Digital Power Tools

Much has been made of the convergence of Search and Social of late. Generally the frame of reference is somewhat limited – the implications for Digital Advertising. The challenge to Marketers, though, is bigger than simply to adjust allocations of the 1%-8% of total ad spend that might flow to Digital.

Search + Digital constitute Digital Power tools for consumers – and game changers for Marketers trying to reach them.

Can you imagine buying a car, planning a vacation, shopping for a new Fridge without tapping the on-demand expertise afforded by Search and Social platforms? It’s a question we don’t even consider, because Search and Social Media are woven right into our buying process. If I was in the market for a baby stroller 20-years ago, I would have polled neighborhood parents and friends with young children, formed an opinion, reviewed Yellow Pages listings, and visited a store or two. Today, I’d still talk to friends, but I would also visit a half-dozen of the top parenting social sites and immediately access the expertise of the planet rather than rely on the smarts of my immediate community. And while I’d certainly launch a few Search queries, I’d be far more interested in the road-tested opinions of real parents than the lab-refined predictions of Google’s algorithm.

The only shocking feature of this narrative is that while my behavior as a consumer bears scant resemblance to patterns of years past, Marketers cling to the same old playbooks with marginal adjustments at best.

But Madison Avenue keeps right on ticking…

Digital Power Tools afford massive innovation opportunities for Marketers, too, but with isolated exceptions, Marketers have responded by finding new places to advertise and rarely finding alternatives to advertising. In other words, with each unit of ad inventory proving less effective, the “logical” response has been to buy more inventory. Beyond digital, even, “innovation” has focused on inventory creation, so we now can enjoy advertising on pizza boxes, coffee cups, dry cleaner bags, park benches, bathroom stalls, etc. Just this week I spotted a cement truck spinning for ESPN Radio as it poured a fresh stretch of Seattle sidewalk. How innovative, I guess.

Think Different:

The fundamental implication of Digital Power Tools is this: the historic asymmetry of information (primarily about true product cost and quality) has been obliterated. 15-years ago a consumer dared into an auto dealership with far more fear than information. Today, she struts in with the deal she wants in-hand, ready to strike a deal on the terms she wants or head elsewhere. That’s a massive power shift. And yet, have auto manufacturers fundamentally changed their go-to-market strategies? Not so much. Generally, they have simply tweaked their 30-second spots to sound a mite bit more buyer-friendly.

A Great Leap Forward:

With the altered balance of power between “buyers” and “sellers”, marketers face a profound challenge. In a world in which consumers received much of their product information from Marketers, Marketers could comfortably focus on their primary job of “Selling”. Digital Power Tools have armed Consumers with powerful information resources. The biggest challenge marketers face is to abandon outdated mental models built around uninformed consumers. In simple terms, this translates into a shift of focus from Media Efficiencies (getting the message out cheaply) to a focus on Consumers’ job of “buying”. Successful Marketing will aim to perform a service, to help consumers fulfill needs and desires. Marketers need to do more than change their ad copy. They need a whole new Playbook. And pumping display ads into Facebook is hardly the way to start.

Twitter Didn't Break the News About Discovery Gunman, People Did

I saw this Washington Post headline on Mediagazer today and it got me thinking about the way in which social media technologies are typically covered. Almost always, the coverage puts the proverbial cart before the horse. This is an artifact from the days in which broadcast media dominated and communicated information and messages in one direction only.

Simply stated, it is people, not technology platforms, that drive activity on social media. This fact is at the heart of what is so disconcerting to so many media executives about the rapid transformation their industry is undergoing at the moment. Years ago, "traditional" media companies lost control of the means of distribution of their product(s) and in recent years that control has been seized by individuals. Email, then blogs, then YouTube, then Facebook, then Twitter, and now Tumblr (?) have each in their own way facilitated this shift in control away from large media companies and toward the producers of the content/information and the individuals in the audience.

Putting a marketer's hat on for a moment, the implications for what this means for me are quite profound. I no longer can focus on a handful of points of distribution to get my messages out. I have to focus on getting it out via hundreds of thousands or even millions of points of connection and distribution. aka The Social Graph.

As this realization began to penetrate the consciousness of an increasing number of marketers, many made the mistake of assuming that the number of Twitter "Followers" or Facebook "Fans" was a useful proxy for the number of points of distribution for their messages. This was a bad idea and one that we see many of our customers moving away from.

Today, many companies that are objectively good at marketing are realizing that effective marketing in a connected, social world requires two things:

• People that are connected and influential (able to share and get others to pay attention even for 5 seconds)
• Content that's going to make influential folks feel like stars for making their friends/readers/audience think, laugh, feel, and/or take some action.

Nothing written above should be considered controversial.  Marketers have  known for ever that good content (copy, 30 second spot, etc.) is what makes advertising work.  What's different today is that it is far easier to see the difference between good content and the other stuff.  Watch what people do and who shows up.  Are people sharing it?  Is that bringing more new people to check it out?  What are they doing once they get there?  Are they passing it along as well?  Much like the impact that search has had on the way we look for and evaluate information, the social web is impacting dramatically the way we receive, filter and validate the quality of information.  Twitter and Facebook aren't causing this change, they are responding to and facilitating it.

A sharing tune-up for your pages

Here's a simple checklist to make sure that your pages are easily shareable, and "look right" when they get shared:

How do your sharing buttons look?

I'll admit, I'm not a fan of the "million tiny little sharing buttons" school.  Implement 3-4 sharing buttons, and unless you have a good reason, these should include Facebook, Twitter, and Email.  Make them a decent size; 32x32 pixels is a good starting place.  Unless user polling reveals a propensity to read the bottom line of the eye chart, that is.

Are there calls to action with regard to sharing?

When the user completes a process (e.g. a registration) is there a clear call to share this with a friend?  If you're blogging, this might actually need to show up in the middle of the page (since nobody reads past 400 words).

Are your meta headers working to your advantage?

There has been a lot of attention given to the Open Graph Protocol, and with good reason: this is what Facebook recommends for implementation of the Like button.  This includes a bunch of tags that attempt to provide a detailed description of a page or item on a page.

While this is all good, there are a few basic tags that every page should include, e.g:

<meta name="title" content="Did you have the baby yet?" />

<meta name="description" content="Trying to figure out whether Kasen James has been born yet." />

<link rel="image_src" href="http://didyouhavethebabyyet.com/images/logo.png" />

As an example of what this would look like on Facebook:

Social Media Funny Business

Humor achieves an artistic arc when it tugs at the truth as well as tickling our funny bone.

In this season when many of us take a brief vacation break, it seems fitting to share a laugh. But as Stephen Colbert so often does, there’s insight in his amusements. Social Networks – and Facebook chief among them – face a revenue problem.

To the extent that they pursue income at the expense of consumer privacy, they chase a diminishing return – building a flawed economy.

Have a laugh at the genuinely hilarious clip below:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Control-Self-Delete
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election Fox News

[via TechFlash]

...and when you return from Summer Holidays, give a thought to the underbelly of the beast: Social Media will only ever become a meaningful marketing outlet when and if a scalable monetization mechanism emerges that is not predicated on trading Personally Identifiable Information for dollars.

Remember: as far as marketing dollars are concerned, Googlemania was launched by AdWords – not an algorithm. Similarly, the innovation required in Social Media is a fundamentally new economic model. Selling ads -- and selling out users -- is not Facebook’s path to riches.

Vintage Windows 95 Ads

Can you believe it's been 15 years since the release of Windows 95? It only took 13 floppy disks to install it to your computer. Here are a few of the ads from the launch campaign.

Which one is your favorite?

"Start Multi-Tasking"

"Start Connecting"

"Start Me Up"

Data is the New Soil: Using Visualizations to Grow Understanding

With the deluge of data and metrics in business, society, and culture, people like David McCandless who have expert skills at translating data into visualizations are increasingly valuable. The insights provided in this TED Talk are a really compelling reminder of just how visual we are as a species and how our brains are hardwired to use our eyes to make sense of the world around us. Seeing talks like this get me excited to think about new ways our technology can bring key insights to sharing and social data. Exciting times.

Watch this when you get the chance!

Email: Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated

Email seems to get treated like the redheaded stepchild of the technology industry:

1. The claim is made that students currently entering college don't use email.
2. Social networks constitute more computer time than email.
3. SMS and IM seem to displace it on Mobile platforms.

I think that, like reports of Mark Twain's death, these reports communicate a shrinking of the impact of email, but are greatly exaggerated. We have seen sites where Facebook or Twitter are the most popular option for sharing content, but have also seen campaigns where email sharing is a multiple of the nearest competitor.

This really points to the need to understand your audience (and especially your influencers): depending on demographics and your mix of content, Digg, or Reddit, or Delicious might be in the sweet spot.

This points to the need for analytics: it is necessary to measure and understand the ways that influencers want to (and do) share. Strong analytics in combination with a focused call to action can incrementally increase sharing, and this increment typically results in a 2-10x return in traffic uplift (i.e. 1% sharing == 2-10% traffic uplift).

This analysis and tuning may take some effort, but the dividends can be large.