Facebook goes anti-social

October 30, 2007 By

Mark Zuckerberg

Today’s Facebook porn revolves around a story that the social network is set to launch a new adserving platform (called ‘SocialAds’) which will take the data from inside their walled garden and use it to serve more relevant ads to people in other locations. Valleywag has it here. Venture beat loose complete control of their horses here, going on to claim this could make the (let us not forget) website, worth $100bn (that’s the GDP of New Zealand).

Venture beat themselves exposes some of the problem with the argument with their stunning example of targeting only those 20-25 year olds who express an interest in beer with a beer ad.

Well, let’s for a second forget that all 20-25 year olds are interested in beer (give or take) and ask a subtly different question: are you likely to sell your brand of beer to someone who’s already such an big ‘fan’ that he talks about beer on his Facebook profile. The reality of how people shop for things is of course, considerably more complicated. When in a bar in a group – for example – most people buy what the first person to order ordered. Second biggest driver is… what the barman recommends. Some banner I ignored on CNN six days ago is not likely to really have an impact.

Any other obvious flaws in the argument that Facebook can take over the world using just the knowledge that I’m a man and watch too much West Wing? Well, if that data is so valuable, why are they getting 10 cents per 100 impressions currently on their own site? Surely it would make AdSense to roll it out their first.

The upside? Perhaps when Mr Zuckerberg is the richest man in the world, he’ll be able to afford some proper shoes.

Filed Under: advertising, facebook, marketing

Planning planning

October 29, 2007 By

(or ‘towards a complete redefinition on the role of the brand strategist’)

Egypt_Nil

There’s a terrible joke or riddle I still remember from school: ‘What was the longest river in the world before the Nile was discovered?’. The answer, of course, is ‘the Nile’.

The launch of the landmark Stephen King retrospective on planning poses an similar question. What was King’s job (and Pollitt’s for that matter) before they invented planning. Presumably job titles like ‘head of planning’ were, at that point, unavailable.

The answer is different for the two men. King worked in JWT’s marketing department (which appeared to involve research and the setting of strategy – so broadly the same, although presumably very differently conducted), Pollitt was an account man who’d been put in charge of research.

And a bit like ‘Hitchhikers’ guide to the galaxy’ and the secret of life, the universe and everything, ever since their job was invented, planners have been  trying to work out what it means.

King, apparently lamented planning’s obsession with constantly trying to redefine its raison d’etre (as Jeremy Bullmore is supposed to have joked, it is a major irony that a profession that spends so much time looking for insight, still can’t explain itself), his own view seemed merely to be that planing was bringing science to the art of communication and persuasion. Famously he said the role spanned ‘grand strategist’ to ‘ad tweaker’.

So what’s the new planning? How do we start defining the role, the profession of the marketer / communicator / staff member who can drive business value through product and communication strategy nowadays.

Of course, if you speak to a planner, they’ll tell you that planning is the new planning. Indeed many of the leading lights of the new discussion (Russell Davies, Richard Huntingdon) and the most interesting and exciting thinking have come from this area. But that’s bound to happen, underlying truths about communication are indeed timeless, and the biggest and most insightful brains are the ones most likely to understand the changing face of the market (they’re the ones faced with the demise of the old paradigms)

But is ‘old planning’ the same as ‘new planning’? Hardly. We all see far too much ‘old’ thinking and approach being forced into the new discipline.

Perhaps marketers will lead the charge. Well again, there clearly are some marketers (like Godin) gearing up, but it’s certainly not most of them. What about designers? What about UEs? What about ‘Persuasion Architects’? Hell, what about cartoonists? That seems an equally rich vein at the moment.

So what are the axioms of this new group?

We take as our starting point that the adversarial unilateral relationship between brands and consumers is over. We understand that great, interesting products will succeed. The acknowledge that consumer insight must inform the product itself and not just it’s messaging or communications. We understand that the consumer will decide how they value goods and services.

Iain Tait’s somewhat tongue in cheek ‘why digital is better than advertising‘ speech at PSFK contained this gem (apologies for the transcription):

[in the traditional agencies, you find] structures that have been put in place  [...] to make well-understood units of advertising, that’s why you have planners, creatives and TV producers. It’s not the same structures you need for technical and cultural innovation.

But like the pioneers that brought science to advertising through planning, we must look at how we do that more broadly in a world where we no longer ‘game’ communications; where we return to designing brands that matter in its deepest sense. It will have to be someone who understands people – from meeting them in all contexts, through observing them, through understanding the latest drivers in society and culture; someone who understands the tonnes of research we can now gather constantly; someone who understands user-experience across multiple media; who understand the truths of communication and persuasion, and the limits of a huge number of media.

But let’s not try and pretend that there is one group ready to simply take the crown. There is not.

Filed Under: advertising, agencies, cluetrain, engagement, experience, marketing, planning

Platform 9 3/4

October 18, 2007 By

 Hugh MacLeod cartoon

How do you know you’re an important part of the 2.0 firmament? The answer is that people have conferences about you and you don’t even go along. Tongiht’s BiMA ‘debate’ about facebookwas just that, and Zuckerburg couldn’t even be on hand by satelite conference to accept the praise. However the event was very well chaired (by Paul Walsh), organised and hosted (oddly enough by BT), with some amazing pannelists.

The initial discussion was wide ranging and interest. The debate bit which followed it was fun, although it decended into a sort of bizarre sixth-form debating contest – not suprising when the topics were things like ‘This house believes the opening of the F8 platform was a mistake’.

As Hugh MacLeod pointed out of the network itself, the whole thing was all very polite. I only made a couple of notes (funnily enough on the back of business cards), so these were the things that stood out for me:

The incredible JP Rangaswami asked the audience to put their hands up if they were on Facebook, getting something close to a 100% positive reaction from the few hundred people in the room. ‘Now put your hand down if you’re NOT on MySpace’. There were only three hands left in the air. The point he was making is that – even though they’re in the same general area, Facebook is not necessarily canabilising MySpace users, the fact that MySpace is calcifying and Facebook growing like crazy is clearly related but is not directly connected or proportional.

Another from JPR. When asked whether corporates should ban Facebook because people are using it during working time, he simply pointed out that he also, for example, uses the toilet and drinks coffee during work time. In a society of knowledge workers (he continued) it’s not about when you clock in and out but about how much you create – and if going on facebook is part of that then so be it (interesting information for his ex-exployees Dresdner Kleinworth, who have banned Facebook, without the full backlash we saw at Allen Overy).

Hugh MacLeod was thoroughly brilliant with a couple of particularly interesting points I noted down.

 He described how the original facebook was a small scale homely enterprise for Zuckerberg – although one to which 75% of the Harvard campus (where it was invented) adopted within a couple of weeks.

MacLeod also spoke about the benefits of his mother’s real-life walled garden (in response to a question about whether facebook was falling to the traps that ended up the undoing of AOL). He pointed out that, in gardening terms, walled gardens created protection from winds and pests, and that online they can do the same, and can be fine so long as they don’t do anything else to be destructive.

One of the debate team said she thought it was important that people practice their ‘social networking skills’ (a theme repeated by Paul Walsh, when talking about the ability to privatize facebook). Isn’t this a nice idea? In the olden days, schoold taught ‘social skills’, perhaps now they’ll teach ‘social networking skills’. “Today’s lesson children is about protecting your privacy in Bebo!”.

Finally, a floor debate erupted around whether you should accept a ‘friend’ invite from your boss. The general consensus was that it was a bit of shame that most people didn’t like their bosses enough to agree to this, but that otherwise it shouldn’t be a problem.

The debate turned to what you would say to your boss when they came up to ask why you had ignored / declined them. Some clever bugger in the audience knew the answer: ‘Because you’re my boss’. All of this technology and the English are still terrible at telling difficult truths!

Filed Under: BIMA, facebook

Outside in

October 3, 2007 By

we need to reinvent our $40bn company. Quick, let’s start a blog’ 

(Slightly adapted notes from my role as chair of this morning’s Oracle and Conchango Enterprise 2.0 event which didn’t end up getting used because of the late start caused by tube suspensions).

So first of all, thank you all very much indeed for joining us for our discussion today of Enterprise 2.0.

We’re delighted to have you.

It’s a packed half day so I won’t ramble on for too long, but I thought it was worth just airing a couple of thoughts about this whole subject of ‘Enterprise 2.0’.

It’s easy to forget that, for many people, the first experience of computers was at work. It’s where they learned how to use type with more than two fingers, where they learned to operate productivity programmes like Word and Excel. It’s where they first became with intra-office communications tools, and then with the beast that was about to assault all of our lives, email.

And the machines themselves became smaller, and cheaper, and cuter boxes, and at some point we started to think ‘these things aren’t all that bad, I could do with one in my house’. ‘I like spreadsheets so much I might get some for the kitchen’.

And then of course there was the web, and – before we knew it the 2.0 web, whatever that is… and all of a sudden everyone is online and our expectations have gone through the roof.

And really now, what we expect as consumers is quite unbelievable. Products and services that were totally unimaginable even five years ago become common place – our grandparents are using Skype, blogging and downloading Gorillazs songs from bit torrent.

You almost start to wonder: Is it denying someone’s fundamental human rights to block their access to Facebook?

And somewhere in the middle of that, Google made the old job title ‘knowledge manager’ seem pretty bizarre.

I don’t suppose I need to talk about web 2.0 here but suffice’ to say, all of a sudden, many of our companies now feel like the car parked on the hard shoulder while their staff (and customers) go whizzing past.

And let’s face facts, a lot of the systems inside businesses are pretty unambitious undertakings. Often turning into vast filing systems for exactly the sort of information that no one wanted, like organisational charts or Joyce from accounts, who’s thinking about selling a black and white television.

On the outside of our firewalls, in three short years, customers have taken the raw building blocks of the web (anything that was close to fit for purpose) and built an internet which works the way they want.

And now our employees must do the same inside our organizations. Indeed, as we’ll hear later – heaven help any of us that try and stop them

And this is not something to be frightened of. The opportunities are incredible.

Whether it is that job of knowledge management from the old days, or collaboration amongst your team or simply increasing efficiencies into all those broken old business practices, it can all be done online.

And we will continue to surprise ourselves with the idea that the staff are often much better at designing these systems than the boardrooms full of boardroom type people.

Filed Under: internal communications, internalcomms, web2.0

The other side of In Rainbows

October 1, 2007 By

If Radiohead’s intention in letting customers choose the price they pay for the band’s new album, In Rainbows, was to light up the blogosphere, then it’s certainly worked: here, here, here and of course, right here.

They were actually beaten to the punch by the Charlatans, who’re not messing around with making customers pay 1p for their content - the next single and album from them will be totally free.

Good, blunt quote from Charlatans manager Alan McGee, “I thought: well nobody buys CDs anyway….[so] I came to the conclusion – ‘why don’t we just give it away for nothing’”.

The funniest write up is Andrew Orlowski’s opinion piece:

Labelless, but hardly penniless, Radiohead are letting their fans set the price for digital downloads of the band’s new CD.

… The new release will also be available in physical form – £40 for a box-set – easily affordable to the well-heeled bourgeois bedwetters who make up the band’s core following.

Then again, this is such a guilt-ridden corpus of record-buyers they may well feel obliged to make more than the minimum donation.”

He also makes the obvious point this sort of thing might be OK for Radiohead, Prince and the Charlatans, but where does it leave the bands at the bottom of label’s rosters, the ones that aren’t millionaires with tens of thousand of rabid fans? Top bands will likely come out with more than the 10% of sales the labels would have given them anyway but the younger groups need more support. 

060515_radiohead

Possible captions

  • “Radiohead delighted with record sales”.
  • “Which of you fuckers put our album on the internet for 1p, I needed to buy a new sweater”.
  • “Lads, the good news is that we sold a 100 copies. The bad news is everyone paid 1p”
Filed Under: music, rights

The new new

October 1, 2007 By

Interesting to find out (although I always knew deep down) that black is the new black (according to Jon Leach).

Several people also seem to be pointing out that old is the new new in advertising - both in terms of the before and after of mass media which Amelia and Steve (and Seth Godin) have been talking about, and tonight a fantastic set of speeches and discussions around the Account Planning Group’s book launch of the collected articles of Stephen King (the inventor of planning, who died in 2006).

stephen_king_brand_planning 

All of the speakers kept coming back to the observation that many of King’s declarations from as far back as the 60s or 70s have a frightening similarity to the sorts of the things we are saying today, even down to the language including phrases such as ‘the changing nature of consumer attention means we must examine their relationship with the brand’. Indeed the book itself is subtitled ‘the timeless works of Stephen King’.

One thing really stuck in my mind. One of the panelists at the discussion at the end of the evening said that in the paper she was critiquing for the book (each paper has a summary by a modern day practitioner), Stephen King talks about the appropriateness of the title ’account planner’.

It turns out the term was coined in a meeting on the basis that it was a cross between ‘account handler’ and ‘media planner’. King, apparently preferred the term ‘brand planner’ and had even suggested ’brand designer’ as an alternative. Now there’s something that couldn’t be more relevant today.

(Sample of King’s work before the book comes out later this year).

Filed Under: advertising, planning
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