Space Invaders (the Death of Conversation)
Markets are conversations. Then Marketers shout. Thus Marketers screw up conversations.
The logic is overwhelming.
10 years ago, a nice book called The Cluetrain Manifesto was published. It changed everything.
Wait.
That needs rephrasing.
10 years ago, a nice book called The Cluetrain Manifesto was published. Some of us thought it would change everything. (In my case it was the first Marketing book I ever read, back in 2000 -in English and while I studied music and worked for a construction company).
The book, in case you live in a cave, starts with 95 theses. The first one reads:
Markets are conversations.
What a revelation! So obvious. In the era of Facebook and Twitter, the time of "online friends", now that the blogs raised and died it is apparently so true.
True, but wrong.
(Yes, I love contradictions)
Marketers have invaded spaces where people lurk (it is the means to the end, right?). They have done so ever since the advent of mass media. When radio become popular advertising surged as almost natural. Then came TV.
Of course those types of media inherently go in one direction; so if someone did not like the presence of publicity there wasn't much they could do.
Then came the internet.
And something seemed to be different. The advent of the social web brought a promise of a different type of Marketing. One that would listen. One that would talk looking into the customer's eye. One that would be a conversation, much like Cluetrain proposed.
And then us (marketers) screwed it up. Conversations didn't quite have the impact we were used to with mass media. We needed more bang for the buck. We wanted more. We started shouting again. We went back from conversation to publicity.
But Marketers are not the only ones to be blamed, the recipients share part of the shame. Both in an active and a passive way.
The public is to blame because it allows their spaces to be invaded by vacuous marketing messaging. The most bluntly example of this becomes apparent with the usage of client-generated content to power marketing campaigns. This would be more acceptable if consent were not tacit but deliberate, but that is usually not the case. Maybe letting advertisements into our own private spaces is a price too high to pay to use many services.
The audience is also to blame because many have tried to take advantage of the few marketers that actually tried to do things differently, of the couple of crazy dudes that actually tried to talk. When I read news that state that a mommy blogger tried to bribe George Smith (Online Marketer) for a pair of crocs at BlogHer I feel saddened.
Thus when a Marketer tries to have a conversation this comes out as the result.
Yet that is deserved. Seth Godin's phrase "all marketers are liars" still applies. Or should I say: Applies today more than ever before.
In the mass media reign days lies were openly displayed and people "bought" them somewhat knowingly. Today things have become more dense, obscure and mangled. Most marketers have a discourse that says that they are part of the conversation, ("hey we even have a corporate blog!"), they find alternative ways to let the customers know about products and services ("we just placed a banner on facebook and MSN!") and have youth and massive appeal with lower than average investment ("we have this viral video you'll love") .
It is all lies. At least on most cases.
Viral videos are pushed to front pages using fake accounts and bots. Advertising, even on the internet, is just that: friggin advertising, not a "new way to deliver the message". Yes, even if you publish your Ad on a social network, it is still an ad. Most corporate blogs delete anything resembling negative comments; so much for open conversation. Not to mention the shallowness of the content and the fact that PR firms handle that instead of the actual, flesh and bone employees.
Metrics are inflated on a daily basis. Results are overrated. Everything is false.
Phony Social Network users, fake fans, non-existing facts and figures, pay-per-post. So much for transparency. So much for conversation.
I don't know about you, but when I talk I don't shout. Shouting defeats the purpose.
The marketers excuse for such type of behaviors is that, amidst so much noise, if they don't go above the mean murmur they would pass by inadvertently. If that is the case maybe what you are saying is not that interesting. Screaming about it is not going to make it any more appealing (or true, or conversational).
But then again, coming up with relevant content and doing thinks that can go "viral" just due to to their own weight and creativity requires thinking, inspiration and hard work. Those things are not readily available.
Thus it is Mediocre (social) Marketers and irresponsible customers who have killed conversation for the rest of us.
Thanks, much appreciated.
Now, lets cut the crap and lets all just say what we are really doing.
On Real Time Web
There has been a lot of buzz around the real time web lately. And the main responsible for that buzz has been, without a doubt, twitter. Some have gone to the extent of saying that Google is afraid of twitter.
Well, hum, I don’t think so, clearly the mountain-view gang is worried about other stuff, not twitter. Twitter does not overlap with what google does. Yet it does open the door to something somewhat novel.
One of the main differences of twitter with “chat” as we knew it is that the content is stored, indexed, and publicly available in the form of webpages. IRC, for instance (or Messenger, or Yahoo! IM) uses its own protocol to transfer, store and access information which, in most cases is not publicly available either.
The so-called “real time web” then is actually “almost real time web”. This makes a small difference to the human interactions (things happen as fast as we can assimilate them) but has huge implications from a technological and indexing point of view.
This is where google comes into play, why they shouldn’t worry and why this rumor about big G’s plans to launch microblogging search makes perfect sense.
Let me explain.
Twitter is endogamy. It is a self-contained universe. Fair enough, its API allows all sorts of interactions with the outside world and extensibility through other services and programs, but it all orbits around the same. Google, on the other hand has always been an outside-looking company and set of services.
Google’s basic premise is to crawl what others generate in order to allow people to find that content. That premise does not have to change with the so-called real-time web. That is what makes companies such as google so interesting, the fundamentals are so simple that they can adapt to changes without having to change them. As a matter of fact what google needs is other real time content-generation sites and services to proliferate.
How so? since most people use Twitter it makes perfect sense to use Twitter’s native search when looking for the latest. But what would happen if there were another big player in the scene? You’d end up using a search engine that indexes them both. That is if such two things existed. It does not make sense for google to buy Twitter, but it makes perfect sense for google to foster and help new players to enter that market.
A lot has been said about how important(sic) Twitter is in news-spreading. I remain skeptic.
I plan to blog about the Iran-Twitter affair soon (and I know most people won’t like that post), but a quick lesson learnt from the entire thing is that Twitter is neither a good nor reliable news source. It is a good alert system, granted, but if you need in-depth information, background or analysis you better seek some place else.
In what seems to be the trend with every new wave of web technologies (scrape the term technologies, this is not technology, call it “usage”) the signal to noise radio decreases. If you watch the entire river of tweets you’ll only spot a very tiny percentage that are meaningful in any way. Yet, I think enough has been said about the amount of rubbish going on in twitter all of the time.
Bottom line is: Would I buy Twitter stock? Probably not for the long run. Do I think Real time web is here to stay? yes it is, we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.
Shifting times, Blurring lines
Is a corporate Blog a PR or a Marketing play? Is it both? Can PR afford stay divorced from online marketing?
What is the difference between the online presence of traditional media and the new heavily popular blog driven sites such as techcrunch?
Do forums serve a purpose for support organizations within companies? Marketing? Public Relations?
Who should fund this things inside a corporation? who should be the stakeholders? Who is accountable for success or failure?
This and other similar questions pop-up like fungi on a hot wet day when working on Social Media Marketing.
The landscape of media and online marketing is rapidly changing. Most of the time changes happen just quickly enough so that people involved in them directly tend to have a feeling of being just one step behind what is happening. Traditional organizations, thinking and decision-making won't do it anymore.
I intend to write up a series of posts looking at things that I consider are changing, at differences that are becoming more pronnounced and percieved differences that aren't so.
End of madness recap
Warning! Massive post.
As the events that happened between August 8 and August 24 start to slip to memory-land I thought it would be nice to do a recap of what we did last summer. Hope you enjoy it, or that you live long enough to read it thoroughly.
The right move at the right moment.
"Bird's Nest" Shot. Courtesy of Ogilvy 360.
Besides what our marketing statements said (that this were the first Games where athletes were allowed to blog) there are several other reasons why this made sense.
First and foremost: Amateurism. Yeah, I know, most of this guys aren't exactly amateurs in the full sense of the word, but you get the point. The same program applied to, say, the Football (soccer) world cup, wouldn't of worked as well as it did for the Olympics. Most athletes at an Olympiad are not celebrities. They might have a small degree of recognition, but the general public does not know them.
That radically changes during the Games. The public eye is in search of these people, hungry for news and stories. That is where we came in, providing content straight from the source.
The time zone difference also played a big part. Most of the action happened while the western hemisphere was sleeping or at work. This made the internet a key player.
The Right Mix.
Ogilvy 360 performed wonderfully during the recruitment phase. Voices of the Olympic Games ended up hosting 101 athlete blogs, representing 31 sports and 25 countries. Although this is a minimal sample of what goes on during the games it was, in my humble opinion, a very nice mix that portrayed their fellow athletes quite well.
Since the program was about hearing the Voices of this guys, recruitment was the key element.
I must admit that the idea of opening up and putting lenovo's brand behind people we didn't know raised some eyebrows here and there.
Now that the thing is over I'm delighted to say that what this athletes wrote about, the way they shared the good the bad and the ugly, the sheer openness and honesty did not cease to amaze me every single day during those fantastic two weeks.
They were sports heroes, now they became my personal marketing heroes.
One Idea. Endless access points.
PC at the iLounge featuring the "voices" site. Courtesy of Ogilvy 360
The idea itself was quite simple: enabling athlete blogging. After getting the right mix of athletes we needed to ensure that their words traveled far and quick.
The site and the way it was thought was just a channel, a place where feeds came in and went out to the various distribution services that orbited around the program. Simply put: athlete posts feeds were aggregated at the voices site and then redistributed as aggregated RSS feeds that powered Facebook Apps, Mobile Phone devices and anything anyone wanted to do with the outcome.
One example of this was what Mark Cahill did for Cycling.com; where he took advantage of the RSS filters we put in place to show only those posts written by Cyclists.
All of that was enabled with the help of Yahoo Pipes and quite a bit of programming on the Voices site.
Lessons learned
Too much happened over the past 9 months. Tons of ideas, reduced turnaround times, pressure, just to name a few. Here's the list of things I've learnt:
- Ideas will flow like rivers, it is execution that matters
- One must learn to focus and discard things quickly
- Anything can be done
- Outsourced stuff does not always work as it should
- Distributed content is the future
- Days can span longer than 24 hours. They can also last a lot less.
- I love chaos. I might rant, but I'd rather be underwater and crazy than doing business as usual.
- I am fortunate to work where I do and, particularly with the people I work with.
I know I left a ton of stuff out, maybe for another post. (Not likely to happen)
(Disclaimer: I have not posted results, targets adn the like because I'm sure David is going to take care of that).
The Marketing Chaos Theory
After several years of investigation and tests I have finally reached what can be called a moment of enlightenment.
A bit of background.
In case you never heard about chaos theory (which means you have either been living in a cave or taken the "God does not play dice with the universe" statement a little bit two seriously), it is a field of math that tries to determine the behavior of certain dynamic systems under the premise that very slight changes on initial variables can yield enormously different final results.
Marketing scenarios are what you could call "dynamic systems". You have people spending money to influence other people in the hope that they'll end up doing about the same thing: spend money.
With that in mind I devoted every second of my spare time to find the ultimate marketing solution. The premise was: if a small change on initial variables can have a huge impact on the outcome of the system after an n number of iterations, then maybe a tiny marketing startup can make a company the hottest thing since the invention of sliced bread.
I was under the impression that some companies had already discovered this, since there is no way that perfectly normal products with nice packaging could have so much success without the aid of advanced maths. Either that or we are plainly stupid.
Since the investigation on the human race being rather short sighted was going to be too short, I decided it must of be maths.
The process.
It was just with the intuition that the theory could be correct that I embarked the task of figuring out all the different variables that could affect a perfect marketing campaign.
Drawing the complete picture of infinite different scenarios and evolution of the dynamic systems was a titanic endeavor. The old chaos theory cliché of the butterfly does apply; that is the reason why there could be absolutely no loose ends.
I have tried to abbreviate the complex maths and equations so that they make some sense. The following picture is a screenshot of an excel spreadsheet. Don't feel ashamed if you don't quite get the meaning of all the mathematical mambo-jumbo, since it is pretty advanced.
As you can see once you study hard and get all the pieces in the right places, it is a fool proof method for success.
The greatest thing (for you) is that my findings are for sale. For just a couple million dollars I'll send you the whole thing.
Oh... there is just a minor caveat. It'll take 527 years, 2 months, 9 days, 5 hours and 23 seconds (approximately) for the campaign to be successful. But, hey, you'll only spend a Dollar (in advertising) and a couple millions (paying me) to get it up and running.
Aggregating – Part 2
So, the challenge was to build an aggregator that could display the life lessons I mentioned on part 1.
When faced with the white canvas I could of done anything. Search for a CMS, build something from scratch ar whatever crossed my deviated mind.
I went with the best platform I know. WordPress. Mainly thanks to me finding a beautiful RSS parsing library called SimplePie. That library enabled me to do whatever I wanted with the feeds. And so I did.
Building a feed reader within WordPress was fun.
First I went for a "live" approach. I just fetched the feeds and presented them. But that proved to be slow and unreliable.
Thus I made the choice to save everything into the DB. That allows me to sort, change, and adapt the content while boosting the performance quite visibly. And there's quite some processing that needs to be done.
For starters the greatest challenge was to make things somewhat usable for the visitors. With over a 100 people aggregating to a single page we had to provide a simple way to sort and find whatever is of interest.
The Solution? Creating filters. If you go into the "Voices" page you'll see 3 dynamic dropdowns (Country, Language and Sport) that allow to get just the content that you are interested in. The same logic will apply, in the near future, to an aggregated feed.
There was quite some degree of learning on the process. For starters I found out that blogspot's feeds are full of rubbish. Also I reinforced the Old Addagio: "IE 6 sucks". I truly believe that that particular browser is the accounts for way too many extra development hours (as the need to "hack" stuff to make it work correctly is a must if you want to build anything somewhat "modern") and a lot of wasted bandwidth.
Also making anything non-that-conventional requires intensive cross-browser testing. Here's a sample of my 3 ThinkPads showing the page on various OSs and Browsers:
(Left to right: Firefox [top] and Konkeror [bottom] under Linux; Opera [left] and IE7 [right] under Windows; Firefox [left] and Safari [right] under Windows. No I don't own a Mac, thank you very much).
I hope you enjoy reading this guys posts and stay tuned, there's a lot more to come.
With some luck I'll leverage part of this efforts and build it into plugins that people can use on their own blogs. (Chances are this wont happen before the end of the games).
PS: In case you wondered why I haven't posted much lately: this is the reason.