Let’s be honest the industry is in a spot of bother.
Trolling, fake followers, vendor bankruptcy, engagement farms, user migrations, user bullying, toxic ad environments, mainstream revulsion at fakery and more importantly for brands: major studies that suggest social media might be killing brands.
Social might have gone mainstream, but it has also gone a bit feral.
When the Huffington Post has to shut down anonymous accounts because 75% of comments are toxic and employ a team of 40 moderators to screen comments you know the swill bucket is getting a bit stinky.
So where is the progress? Where are the beacons of innovation?
As I write this post (Saturday 15th) Turkey's police have been instructed by their prime minister to forcibly gas and remove the remaining #occupygezi protesters from Gezi park. They have used jamming equipment to block broadcasting. And they have prevented journalists from reporting.
What started as a protest about a park has become a protest against an authoritarian (but democratically elected) regime that uses unreasonable force on its own people and censors a free media.
I was a tourist in Istanbul from 7th June to 14th June and was mesmerised by the atmosphere of protest during this time.
Here are a few rushed thoughts on the impact social media has had during the past 18 days of protest.
In the study, the question about your associations and who you know socially is a key indicator of type classification with what appears to be a significant weighting.
But does your class matter online? How visible is your class signature in social networks? And what are the typical ‘class behaviours’ in social media?
In an increasingly networked and transparent world your social graph is a mirror of your class graph. And what you share and the way you share are signifiers of your socio-economic-cultural class.
The London Riots highlighted howsocial media clearly has a class divide, showing different socio economic skews for different social networks. But it is thebored at work networkand bored in line networks where the complicated and stratified world of cultural consumption bubbles up.
Like it or not, it is our aspirations, fears and desires that define who we are. These constructions of identity are distributed on social networks and digital destinations for all to see.
But what does ‘class behaviour’ look like on the social web? Here are some glimpses:
It is the season to play Mystic Megg and
predict the future...
I
didn’t do too bad last year. It was encouraging to see most of my 2012 themes become
real industry talking points during the course of the year. Well some of them anyway.
Once
again, I have gathered a few themes to chew on, mainly covering social media
marketing and social business strategy. Enjoy.
1. The dynamic customer journey will continue to disrupt
As we
all now know the customer journey has changed almost beyond recognition. The
well versed Mckinsey models and
others have become accepted thinking as the ‘social customer’ emerges as the
default actor in a non linear fast moving buying process. This inherent dynamism will
provoke brands to think how they sync the decision journey with an arc of dynamic storytelling to
nudge consumers along.
2. The red lines of social business buy-in will shine brightly
The
last sceptics are on the ropes. There remains an ‘unconverted and lost’ tribe
of executives in organisations asking ‘what can social do?’ This year CEO's were told by IBM if you
aren't active in social media then you probably won't exist in 5 years. 2013
will be year where these skeptics get flushed out and decide how they can
embrace social business principles. It will be interesting to see where the red
lines fall in organisations.
So to help the other 90% here is my quick guide to measuring the impact of social media:
1. Learn from what works
The only way to do this is to read voraciously. Read the mega posts from the experts who pour over every pixel, data point and new argument. A good start would be Avinash Kaushik and Olivier Blanchard.
2. Decide what is value
Paint a clear picture of why what you are doing matters to the business. Establish where value lies. What are you really trying to achieve? Gaining true ROI can be difficult depending on what you are trying to achieve. Sometimes you will have to use proxies to prove the link. So be prepared for this.
It was essentially an academic conference about how social media is changing the way academics analyse ‘in field’ data. It was refreshing to hear a non business perspective on the impact of social media.
Indeed only in academia would you get a question from the audience asking whether we are living through Asimov's Saga. And the guy sat next to me was from the Rand Corporation wanting to understand the user journey of a person getting radicalised on the web.
Facebook marketing this was not.
So here are a few quick observations, themes and interesting bits I picked up:
Social Network Analysis: We’re Not There Yet
There was lots of talk about 'discussion group motifs' and group 'digital signatures'. But what struck me the most was that most social scientists are only just starting to get to grips with how to analyse online social networks. Studying offline social networks is well established, of course, but it seems that there is a lot of work to do to define the right methodologies to make the most of social data.
Big Data, Big Problems
Alex from Tweetminister spoke eloquently about the challenges of processing big data. He said they have processed more data in Q1 of 2012 than all the data they looked at in 2010 and 2011 put together. Scale is definitely not easy in this business.
His advice was to identify up front what is really important and look at the context of what you are trying to analyse – context is everything. You should scale back wherever possible and avoid trying to process too much data. More importantly go narrow and deep on verticals before you decide to do any horizontal analysis. And above all else, place a blinding focus on finding real value in the data.
Yesterday I attended Bloomworldwide's event where Mark Schaefer spoke about his new book Return on Influence and how influence marketing is changing the world. It was thought provoking stuff.
A few old and new things stuck which I found quite interesting. Here are a few reflections:
1.As everyone knows, I think, social is all about the ability to move content around the web. Surfing social and interest graphs through to paid, owned and earned properties. The velocity and direction of this travel is dictated by two fundamental things: your content strategy and your network strategy. Here is the rub. Most people don't want to move content. They are just happy to observe, consume and watch. To stimulate velocity you need influencers, taste makers, mavens and those people who can tip that fantastic content forward. At the moment Klout are the chief signifiers of propagation velocity potential. So in a way, Klout scores could be read as speed limits. Choosing how you change gears using influencer marketing will help make your content travel faster.
A language defined by the act of sharing images that define the fleeting, the profound and the trivial. This is a global language governed by the need to feel connected and the desire for expression. This is the language of photography on the social web.
Today anyone can publish a photo, but not every photo is interesting. Never has the policy of I will be interested if you are interesting mattered more. If photography is the de facto language of the social web does that mean we are all fluent? Or are we less thoughtful in our expression? Has technology impoverished the poetry of this new visual language? Or are we getting visually dumber as a result?
Language in its purest form is a technology. A complex set of sounds, signs and meaning with over 7,000 variations. Today technology is ipso facto language. Photography until relatively recently was for the privileged few to play with. With 2 billion people now armed with a smartphone, hooked into their social network and looking to play the citizen journalist the democratic future of what you shoot is what you say has arrived. The written status update has been bypassed by a 24 hour curated visual exhibition called our life in pictures.
Once again social media week has come and gone in London.
In no particular order here are a few of my observations on some of the big themes that emerged …
1. The role of social is to inspire
With a bit of imagination, social media can be about so much more than listening, customer service, community management and pushing out content.
Social media is about the ability to spark and inspire. To find that social dimension which lights a fire or celebrates a mood. Sharable and memetic ideas that can define and bond a community.
As the social space saturates, competition fizzes and the march of algorithmic marketing increases it’s worth pausing and putting in the work to find that great idea that can inspire your community.
2. Move over social business, culture eats strategy for lunch
If you want your business to change and flourish in the social era, you have to lead from the front - social business will only ever become a reality if business leaders drive the cultural adoption of social business practices.
The best-laid plans will never work unless the working culture is actually prepared to embrace change. You need to constantly push the culture forward, target the sceptics and work on a binding cultural glue. Eventually the cultural values of collaboration will overcome any resistance.
3. There are two very different social marketer worlds
The world of social media marketing and social business are still worlds apart. The 1% of client marketers who are launching cars on Facebook, connecting social to CRM programs and adopting social business strategies are very much in the minority.
It’s clear that the other 99% are still figuring things out and haven't quite passed the experimentation phase. The CIM #smbenchmark research launched last week paints a very sobering and real picture of how nascent the UK industry still is.
I can't believe there are people in this world that have had no contact with the modern world.
This is staggering. Almost unbelievable, like it has been staged as some farce.
The paparazzi style 'discovery' shots of the Masho-Piro Peruvian tribe by anthropologists this week crashed into my digital world like a cup of cold lumpy reality. My innocent disbelief was quickly humbled by exploring UncontactedTribes who monitor how tribes like the Masho-Piro encounter the modern world and suffer its inevitable consequences. Watch this:
I mean, I was aware that there were lost tribes, but couldn't quite believe the degree of their 'uncontacted' existence. How could this be in 2012?
For anthropologists this is a wet dream. Their fascination with the purity of lost tribes is in complete contrast to the emerging discipline of digital anthropology where the opposite of what it means to be 'uncontacted' or disconnected is being explored with keen interest.
Digital Anthropology (or online ethnography) is a relatively new academic discipline that aims to understand how digital communities evolve by studying digital media and internet culture. Think of Facebook as the equivalent of fragments of Roman pottery centuries from now, where profiles, timelines and status updates will be studied to understand how society transformed from the chaos of the C20th into the enlightened networked society we now live in.
Digital anthropologists observe and participate in digital communities to understand how technology is shaping our world. Intel, Microsoft, IBM and Apple all have digital anthropologists in house to help them understand the social consumer. Ethnographic research can help brands understand:
- the catalyst for digital communities and how they evolve
- how self governance / regulation works within social channels
- the motivating factors for community health
- the cultural pathways of how memes travel
- the new behaviours of a networked global culture
If you want to know more about digital anthropology you really need to watch this, made by the amazing Mike Wesch. It’s a bit long and a bit old, but is a great primer on how memes and digital culture is changing the way we live.
From lost tribes to internet memes, so what's the connection? Both require intimate study to understand the signifiers of our changing world: one a distant echo of the past and another a glimpse of what's to come.
In the same week that uncontacted tribes were paraded on our screens there was also the story about Facebook’s IPO.
Channel 4 chose to cover the IPO story by filming local IT lessons to the elderly to show how they can use Facebook to stay in touch with their family. Implying that Facebook are reaching parts of society previously untouched by the digital world: the last uncontacted tribes of the modern world.
Clearly, Facebook is building the largest digital anthropological record of all time. What we will learn from this great experiment of being ‘open and connected’ won’t be realised for many, many years. The digital social graph has become humanity’s fingerprint to be studied, monetised and protected.
In a way, these isolated Amazonian tribes are a reminder of what lies beneath our networked digital world: a collective memory of human nature uncontaminated by technology.
I think it’s incredibly healthy to be reminded of our earthly origins, where tribal culture was the first organising factor and where social bonds meant the difference between survival and extinction.
As we become more individual, the more we yearn for community. As we become more independent, the more we rely on close ties and stronger relationships. As the world turns more commercial, the more we long for authenticity.
Consider just for a moment: a child of the Masho-Piro tribe logging into their Facebook account in 2020 to upload photos of their grandparents and audio recordings of lost tribal songs and then a digital anthropologist discovering these on a dusty server in 2412...
Even my hairdresser is thinking of using it as his follical style board for customers on his ipad.
Friends and colleagues have swarmed to it in the last few months, the last month especially. All those trend forecasts for 2012 might have helped big up Pinterest as 'one to watch'. With 4 million users and 11 million visits in December 2011 Pinterest is making marketeers take notice.
Why I love Pinterest
1. It has a beautifully simple user experience
2. It is strangely addictive.
3. It trades on an old, almost Victorian, habit of classifying and collecting.
4. Its a great content discovery tool, with the standard Likes, Repins and Comments as currency.
5. It works great as a mobile app and on tablet devices in glorious visual detail.
6. There is no distracting advertising.
7. You can opt to follow all of a users boards or just one board, making your decision to follow much more considered and tailored.
8. Its anonymous creative expression: you don't have to complete a massively detailed profile.
9. You enter this zen like mode of 'you are what you curate'.
Three things happened last week which prompted this post:
1. Citibank launched their social rewards program which allows users to pool rewards points on Facebook and team up to decide how they get used.
2. A supplier pitched us a 'portable loyalty tool' that layers on top of a brands Facebook page that rewards users who share content within their network via a points system.
All of these things have caused me some angst. Why?
Well, if you use social currency as a trading mechanism does it ultimately undermine the final value exchange? Spamming your mates because you get free stuff may not fare well for the brand. Do you really want to be traded in Empire Avenue?
I think Citibank's idea is a great natural extension to a rewards program they already had in place. Although it will be interesting to see what the wisdom of friends help create within this program. I wonder how altruistic users will be?
However, when it comes to layering a cold loyalty program on top of a brands Facebook page that is purely focussed on 'points for sharing' I am not sure how this plays out.
The social web is here to stay. No surprise there, but in 2012 we will see it become completely baked into pretty much every aspect of our work and play.
The social graph will be seamlessly integrated into all devices, applications and services. Philosophical debates over its use will finally die away and the term 'social media' will begin to disappear. Brands will finally realise that it’s not just 'another thing' to manage, but that it is the glue to their emerging social business. Accelerating plans to connect the complex social business spokes across their organisations will become a priority.
As consumer adoption increases, ignoring social will become a real hazard in 2012. Showing up just won't be enough. From the way brand trust is built to the way customer service is delivered optimising for the social graph will continue to disrupt conventional game plans.
Brands will recognise that the ubiquity of the social graph demands an agile strategy to navigate a perma-state of worsening signal to noise ratios. Those brands with clear goals and good practices will make the most of travelling through this crowded and ever changing landscape.
Expect to see: social media budgets rising substantially, governance issues addressed, social media centres of excellence established, investment in internal programs prioritised, companies battling for specialist talent, internal social networks launched, late adopters arriving and employees enlisted to contribute to brand social media activity.
2. The Social Business Intelligence Lens
As social media becomes the main engine of consumer discovery, the analysis of social data will become a strategic imperative for companies in 2012.
Finding the right signals in the noise will become more important for brands to understand how to grow, engage and monetise their communities. The convergence of trends like Big Data, Social CRM and the application of sophisticated predictive models will create opportunities for companies to find new business insights and monitor real and future social trends.
Those companies that invest in analytics and processes that translate social business intelligence into actionable business insights and shared value will come out top in 2012.
Expect to see: a move from consumer to enterprise solutions, a focus on mining social metadata, a focus on temporal analytics, an interrogation of how engagement strategies work, use of customers to drive innovation and more ways to deliver collaborative decision making.
What impact will the gloomy economic news of this week have on social media and its development in business, society and culture?
With reports of a lost generation, a decade of cuts and a prolonged stagnant economy how will social media adapt and develop? How will users, brands and organisations react?
Here are my nine (very) top-line implications I think are worth considering:
1. Social recruitment booms
With nearly 10% unemployed and fierce competition for jobs, the recruitment business will increasingly use social media for efficiencies in the way they recruit staff. Expect to see more personal employee branding and a lost generation of digital natives using clever social media tactics to get the attention of employers.
2. Fierce competition for the social graph
As consumers spend less, demand more and generally cut back, brands will need to compete more than ever for attention. Building interest, trust and value through social channels will become even more important as consumers aggressively filter out the brand noise and use their social graph to guide them to the best deals.
3. Hyper-local healing
As the global economy burns local concerns will become more vivid and pressing. The rebuilding and rejuvenation of broken communities will become a leading political issue within the contentious lens of The Big Society. Hyper-local and independent social networks like Yeah Hackney and StreetLife could become hubs for community traffic helping to find new ways to rewire how local communities pull together.
Facebook's infamous algorithm decides how your content travels through the all important news-feed. It is used to rank posts on a users news-feed to determine which posts should be shown on top of the news feed and which posts lose out. The Edgerank algorithm is based on an Affinity Score (the level of interaction of one Facebook user to another), Weight (the quality/relevance of content) and Time Decay (the lifetime/freshness of the content). With recent reports suggesting that only a tiny fraction of posts make it through Edgerank you really need to understand how to optimise forEdgeRank to succeed on Facebook.
2. 90-9-1
Most users of the internet are lurkers. Not everyone has a blog and contributes to the 'conversation'. In fact according to the 90-9-1 principle or '1% Rule', 90% of people will lurk, 9% will contribute in some way and only 1% will actively create new content. This idea of participation inequality should be top of mind when thinking about encouraging User Generated Content, community management and nurturing super fan communities.
Analysts and commentators have continued with stories about traffic declines and fading user interest, whilst the snarky twitterati sit high on judgment extolling Google's failed mission.
But I believe they are overlooking a very large hairy point: do not underestimate an opponent playing the long game.
The long game is always the smart play. And it takes patience and fortitude to get there.
When Chairman Mao Zedong was asked by a journalist in the 1950's what he thought of the effects from the French Revolution he said "it is too soon to say". His answer illustrates the current analysis of the Facebook vs. Google war. That this is nothing less than a long term power struggle for the ownership of the social web. And it won't be concluded for some time.
Twelve features of the Google+ long game:
Google+ is a force multiplier. Google does not see Google+ as separate product, it IS the product. The social layer that sits across the entire portfolio, is the new oil that is lubricating the entire Google project.
In a world of real time big data how do you make sense of an ever changing complex world?
When markets and governments struggle to keep up with events how can brands possibly keep up? But what if brands could partner 'real time' with 'future time' data to help turn brand noise into meaningful predictive brand signals? Welcome to the new world of temporal analytics.
Data is the new oil
It's old news that data is the new oil. The torrent of data is increasing at unbelievable rates according to a report by Mckinsey with opportunities of making a 60% improvements on margins if data is mined correctly.
The industry of finding patterns and meaning in Big Data has been growing over the last few years. From Sean Gourley explaining how he identified the mathematics of war at his 2009 Ted Talk to starting Quid, a company that harnesses new corporate intelligence to help companies compete in a complex world.
I love the Adam & Joe Show. I have listened to their comedic genius since 2007. Carefully collecting every podcast and frequently scaring commuters with my maniac solo laughing episodes.
You might think its just a radio show, but I think it's a superb case study for how amazing content can energise your community. It can offer some lessons on how to grow your own content network.
1. Develop your own language
There are not many online communities that develop their very own vernacular. But those that do exhibit stronger bonds and connections to those of the hosts. The language a group uses to talk about the things it likes and dislikes is the currency of the community. The Adam & Joe show is a perfect example of how inventive content can be used to develop a creative use of language. They use a range of catch phrases and memes that only the community would understand, but to any newcomer they will be intrigued to find out more and join the club. My favourite is the social phenomenon, known as Stephenage, whereby listeners shout out 'Stephen!' in a public place and other listeners reply with 'just coming!'.
I attended Social Media Influence 2011 conference last week. It was interesting, with a strange mix of the pedestrian and the inspired. However, some Big Themes emerged from the day which I think are worth briefly noting:
1. Social is rapidly changing the structure of organisations
Believe the hype: the corporate plumbing is changing fast. Sooner or later you will need to empower the whole workforce. All organisational functions are being reshaped by the transformational social web, with internal and external ecosystems slowly joining up. Employees are at the heart of this cultural change with new roles and training helping to frame progress. Struggles over ‘who owns social’ will eventually die away with brands realising that to truly embrace the social web they need many voices, not just a single brand Twitter stream.
Forget your wallet and cash, the future has arrived – Mobile money is here.
Near field communication technology (NFC) is now moving rapidly towards widespread adoption. Well, almost – if recent announcements, media buzz and consumer anticipation is anything to go by, the signs are encouraging:
Google is set to unveil plans for a mobile payment platform using NFC
Orange and Barclaycard launched QuickTouch the UK’s first NFC payment system
O2 announced key financial partners for their NFC strategy
Nice became Europe’s first city to embrace NFC under a city wide integrated pilot
6Starz launched using NFC for check-in, social networking and coupon reclaim
I have been reflecting on what all this might mean for social and have speculated on some of the bigger themes:
Adoption – To gain take up you need to build an influential groundswell. Of course, targetting early adopters in metropolitan bases will help to create awareness, but how? NFC enabled commuting games, anyone? Or perhaps a mass retailer geocache hunt?
