April 09 - Search gets social

Spend any time with people that work primarily in the digital media and you’ll find that their focus is extraordinarily narrow.

If it ain’t digital it ain’t worth spending time with, seems to be their modus operandi.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of doing it digital, but it’s not the solution to everything that the digerati would have us believe it to be.

Take the Yellow Pages for example. I’ve tried the online version, several times in fact, but I still prefer the book.

I’m happy leafing through the pages, scanning the ads, till I see a couple that meet my needs. As opposed to typing in a search term and having “recommendations” served up to me.

The digital divas can present as much evidence as they want about the amazing algorithms behind search recommendations, but if I wanted a recommendation I’d ask someone I trust. Not a computer.

A great case in point was when I needed to get a service done on my air conditioners during the heatwave that hit Melbourne a few months back.

Surprisingly we didn’t have a copy of the Yellow Pages book at work. So I had to resort to the online version. Which soon had me hotter under the collar than the 43-degree day I was suffering through.

Sensing my frustration, one of my colleagues asked if he could help.

I told him about my air conditioner problem and he promptly recommended a tradesman who had installed an air-con unit for him a couple of months earlier.

He told me the name. I typed it into to Google. A few minutes later I had a service call booked. Easy!

In essence, I had used what I’d call an analogue form of social media to solve my problem.

After all, social media is all about interaction and sharing with other people. Which is what I had just done. It’s just that I didn’t use a computer to do it. Although I did when it came to finding the phone number, obviously.

Which got me thinking about a way to combine social media style personal recommendations with a powerful search engine.

So I did a bit of a search using Twitter. Yes Twitter. It’s a great way to see what people are talking about.

And it seems I wasn’t the only person who had been thinking about a social media search engine combo. Apparently all the big guns in search are looking into it.

For something like this to succeed however, brands need to be comfortable with the fact that not everyone has something positive to say about them.

An interesting example of what I imagine will ultimately come to be termed social search, is Rowdii.com which originated here in Australia.

This new search engine allows you to comment on the links that are returned in a search. I gave it a plug on my blog a little while back, which resulted in some interesting comments:

“I'm curious to see if it’s gonna catch on,” wrote Morgan Coudray. I suspect he’s not the only one.

Nathan Bush also commented. He thought, “Google's system of a quick 'yay' or 'nay' to be more enticing.” However he also acknowledged that social search was, “Definitely a new trend.”

And that well known blog commenter, Anonymous, had this to say; “Makes me think we may see a Facebook search tool. Something that lets you search the web and share your results etc with friends.”

Now there’s a great idea, if ever I saw one. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if a bunch of kids are sitting in their bedrooms working on it right now.

Which brings me back to my opening comment about digital not always being the answer.

A search engine that makes recommendations based on algorithms will never be able to make suggestions to you as good as those that your friends make.

But a search engine that enables human beings to comment or make recommendations is sure to be a success. At least until the next big thing comes along!

March 09 - Tweet Tweet!

Last November I was in Sydney for the ADMA Awards. I flew up the night before the event, so that I could attend the regular Friday morning gathering of social media types at a funky little breakfast spot in Surry Hills.

One of the key topics of conversation that morning was Twitter, or more precisely why I wasn’t on it. Anyone who has ever visited my Brand DNA blog will know that it carried a badge proudly trumpeting my resistance to Twitter.

To be honest, I really couldn’t see the point of it. Who on earth would be interested in bite sized blips of mundane information about what people are up to?

How wrong could one man be?

When I got back to Melbourne I decided to take down my anti-Twitter badge and dip a toe into the waters of so called micro-blogging. Call it peer pressure. Call it professional interest. Call it curiosity. I’d call it a combination of the three!

I announced my adoption of Twitter on my blog, as well as in my Facebook status. In true social media fashion, by the end of the day my inbox was overflowing with emails notifying me about people who had started to follow my updates on Twitter.

When I got in to the office the next morning, there were even more emails. These were to alert me to new followers from the UK and USA. I’d never given time zones a second thought until that moment.

So what exactly is Twitter, I can hear you thinking. And why oh why would you want to get involved in it? To be honest, there is no definitive answer to the second question. There are quite literally hundreds of reasons to get in to Twitter.

For the answer to the first question, let’s see what Michael Stelzner, writing at Copyblogger, had to say:

“Each day 5 to 10 thousand new people join Twitter. Current estimates of total users top out around 5 million. That’s a lot of opportunity. Twitter allows you to post updates (called Tweets) as often as you want (limited to 140 characters).

When you follow other people on Twitter, you see their tweets. When they follow you, they see your tweets. It’s a constant stream of communication. The good news is you can turn it on or off as often as you like.”

Like many of the other social media tools, Twitter is proving to be invaluable for business. The great thing is, it’s still yet to attain the mainstream status that the likes of Facebook have. So you have the chance to get involved before it really takes off.”

And why would you want to do that?

According to London based digital thinker Eaon Pritchard, “Twitter is pulling away as the leading opt-in, permission based communication and listening platform.

Anytime anything is being said about your company, products, or services you can monitor it and, most importantly, respond instantly if appropriate.

In fact you can also use various freely available Twitter tools to track what’s being said about anything you fancy. Your competitors for instance.”

If the opportunities Pritchard talks about aren’t enough to get you Twittering, let’s see who else is doing it. Well me, obviously, but both Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull are onboard!

Barack Obama was a big user of Twitter during his election campaign last year. In fact a look at his use of social media in 2008 is required reading for anyone who calls themselves a marketer I think.

As you would expect, the leading minds in marketing and digital media are all Twitts. People like Guy Kawasaki, Clay Shirky and Robert Scoble are constantly posting nuggets of useful information.

Which means you can avail yourself of their much sought after opinion and thinking for absolutely nothing. Which has to be a bargain if you ask me.

And if you did ask me, I’d also tell you that I am now a Twitter convert. I have taken to it hook, line and sinker. Yet it was the way that the brand (because it is a brand, after all) positioned itself, that put me off.

Like me, you need to look past Twitter’s “What are doing?” tagline and see it for what it is. An easily accessible way to source and share valuable knowledge, 140 characters at a time.

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Copyblogger

Eaon Pritchard

Stan on Twitter

Feb 09 - Get involved

My old friend Gerry McCusker is one of the most switched on PR guys I know. His PR Disasters blog is a must read for anyone interested in just how badly PR can be handled. He recently shared this passionate rant on his blog:

“I can’t keep it in any longer! Speaking at a conference, I was asked a question from the floor that near left me speechless.”

So what was it that got Gerry so riled?

“In a room full of PR professionals, someone basically challenged the validity of my assertion that Social Media is becoming increasingly influential in issues and crisis management campaigns.

The person asked is a blog different from a website and why would anyone in business or an organisation bother with one?”

Oh to have been a fly on the wall then that question was asked.

As Gerry himself said, “How can modern communications practitioners not know the whats, whys and hows of the blogosphere?”

Sadly I don’t think Gerry is alone in his frustrations. Many of the marketing people I come into contact with at events and conferences seem to operate like it’s still the nineties.

I wonder if it’s because they feel the need to control everything? Brand guidelines and the use of trademark and copyright marks are omnipresent in today’s marketing world.

Yet what use are these brand protection devices when people everywhere are free to not only do what they want with your brand, but also publish and share their opinion for all the world to see?

I can’t remember how many ‘brand onions’ and other brand communication devices I’ve been witness to during the course of my career. The thing is with an ‘onion’ the brand is always at the centre. I just don’t think consumers think this way.

Author of The Brand Gap, Marty Neumeier, defines a brand as a person’s gut reaction about a product, service or company. Which in essence means brands mean different things to different people.

Nowhere is this contemporary approach to brand thinking more important than in the area of social media. The old methods of broadcasting messages and pushing information are no longer valid here.

Marketers entering into social media need to completely rethink their approach. They need to let go of their compulsion to push and control information and let people discover and share information for themselves.

Neil Perkin, from IPC Media in the UK, had this to say about modern marketing on his blog, Only Dead Fish; “The principles on which the networked world are based are counterintuitive to those that govern the world of industrial era mass-marketing.

That means the opposite to what we're used to. Reinventing what we know. Which isn't easy.

And if the two worlds are co-existing right now, it doesn't mean that you can fit old established practices to a new environment based on fundamentally different logic and expect them to work.”

Marketing Strategist Hugh Macleod has a lot to say about new marketing on his widely read blog, Gaping Void. He offers the following advice;

“When you’re planning how to embrace the brave new world of Web 2.0, the first question you ask yourself should not be "What tools do I use?"

Blogs, RSS, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook- it doesn't matter. The first question you should really ask yourself is how do I want to change the way I talk to people?"

In Hugh Macleod’s eyes, if you talked to people the way that advertising generally spoke to people, you’d probably get a slap in the face. Harsh but probably quite fair, me thinks.

Hugh tipped me off to a recent paper by Mark Earls and Alex Bentley, which offers this piece of advice:

“Stop thinking about marketing as something you do to people and start thinking about what you can do to help the natural pull mechanism work better.”

Which segues, I think, nicely back to the start of my column, and that person who asked Gerry McCusker about why an organisation would need a blog.

Because it helps humanise a faceless enterprise. Which gives people something to talk about. And whether or not it is an important part of the marketer’s arsenal, it is part of social media - and so should every marketer be.

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Gerry McCusker

Neil Perkin

Hugh Macleod

Dec 08 - Business of blogging

A couple of months back I was interviewed by a journalist who was researching an article about business blogging. I thought he was interested in talking to me because of this column.

Turns out he had seen my blog, Brand DNA, and wanted to talk to me about it, why I blog and to get my thoughts on business blogging.

It made for an interesting chat, although I can’t say that he would have gleaned anything useful from talking to me. You see I started my blog for fun and I write it for fun.

Brand DNA is a place for me to ramble about advertising, marketing and related topics. The sort of stuff I do every day at work to be honest, except I get to share these thoughts with the whole world.

Surprisingly for me, there are people out there in the world who seem to enjoy my rants and rambles. Quite a few of them actually. Which makes finding the time the post something to the blog each and every day worthwhile.

At no stage did I set out to achieve anything with my blog. In fact I’m surprised that I continue to write regularly for it after two and a half years.

I think the fact that I set up DNA simply because I could, is what keeps me going. I do it because I enjoy it. Simple as that. At no stage did I set out to make money from my blog.

Which brings me to the one thing that bugs me about so many blogs today (and believe me I read a lot of them) is that they are written with the sole intention of making money.

There are even blogs out there that are devoted to helping bloggers make money from their blogs.

These blogs are incredibly popular. Whether or not the blogs that use their advice are just as popular I do not know.

But how could you fail with great advice like; “How to write a killer headline”, “Double traffic to your site”, “Make money from adwords”, “Earn a living off your blog”.

Of course as soon as someone found a way to monetise blogging, along comes a ranking system. A list that says one blog is more important than the other.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m as much of a fan of lists as the next man, but to me all blogs are created equal. I don’t rank them, I simply enjoy them. And, of course, join in conversations with fellow readers by commenting.

Having said all that, I was very excited to find out that I’d made Julian Cole’s list of Australia’s Top Marketing Blogs. My blog also made an appearance in Brad Howarths list of Australia’s Best Business Blogs.

Thing is I never ever considered Brand DNA to be about marketing or business, even though I write regularly about those topics. Or could it be that I know enough about those topics that what I consider to be opinionated rambles are actually educated opinion pieces. Who knows?

What I do know is that the blogs I read are written in a variety of styles about all sorts of topics. The only thing they have in common is that most of the people who write them are voicing opinions that would not have been able to be voiced without digital technology and the internet.

The great thing about being a blogger is you get to know lots of people who are more than happy to share their knowledge and opinions with you.

If you’re thinking about starting a blog, feel free to email more if you need help or advice. I’d be happy to help. To get you started, here’s some great advice from Brad Howarth;

“Post often, and post well. Give your readers a reason to come back regularly.
Acknowledge other bloggers and sources of information.

Try to avoid writing about things that are outside of your specialisations just because they are popular topics.

Don’t be afraid of using images, audio and video content to spice things up, and make yourself a resource for people interested in your areas of specialisation.

Never ever, ever, ever, be anything other than upfront with your readers. Readers can switch off instantly, but their scorn can last a lifetime.”

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Business Blogs

Brand DNA

Nov 08 - Getting Social

Stop any person in the street, ask them what advertising is, and chances are they’ll not only tell you, they’ll also have an opinion on it.

Ask that same person about social media, and there’s every possibility they’ll look at you like you had just asked them the square root of 347.

Of course social media and social networking are two of the marketing buzz-terms of 2008, but are we as an industry perhaps getting a little over excited by them?

I think we may be.

I’m not saying they’re not important or useful as marketing tools. I’m just saying that the average person in the street isn’t as aware or involved in social networking sites as we might think.

In fact, a recent survey by marketing intelligence group, Synovate, found more than half they people surveyed had no idea what social networking was. A similar survey conducted in April this year by Universal McCann also found social networking to be a minority activity.

Greg Verdino, from US agency Crayon, blogged on this subject recently. “Just because blogs, vlogs, virtual worlds and mobile social software might be woven into the very fabric of our day-to-day lives,” wrote Verdino, “doesn’t mean that any of these things have actually mainstreamed.”

When he uses the word ‘our’ Verdino is talking about thought leaders in marketing and the blogosphere. Not the populace at large.

“We're trying new things, overdosing on them and writing them off as yesterday's news long before the more typical consumer has even heard of them,” says Verdino.

“Take social networking for instance. Who among you doesn't at least have a Facebook profile? But imagine you're on a crowded train. Odds are the person sitting next to you couldn't tell you the first thing about MySpace or Facebook.”
I’m not completely sure I agree with Greg Verdino to be honest.

Whilst I don’t doubt that a large percentage of people may not have MySpace or Facebook accounts, that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t participate in social networking.

As Chris Grayson from Gigantico points out, “We are too close to it.”

For him, the most popular and widely used examples of social media applications are email and instant messaging! “The people you really know,” believes Grayson, “are in your phone list.”

For the go-getters at the vanguard of social media however, everyday tools like email and the phone are old hat.

But when you stop and think about it, you can share just as much information and conversation with your friends using email and phone as you can with a Facebook account. It’s just that Facebook makes it so much more simple.

So perhaps the Synovate survey is wrong. Maybe most people are social networking, they just don’t do it using the latest hip new web 2.0 gizmos. Which is a bit of a shame, as applications like MySpace and Facebook really do facilitate social networking.

What the experts are slowly starting to realise though, is that these new technologies are actually taking us back to the so called good old days.

Writing on the One Size Fits One blog, Anjali Ramachandran says, “Social networks like Facebook and Twitter have basically taken the social system back to the period of small-town life when everyone knew what you were up to all the time.”

“Most of the people we know,” argues Ramachandran, “or at least those that we interact with on a regular basis are likely to be on Facebook.

At the end of the day, your life is most impacted by those people. So even though I am not super active on Facebook or LinkedIn anymore, I still maintain my profiles, because that's where my friends are.”

That’s also the case for me too.

The days of checking Facebook on a regular basis are long gone. But check it I do, because it brings my friends from near and far together in the one place. The same with my teenage daughter and MySpace.

As Chris Grayson says, “What these sites are brimming with are happy loyal members of tight-knit online communities.

When you’re on most of these sites, they ask in your user profile whether you wish to share your website URL, your email address and instant messenger identities.

But the true lesson to be learned from these sites is that, irrespective of technology, content is still king.“

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Greg Verdino

Chris Grayson

Anjali Ramachandran

Oct 08 - Express yourself

As a teenager I was one of the first kids to be allowed to use a calculator at school. I remember my Dad grumbling on and on about how he knew all his times tables by the time he started school. And how our generation had it all so easy.

These days calculators are commonplace. I have one built in to my computer, a scientific one in my iPhone and I also have one gathering dust in my desk drawer. That’s not to say the calculator is not a useful tool, it’s just that we take their existence for granted.

Clay Shirky touches on the idea of ubiquitousness in his book, Here Comes Everybody. His primary focus however is not the calculator, but the internet, and its ability to give everyone, well everyone with access to a computer anyway, a voice.

A professor at NYU, Shirky has consulted on the social and economic effects of the internet for the likes of Nokia, Proctor & Gamble, News Corp. the BBC and Lego. He’s also an in demand public speaker and a couple of months ago gave a talk in London, which was documented by Russell Davies on his blog.

In the eyes of Davies, Clay Shirky said something he believes we all need to hear. “The most profound thing that's happened with all this internet and media stuff is this; fifteen or twenty years ago, if you'd wanted to say something in public, to the world at large, you couldn't. You just couldn't do it.”

Since I read Russell’s post I’ve been wracking my brain trying to dispute this argument, but to no avail. The only thing I could think of was writing a letter to the editor of the newspaper. But even then there’s no guarantee that your opinion will appear or that it will appear unedited.

Says Shirky, “You always had to get access to someone else's media machine. You had to persuade your way or buy your way into the public discourse. You could write a letter to the paper, publish a pamphlet, make a sandwich board, do all manner of things but expressing a personal voice in public was an expensive and difficult thing.”

The primary difference between then and now obviously, is that you can get your voice heard on your own terms. And you can do it with relative ease. Not only that, but if you do it well, you can get other like minded people to join with you. “That,” says Shirky, “is a big change.”

A change so big, it prompted Russell Davies to pose these questions; “When everyone has a voice what are editorial columns for? How might they change? How should news change?”

I don’t know the answers, but I’d hazard a guess that some very highly paid people are currently locked away in the boardrooms of our major newspaper publishers wrestling with these very questions.

Of course academics and members of the Fourth Estate will argue that the independent voices expressing themselves on blogs and other internet empowered social media tools are not trusted sources of news and information. In 2008 this argument seems to be holding less and less weight.

The publishing power of internet and its impact on traditional media was covered beautifully by Clay Shirky in a recent post he wrote for the Penguin Books blog;

“Imagine a technology that, from its inception, threatens to throw intellectual society into chaos, a technology that radically democratises both production and consumption of media while creating countless new forms of expression.”

He didn’t stop there.
“Now imagine,” wrote Shirky, “that while some of the new material produced is of lasting value, most is evanescent at best, and that the resulting flood of material weakens traditional institutions, eroding their special place in society by making the functions they provide seem irrelevant to young people.”
As I sit typing this I can hear the sound of ‘hear hear’ resounding around many a hallowed hall. Thing is, Shirky wasn’t actually writing about the internet. He was highlighting, “The most intellectually radical technology the world has ever seen: the printing press.”

As a generation raised on the internet as their primary media and publishing source begins to make its way into our academic institutions and the workforce how will we cope with them?

Forget spending in time in the library. These are children of a different revolution. Are you ready for them?

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Clay Shirky

Russell Davies

Sept 08 - Going mobile

At the time of writing, I have sitting on my desk a call for entries for a mobile marketing award. Having recently returned from a trip to Japan, where the mobile market is infinitely more progressive than ours, I couldn’t help but wonder what Japanese marketers would think of our mobile marketing.

They’d probably shake their heads in disbelief. Virtually every mobile phone plan is Australia is primarily focused on phone calls and text messages. An allowance for data is rare and generally very expensive.

I believe the high cost of mobile web access has held back mobile marketing in this country. Which is why I was so excited by the arrival of the 3g Apple iPhone a few weeks back.

It seems our telcos have finally woken up to the future and introduced phone plans that actually encourage you to go online. Well some of them anyway! My plan includes a very generous data allowance. Sadly competitor plans do not.

So will the iPhone finally give our local mobile marketing industry a much needed boost? I think it will. As long as you have a plan with a decent data allowance.

Over a million iPhones were sold around the world on the weekend the phone was launched. A million! It took almost three months for the first generation iPhone to hit that sales target. Here in Australia, as we all know, it sold out across the country on the day it was launched.

So what are people doing with their iPhones? Well I can’t speak for everyone else, but since I got mine I regularly go online, as well as checking and replying to email when I’m out of the office. I would never have done this before, because the cost of doing it was prohibitive. Now it doesn’t cost me a cent!

If I’m behaving in this way, I’m pretty sure a hell of a lot of other people are too.

And in the same way that Apple kick started digital music with their highly successful iTunes Store, they’re doing the same thing for mobile internet with their App Store, which was launched on the same day as iPhone.

For those who are not familiar with it, the Apple App Store has literally hundreds of applications developed specifically for the iPhone. These range from games to widgets to useful business tools.

Some Apps you pay for, some are free, but I’d imagine every iPhone owner has downloaded something from the Store. In fact, over 10 million of them were downloaded over the launch weekend alone!

One of the most popular Apps is the iPint. This is a no-charge branded application developed by English ad agency Beattie McGuinness Bungay for their beer client, Carling.

This fun little app has literally thousands of people spending time having fun with the Carling brand and a virtual pint of the product. Who could have foreseen this kind of brand messaging even as recently as just a few months ago?

Asked about the iPint, and being seen an a first mover in the branded apps market, Carling’s marketing director, Nic Young, said, "Innovation is at the heart of the Carling brand -- through product developments like an indicator on our can that turns blue when it is perfectly chilled -- but also through emerging new technologies.”

Writing on the Financial Times’ blog, tech commentator Richard Walters also talked up the iPint; “It looks like Beattie McGuinness Bungay is the first to have cracked the code for using Apple’s new App Store as a vehicle for corporate sponsorship.

The free game it produced for Carling has made it into the top ten list of most-downloaded free apps. That puts it ahead of things like Google’s new mobile search application and MySpace.You can bet that every adland tech geek with a taste for the viral is even now switching his or her attention to the latest Apple toy.”

He’s not wrong either. Within ten minutes of me downloading and playing with the iPint, I was already thinking of an idea for an automotive client. All I need to do is get them interested in the idea. Which won’t be easy, given the slow take up of mobile internet use in this country.

English blogger the Bubbler believes that, “Many in the technology industry see significant potential in the iPhone as a standalone computing platform.” He writes that, “Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the investment firm, has set up a $100 million fund purely for investment in iPhone-related software companies.”

With that kind of money floating around, you’d imagine the mobile marketing industry will be rubbing their hands with glee, as after many false dawns, they finally start to see their industry becoming a key channel in the marketing mix.

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Richard Walters
The Bubbler
The App Store