Howto as a category morphed out of a few things. I learned about the power of helpful content from Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. A second aspect of it was my natural inclination to share useful hacks.
I started writing this blog to explore the media so that I could advise clients so its roots were in the howto mentality. Over time, I built up a certain amount of authority based on the content that I shared here. This resulted in work for Econsultancy, teaching MBA students at a private Spanish university and a number of agency jobs.
Howto content tends to come when I am sharing skills and I have been developing AND that these skills can be easily codified into an article or two. I have also shared my personal workflow that I use to try and make sense of the world through online resources.
Many of the skills that I developed doing that came from a pre-social platform dominated world. Before Instagram told us how to look and TikTok told us what to think. And back when Google was actually useful, well more useful than it seems to be now.
I even wrote a couple of guides on how to get the most out of Google, but most of the advice won’t work any more as the platform did away with many shortcuts in favour of telling you which is the nearest coffee shop with free wifi.
The reason why howto ended up being one word rather than how to was down to the early version of Wordpress that I started to blog on and my lack of expertise more than anything else.
In order to get a brand on social media it isn’t about dropping brand assets on social channels but thinking about what it actually means.
Distillation of this process is likely to appear on a social media document:
It contextualises why social, there must be a business and brand reason to be there beyond ‘well everyone is on Facebook’ in order to get a brand on social media
An explanation of how to use the document. Those involved need to view the document as a ‘north star’ for social. It needs to be clear that the document is a set of guidelines, but not immutable
In order to get a brand on social media, you need to understand what what will look and sound like
How the brand manifests itself on social:
What’s the brand’s tone of voice on social media channels. Does it want to want to sound like an everyman, does it want a bit of distance and gravitas, does it want to be an authority on a given area?
What’s the personality? If it was a person, what kind of person would it be. This frames the content, what questions it will answer and the view point that it will take. It’s adding extra dimensions that won’t necessarily be applied in public relations, print or even TV advertising due to the nature of social channels
What are the content pillars? Think of this as the core messages. Every piece of content created and shared will demonstrate at least one pillar. These are typically things like organisation innovation, heritage, values, point of leadership (thought leadership, authority / expertise, style leadership etc)
Cross channel rules:
How will you handle hashtags
How ill you handle localised domain names? (Will their be local domains?)
Who has the right to publish what first? For instance if you look at sports brands like Nike or New Balance; you’ll see that soccer related content first appears on their specialist football channels
Should local channels link back to ‘global accounts’?
Are there any sponsorship or IP-related watch outs? When I worked on New Balance; any club kit related content had to feature a minimum of three players. Otherwise there would be problems with the players other sponsors (notably their boot sponsors and their agents who would be looking for another pay day). Who needs to approve use of sponsorships and how long will approvals take? Can you do a flow diagram to provide insight into the process? How do you handle successes or set backs of partners?
How do you handle rumours and speculation? (New iPhone launch or renewal of sponsorship deal with Tiger Woods)
How do you handle images that might have a competitor brand in shot?
Do you ignore controversial news?
Will you share partner content? What channels and handles are legitimate partner content to share?
What kind of tools will you put in place? Large brands often use an intermediary platform like Percolate that provides measurement, asset management and an approvals workflow as needed. It even allows the localisation of content by the local brand team
Social channel-specific rules
How often will you post on a given channel? This might be dictated to you by the kind of account you have on some channels like WeChat. With most others it will be driven by audience content consumption. Twitter generally lends itself to more frequent posts than Instagram or Facebook
Specific channel aims over the coming year
How will the channel be used? Are there particular segments that it is good at reaching?
What kind of content can be published? Example content categories. Best practice executions from other (non-competing) brands to get best practice ideas
Social crisis response
Crisis like accidents have an incident funnel marked by small events, the more of these that happen, the harder it is to climb out of the funnel. The trick is to limit these before they take you down the funnel.
Have a clear workflow in place to handle negative criticism. The US Air Force had a really good workflow to borrow from.
Real-time monitoring should highlight things before they escalate. How is this intelligence distributed and to whom?
Who is going to be part of the decision group, you’ll likely need people from: customer services, product expert, public relations, management. How will you ensure that employees and the supply chain speak with one voice?
Mark Ritson wrote an op-ed over at Marketing Week on influence and influencers. Whilst it lacked nuance on the subject area, a lot of what it said is true. Go over and have a read; I’ll be waiting for when you come back.
Whilst I disagree on the finer points, what Ritson wrote needed to be said. There needed to be a turning of the tide on influencers from boundless optimism to a greater degree of sobriety and critical analysis of the influencer opportunity.
I first noticed this boundless optimism when I attended the In2 Innovation Summit in May last year. Heather Mitchell on a panel. Mitchell worked at the time in Unilever’s haircare division where she is director, head of global PR, digital engagement and entertainment marketing. I asked the panel discussing influencer marketing about the impact of zero-based budgeting (ZBB) and the answer was ducked. ZBB requires a particular ROI on activity, something that (even paid for) influence marketing still struggles to do well.
This was surprising given the scrutiny that other marketing channels were coming under, I couldn’t understand how influencer marketing merited that leap of faith.
Substitute ‘buzz marketing’ for ‘influencer marketing’ and this could be 15 years ago. Don’t get me wrong I had great fun doing things like hijacking Harry Potter book launches when I worked at Yahoo!, but no idea how it really impacted brand or delivered in terms of RoI. Influencer marketing seems to be in a similar place.
Just five years ago we had managed to get past the hype bubble of social and senior executives were prepared to critically examine social’s worth. In the meantime we have had a decline in organic reach and massive inflation in both ad inventory and influencer costs. What had changed in the marketers mentality?
Onward with Mark Ritson’s main points.
Ritson’s Three Circles of Bullshit
A very loose reference to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy trilogy; but for modern marketers
The First Circle of Bullshit: Are the followers real?
Are they bots?
Are they stolen accounts?
Are the user accounts active any more?
Has the account holder padded their account with bought followers and engagement. Disclosure – I ran an experiment on my Twitter account and still have a substantial amount of fake followers. More on this experiment here.
The Second Circle of Bullshit: Are influencers trusted?
Ritson did an unscientific test that showed (some) influencers would post anything for a bit of money
The Final Circle of Bullshit: Do they have influence?
Some influencers are genuinely authoritative; but this is a minority of influencers out there
Ritson alludes to the lack of organic reach amongst an ‘influencers’ followers which is likely to be 2% reach or less
Trends in influence
I looked at Google Trends to see what could be learned in the rate of change in searches over time. Consider Google Trends to be an inexact but accessible measure of changes in interest over time.
Global interest in influencers have been accelerating
There has been a corresponding rises in interest around paid influencer marketing
There hasn’t been the same interest peak in organic (PR-driven) influencer work
All of which supports the following hypotheses:
it’s become on-trend from the perspective of marketers, agencies and ‘influencers’
A significant amount of influencers are in it for the money – which brings into question their (long term authority and consumer trust)
A significant amount of influencers have an exceedingly good idea of their value (more likely overly-inflated)
Ego is less of a motivator for becoming an influencer than material gains
What would influence look like?
Propagation of the content by real people. Instagram, a particularly popular influencer channel, has made sharing posts difficult for followers historically. Re-gramming was a pain in the arse for the average Instagram user.
If we look at the mainstream media and how it is shared on Facebook we see that only five media brands are consistently in the top ten most shared media properties. ‘Traditional’ influencer status isn’t necessarily a garrantor of consistent successful propagation either, if Newship’s data is to be believed.
Attributed sales. Some luxury brands in China have had success collaborating with influencers and selling through their channels; the post child being Mr Bags collaboration with Longchamps.
How is the best way to use influencers in marketing?
Assuming that you are using influencers in the widest possible sense at the moment.
Treat the majority of influencers as yet another advertising format
That means that reach, the way the brand is presented, and repetition are all important – smart mass marketing following the playbook of Byron Sharp.
Viewing your influencer mention in that prism, it means estimating what the real reach would be (lets say 2% of the follower number as an estimate) and paying no more on a CPM rate than you would pay for a display advertising advert
Ensure that the brand is covered in the way that you want. Some luxury brands have managed to get around this by keeping control of the content; a good example of this is De Grisogono – a family-run high jewellery and luxury watch brand. They work with fashion bloggers that meet their high standards and invite them to events. De Grisogono provides them with high-quality photography of its pieces and the event. They get the high standard of brand presentation which raises the quality of the placement
Get repetition with the audience by repeating the placement with other content that delivers the same message with the same high standard of production
All of this might work for a luxury brand, IF you found that the amount of agency time and creative work made commercial sense. It is less likely to work for normal FMCG brands. What self-respecting influencer is going to be bossed around by a breakfast cereal?
Thinking about micro influencers, probably the area that has had the most interest from marketers recently due to them appearing to be better value than macro influencers.
Brown & Fiorella (2013) explanation of micro-influencers:
Adequately identifying prospective customers, and further segmenting them based on situations and situational factors enables us to identify the people and businesses – or technologies an channels that are closest to them in each scenario. We call these micro-influencers and see them as the business’s opportunity to exert true influence over the customer’s decision-making process as opposed to macro-influencers who simply broadcast to a wider, more general audience.
Brown & Fiorella focus on formal prospect detail capture and conversion.
This approach is more likely to work in certain circumstances; where there is low friction to conversion (e-tailing for discretionary value items).
It starts to fall apart when you deploy their approach to:
Consumer marketing
Mature product sectors
Mature brands
You would also struggle with many B2B segments where social provides a small reach and little social interaction.
Work with real influencers on long term collaborations
There is more likelihood of having audience trust if they can see and understand the long term relationship between a brand and its influencers
Better brand placement easier, with an influencer that ‘gets’ the brand
You’ve got a better chance of being able to get access and fully understand the underlying analytics of their accounts (which should be a prerequisite for long term relationship)
You can look at collaborations and attribution payment models that raise all boats
Ketchum’s David Gallagher wanted to know whether he should have his own website as part of managing his personal online brand? He initially felt that publishing on Facebook and LinkedIn was enough. There was also discussion around platforms like Medium. None of which give you real control over your content. Wadds like me felt that owning your own platform was important.
Why have a website as part of your personal online brand?
LinkedIn and Facebook don’t have the same agenda as you. Your content becomes a hostage to their business whims
It is hard for users to discover your content, Facebook and Google make it so
Even on Medium you no longer really own your content. It can’t be easily exported like content on the Blogger platform
Even in the world of Facebook, Google is still a reputation engine
So show do you manage the process?
You need to find a system that works for you. Here is what mine looks like for social syndication.
IFTTT – if then, then that. A service that allows you to trigger actions based on pre-created inputs. It allows rules to be built up based around different inputs:
A photograph tagged with a particular label or hashtag
It supports numerous services including Flickr photography and pinboard.in
Buffer – buffer is a social publishing tool. I have pre-scheduled slots. It is also compatible with publishing posts sent via IFTTT.
Pinboard.in – pinboard is a way of storing your bookmarks with notes and tags online rather than on your computer. Your bookmarks then become accessible wherever you are. It is handy to be able to search things that you have found previously. Google seems to have moved away from organising all the world’s information to mainly focus on ‘now’ content. Pinboard helps you get around this.
“Global activation local amplification” – four words that make a process sound easy. Yet it is amazing how many established successful multi-nationals struggle with this process.
I was talking to friend the other week who talked about a project that they were asked to pitch for. A global multinational asked them to come and workshop the company’s digital global activation strategy for local teams – so that they could then work out how to localise it.
The implication was that a global activation strategy had been decided upon that didn’t take into account who it could be scaled for markets with low budgets (small countries) or atypical digital usage.
I’ve used the words atypical here for good reason. These markets may not have gone through widespread desktop online usages. They may be transitioning between feature phones and SMS to low specification smartphones on lean data plans. However, in the likes of Kenya, their use of mobile payments with services like mPesa are far ahead of the west.
You also can’t assume that usage is one phone, one person. In the likes of rural India the phone may be used by other family members with SIMs being the individual’s own.
How much of their media consumption is side loaded on to mobile devices?
A global activation approach requires extensive discussions with local company stakeholders BEFORE it’s sufficiently baked. I worked on web properties at Unilever and we thought about how could graphical assets be leveraged, a common social publishing platform (Percolate) and common measurement (Adobe Analytics) as a primary focus. We recognised that markets may want to build leaner, smaller websites or roll out changes when they had marketing budget.
Bringing key stakeholders gives them ownership of the strategy, so they are much more likely to give a decent effort in local amplification. More related content here.
Pipes – Yahoo! Pipes analogue, lets just hope that they haven’t captured the ‘flakey’ experience. I often remember hearing Yahoo! Pipes being compared to owning a British sports car. Instead I would prefer that Pipes provide the Mazda MX5 (Miata) experience where you get the experience but none of the broken ass crap of owning an MGB
Business
Is 2017 the beginning of the end for the app economy? TheNextWeb – not exactly the beginning of the end. More like a new normal – one thing that’s missing is the importance of building inside existing app eco-systems such as WeChat, Facebook Messenger etc. Whilst WeChat have made headway with mini-apps it will be interesting to see if Facebook can duplicate their success.
Korea
Why young South Koreans are turning away from religion | Arts & Culture | Al Jazeera – a certain amount of this turning away is geography. Korea had a mix of buddhism and Shamanism historically. Buddhist monasteries and temples were often in the mountains close to nature. Shamanism depended on closeness with nature – so again being out in the middle of nowhere. You throw in the move to cities, the break down of familial connections through distance and time poverty. More on Korean related topics here.
Does Slack allow your boss to spy on you? — Quartz – yes, but only with output rather than outcome-focused measures on productivity. It will reinforce the practices of poor managers rather than help make good managers
