The online field has been one of the mainstays since I started writing online in 2003. My act of writing online was partly to understand online as a medium.
Online has changed in nature. It was first a destination and plane of travel. Early netizens saw it as virgin frontier territory, rather like the early American pioneers viewed the open vistas of the western United States. Or later travellers moving west into the newly developing cities and towns from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
America might now be fenced in and the land claimed, but there was a new boundless electronic frontier out there. As the frontier grew more people dialled up to log into it. Then there was the metaphor of web surfing. Surfing the internet as a phrase was popularised by computer programmer Mark McCahill. He saw it as a clear analogue to ‘channel surfing’ changing from station to station on a television set because nothing grabs your attention.
Web surfing tapped into the line of travel and 1990s cool. Surfing like all extreme sport at the time was cool. And the internet grabbed your attention.
Broadband access, wi-fi and mobile data changed the nature of things. It altered what was consumed and where it was consumed. The sitting room TV was connected to the internet to receive content from download and streaming services. Online radio, podcasts and playlists supplanted the transistor radio in the kitchen.
Multi-screening became a thing, tweeting along real time opinions to reality TV and live current affairs programmes. Online became a wrapper that at its worst envelopes us in a media miasma of shrill voices, vacuous content and disinformation.
Why we should relish putting ads into testing – VCCP – bit of an odd concept. The TV ads that I’ve worked on have all gone into testing at concept stage. Ads put into testing have their concepts polished using research from Kantar to maximise effectiveness. I couldn’t understand not putting ads into testing of some sort. More related content here.
Death of corporate media relations | WSJ – brands don’t trust or need media according to one editor. With their own social media accounts, blogs and websites, they go directly to their audience
The architects had a bold plan for the executive suite. They wanted to station Mr. Ma and his top lieutenants in a central command post with high visibility, like the bridge on a battleship.
That wouldn’t do, architects were told. One reason: Too many government officials come calling, and their visits need to be discreet. The executive offices were placed instead in the upper reaches of the highest tower.
Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras – The New York Times – “Reform and opening has already failed, but no one dares to say it,” said Chinese historian Zhang Lifan, citing China’s four-decade post-Mao policy. “The current system has created severe social and economic segregation. So now the rulers use the taxpayers’ money to monitor the taxpayers.”
Google Cloud changes abuse prevention process after viral customer complaint – Business Insider – Google appears a lot more vulnerable. In the many discussions about this incident on Reddit and other online message boards, a big complaint that has surfaced is an inability of Google Cloud customers to contact human customer-service reps in emergencies – not ready for enterprise use
Music’s ‘Moneyball’ moment: why data is the new talent scout – all of this can get gamed thru payola very easily. It recognises popularity rather than talent and begs the question, why would you go with a record label if you were already ‘making it’ nowadays?
Demo One disc that came with the early PlayStation’s had an application called V-CD that played music CDs and had a great visualiser to go along with the music. As I am not a gamer, this is why I miss the original PlayStation so much.
Negativland Interviews U2’s The Edge :Negativworldwidewebland – for many people the hypocrisy that is U2 didn’t manifest itself until some time in the noughties. Negativland’s dispute with them back in 1991 was one of the reasons why Mondo 2000 had them interview The Edge a year later and showing him up. I bet the publicist got fired for this
The Bureau season 3 on Amazon. It is one of the most well written series I have watched in a long time. The Bureau season 1 and 2 where taunt thrillers that were James Bond reimagined by John Le Carre. It is the show that Spooks should have been. The ending was on a cliff hanger and I didn’t think that we’d see The Bureau season 3 The Bureau season 3 sees our protagonist captured by ISIS. Guillaume Debailly is captured by ISIS who know him by his former cover of Paul Lefebvre.
A brass band cover of Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name
This amazing episode of NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert featuring Rakim (of Eric B & Rakim fame). What people tend to forget is the difference that Rakim made to hip-hop. Before him, most rappers rapped on the beat. Rakim used his rhymes the way a jazz musician plays their instrument. They go around the beat, yet are in time.
With Amazon delivering analytical data like this, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a lot more sites signing up to Amazon’s affiliate marketing scheme, even if they don’t want to sell anything for the beast of Seattle. The recommendation areas draws from its massive retail data set that shows what consumers are interested in across various different product categories.
This week I have mostly been working my way through John Kelly’s Mystery Train for my listening pleasure. Kelly is a veteran Irish DJ who has a rare skill in the quality of his sections. Naturally this is all backed by the massive music library of RTÉ. The original run of it in the mid to late 1990s was legendary and thankfully Irish state broadcaster resurrected it. Kelly just nails music selection. More culture related content here.
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
German nuclear plant infected with computer viruses, operator says | Reuters – So Sarbannes Oxley meant that a lot of corporates disabled USB ports. Technology company Huawei used to have ‘dirty machines’ and clean machines. Neither of which were connected by a network. The same was true in many agencies where I worked. Yet a German nuclear plant allows easy access via USB. Secondly, why do the USB chargers on airplane cockpits have any intelligence at all that would store a virus and allow it propagate? I would be very paranoid about using any USB chargers in coffee shops or an aircraft seat moving forwards. This is the problem when everything from light bulbs and doorbells now contain a Linux server. More security related content here.
iPhone maker Foxconn is churning out “Foxbots” to replace its human workers — Quartz – I am not convinced that they will be that successful. This is partly down to some of the manual dexterity required being similar to a watchmaker in some parts of the assembly. And that is down to Apple driving an industry race to squeeze phones into tighter factors for the guts. The process is repeatable, but hard to deliver. Back in the day Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers used to use pick-and-place machines for a lot of consumer electronics. It is why Japan went more towards micro-chips faster than players like Philips. Japan did a lot of component standardisation in terms of sizing and connectivity to the board. The boards were relatively simply designed and gave a bit of latitude to allow for a lack of precision from the machines. That meant slightly larger goods. More expensive devices like Sony’s Walkman Pro, were handmade because they crammed so much technology inside them .
