenge.

4 Questions  For Marketers

How do we tune in past the noise and the cyber loitering that passes for conversation on some sites?

Do social media tools like Digg, Delicious and even regional and local ones like Scoopit help us to cut through to the core ideas ?

Is there a way to mine conversations and test social media idea distributions that gives us a greater depth of analysis and measurement?

How do we translate these ideas to the into guidelines for the marketing team on Monday morning?

All markets go through different stages of adoption up to the point at which they mainstream. In the early phases the leverage of new tools received disproportionate results.

For example I remember sending direct emails to various authors in the late 90′s and most of the time making useful and very clear connections.  Of course that couldn’t last and the sheer velocity of changes and technology induced spin has made it harder to make those connections on a meaningful basis.

Many of our work projects are based around the idea that we can use online iterations and feedback to regenerate a more highly tuned marketing campaign in real time as the markets respond to ongoing change.

Ironically in some cases as big businesses have added systems to cope with all of these ongoing conversations they have not kept pace with the editorial and analytical side effects.

In another  example  using an FAQ (frequently asked questions) based system to log faults,  issues and hopefully provide quick answers for  user based searching is a key way that companies can help themselves.

Unfortunately many of those systems have been set -up in such a way that there is no active and ongoing review process so that staff and customers just work out new ways to sidestep the existing process so they can talk to a human.

And the issue with many of the social media bookmarking tools is that they have been gamed right from the start by those who understand page rankings and also those with more spurious objectives.

The big promise of Cluetrain and conversational marketing was to get to a level of  “human to human”  connection so that we all get smarter, better and more relevant products and services.

The challenge for most business managers is quite simply they need to have definitive measurements on what works and what doesn’t so that they can persuade the finance department to make sense of themes and memes and and mine significant meaning.

Finance departments can’t deal with ambiguity at any level for the most part. Many of us have worked for companies whose philosophy is ‘if we can measure it we won’t do it.”

The Best Buy story linked to in the Hirshberg link (below) noted one key metric that finance would definitely understand. Before Best Buy started using social media tools the employee turnover in the company ran at 130% ! each year and it has now dropped back to 50%. That is a mind blowing result to say the least.

My personal view is that blogs and wikis can still add incredible value to customers and suppliers on a regional basis if we add them to our websites and a conscious and  useful way.

Even without specialist medial tools we should always be able to see the impact of better engagement between customers, suppliers, managers and staff and that should flow through to improved profits and even market share.

Here is another example of what we can easily do.  Back in November I linked to a great essay from Paul Graham on Why to Start a Start-Up in a Bad Economy where you really need to check the comments to get a better read on that piece.

Ideally the comments should be more closely connected but the point is while the essay can be read in isolation it is so much better if we look more closely at the context and that means comments.

Here are some other  answers and some more clues – please feel free to add your own ideas as well.

• Conversational Media watch this space (Conversation Measurement Toolbox from Federated media.)
• A code of Conduct for conversational marketers
• What this all means on Monday Morning (4mb PDF)
• Try something new capture your passion and communicate that.

Last but not least,  a few weeks ago I wrote about Peter Hirshberg. He has another video interview on his blog at where Best Buy CEO – Brad Anderson notes that as we move from

“simply distributing product to insuring customer delight under countless usage scenarios, only a method that tapped the wisdom of everybody made sense. “

And this is the point at which all of your group wisdom and comments become more pertinent.

A true self learning organisation won’t wait for the accountants to catch up and this is where we can all help out by decoding the market signals we know are out there.

Best wishes for the Christmas Season. Thanks again for stopping by.

Be present, be engaged and be renewed – see you again in the New Year.

P.S. While at Zeitgeist Google I also found this clip which features Lee Clow of TBWA and Alex Bogusky talking about the transition from narrative to interactive and implications for brands. It is definitely a related topic as are many of the other 117 other videos on that Zeitgeist 08 channel.

Marshall McLuhan once said that “The old medium is always the content of the new medium.”

He was talking about the way that movies were being morphed into TV but that idea is more than relevant now with all kinds of media being filtered through millions of eyeballs online.

It is tempting to think we will know what the results will be when we mash up content across the media universe but the truth is far more interesting than the fiction.

There is an ongoing need for individuals and businesses to reinvent the way they talk to and otherwise engage with customers- in McLuhan’s description – for the customers to fulfill a extended role in the process and feel themselves to be part of the media / inside the moment.

Peter Hirshberg is one of those  who understood early on some of the implications and the huge social changes coming. He also missed a lot at the time (like most of us) but was able to link a number of the crossover points between TV and the web into a coherent and entertaining story about cultural disruptions and technology.

The video contains a fair amount of archival footage including some classic McLuhan moments.

Peter Hirshberg on TV and the web -31:41 Posted: Sept 2008 on TED

On Peter’s blog he links to a Sept 2007 paper over at HBS If you are an online marketer go read it now.

For digital marketing practice and theory, the last decade has brought two related surprises: the rise of social media and the rise of search media. Marketing has struggled to find its place on these new communication pathways. Old paradigms have been slow to die.

This paper reviews early beliefs about interactive marketing, then identifies 5 discrete roles for interactive technology in contemporary life and 5 ways that firms respond.

It concludes that the new media are rewarding more participatory, more sincere, and less directive marketing styles than the old broadcast media rewarded.

Key concepts include:

• Successful interactive marketing may be less a matter of domination and control, and more a matter of fitting in.
• There is a human need to assert and present to the world a self-serving identity and to manage one’s personal reputation.

The form of interactivity most attractive to marketing is one that facilitates people’s ability to construct their identity and contribute to the making of meaning.

That was the exec summary – I also liked this quote buried in the abstract.

“It concludes that while meaning-making remains the central purpose of marketing communication, the shift from broadcasting to interaction within digital communities is moving the locus of control over meanings from marketer to consumer and rewarding more participatory, more sincere, and less directive marketing styles.”

So there you have it – Engagement and roleplay by the consumer.

This goes all the way back to Shakespeare putting those extra scenes into his plays for the groundlings to watch.

Modern marketing turns out to be live theatre at its best playing 24/7 on all of your networked devices and no auditions!  Wait… I feel a Shakespeare quote coming on. What do you think?

Had a great conversation the other week about the growth fixation of business.

The idea is that with most businesses we focus on growth all the time – however we can get to it.  As mentioned previously growing business with existing customers seems an obvious but overlooked area for most.

The follow-on idea was just imagine you can’t get the obvious growth angles like customer numbers and revenue – what would you focus on?

My guess is quality improvements for existing customers would have to be at the top of the list.

And it is getting to be much cheaper to go to market with some of the systems and processes on offer.

David Cowan has written again about the reducing cost of those systems…

“My Internet Law
The time and money required to produce (design, develop, secure, test, launch, scale) a typical data-oriented form application on the web drops in half every 2 years.
This seems to have held true since the public emergence of the web in 1994. Do you agree? I don’t have much hard data, but McCain proposes new internet laws with far less.

For example, I recall the large systems integration firms charging as much as $20 mlllion to completely outsource development of a web application. (I forget the name but I recall a DFJ-backed pay-me-to-advertise-to-me startup that spent as much in 1996 with someone like Perot Systems and the app still never worked.)

Is there any doubt that most apps today can be launched with as much scalability for $300,000? The implied factor of improved efficiency is 0.5 to the sixth power over a 12 year period.

Cheaper hardware (Moore’s Law) accounts for only a small fraction of this effect. The real gains seem to come from decoupling and automating specific steps of the process. Major disruptions that come to mind: Microsoft FrontPage, SSL, Exodus hosting, Apache, Java, ActiveX, Javascript, Shockwave, Flash, load balancers, PHP,  XML, Ruby on Rails, web service APIs, AJAX, Amazon S3, DIY communities (Ning).”

We could quibble about the significance of some of his picks but it does make sense.

Not sure you can extract a reliable formula for this but the point that development costs are roaring lower makes huge sense. I have based a business on open source.

It is the only way to compete in the longer term I believe.

Guy Kawasaki has blogged often about this idea. Marketing and sales are still going to be much larger. The analogy might be production costs for a movie going much lower but marketing costs increasing at the extreme as competition for mind-share escalates.

In the future more businesses can be competitive but will need to do much more to get noticed and win business.

There is a still a certain level of novelty around online networking now / the equivalent of “free ink” is available but it won’t last. More of us will be in the advertising and communications sector for more of the time.

The idea of a Moores laws echo is a good one for gaining attention but the math doesn’t really hold up and for the reasons I’ve mentioned the game is being played elsewhere.

So production cost are lower – marketing costs are rising.

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