Can’t Believe it – Shezza Get’s it Right Again

It does worry the hell out of me when I find myself agreeing with old Shezza greybeard – and it’s happened twice in a row.

In his last post he ‘fessed up to being a Republican in a footnote to his nasty little piece about the failure of Duchy Originals under HRH Chazza’s stewardship. In Shezza’s case I suspect it’s sour grapes for not getting so much as a sniff of a gong. In my case I have always wanted to ditch the Royal Family for the most noble reason – it underpins the class system that says your place in society is determined by who your parents were, not who you are – a charter for chinless, witless toffs. Like most I have a great deal of respect for the Queen but after she’s gone here is my plan. Round up all the Royals who won’t relinquish their titles and stick them in a theme park near Dover for the tourists. Make Britain a Republic with a president and two elected chambers like most other places. Then anyone in society can aspire to lead their country (British Prime

Ministers are elected by their parties not directly by the people and only the Queen gets the ultimate sign-off). Who’d argue with that plan?

I often feel that part of the reason for my under-achievement is that I never had the possibility of becoming head of state. I lacked the motivation of a Barack Obama or Robert Mugabe. Take away the chance of ever getting the top job and it’s bound to undermine your work ethic.

Up yours and theirs, Stame

Duchy Originals – A License to Print Money Unless Your Mum Already Does

HRH Prince Charles started Duchy Originals, a range of wholesome organic products, as a way of generating funds for his charity, The Prince’s Trust. The charity supports disadvantaged young entrepreneurs and is a really worthy cause. Britain needs entrepreneurs and the Trust provides seed capital and mentorship to kids who, having grown up on the wrong side of the track, would otherwise never be given a chance. It gets corporate and private sponsorship but the Prince thought it would be a good idea to create an annuity income from one of his entrepreneurial ideas.

Charles has always been convinced that original is better and environmentally friendly is essential. He prefers old style architecture and any ‘back to nature’ way of producing food. Since he feels he represents British values at their best (so I was once told by someone in his entourage) he believes that deep down we all want to be like him. So when, on his Highgrove Estate,  he came across a nice biscuit made with organic ingredients to an old fashioned recipe or bacon from free range organic pigs he reckoned, given the chance, we’d all like to pay a premium for these foods. He founded Duchy Originals – or at least he had some of his people do it – and launched a range of products the best of which, in my opinion, were the biscuits and the bacon.

He put some professional managers in charge and for a while it did OK – it got to 4 million plus turnover at its best and the charity received some annual dividends. Charles was known to boast playfully that he was “a self-made millionaire” on the back of the success of his business start up. So far so good.

I met people who worked at Duchy Originals and while they tried to be discrete it was pretty clear that the business significantly under-performed because, allegedly, HRH could not stop meddling and forced on them whatever latest crackpot idea he had come up with. If he happened upon some tasty Lemon Curd or sturdy Garden Sheds, he insisted these be added to the range irrespective of whatever carefully laid business plan they were working to. Worse still he also foisted on them whichever business or marketing expert he happened to meet who showed any interest in Duchy Originals (which you would, wouldn’t you, if you met HRH and were trying to make conversation).

Nevertheless, some might say that he deserves full credit for founding the charity and having the gumption to start a business that he believed in, and that would provide some extra funds. Yes, but…… What Duchy Originals is, in effect, is a commercial application of the Royal Warrant, the special seal of approval the Queen bestows on any product she uses personally. The Royal Warrant is strictly non-commercial – if the Queen happens to patronize your brand of Waxed Shooting Jacket or Umbrella or biscuit you can apply for a Royal Warrant. If it is awarded you may feature this in your advertising or on your product but there are strict rules as to how this is done and no money changes hands. You only have to look at what the Duchess of York pocketed for her full blown endorsement of Weight Watchers (genius move on their part by the way) to see how much the Royal Warrant could be worth if you could really exploit it. Ditto Duchy Originals. How much money could you make – especially in the USA and Asia – if you could launch a company with a range of products under the HRH Prince Charles Brand? Hundreds of millions, billions even if it was well managed.

How high did HRH drive the revenues– 4 million quid at best, and this slumped last year to half that and a loss of 3.3 million pounds. So he has licensed Duchy Original to Waitrose – the upmarket grocery store that are the most enthusiastic stockists of the Duchy range – in return for a guaranteed donation to the trust of 1 million per year. Waitrose will do well with Duchy Originals and one assumes at last it will get the less fettered professional management and development of the brand it deserves, but one can’t help feeling Duchy Originals could have been a license to print money for a very worthy charity.
Mind you, if you are the heir to the throne that does print the money there are probably easier and ways to generate extra funds for the Prince’s Trust than selling biscuits one happens to enjoy with one’s tea.

God Bless him, Prince Charles is the best weapon we British republicans have

So That’s What Crowd Sourcing is

Well for once I found one of Shezza’s posts vaguely interesting and that’s about as rare as Rocking Horse pooh. I had heard this term Crowd Sourcing and had no idea what it meant. I thought it started with The Rolling Stones free gig in Hyde Park. With no price for entry a huge crowd pitched up to watch Mick strut his stuff in full make-up and tart’s clothes – he looked camper than a row of tents.

If I’ve got this right, you can use a crowd to solve problems or come up with ideas. Well not the Hyde Park crowd that day, you couldn’t. We, sorry I mean they, were off their faces on a cocktail of Columbian Marching Powder, Mandies, Speed and Carlsberg Special Brew.

Anyways up, I like this idea of getting a load of wannabe creatives to solve all your marketing problems. In the days I had budgets I’d have shoveled large portions in their direction and taken all the credit myself. ”Yes, the idea just came to me while I was taking a shower, I never stop thinking about work”.

Shezza mentions the slight downside if the brief is confidential (why are they called ‘briefs’, they’re normally anything but). Can’t see that’s a problem – agencies are known to be as a confidential as a bimbo who’s just shagged a Premiership footballer. Most ‘creatives’ are not even on the agency payroll. I know, I used to go and have a pint with them and hear about all the stuff they were working on that had nothing to do with advertising or marketing. In my experience discretion was not their middle name – leaky bucket was.

Yep, I like the sound of this Crowd Sourcing. Brand Managers have always been ace at getting other people to do their job and most of their thinking for them. Now they can spread the net much wider than a few local agencies and outsource even more of their job description. I can only see two downsides. First, Agencies are going to use this themselves and to be fair they will be better at picking the best ideas. Second, no crowd sourcer will spring for tickets to Twickenham or a decent lunch.

Up yours, Stame

Crowd Sourcing – The Pros and Very Few Cons

There seems to be a debate about Crowd Sourcing. I don’t understand why. I cannot believe anyone is seriously debating ‘whether’ crowd sourcing a good idea only how best to use it? Of course it is. I first came across crowd sourcing as a team building exercise we used to use with clients. You’d get a group of people and give them a scenario. The one we used was where a plane crashes in the middle of a desert and the survivors are given a choice of options in terms of what they do and what they choose to rescue from the wreckage, in order to maximize their chance of survival and rescue.

First people had to complete the exercise on their own. Then they worked as a group and their collective and individual answers were compared to the advice of ‘Survival Experts’. Not quite sure who these experts were – this was long before Bear Grylls – but the results were always the same. No individual scored as highly as the group – ever. The collective views of the group were always closest to, sometimes spot on with, those of the experts.

Like most people, my appreciation of Crowd Sourcing was given a real kick with the publication in 2004 of “Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki. One of the examples he used made me realize I had been watching Crowd Sourcing in action every week on “Who wants to be a Millionaire”. The lone contestant might struggle, but ask the audience and, collectively, they always get it right.

Actually, maybe I’ve skipped a step in my journey? I seem to remember my mum telling me that, “Two heads are better than one”.  Presumably several thousand heads are better than two? But I think she also told me that “Too many cooks spoil the broth”. Well how many is too many? “Two’s company, three’s a crowd” I definitely remember her telling me that. So let’s try to pull this together – more than two is a crowd, a crowd is generally better than one head, but not for making broth.

I reckon there is no debate about whether Crowd Sourcing is a good thing, a useful tool if you can get your hands on it, but perhaps not for every task or problem.

That last bit is worth a debate. When should you use crowd sourcing, how best should you use it? Hang on – what exactly do we mean by crowd sourcing? Well, for the answer to that I turned to one truly excellent, and I think by now universally approved , form of crowd sourcing – Wikipedia. With just one click I got a very useful explanation of Crowd Sourcing sourced from a crowd. Here it is:-

I could not have written this better and, more to the point, it would have taken days of research to get even close. Right away, here are two major benefits – the wisdom of the crowd and Web 2.0 enabled speed.

The Wiki definition is “the act of outsourcing tasks, normally performed by an employee or contractor, to a large community through an open call”. The term ‘Crowd Sourcing’, Wiki tells me, is a neologism (a new made up word  – thanks Wiki) of crowd and outsourcing.  It goes on to tell me that, as with Wikipedia itself, experts or wannabe experts enjoy helping you solve these outsourced tasks so much they often do it for free or very little reward.

So wise, fast and really cheap. Come on! Who would not use Crowd Sourcing all the time for everything? You can use it to build a living on-line encyclopedia, you can use it to source thousands of designs for, say, T-Shirts and get the same crowd to help select the best. Instead of trying to do all the development work on a piece of computer software and inevitably butting your one or two heads against problems you can’t fix (or didn’t even spot) you can get a prototype or Beta version out there and have an army of willing experts help you perfect it. Brilliant!

I have a marketing bias so let’s look at possible applications for marketing. You could build a platform where any marketer, any time anywhere could post a problem (or opportunity) they are working on and ask a crowd for ideas on how to solve it. It could be anything. Maybe you are a bank and you want ideas for how to persuade the laggards to move to on-line banking. Maybe you need an idea to unite all your disparate sponsorship properties. Maybe you need some new product ideas, a new brand name, a fresh idea for a trade conference, some ideas for on-line brand content (the internet is a hungry beast when it comes to content). Hell, you could even post your latest advertising brief – would that work? Well it’s not unknown for Ad agencies to bring in some extra free-lancers to help solve a brief – this way you could get to thousands of free-lancers, amateur or professional.

To make sure that you attracted the experts most likely to have the best ideas, the professionals or semi-professionals, you probably should offer some kind of reward, a bounty if you like, for the best ideas. Most of these people just love solving problems and get a certain personal benefit from doing so, as well as maybe some professional kudos. But it seems only fair to offer some hard cash in return for the commercial benefit you would get from a great new marketing idea. It would still be cheap and it would, of course, be the wisdom of the crowd at cyber speed.

We could call it “Idea Bounty – the best ideas get paid”. Forget focus groups and consumer workshops – if you have a marketing problem get it on our platform and we’ll guarantee that you get great ideas you can use, all for the cost, as it happens, of less than a couple of focus groups.

This Idea Bounty could be huge – I’ll just check it out on Google, see if anyone else…..Bugger!

Someone has already done it and so far every client has got ideas they both liked and have successfully used.
In fact, I discover, there are loads more crowd sourcing platforms for marketing, design, innovation, all manner of marketing needs.

So is Crowd Sourcing the future? Yes – in fact it is the present, the train has well and truly left the station. This is no fad. It is inconceivable that the genie will get put back in the bottle. More and more people, for more and more things, are going to use Crowd Sourcing. Get with the programme. Who says? – a bunch of geeky on-line nerds? Well the late and very great CK Prahalad based his last ever book on the prediction that crowd sourcing will become the way of doing business – N=1, R=G – and he was one of the most respected Business Strategists on the planet.

I can’t comment on whether T shirts and Computer Software will only ever be designed by a wise crowd. I suspect not. But I do believe strongly that not every marketing problem will.

There are occasions when I would not choose to use crowd sourcing. For me it has limitations and I think there are reasons why a small, closed community can on occasions be better.

1. Let’s start with the obvious. If the marketing brief (problem/opportunity) is highly confidential I don’t think I want to publicize it to a crowd.

2. What if I am not 100% sure of what the problem is? The advantage of working with a small, well motivated, closed community – let’s call it an agency/client team- is that you iterate the brief through working on it together. The brief gets honed, refined and sometimes completely changed. If I am going to give a problem to the crowd I need to be sure I can express it clearly and with confidence.

3. As a close cousin to this, briefs sometimes have nuances, subtleties, constraints, that are only truly appreciated by the small team that are working on them. The crowd needs clarity of purpose and cannot be relied on to wrestle with reams of sub-text.

4. Often you come to trust certain groups of problem solvers. You’ve worked with them before, they have a great track record. If I have a winning team, why do I want to expand it by inviting in the crowd? Would I run the risk of undermining confidence? I like working with people I can see and touch and – as noted above – debate with. Teams perform better with shared purpose built on like and trust that can only come through physical interaction.

5. Last on my list is a back-handed compliment to crowd sourcing. I accept I am going to get hundreds maybe thousands of ideas but how am I going to choose the right one? Out of respect to the community – which is important – every idea has to be given proper consideration. Too much choice is not always a good thing.

These, surely, are valid reasons for not using Crowd Sourcing? Maybe, maybe not.

1.    If you are worried about confidentiality you can disguise the brief.

2.    A great way to get insight on a problem is to throw it out there – use the crowd to help you understand the problem. It’s a lot better than a few focus groups.

3.    Yes there are nuances but at some point there must be clarity – when you can summarize it in 100 words or less then throw it out there. If you can’t, keep working until you can

4.    Teams are very important – it should ideally be a team decision when and how to use crowd sourcing. But if the team are so motivated why would they pass up an opportunity to check whether there might be a better solution?

5.    There is something to the “Paradox of Choice” argument but it is possible to put in place a process to screen and select ideas (Idea Bounty has a range of levels of support for this). Get the team to help, employ some experts. Ask the crowd to help make the selection. Just roll your sleeves up – this is a high quality problem, too many good ideas!

I still conclude that there are reasons and occasions why/when Crowd Sourcing is not optimal. I just think they appear few and far between, or at least I think there are few occasions where at no point in the process of cracking a marketing brief would crowd sourcing not be a useful additional tool.

Too many cooks spoil the making of the broth but the more cooks you have access to, the better the broth recipes you can choose from.

Only Old Guys Care About Privacy

David Rowan is the editor of Wired UK and he recently wrote about why he is not active on facebook. This interested me. I’m much older than David – who admits to being the wrong side of 30 yrs while I try not to admit to being the wrong side of 50. I, too, am very inactive on facebook. It’s partly a brand thing – feels more relevant to my kids than me – but I confess to a certain unease about sharing too much stuff on a social site motivated by profit.

David Rowan is much more explicit about his worries. Apart from the general point that sites like facebook are not motivated by your self – interest he goes on to list several other concerns. Giving away too much information makes it harder to reinvent yourself (mature maybe?) in later years. Information supplied for one purpose will invariably be used for another that you did not sign up for and indeed, may be used against you – are you happy to share everything about yourself with a prospective employer? People can be selective in what they choose to republish about you to paint a less attractive picture – people like journalists. Social sites lull us into revealing more than we realize and clever search allows that to be singled out.

Facebook have a Privacy policy that runs to some 5,830 words, nearly a third longer than the US Constitution, but it amounts to “we can do what we want with what we know” apparently. If this seems alarmist on David Rowan’s part you might like to bear in mind that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been quoted as saying he believes the world would be better place if none of us had any secrets. Hard to argue with that. We would behave better if we felt every thing we ever said, did, wrote or thought was freely and readily available to all our fellow citizens. We would be good – but not for goodness sake. Not sure that’s the world I’d like to inhabit (it is of course the world you already inhabit if you believe in God and divine retribution).

Rowan wrote his piece in response to a colleague’s taunt that only old guys care about privacy. In fact the proportion of younger users of facebook who are becoming more circumspect and private in terms of their use of the site is higher than the older users. We all care about privacy, perhaps if you are older you are better able to understand why. You have more experience of the benefit that comes of mistakes you were able to keep private versus the downside of the ones sadly you were not.

I am a firm believer in Permission Marketing especially in today’s ‘Wired’ World. I think the transaction must be clear – I tell you certain things in return for you using them to my explicit benefit. I am involved in one such business and am aware of others that are being developed. I think we’ll see more and more of this. People will share information about themselves if they can see you will use it responsibly and transparently and they get something out of this. No harm in marketing to people if they want you to. I love cars and would happily share insights on what I own, what I like, what I think about cars etc. if you promise to reward me with great deals and interesting content about my particular hobby. However, I’m not sure I want you to market some diet pills to me just because I confessed to being worried about my weight on facebook to people I thought were my friends or if I uploaded some photos where I looked a bit podgy (which would be any photo of me).

Young people (and old people) read about their favourite celebs in magazines like Heat and Hello. Their facebook page is their chance for a bit of fame if they share what’s going on in their lives. They are copying what they see celebs do (or have done to them) in terms of publicity, reaching for their 15 minutes of fame.

So, I have adpated an old Cat Stevens song as a warning to young people who, in their search for internet celebrity, are not sufficiently wary of facebook:-

Oh, baby it’s a wired world,
It’s hard to get by just upon a smile.
Oh, baby, baby, it’s a wired world
I’ll always remember you just like a child, girl.

At least I will if you are not careful about the photos you upload to facebook.

Brand Loyalty and Boyle’s Law

Andrew Ehrenberg passed away this year. I had the pleasure of meeting him on several occasions and have him explain to me first hand his findings on brand loyalty. I never really understood it then and have still not entirely got my mind round it. Andrew applied the laws of physics to brands and in a study of over 100 fmcg brands in Europe, Japan and America proved something that none of us marketers wanted to believe, still don’t – that brand penetration and average purchase move in a constant relationship. Put in plain English, big brands are big because more people buy them and on average they buy more of them. Small brands are small because fewer people buy them and buy less of them.

“It is like Boyle’s Law, Mark, as the volume of a gas declines the pressure goes up in a constant relationship” he explained to me (I did not have the heart to point out I gave up Physics at the age of 13 years). But what causes the change, I asked? “Ah, that is for you clever marketers to find out!” he replied.

The implications of this struck me as staggering. For years I’d believed that most of marketing was designed either to build penetration or increase loyalty and that we could somehow manipulate these as separate objectives. His findings were clear – they work in tandem. If you make a brand stronger then both penetration and loyalty (in terms of how often/how much people buy) go up.

Over the subsequent years I was exposed to many marketing models that failed to take this into account. McKinsey have a funnel that dissects a brand into sub groups from aware to consider, to buy occasionally, to buy most often, which they use to define the specific marketing objectives for a brand – its opportunity to grow. Wrong according to Andrew Ehrenberg. Strengthen the brand and every one of these measures will rise.

At one level this makes sense. It is hard to think of any marketing activity which addresses only one aspect of the funnel. Even if you flight an ad that encourages people to try a brand for the first time it will also encourage some to use it more often. If you run a promotion that rewards heavy purchase it will get the attention of non-buyers and persuade them to try. But surely there must be different levels of effect that would cause a skew in Ehrenberg’s findings? He was certain that there were not – he had the data to prove it – unless there was some structural market anomaly. Unleaded petrol was just coming on the market at the time I met Andrew (tells you how long ago it was) and he used this as an example which could skew the results because the distribution of the new type of fuel was controlled artificially and patchy. It was, in economists’ terms, ‘an imperfect market’. But in most fmcg markets were brands are freely available and fair competition keeps prices in line (i.e. a more perfect market) Ehrenberg’s Law held true over time. Those last couple of words – ‘over time’ – are important. I am quite sure that in the short term, a month or so, certain marketing activity will disproportionately affect either penetration or loyalty but over the course of a year they effect will work their way through to either a stronger or weaker brand in the way Ehrenberg described.

During my time at SAB we focused hard on the nature of brand adoption (and ‘unadoption’) and loyalty, and I got heavily immersed in studying it from many different angles. This included a lot of data-based analysis building on Ehrenberg’s work but also ethnographic work (studying consumers’ behaviour in real time). We even looked at the differences in people’s learning styles from the findings of educationalists to see if we could segment the different ways people assimilate new information about brands. We studied the best circumstances in which to sample a beer brand – in a busy pub when the party is in full swing or when you had quieter groups of friends in the early evening. We found that if people were ‘out of their comfort zone’ for example in a new venue with an unfamiliar group of friends, it improved their receptiveness (in a lasting way) to new ideas and new brands. We looked at various conversion models and even developed one of our own. But I never felt we got to the ‘answer’ and I certainly never felt we fully took account of, let alone disproved, Ehrenbergs challenging empirical analysis and findings.

So I’m still thinking about it. Here are my latest thoughts.

The journey to loyalty is not a journey

At any one moment in time we can divide a brand into various usage/attitudinal groups:-

•    Blissfully unaware
•    Passively aware but don’t know much about it
•    Saliently aware – both know the brand and know something about it that makes it interesting/relevant/attractive.
•    Actively considering
•    Using occasionally
•    Using most often
•    Using exclusively and downright evangelical about it

You can look at a brand in this way – people have to fall into one, but not more than one, of these groups. BUT it is not a journey from “aware to loyal” with several neat steps along the way. You can go from blissfully unaware to evangelical in one brief moment.

There’s a difference between behavioural and attitudinal loyalty

Financial people only care about bevioural loyalty because that shows up on the P&L. If someone is buying a brand on more than 80% of their purchase occasions we can say they are behaviourally loyal. But they may or may not be attitudinally loyal – they may be buying out of indifference and/or inertia or they may be buying very deliberately because of their strong feelings towards the brand. Guess which is better in the long run?

Cheating only helps in the short term

It follows from the above that we can manipulate behavioural loyalty with short term incentives – a discount, a promotion. I’m not knocking this – if you can do that cost effectively and there is no competitive reaction it can be profitable. If you force trial and therefore force people to see how much better the brand is it can also be of value. But that is the point – you need to affect the attitudinal loyalty, the strength of relationship with the brand to make it so strong it will still be bought as often by as many people long after the discount ends.

We want to shift the demand curve

As Andrew Ehrenberg said, as marketers we need to figure out the best ways to create the difference in “volume and pressure’ in other words to strengthen the brand, in fact to shift the whole demand curve so that at any given price more people will consider, buy and buy more often. There are no short cuts to loyalty – it is a proxy for brand health and it takes time and effort.

I did not know Andrew Ehrenberg well but he struck me as a highly intelligent, decent and thoughtful man. He was a scientist and he enriched our understanding about marketing through the appliance of science. He injected some facts based on experimentation into a ‘marketing discipline’ that is often anything but.

Is the Internet Changing our Brains?

I have been involved in a debate about whether the internet has changed marketing. It began in an exchange between myself and Paul Feldwick in Market Leader, the UK Marketing Society’s journal, and then moved on-line. There have been, as we hoped, some great contributions, including one from Elen Lewis who referenced an article in The Guardian that features several very eminent scientists (and a novelist) debating whether and how the internet has changed our very brains. I was interested in this since a big part of my argument that marketing has fundamentally changed as a result of the internet is based on the fact that society and people have changed. To be able to show that our brains have changed is therefore a killer point.

The article is worth reading in its entirety and being given some quiet consideration rather than surfing this short post to get the gist – you will realize the relevance/irony of this recommendation if you do. However, if, as a child of the internet, it is gist you want then here it is. Yes the internet is changing our brains. Some argue that it is for the worse, some argue it is just different with pro’s and cons, others argue it is our choice whether or not we allow it to change our brains (reading more books would help us retain our intellectual reasoning apparently).

For me the most interesting comment in the Guardian piece comes from Ed Bullmore, Cambridge Professor of Psychiatry no less. He argues that the internet resembles a human brain and how it works and therefore we can learn a lot about how we think by studying it. He calls the internet “a prosthesis of our collective memory” that’s an artificial brain to you and me. I know extrapolation is a dangerous thing but it has struck me before that if, at some point in the near future (near being imminent in evolutionary terms) everything that has ever been written and conceived, everyone one of us, every artifact and idea is digitally coded and available on the internet, and if every person on the planet is uploading their thoughts and conversations in real time, and if there are search engines and social networks able to allow each and everyone of us to access and connect all of these things again in real time, that is in effect one global brain is it not? This sounds a bit far fetched I agree. So do the views of Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. Far from being shame-faced that community information has leaked out he believes that everything should be transparent and publically available. He thinks – this is really crazy – that the world would be a better place, we would all behave better, if there were no secrets, if we were all honest with each other. Actually there must be a flaw in this argument since I have only one brain and I’m not honest with myself.

Anyway, the fact is that the big brains agree the internet is changing our brains and how they function as well as how we interact in our global cyber society. I think that means marketing must be changed fundamentally since at its heart it is about influencing how people think, behave and choose, individually and collectively, to the commercial benefit of a business. In fact I’d say that was game, set and match Paul! I’d now like to move on to a debate about the cult of celebrity and its role in our slide into destructive global decadence (aka Paris Hilton will be the death of all of us).

Any takers?

Shezza put the Twat in Twitter

Oops, typo, meant to say put the Twit in Twitter (no, I didn’t). Shezza loves his tweets and I now see he’s trying to tout himself as some kind of expert in Social Media. I’m happy to call it Social Media, I’m even happy to call it Social Forum or Social Bollocks. As I keep pointing out, if you want to reach the true social opinion leaders, the people who can really change purchase decisions based on the respect their peers hold for their expertise, then talk to me. I don’t tweet or twat but I can take you down my local pub and introduce you to my mates who will put you right about which car to buy or phone upgrade to go for. They can even tell you the most effective insurance scams.

I’ve tried Twitter but I find this 140 characters thing a pain. If you’ve got something to say other than “@ anybody out there, I’ve had a really tough week, looking forward to the weekend, LOL” which seems to be the majority of the crap filling the airwaves, then you need a few paras. I’m sure you would agree that this post is of great value to mankind and I’m already up to 205 words.

Why doesn’t someone super size Twitter.  Keep all the easy to use bit (I will grant you Twitter is heaps better than Facebook if you are over 20 years old and acne free) but just allow up to 200 words. Less than blogging but more than 140 characters, so we get some decent ideas flowing. I’d go for that and then more of the world could benefit from my pearls of wisdom.

Up yours, Stame

Social Media or Social Forum?

I’ve written in the past that marketers made a telling mistake by calling digital and the internet – “New Media”. By doing so they associated it with traditional one-way media such as print/TV etc. The internet is essentially a multi-dimensional exchange and probably its least effective use is as a medium for banner ads. The same people, in my view, are making the same mistake by calling Twitter and Facebook “Social Media”.

Twitter is a social forum, a big on-line conversation involving 100 million people and 65 million tweets a day (and counting – the new generation of mobile devices with Twitter as a main page app is going to make this explode). Of these Tweets 91% are people (yes – people, NOT ‘consumers’ another word that gets us into the wrong mindset). The balance comes from brands and just a tiny percentage – 0.4% – from celebrities. Celebrities are people too but the key difference, apart from their desire to make themselves a profitable brand, is that they reach, on average 300,000 followers, which is 1000 times more than the rest of us.
I have got all these stats from an excellent report by 360i published on the equally excellent Brandchannel. Definitely worth a download. Another telling stat from the report (completed in March 2010 so fairly up to date) is that 92% of all tweets are public so this is an on-line forum brands can and should tune in to. But that’s the point – people use Twitter to converse and air their views. Only 12% of the Tweets mention brands and most of these brands are technology, entertainment or other social networks. The rest are things like cars, cameras, music, restaurants – in other words brands that are a part of their lifestyle and interests. Not a lot are about Persil or Coke. Only 1% are engaging in conversations with brands which is hardly surprising since only 12% of brand tweets are conversational. The brands are talking AT them, not with them, just like they do in other ‘media’.

Here is how I think marketers and brands should think about social forums or networks. Imagine you are Coca Cola or Persil and you were sitting at a table in a pub or restaurant and on the table next to you were a big group of friends, talking loud enough for you to hear.  You would listen and learn but you would not interrupt unless there was a socially acceptable opportunity. For example one person complains that they have a stain in their favourite shirt they just can’t shift and have had to throw it away. Or someone complains that they think the draft Coke they are drinking always tastes watered down. You would pick your moment and you might say something like this:-

“Excuse me, I hope you don’t think I’m being rude but I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. I am actually Persil or Coke and I’m really sorry you’ve had a problem but I think I might be able to help you”.

If they had not mentioned anything to do with you but you have gathered from who they are (by the way, quite hard to do with Twitter other than by inference) that they are people you’d like to talk to, you would take a different approach.

“Hi guys, sorry to interrupt but I’m from Coke and I just wanted to let you know we’re having a party you might like to come along to (for ‘party’ read anything you are actually doing that could be of interest to this group). Let me tell you about it and you tell me what you think”

You see the point I’m making – treat it like the social discourse it is. Don’t barge in, don’t talk at them, talk with them, be helpful, be relevant, be interesting.

And recognize that most of the time, they do not want you involved in their conversation. There is no socially acceptable moment to interrupt them and introduce yourself. That said we have to be careful with percentages. Based on 360i’s figures I reckon that even if it is only 1% of the 12% of tweets that mention brands other than technology/entertainment etc this is still close to 100,000 conversations a day you may be interested in and where the participants may be interested in you. That’s 3 million a month. How many people do you talk to in focus groups? How many effective messages from your very expensive conventional media actually get through? But please, just remember to be sociable. As 360i say in their report – Twitter is not a megaphone.

If you don’t have the patience for all of this then get hold of a few celebrities and get them to plug you but try not to make it too obvious.

A Great Idea Goes Down The Toilet

I was taking a slash in a pub toilet in the West End last week, several actually – you know what it’s like after a few pints, once you break the seal you pee like a puppy. Anyway I spotted this promotion from Toshiba (advertising in toilets is called “ambient media” so I’m told) – I should be posting a photo but I didn’t want to get caught with my iPhone out in a public lav. Doesn’t matter, I can explain it easily enough. The deal was that if you bought a Toshiba PC in June they would refund the full price if England won the Soccer World Cup.

This must have seemed like a great idea to the witless brand manager, or his/her agency, who dreamt it up. On the one hand, capture a bit of World Cup vibe, get behind the lads and all that, on the other hand, not likely to be paying out. Well that’s the bloody point isn’t it? As soon as England got knocked out they needed to get these ambient posters down. Not only did England exit early on, losing to the old enemy, Germany, they played like one legged cripples in an arse kicking competition in all their games (4 in total). England fans are pissed off beyond belief – not only has their team embarrassed them, many feel literally robbed having forked out for new tele’s or even trips to the Rainbow Nation.

So how do they feel now, looking at Toshiba’s World Cup promotion? How warm do they feel towards the brand? Do they think, “Well done for getting behind the lads, getting in the spirit of things, you are definitely a brand I have a strong affinity for”?
Or do they instead think, “You slimey bastards, you knew f***** well we wouldn’t win didn’t you. You bet against our boys and you won – well f*** you. Toshiba – Japanese innit? Only Germany’s f**** allies during the war, weren’t they? etc etc etc”

Buy Toshiba – the foreign brand who knew all along that England have a shite team who never win anything.

I think advertising, “ambiently”, a truly crap promotion in a pub toilet is somewhat ironic.

Watch this space for more great case studies.

Up yours, Stame