June 10 - Tinkering

I can’t remember how many cars my parents owned during the course of my childhood, but I have vivid memories of two of them; an orange VW Beetle and a white Mini.

It isn’t that the cars themselves were particularly noteworthy, although the colour of the Beetle was definitely not what you’d consider subtle, it was the attention that my father lavished on them.

Actually maybe attention isn’t the right word. Because he was never that big on washing or polishing cars. What he loved to do was tinker with them.

On a Saturday afternoon when I was either at the football or listening to it on the radio, he’d be under the bonnet, tinkering.

The saying if it ain’t broke don’t fix it meant nothing to him. Fiddling with the carbies, adjusting the spark plugs, cleaning the air filter – he just could leave them alone.

You’re probably wondering why on earth I’m taking on this trip down automotive memory lane. Well believe it or not, it has absolutely nothing to do with cars or the automotive industry.

What prompted to think about my dad and his endless tinkering was a video that landed in my inbox that had been created to demonstrate the design changes that had been made to the YouTube website.

As I watched the video, all I could think was why? No, not why make a video, but why make so many changes that it required a video to explain them?

Not a short video either. This one ran for over five minutes.

I’m a regular YouTube visitor, as I’m sure many of you reading this column are, and I have been perfectly happy with the layout, design and usability of the site. So why change it?

And why change it so drastically? Because they can.

Sounds simplistic I know, but the catch of many of the most successful offerings of the web-2.0 era have been built on the catch cry “always in beta”.

And “always in beta” is a philosophy I work by too. At our agency we constantly test and refine our work based on results and analysis of data.

But what I’m talking about here isn’t testing and refining. It’s change for change sake. Well I think so anyway.

Of course YouTube are not alone in this. All the popular social media sites have a tendency to needlessly tinker under the bonnet.

Facebook seems to get overhauled every couple of months, much to the dismay of users. Twitter is constantly fiddling with things and even Foursquare, a relatively new social offering, has recently had a revamp.

As a regular user of the above mentioned social media sites I consider myself a brand advocate. And every time they go and mess with their design or usability I consider it a bad brand experience.

So I decided to write about this on my BrandDNA blog. Suffice to say my post received some interesting and passionate comments, including this one from Lauren Brown, who blogs as She Sees Red;

“Considering the internet is such a public space - maybe not by technical ownership, but certainly by modes of engagement, it disturbs me that there is this constant flip.

Like continual renovations or redecorating your local train station - nice in theory, but when you just wanna be able to buy a ticket and run onto the platform before the doors shut, annoying.



I would like to see a little more conversation about changes happening - like a DA notice or something. Most of the time I probably won't care and will adapt, but it's nice to know, prepare, or at least forget and remember again. 


Personally I think unnamed, unspoken changes to sites that leverage their power on their “social media überlord status” does have a whiff of arrogance about it.”


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She sees Red

May 10 - Engaging consumers

Many years ago, brands spoke to us via advertising and generally we believed what they had to say. And why wouldn’t we, when they spoke to us via the omnipresent box that sat in the corner of every lounge room.

We swallowed hook line and sinker the promise of fun in the sun from Coke, the virtues of hard work and mateship celebrated by Victoria Bitter and the international jet-setting lifestyle of a popular cigarette brand.

Today however things are a little different. Not simply because of the internet, but the unimaginable connectedness of people it has given rise to. I’m talking of course about social media.

Thanks to the likes of Facebook and Twitter, people are more connected than they have ever been. The concept of losing touch with someone, no matter how close you may or may not be to them, is completely unimaginable to the youth of today.

Once you’re hooked up with someone via Facebook, you’re connected forever. Unless you have a falling out and delete them as a friend, obviously!

I can’t remember the names of most of my classmates from my final year at school. Mind you it was a long time ago. Kids today however will stay in touch with school friends, however loosely, for life thanks to Facebook.

It has become an important source of information and recommendation for people. So much so that people are putting less and less trust in the messages spouted by the brands their parents trusted.

In fact, according to Mike Arauz, a Strategist at Undercurrent in New York, “There is no longer any interaction that an individual may have with a brand or service that is disconnected from the people they know.”

Given the sheer number of brands setting up Facebook Fan Pages you have to wonder how much longer social media can sustain itself as a place where friends gather. Once it becomes overrun with ads (or ads that don’t appear to be ads) will people move elsewhere?

I reckon they will.

Regardless of which social network people use, they will always trust the recommendations of their friends. Or will they?

I thought they would, but it appears this may not actually be the case. According to the 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer report, we seem to be putting a lot less faith in the opinions of our network of friends than we did two years ago.

Why?

I’m not sure exactly, although I suspect it may have something to do with the impact of the global financial crisis. With job security weighing heavily on peoples’ minds, they tend to turn to authority figures for reassurance.

According to Patricia McDonald of BBH Labs, “In difficult times, we are drawn to authority: we want there to be expert opinions and definitive answers.”

If this is in fact true, why are we putting less trust in our personal networks?

McDonald believes that, “As the network expands, connections weaken.” I think she may be onto something here. A girl who works occasionally in a friend’s fashion store told me she has over 2,000 Facebook friends.

2,000! That’s just ridiculous. However it may explain why people are not putting as much trust in their network as we imagined; their networks are becoming so large that close friends only make up a small part of it.

Which presents a bit of a quandary for marketers and a tremendous opportunity for switched on agencies.

If people don’t trust brands like their parents did, and if people don’t trust their social network like current wisdom says they should, then how on earth do brands engage with consumers?

Answer that question and you should be able to name your own salary or set up an overpriced consultancy. Just don’t expect your social network of peers and colleagues to recommend you.

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Mike Arauz

BBH Labs

Edelman Trust Barometer

April 10 - Changing habits

When I first started my BrandDNA blog I was an avid reader of advertising and marketing blogs. Over time I built a repertoire of blogs that I visited on a daily basis.

If a particular blog had not published new content on the day I visited, I made sure I went back for another look later in the day.

I did this because blogs were a constant source of news, information and opinion on the industry in which I work.

What I really loved about blogs however, was that I was able to comment on them. This meant I was able to engage in a dialogue with the publisher of the content.

Not only that, but commenting also enabled me to debate issues with other commenters as well.

Blogging truly was a whole new way of publishing. One that sought opinion from the reader and encouraged interaction between reader and publisher and amongst the readers themselves.

Fast forward a mere four years and social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook have changed everything for me. A change of habit summed up perfectly by this quote I found on the web by Josh Miller;

“In the past, people would blog about a topic they thought was interesting. Now they just link to it on their Twitter. They do this also in place of comments since the Tweet will contain a comment.”

So what does the future hold for blogs, with more and more of the industry thinkers I respect shifting from longer opinion pieces on blogs to short snatches of thought via Twitter?

J. Paul Duplantis, from Quired, took a look into the future and came up with this insightful question; “Fast forward 5 years and tell me people are going to still login into 20 different networks to post?”

Obviously 20 network sounds like an exaggeration, but I’m pretty sure I have login names and passwords to close to that many social media and other online platforms.

In the future, people will, says Duplantis, “Post from their own website which will feed out to 20 different networks. Comments will be pulled in to the main website from all of the networks which will carry their branding and possibly their advertisers.”

This is already happening, believe it or not. The best, and most obvious example, is Google. My Google login and password work for a number of sites and services. As do my MSN and Apple account details.

So, if Duplantis vision is realised, and I suspect it pretty much already is, commenting on and reading blogs may actually become more commonplace in the future. As we consolidate our reading repertoire into our preferred social media channel.

The only thing preventing this from happening at the moment is the rise and rise of Twitter.

Of course many industry people, myself included, use Twitter as a source of links to information and opinion. But not everyone does.

Spend a couple of minutes in the “general” Twitter stream and you’ll soon discover that 90% of the people on Twitter are talking absolute crap about absolutely nothing. All be it in 140 character chunks.

But then most of us never visit the rest of Twitter. We stick to our followers and followees. People like us.

But even these people, smart as they are, have less to say in 140 characters than they do on a blog. Leading Russell Davies, the Godfather of marketing blogging, to say this;

“We were seduced by the speed and reach of twitter and started putting our fragments there instead. But bits of thought on twitter are ephemeral, they slip away from us.

Whereas on a blog a fragment of thought is pinned down, tagged, permanent and can become part of a larger body of accreted thinking.”

If Russell is right, and he usually is, blogging will be around for a long time. It just needs us to find a way to fit it back into our daily schedule.

March 10 - Things change

Many of my clients didn’t understand what a blog was when I set up BrandDNA about four years ago. In fact many of them thought I’d created some kind of online diary.

Of course this was what most people thought a blog was when the concept of a weblog, to give it its full name, was first launched.

In 2010 however, blogs are commonplace. I doubt anyone would not know what a blog is. In fact the only question about blogs these days is whether they are personal blogs or corporate.

How much longer blogs remain part of our media repertoire is open to debate. Five years ago I read a lot of blogs every day. Most of them via my RSS feed.

But not anymore. I haven’t looked at my RSS reader since the Christmas holidays. Nowadays I spend a lot of time on Twitter and most of the blogs I visit I discover via links posted by my Twitter friends.

The thing is, this shift in my online reading routine has happened without me actually noticing it. I’d thought that my social media habits were pretty stable. Yet on closer examination they are constantly changing.

It seems that each time I adopt a new social media tool it impacts on the others. Some amount to no more than a passing fad. Others have impacted heavily on my media consumption as well as my day to day life.

I was an early adopter of the online photo website Flickr. Yet I haven’t posted a photo there in close to two years.

Why?

Because once I got involved with Facebook I started posting photos there instead.

I was sceptical of Facebook at first. I even documented my first few months as a Facebook user in this column. Yet I quickly became a convert, adopting it into my regular social media routine after just a few weeks.

When Twitter came along I resisted that too. So much so that I proudly displayed an anti-Twitter badge on my blog. Eventually, after chats with a couple of my social media friends, I decided to give it a go.

Suffice to say this also impacted on my social media habits. In fact you could say it consumed them. The more I used Twitter the less I looked at Facebook. After a month of Twitter I had lost interest in Facebook completely.

However, because of Twitter, I also found myself visiting a lot less blogs than I used too. As I mentioned earlier, this is primarily because I now visit blogs by clicking links in Twitter rather than actively seeking them out.

Over the last few months my social media habits have started to change again.

I now have connections with such a large number of people on Twitter that it has almost become a broadcast medium for me. The people whose tweets I used to read religiously have been swallowed up in my ever expanding list of followers and followees.

Meanwhile my long neglected Facebook account has been rediscovered anew. I don’t know why, but I’ve started enjoying it all over again. I suspect it may be because it is more intimate than my cluttered, noisy Twitter feed.

And as I write this column, I have two new social media tools to play with - Google Wave and FourSquare. Both of them at this stage are sitting unused and unloved. I doubt this will be the case for long though.

Feb 10 - Interactive TV

When I was living in the UK a few years back, MTV regularly broadcast shows where the audience was encouraged to interact, and seemingly participate, with a show by sending text messages.

During the course of the programme, the text messages ran across the bottom of the screen. Much like the news feed used by CNN and other news channels these days.

More recently I’ve noticed this type of viewer interaction has shifted from text messages to Twitter. From Masterchef to New Inventors, if you logon to Twitter during any popular TV show you will always find people commenting on aspects of the show.

As yet, this Twitter stream is not being utilised by the TV networks, but it can’t be far away. In fact, I predict that coverage of the next federal election will almost certainly feature a Twitter stream scrolling across the bottom of the screen.

The best use of Twitter/TV interaction at the moment is the ABC’s panel discussion programme Q&A. Throughout the show viewers are invited to add the programme’s hash-tag, #qanda, to their tweets about the show.

By entering the hash-tag #qanda into the Twitter search function, users are able to follow a stream of Q&A related tweets. For me, and many others I’m sure, this greatly enhances the viewing experience.

It does, however, require you to watch TV and follow Twitter at the same time. Some people might roll their eyes at the thought of that, but it’s probably a lot more common than you realise.

In a study conducted by YouTube in December of last year, 36% of broadband users in the UK said that they had the TV and internet on in the same room every day.

On weekdays, the time when this TV/internet multitasking was most likely to happen was 8pm. Ask any TV executive and they’ll tell you that’s primetime in TV land.

So if primetime TV is also the time when around a third of people are also on the internet, how much longer can it be considered primetime? Unless of course you are able to create TV programming that utilises the web to expand or enhance viewing.

This type of viewing has given rise to the term continuous partial attention. This is a much more accurate description than multitasking I think.

When you multitask you are focussed on doing more than one thing and doing it well. When I “watch and web”, my attention is on both media, but with constantly varying levels of attention.

The best explanation of continuous partial attention comes, I think, from noted technology writer and consultant, Linda Stone;

“Continuous partial attention is motivated by a desire to be a live node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.”

So why do so many of us feel the need to do many things at once, when we could be relaxing? According to Stoner, “We pay continuous partial attention in an effort not to miss anything.”

Of course it could easily be argued, that doing multiple things at the same time, that none of them are getting the attention they deserve. Given the disposable nature of much TV programming, I doubt that’s really a problem.

If it is a problem, and I’m not convinced that it is, then how do we explain the success of the interaction between Q&A viewers and twitter? I suspect it comes down to the audience of the show.

Q&A is intelligent television. It is a programme that generates debate. By encouraging viewers to tweet, it is inviting them to become participants in the show.

Obviously they’re only participating with other viewers. But I’m sure it won’t be long until Q&A style twitter streams become commonplace for many of our TV shows.

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Linda Stone

Q&A

Jan 10 - It ain't easy

When I began writing this column over two years ago, there was very little if any coverage of blogs in the advertising or marketing press.

Whether it’s the growth in importance of social media, the explosion of interest in Facebook or the latest celebrity to hop onto the Twitter bandwagon, I learnt about it all by reading blogs.

Which is one of the reasons why I pitched the idea of an agency blog to our management team at Wunderman.

Given the success and wide readership base of my personal blog, the agency was very keen to pursue the idea. Which we did.

We learnt a great deal developing our agency blog. I thought I’d share some of our experiences with you.

The first thing I did before pitching the idea, was to put together a list of my favourite agency blogs, with the always enjoyable Wieden & Kennedy London at the top of that list.

Their blog has a charming DIY feel, with short posts about the day to day goings on at the agency. It captures, I think, what it’s like to work at W&K London.

Sadly our attempt at a blog turned out to be anything but.

So where did we go wrong? Well first up we gave our designers too much leeway with the build and design.

Blogs don’t need flashy design. Blogs don’t need stuff that’s going to impress other web designers. Blogs need nothing more than good content and storytelling.

Ours was beautifully designed. It looked, if I say so myself, pretty damn slick. It had lots of little design touches.

Problem was, behind the beauty lay a backend that was far from intuitive, even for a seasoned blogger like myself. Which meant that posts to the blog became less and less frequent.

Not because we had less and less to say, but because it was so bloody tricky to actually post something. As a result, our blog started to gather dust. And after just six months I made an executive decision to shut it down.

As the guy who dreamed up the idea of an agency blog, this was not an easy decision to make. And yet it was, because the blog we had built, was not the blog we wanted to build.

So, unbeknownst to anyone at the agency, I set about creating the blog I had always envisioned. My starting point was, as it had been all along, the Wieden & Kennedy London blog.

They used a free blogging software rather than a custom created website. So I followed their lead, and set up a new version of our blog using Google’s free blogging software package.

This took no more than about 15 minutes! I then chose a clean, simple design template from one of the many available from Google. This took about 5 minutes. Next step was to create a masthead. This was as simple as cutting and pasting the masthead from the original blog.

And so our blog, which we had named Wunderings, was born again.

Over the next few months I posted several snippets and photos capturing day to day life in our agency. Other than my creative partner, no-one at the agency knew I was doing this.

When the blog was three months old, I began to drop hints about its existence. Obviously curiosity got the better of many of our staff, who searched for Wunderings on Google, and fell in love with it.

I’m proud to say our blog is now thriving. It is, as I always intended, a window into the day to day life of Wunderman in Australia.

Candidates at interviews have remarked on it. All staff contribute to it. And best of all, it helps position our agency as a great place to work at (and with).

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Wunderings

Nov 09 - Stan's rant

About eighteen months ago I wrote a column about young people using blogging and other forms of social media to break into advertising and marketing. This piece came about as a result of a couple of emails I had exchanged with Julian Cole.

At the time, I described Julian as an aspiring marketer and Monash Uni student. He now works at an agency in Sydney, still finds time to write a popular blog and is also the driving force behind the Australia’s Top Marketing Blogs list.

After thinking back on my email exchanges with Julian, I starting looking into what had become of some of the other young hopefuls I’d mentioned in that column from last year.

Back then Sam Ismail had unsuccessfully applied for an internship at Saatchi & Saatchi in London, and chronicled his struggles via social media. He’s now working as a strategist at one of London’s leading digitally focussed agencies.

Hong Kong born Gwen Yip was the other notable wannabe to appear in my column. She too has done well since I wrote about her, having had not one but two illustrated books published. She has also recently been awarded the 2009 Hong Kong DesignSmart Young Design Talent Award.

Sadly, I suspect that Julian, Sam and Gwen may go on to prove exceptions rather than the rule.

For every talented young person out there using social media to get noticed and get ahead, there are many who may not be quite as talented as they think they are.

It’s a harsh comment to make, I know. But as a veteran of both the ad industry and the world of blogging I believe my observation is far from unjust.

Advertising and marketing are difficult fields to break into. So in theory those who write blogs about it should be well placed to get noticed by prospective employers.

The problem is, as I see it, many young people think that taking pot shots at industry institutions via a blog is a viable route into the business. It’s not. Well not in my opinion anyway.

Anyone can start a blog. It requires no skill or money to do so. Yet some people think this is their first step to fame and fortune or at the very least a well paying job in marketing.

Starting a blog was not the reason Julian, Sam and Gwen got to where they are. They got there because they’re talented and smart. They used blogs as a way to help them get noticed.

Many of the wannabes writing blogs at the moment seem to think that having a blog makes them important. It doesn’t. Unless of course the blog is regularly read by important people in the industry. Which it generally isn’t.

How do I know this?

Because most senior marketers are not regular blog readers. Most senior ad agency execs don’t read a lot of blogs either. It’s a cliché I know, but they’ve generally got more important things to do.

If these people were regular readers of industry blogs, and on the lookout for someone to hire for a junior position, I suspect the following attributes would not be on their shopping list:

Someone who can’t spell despite having a spell checker built into their computer.

Someone whose grammar is so bad that many of their sentences do make sense.

Someone who claims to be an expert in an area in which they have absolutely no practical experience.

Someone who vehemently criticises the industry and the people who work in it.

Someone who rants about how employers need to bow to them rather than the other way around.

Well that’s my opinion anyway. And like the very people I have just criticised, I am prepared to use it. Perhaps I’m wrong. I’d like to hope I am. But sadly I very much doubt it.