Catch it, kill it
Thinking about the behaviors of Habitat and Moonfruit over the last week begs the question about what we mean by SPAM. Clearly, inserting marketing messages into randomly trending topics is corrosive and shows no respect for the community. Doing that when the topics were the first voices of dissent from Iran was just plain dumb.
But what about creating a trending topic with an incentive? If giving away three laptops may get you millions of mentions, then you can certainly imagine why moonfruit might think they want to do it. But noise doesn’t mean interest or relevance, and is this the sort of noise you want anyway, entirely free of content or motivation?
We used to do this back in the day with ‘viral’ competitions – invite five of your friends to watch our video and you’ll get five times as many chances to win. It didn’t really work then either, although for a while, it was the only real idea in town.
There are two reasons that member-get-member died out as a method to spread messages:
- The message itself got lost in the mechanic. All anyone cared about was winning the laptop, they didn’t want to know about making their own website with moonfruit
- People’s propensity to forward this crap would decrease over time as they realized that they had become the SPAMers themselves, devaluing their personal reputation in their own networks. Remember how we all pitied our contacts that would send around out-of-date or hopelessly commercial messages.
Surely the same will happen with Twitter and the rest. Who amongst us wants to be seen as being tricked into doing a marketers job for them? Or for failing to spot what are commercial messages.
It’s a bit like swine flu. You don’t want to get it yourself and you certainly don’t want to be seen to be the one forwarding it on. Catch it, kill it, bin it.
And it becomes more complex too when we think about ‘personal brands’. Just as twitter – and all that – mark the rise of the citizen journalist, citizen marketer etc, they also seem to mark the rise of the citizen SPAMer. Where does the line lie? Let’s say I’ve got a room to rent out. If I mention it once on twitter or facebook, then I am being useful. How about if I ask friends to retweet it? That’s reasonable. What about if I keep mentioning it and asking friends to retweet slight variants of the message. Haven’t I then crossed the line? What about if I’m asking for attention for my blog posts? What about if I’m talking about an ad or campaign I made at work? Even with our friends, I think the level of tollerance is low.
But it’s a line a lot more of us are going to have to recognize. People like Hugh MacLeod, brilliant though he is, are flirting with this all the time. Needing to make sure the commercial-esque messages make up the right-proportion overall, staying useful, not trying to hide the commercial messages in the ‘editorial’ ones.
It’s a line which is about how closely you are connected to the network in which you are communicating, and how well you stay in touch with what they care about.
Can brands make these approaches work today? I’d say Habitat’s approach is a definite no, Moonfruit’s a probable no, and certainly one with a limited shelf life.
Of course, this is not really new information. There is little substitute for actually doing the work of getting involved in the market as a collection of human beings:
‘Markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked. (Cluetrain, 1999)
Hierachy of feeds
I’ve gotten into a bad habbit. Recently, I’ve found myself only wanting to write about topics when I can think of a good headline. Which reminds me, a new high-watermark was set by a genius in the copy-editing team at the Sun this week. A front-page banner headline relating the Jacqui Smith expenses furore (over her husband claiming for some dodgy movies on a hotel bill) reads ‘The Porn Ultimatum’. The Sun has always had great headline writers (e.g. two previous corkers associated with the John Darwin story: ‘Canoe accompany us to the station’ and ‘The liar, the witch and the wardrobe’) but I thought this was real ‘stunna’.
Anyhow, I digress. And in fact, today’s headline is acutally more of a polish than an invention. The Innovations Diaries’ post is called ‘Hieracy of Tweets’, and it came along just as I was thinking about precisely the same issue: what have a 1940s psychologist and a 21 century microblogging service got in common?
What Innovation Diaries were talking about is the psychology of twittering. If we look at the bizarre range of stuff that comes up on the trendy microblogging site, it maps across base human desires and needs – hunger, tiredness etc – through higher-order needs such as love and belonging to the grandly named ‘self-actualisation’, relating directly to the concepts to Maslow’s famous hierachy of needs.
This connection is a very interesting one, although I think there’s actually more juice to it than you might get from the examples given in the diagram or in the post.
At the base of it, the needs themselves are real. It is not enough to talk about eating cake – people must actually eat it. Twitter’s not a lot of use for that (although let’s not rule it out: ‘CAKEIFY: just twitter with #blackforrestgateaux…’), but it can be of help at the other end of the spectrum where we’re talking about morality, creativity and problem soliving. So we can think about how people can directly meet the ‘esteem’ need or the ‘self-actualisation’ need through twitter rather than just reflect upon it.
This is an approach to planning and design in digital which we’ve been talking about for a while now, and there are some good examples of it in the wild. In a very real sense, people who are generating content for places like YouTube, or doing work with mashups in technology are squarely exercising their right to self-actualise (and, isn’t that a charmless phrase).
It’s also worth noting (as Innovation Diaries do), that not all of the base instincts are strictly physical, psyiological needs. We’ve talked here in the past about Intermittent Variable Reinforcement, the addictive property which comes from plugging yourself into a unpredicatable but constant stream of updates. Modern relationships are moving towards placing a hugely increased value on ‘ambient intimacy’ in the emotional rhomboid.
People like Forrester talk about a ‘ladder of participation‘ for social media Just like the government and parents think cannabis leads to harder drug use, the analysts believe that the internet people are weaned on a diet of commenting and rating, before eventually picking up blogging and twittering. Certainly we know from building sites and things that participation does seem to drop off in accordance with required sophistication and effort.
To mix metaphors, Twitter has arrived on the ladder at an odd time. Or perhaps blogs did. I’m certainly not saying that Twitter is low-brow, although it can be. But it requires a weird mix of low involvement and high sophistication. Twitter may be the new black, or the second coming of the messiah, but its use would appear ‘lower’ down our hierachy of needs than many more expressive and creative formats. If the conservative party weren’t so busy jumping on bandwagons, or the Daily Mail knew what it was, they’d both be criticizing it for ‘dumbing down’ social media.
A revolution that started with the highest of brows (endless blogs about politics, philosophy, (marketing) and (ahem) blogs) appears to be descending towards our more reptilian insticts.
I think the reason is that Twitter has no antecedant at all. Blogs are like articles, Facebook is like an address book (or facebook), Myspace is the teenager’s bedroom wall. But we’ve had nothing like twitter before.Were any of us taught at school to communicate in single thoughts?
Hopefully with mainstreaming of Twitter will come a rebirth of blogs and other, richer social media – a chance to get people thinking about more than one idea at time, and in more depth.
You can’t say that in 140 characters.
Managing to grow
Antony at Open has been digging into some interesting questions about the changing nature of management and providing environments for leadership in a new world. The first post deals with the concept of ‘command and control’ being dead. The second talks Shona Brown’s contribution in exactly that area to how Google organises and manages itself.
The same issue is at the heart of Ken Robinson’s excellent new book The Element which I’m half way through at the moment.
Here perhaps is the best way to phrase it: If you were going to build a company tomorrow, which had to deal with both the current economic climate, and one which would be ready to take advantage of the growth that will undoubtedly follow our current worries, how would you do it? How would you structure it, what sort of market would you want to be in and so on.
At some point, the market will pick up. God knows when that will be, but when it does I think it’s reasonable to assume we will again experience rapid and transformational expansion with some big winners and big losers (althought the losers may not have to pay the price until the next bust).
Given this position, clearly most people would pick the right ingredients to cook with: the best and brightest staff, the latest technology, perhaps a nice office in a cool part of London or New York. The finance orientated would want to find some funding that wasn’t too immediately tied to results. And cetainly, we’d want to be in a market that wasn’t too subject to regulation, and perhaps – at first at least – not too subject to competition.
There are some other important details of course: nice corner office for yourself, and lets not forget the company jet (hopefully that will come back into fashion sooner rather than later).
The real question and the one which Antony and Ken Robinson are talking about is how you would manage your team to enable both operational efficiency and innovation.
I believe the natural inclination is still to go for a model with several heads-of things, reporting lines, lots of objective setting, reporting and all that.
Are Cisco crazy when they say they are running their business through social networks? Are Google crazy when Shona Brown says the way to proceed is ‘is to avoid creating too much structure.’
Well let’s go back to the question ‘If you were going to build a company tomorrow…’ and now you can assume that no member of staff will ever make a mistake or come into the office feeling a bit lazy, or stop acting in the best interests of the company.
The idea of the ‘heads-of’ starts to look not just a bit like overkill, but also like it will stiffle the innovation which could be the difference between long-term success and failure (even as it enables the operational efficiency that delivers short-term success).
I know what you’re thinking: that’s just not realistic; our ‘top down’ methods are tried and tested.
In this post Mary Poppendieck talks about how we got to our current ‘tried and tested’ methods. These are the ‘tried and tested’ methods of Enron, of Lehman, of RBS. These are the command and control structures that will document, but not resolve, the demise of the major record labels and many national newspapers. Not a single person will be to blame but those companies will go out of business nevertheless.
We’ve seen these more loose and responsible methods already work in the most diverse of industries. In software manufacture (Agile) in product innovaton (3M) and in killing the US auto industry (Toyota).
What is the number one requirement to implement these more progressive, more responsive, more dynamic team structure? It’s not technology or infrastructure or even smart management teams. It’s the ability to have faith in (and to inspire conviction in) the whole team. It’s leadership by sharing responsibility, rather than leadership by detail.
Just because you can
I’m not a twitter expert. This seems to put me in the minority. And it’s a great thing that so many people have a view on what the microblogging service is doing in communications and how people, and companies, should be interacting with it.
Over at e-consultancy there’s been a couple of recent interesting outbreaks of expertise. The first was the victim of poor research. John Gaffney went about a critique of Walmart and Best Buy’s social media strategy. His assertion was that the brands ought to be on Twitter and were not. I’m guessing the author was probably more suprised than anyone when the first comment came from the Best Buy community editor themselves and talking about the amazing work they are actually doing. Other commentors pointed out the author himself had only been on the service 1 month and had posted 14 times. The author apologized, the editor delivered a half-hearted apology, Ashely Friedlin jumped in with something more closely resembling attrition, and the post itself was updated to recognise the error.
So far, so much schadenfreude. I’m sure Gaffney will not repeat that mistake, and I’m sure e-consultancy will in general continue to be the broadly respectable rag for news, opinion and social media that it has been to date.
The post was then followed up by e-consultancy editor Chris Lake carrying out a sort of half-arsed audit of what the biggest agencies in the UK are doing about twitter. Essentially he had taken the NMA top 50 agencies (overall) and looked to see whether they had a twitter feed under their own name. I think it would be fair to describe the research in this case as brief, consisting of how many followers and posts each account has and so on.
Without wanting to repeat the debate which became lengthy, the point emerged fairly quickly that agencies (like mine which is in the list) have often started out with a company feed, only to move to individuals twittering under their own names fairly quickly. I think it’s also fair to say that the mere presence or absence of a twitter stream does not confirm or deny a reasonable approach to the medium – just as the presence of a brain does not imply brain activity.
I sort of pointed this out on the post (and to be fair, unlike the e-consultancy twitter feed, the author was all over the replies). It has taken me a couple of days to spot the gotcha in this part of the author’s response to me:
I’ve seen thought-leadership work wonders for agencies and Twitter enables that quite brilliantly. No longer do you have to release a white paper, or in-depth blog posts, but you can communicate at a micro level on a platform that is targeted to people’s interests.
I’m sorry it’s taken me a little while to realise what is was that was jarring in the author’s response but isn’t ‘thought leadership’ something that PR people invented in the late 90s. I don’t mean promoting yourself through good ideas. I mean the concept that a single thought-leading idea will be used in marketing or PR. Isn’t is an idea precisely oriented to single-track mass media of which Twitter is the antithesis?
For me, the benefit of Twitter in terms of promoting our agency is that people can see that there is a great deal of (leading) thought going on, and they can get involved in those thoughts and start a debate. But EMC Conchango as an entity doesn’t have a single view on anything. It’s got 400 views. Some are about technology, some about society, some about e-commerce, and on and on. We’re a pretty engaged bunch and we talk about stuff a lot, so we’re often broadly in agreement on certain points but the suggestion that there is an EMC Conchango view point on anything (or indeed an e-consultancy view on anything) seems wrong to me. That would be a denail of thought, and certainly wouldn’t be an indication of our leadership position. Unless we were following the North Korea model.
Of course, one size will not fit all, and it will make sense for some organisations (especially one-man agencies – or two-man agencies where one man doesn’t have any opinions) to blog as an enttity. I for one am delighted to know that more big agencies are prefering to let staff think (and communicate) for themselves in such a personal new medium.
Switch off, tune in and chill out
UPDATE: two days after writing this (and after the event itself) I came up with a much better headline. Seems a shame not to mention it:
An hour, at a time
I don’t know about you but the things I love about London is the rare few occasions that we do something together, even if it tends to be in a slightly half-arsed way.
New Year’s Eve is like that, or being on streets of central London on Christmas day. Or the day that we all got snowed in. Or the day that the city was incredibly brave, and together and defiant of terrorists, and all those people who’d been ignoring each other on the tube for the rest of the year, walked home across the bridges and parks.
Well our friends at We are Social are asking people to talk about a similar event on Saturday, when I hope the city will do it’s kooky thing one more time for just an hour and turn off all our lights. The idea is to make the point that we know the trappings of modern life – which we take for granted – are not sustainable and we know that we willing to take action to make them so.
So please check it out, and hopefully enjoy an hour in the dark, feeling part of the solution.
(Thanks to Nic Spic for the Pic)
Status anxiety
I imagine I was not the only person struck by the media collision around the coverage of the death of Jade Goody. The last few weeks of her life were marked by a quite depressing co-dependency with a media at once uncomfortable with their proximity to the unfolding real-life anguish, and delighted by it. For everything else she was, Goody was a media phenomenon; a byproduct of an culture of instant fame and circular celebrity. Without media attention she ceased to exist and so her death, as her life, became dependent upon the publicity that made it – at times – distasteful. Like Schrödinger’s cat, the fact of her observation was thoroughly part of her entire being.
Equally, her death brought a simultaneous low point and high point for the role of things like twitter in the news media. The BBC’s official report, takes much of its content directly from Stephen Fry’s twitter feed, that many of us will have seen (as followers) many hours before. Perhaps the BBC cleared the comments for reuse. Perhaps he intended them for this very purpose, or perhaps they were idle ramblings as he tromps around the globe, but we have certainly moved away from the point where journalists would refuse to publish content which had appeared before. With over 300,000 followers, Fry practically is another media outlet in his own right.
Is Twitter itself a sea change in media?
Certainly its recent growth has been surprising. The influx of users is reminiscent of the period 18 months ago when everyone and their aunt joined up to Facebook.
It’s worth considering why it is really more than a glorified status.
First and foremost, Twitter takes more from blogging than it does from social network thinking. It is much more public. It is much more permanent (and it can be indexed by search engines). And it is being used to convey a much wider range of information. Each 140 character entry may be whimsical and often vacuous but it has the potential of being remembered and useful long after its posting.
Like blogging, Twitter is asymmetrical. Not all Twitterers are created equal. 12,000 people are following Hugh McLeod, as compared to the list he is following of just over a thousand. He may have two brains, but you have to wonder how Robert Scobble can possibly understand the stream of consciousness that comes from over 50,000 people he is following. And his audience is just as big. At this scale, Scobble’s twitter feed has at least as much influence as my local paper. And that’s just the first order influence. Twinfluence (twinfluence.com) looks at extended reach (1st and 2nd generation connections) to estimate that twitterers such as Apple evangelist and entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki can reach up to 18m people.
No wonder then that it was seized as a tool by the Obama campaign. And no wonder that so many brands are attempting to hitch themselves to the bandwagon. For both marketers and politicians the question is oddly simple: not ‘what message should I broadcast to the network?’ but ‘how can I get the network to follow me?’ – what can brands and individuals do to interest, entertain or provide utility in such a setting. For a cause like the American primary contest, this was simple (if not easy) – tapping into a huge latent demand. For manufacturers of mid-size family sedans, it will prove a little more difficult. Twitter is just another example of marketers needing to learn about the power and significance of networks. And we can certainly expect many of the same missteps. Brands will need to be prepared to listen and well as speak.
But the real question about brands in Twitter is one of personal identity formation. As Clay Shirky has noted, attention amongst (traditional) bloggers is anything but evenly spread. Rather there is a ‘power law’ distribution, with a small number of top bloggers receiving the vast majority of attention.
As a Twitter elite establishes itself, the site will continue to operate and grow dramatically on two distinct levels – as an efficient if limited social utility, and as the blogging platform of choice for fast ideas. Such thoughts may be half-cooked but they are much more accessible than multi-page blog entries (it is no coincidence that they are the right length for a single thought or link). And we now know from experience than users will at times radically reconsider their use of technology if they find it interesting or useful enough.
Would Goody approve? I think she would.
The numbers’ game
Perhaps it’s a coincidence, perhaps a conspiracy. Perhaps there’s something in the west-coast water supply but the last week or so has seen a pretty sophisticated debate break out on the use of facts and intuition in design.
- Douglas Bowman is leaving Google, having been heralded as one of the best things to happen to the search giant when he arrived in 2006. To make matters more interesting, Bowman has blogged about his reason for leaving – an excessive Google reliance on data-driven design (well, data-driven everything)
- Google themselves are flogging a new product to help everyone else become as data obsessed as they are, bringing reasonably complex multi-variant testing to a car dealership near you. This is in a market which is rapidly waking up to the user of performance tuning and management
- Everyone (and especially the Twitterati who might be expected to love it) hates the new Facebook design. Unlike v2 which was introduced in a vaguely consultative way, v3 has been foisted on all users rather suddenly, seems most to be ‘inspired’ by Twitter (which is frankly a very different beast), and jettisons many of the best features of the site. This has raised a debate about how much companies should listen to users in design.
- Apparently Steve Ballmer has been off telling people that Microsoft has a challenger advantage in search over Google, who are too set in their ways and conservative
- At the other end of the spectrum, Apple has released the frankly insane zero-button iPod shuffle. Bizarre: yes. Bold: certainly. Tasteful: perhaps.
So the question is: just how innovative can a business be by relying on data about current user behavior, rather than using creativity and instinct to come up with new things that people don’t even know they want yet. Bowman’s disquiet about Google is that the company would (for example) statistically evaluate the colour of borders or the size of buttons, making his role as head of visual design somewhat redundant but also making his aspirations – as someone who is looking to lead the market through visual design – impossible.
I think this says more about Bowman’s expectations (quote: ‘change the world a few million users at a time’) than anything that surprising about what Google does. The experiences Google are trying to enable are all about using great technology to build perfect mousetraps. The core ideas can be expressed in just a few words (“get the correct results from any search”). And I think it’s true that usability has always been much more important than visual design for the business. And, Google has always known that the user experience is as much governed by performance and quality as interface. With the exception of Chrome, all of their products have been almost deliberately ugle, liberating them to focus on function.
I’m sure too that there’s immense chortling at Google HQ about the idea that this focus on statistical research is stifling the multi-billion pound Google business, and equally that Microsoft is likely to fly right past them in terms of search. Google is synonymous with search, it is the generic, and that has everything to do with what goes in and what comes out, and very little to do with how it goes in and how it comes out.
A similar reality is starting to exist in every other area of utility-orientated computing.
Facebook has done the opposite. Zuckerberg-centred design pervades with – I presume – the rest of the user experience team bowing not to statistics but to the great one and his views. Of course, time – and numbers – will be the judge, but it seems odd that Facebook has thrown out many of its best features and endorsed the micro-blogging format, just as that market become more competitive and challenging.
What Facebook appears to have lost, is its principles. Google’s area is straight-forward: ability to find, or ubiquitous access. Facebook’s used to be about enabling connections in groups. What are they now?
Whilst Microsoft’s ambitions for search seem unrealistic, there is a strong case to make that this unlikely candidate has the best overall approach to design.
Creating some of the most complex products in digital (Windows and Office), Microsoft has found a way to combine imagination, principles, many types of user research and engineering to produces fantastic products. I’ve posted the Jensen Harris Mix presentation before but it remains well worth a watch. An understanding of the core user behaviors gave rise to an overall framework for the application, which then used ethnography, user research and the amazingly detailed data from the customer experience programme to really find out what people do. Do we need a ‘save’ button if everyone uses CTRL-S? In fact we do because many actual users don’t use quick keys. Customization may seem like a neat solution to a complex problem, but we actually learn that only a tiny proportion of users ever turn it on.
Similarly, the Windows 7 team has done a great job (yes, an overdue one), of informing their design decisions through detailed understanding of customer behavior, but without just asking users to do the design for them. The team’s detailed analysis of problems (and again, understanding of the role of performance) is rigorous and inspiring.
Should data be at the heart of your design strategy? Yes, but it shouldn’t be the heart of your design strategy. The heart has to be the principles, and the team must believe that inspired thinking can change the game about sticking with those principles and achieving objectives. The fact that Google’s inspired thinking has almost all been in technology and architecture is besides the point. The fact that Facebook’s solution is wrong is not because they’ve ignored users, it’s because they’ve ignored users’ motivations.
Agencies and echos
Here I am in New Media Age. Always a pleasure. And this article makes a good exposition of the vast range of agencies competing in this area.
It would have been nice if they could have included the ‘However….’ after the bit where I talk about how good non-digital agencies sometimes aren’t at digital design.
Also a bit of a shame that the article somewhat uncritically peddles the Doc Marten’s work, which was exactly what I was thinking of when I wrote the ‘however’ bit.
In any case, for any of you interested to know, here’s what I originally said.
- Traditional design agencies have been busy upping their digital games over the last couple of years, and many believe their involvement in brand identity gives them an edge over their pure digital counterparts. What is your response to this?
It’s certainly true that a lot of traditional agencies are working hard to break from marketing-led and brand-led design areas into digital design. Equally, it’s obvious that they have some of the most important building blocks: passion, imagination and an understanding of their clients’ brands. However, whilst many have produced interesting work, there is still a great deal of opportunity to for most of these agencies to build out their digital capabilities and to continue to move towards more digitally-oriented thinking.
In disappointingly many cases, agencies appear to lapse into re-deploying their staff without considering the different skill sets and experience that are needed for the best digital design and strategy. And, without a fundamental shift in skills, we will too often see offline thinking brashly applied online. When all you have is hammer –as the saying goes – everything starts to look like a nail.
The most obvious change required is the understanding of digital as more than a transmission of communication messages, in which the recipient is an essentially passive observer. Instead, we must be in the business of creating and managing entire consumer experiences.
Putting the user truly at the heart of the design process, the business strategy, and innovation cycles requires a structured approach to research, evaluation and insight, sometimes overlooked in the desire to sell an image-led or communications-idea dominated campaign.
Agencies must also avoid shying away from looking hard at clients’ business realities. When the project you’re working on has a life outside of Photoshop, you need to think not just of how you will create it, but what it’s true lifespan will be: how will it be maintained, how will it impact on the business; what will the business do to make it a valuable asset?
Finally – and perhaps most surprisingly for agencies committing to the digital area – is lack of understanding of the technology itself. To be truly digital, design agencies must eat, sleep and breathe technology. They must be fascinated about what it can do and how it works, they must push the boundaries of what is possible and the experiences it can create for consumers.
- What advantages do you believe pure digital agencies like Conchango have over traditional design agencies moving into this space?
Strategic design agencies like Conchango have structured our business precisely around creating and enabling incredible customer experiences. We are not here to win petty awards but to make a real difference to how our client’s customers feel about their digital interactions. Our team comes from a very varied background. Yes, many of the team have worked in brand- or advertising-led businesses. Others may be user-experience specialists, experts at experience planning and management, experts in business change, or technology specialists. Our ambition for bringing this eclectic team together is to transform our clients’ digital customer experiences. And so we are aligned behind that single goal, in a way in which we believe some traditional design agencies will find it difficult to do.
- What do you think the biggest challenge is for traditional design agencies trying to grab a slice of the digital pie?
Design agencies are a varied bunch and the challenges will vary widely. Many will need to seriously rethink how they use research. Some will need to look at their skills in interaction design or technology. Others will need to think about how they plan for experiences which have extended life spans. Whilst adding new disciplines, agencies must work hard to make the most of the skills that already exist: quality visual design, quality copy production, client management and so on, without trying to merely roll them across to the digital space.
- What do you believe we will see in 2009, in terms of how this landscape will evolve?
There will be a polarization, as there was in 2000/2001. Design agencies must either get serious about digital or get out of it all together. Getting serious will require investment and a willingness to undergo a change in culture. But, in a market where supply outstrips demand (especially at the bottom end), agencies still dipping their toes in the digital pond will find it is time to refocus on their areas of strength.
The complexity of digital thinking and digital design will continue to increase over the next 12 months, accelerating in line with dramatically shifting patterns of consumer behavior and significant increases in sophistication across many technology areas. It’s an incredible space to be working in, but agencies must be driven by more than a motivation to get where the budgets are going.
A funny thing happened on the way to the forum
In the last post, I talked a bit about the new Skittles site. This post really comes by way of an apology for a small experiment I ran following that post, and a couple of unexpected observations that came out of it.
The experiment was to try and take over the twitter search feed which had previously been (all of) the Skittles new ‘social media concept’ home page. The idea was to turn it into a large advert for something other than Skittles. As alluded to by Amelia , I could have chosen a a very ‘specialist’ or even offensive product. Instead I went for a simple, delicious and peanutty competitor, Reese’s Pieces - not least because I’m mildly addicted to them.
Unfortunately by this stage, the Twitter feed was no longer the site’s home page (instead being relegated to the ‘chatter’ section). Something tells me it might quietly disappear altogether fairly soon.
Frankly, it was very easy to do. Indeed, it could easily be accomplished using brute force alone. All you need to do is set up a twitter account and constantly repost comments about your product with the word ‘skittles’ (not even the hash tag) in them.
So far, so good. I coloured it up a bit by also creating an identity for my product and an appropriate little picture.
Manually putting the posts in is a bit dull so I set up a (google) app engine page to do it, using one of the Twitter APIs. That sounds fiddly but actually wasn’t much more complex than adapting some code samples from the web. App engine itself is relatively easy to understand, and it’s free.
I’d originally plalnned to post ‘Personally I prefer Reese’s Pieces to Skittles’ at regular intervals. GAE doesn’t currently have prebuilt fixed interval event calling (what’s called CRON) although this approach would still have been easily done. Instead, I turned it into a poll, where other users would click on a link saying, basically, ‘click here if you prefer RP to Skittles’. Each time it was clicked, the poll question was reposted.
And that was it. Every post on the Skittles chatter page for most of the weekend was someone saying they prefer a competitor product, and showing a picture of it.
There were a couple of issues, aside from being pointless. Firstly,Twitter limits tweets per hour which made the page hijacks bunch up a bit (although, again, I can think of multiple straight-forward solutions, if this were a serious attempt to cause trouble).
Secondly, someone – perhaps Mars or their agency, perhaps Twitter themselves, perhaps a search engine or a spammer was following posted links automatically – leading to loop that would ‘vote’ for RP every second or so – until tweet sending per hour was reached. Again, this could be easily fixed for a proper attempt to regulate the flow.
Was it vandalism? It certainly looked like it on their site, but really that is more a reflection of the Skittles’ approach. The way Twitter search works means that a feed with no followers, which is only a few minutes old, can dominate the search results. There is no inbuilt mechanism in this sort of setup to infer the authority of the post or the poster.
Clearly I was being a pain deliberately but there can’t ever be a reason why a lonely twitterer shouldn’t be able to say what they want to themselves (bear in mind that ReesePieces1, my Twitter identity had zero followers for most of the experiment – although even this bizarre character picked up three SPAM followers in a couple of days). And Skittles can scarcely object to their customers using the brand name – that’s the entire premise of this whole stunt.
So, my apology is to anyone who found the experiment intrusive or annoying, although it certainly showed what I wanted to test.
Whilst I’ve found the whole Skittles site launch most peculiar, it has been interesting to watch both the reaction to it, and the variety of thinking about what it means.
For me, the most telling aspect has been the brand’s reaction to trouble. Having Twitter as the dominant social media format certainly was quite brave. When that started going wrong, they switched to Wikipedia. Well it didn’t talk about deviant sexual practices, but you’d have to conclude that no one at the agency had really read it.
This is what it said at launch:
Skittles is a brand of chewy fruit candies produced and marketed by Mars, Incorporated. They have hard sugar shells which carry the letterS. The inside is mainly sugar and hydrogenated vegetable oil along with fruit juice, citric acid and natural and artificial flavors.
…..
Since then, the main Wikipedia entryhas been toned down a bit (by the agency?) and the Skittles.com links to Wikipedia have been updated to point at this bland varieties page. The Skittles.com home page now points to the brand’s YouTube channel (the area they control most) and shows the brand’s TV ads… which is exactly what every other ‘convenitional’ FMCG brand site is. Was it worth it?
Chasing rainbows
Listen, I’m not going to start believing my predictions. I promise. After all, one correct hit in all these years is not good odds. However, I do find it a bit spooky that I wrote this post last week talking about just how pointless FMCG-brand websites are, and how useless FMCG brands are therefore likely be on Twitter, and in less than 5 days, Skittles relaunches its site in a special efffort to prove me right. Perhaps they’re watching the house.
(For those who haven’t seen it, the site isn’t really a site, it just points at Skittles-related social media like Twitter, Wikipeida, Facebook and YouTube. The point is supposed to be that the concept of a site is becoming less meaningful and your brand should be in disparate locations. This is all true. But it doesn’t matter when you’re Skittles, because no one cares).
It also showed how mind-numbingly bored the twitter community must be. Because it properly lit up for the first time in ages. The discussion went something like this
‘What the hell has Skittles done to its site?’
‘I dunno, but if I twitter about it, I appear on it’
‘Wow that’s circular (and I also like it because I’m secretly seeking social approval because I never got picked for the football team in school)’
‘I think Skittles are shit’
‘Look, you just turned up on the Skittles site, in twitter, talking about how the Skittles site is shit because it uses twitter’
‘How post-super-modern. Now I like the Skittles site’
‘Skittles are made of dead flies’ eggs’
‘Now it says ‘skittles are made of dead flies’ eggs’ on the Skittles’ site’
‘Blah’
‘Blah’
‘Blah’
‘Blah’
‘Blah’
‘Blah’
‘Blah’
‘Blah’
‘Blah’
‘I wish everyone would stop taling about Skittles’
‘I wish everyone would stop taling about Skittles’
‘Talking about not talking about Skittles is actually talking about Skittles’
etc
Now.
Stop and think. Put yourself in a deep state of reflection. Imagine the quiet trickle of a river. Forget all about microblogging. And ask yourself: are you going to buy any more Skittles? If you only had slightly old cheese and Skittles in the house, which would you eat? Do you believe Skittles are healthy? Would you give them to your three-year-old child?
Thought so.
It would be somewhat better if the idea was new. But it’s such a clear rip off of the Modernista! site from last year that I’m suprised they even changed the colours.
It’s not just proof of how redundant FMCG brand websites are, it’s an admission of the fact, by an agency. Otherwise it wouldn’t be an improvement to have one replaced by… nothing at all. The agency hasn’t even put up marketing messages for the individual brands – instead showing Wikipedia pages (as, ahem, predicted by Mystic Meg here). Jesus guys, at least string the client along a little bit. Or is this your big ‘going out of business’ sale?
And of course today, there will be loads of interest on the twitter search. But what happens tomorrow when everyone’s moved on? They’re not coming back!
The problem isn’t that people don’t like Skittles. I happen to hate them. But, I do have an unnaturally strong affection for Reese’s Pieces, and even that doesn’t get me looking the little beauties up on Twitter. I never ever think: ’Hmm, I wonder what people are saying about Reese’s Pieces today?’ (Incidentally, and to save you the bother, the answer is nothing much: 5 tweets in 24 hours. Altough there is a quite a vibrant Maltesers discussion going on 
).
The biggest conflict here is between the words in the phrase ‘digital creative agency’. Agency means you have to charge your client for doing something they couldn’t perfectly well do themselves, creative should mean ‘new ideas that add value’ (thank you Ken Robinson) but acutally ends up meaning ‘suprising or pretty ideas’, and digital means (has come to mean) that you can’t buy your way in very effectively. Try making a cake with that recipe.
As far as I can tell, there’s only two interesting things about this site: Why on earth it has an age restriction, and how the hell agency.com sold it to their client – why couldn’t they have put that video on the web?
Recent comments