Business cases discussions seem to have narrowed down to ROI these days. The ROI of social media is a particularly hot topic – often accompanied by lots of hot air too. I like Trey Pennington’s take on the issue and personally I’m not sure that ROI is the right question – it’s far too easy to manipulate - Opportunity cost is a bigger factor in most business cases.

Not all cows produce milk

Donning a cow costume does not make you a cow. Think about it. Getting a traditional agency to do digital marketing via social media is not the same as doing social media marketing. You’ll get results, but no social media juice.

One of the advantages of executing your first social media project as part of an existing campaign is that it helps to make the distinction clear – just ensure you can identify the contribution of the social media component.

The upside of social media is huge, but hard to predict - @radiokate‘s fox (mentioned during my presentation) has now been viewed over 50,000 times: http://twitpic.com/sebvd – and it just jumped from social media to mainstream media. Could you have predicted that?

Which takes me neatly to my final points: Social media shouldn’t be viewed as an island. Without exception, every social media success story I have been involved in has worked exactly because in was integrated into a broader marketing and communication plan, and because it had a knock on impact into other channels.

‘Doing social media’ isn’t a case of walking through the blue door, never to see the old world again, it is a matter of organically building new skills and extending traditional marketing activities. See it as a gradual transition to a different way of engaging with customers, suppliers and prospects, one step at a time.

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Twitter played host to a passionate discussion about social media experts earlier this week, kicked off by a blog post:  6 Reasons You Shouldn’t Brand Yourself as a Social Media Expert by Dan Schawbel, who describes himself as “the leading personal branding expert for Gen-Y” – reading the post I would say he’s wrong on most of the points he makes, but  what do I know, I’m just a social media expert.

Suw Charman-Anderson wrote a thoughtful post that provides a narrative on the issues, of which there are many. Picking up from a tweet in Suw’s post:

In the Twitter conversation this morning, @BenjaminEllis said  “@Suw It’s hard for the true experts when people with 6 months experience and no results to show for it call themselves experts too.”

Sadly, the social media scene is full of self-proclaimed experts. As opportunists jump on the TwitterLinkedFaceInMySpaceBook bandwagon, much of Twitter and the Blogosphere has become a torrent of misinformation and blatant  nonsense, most of it promulgated by “experts” – it is frustrating for those that have been making a living, rather than a noise, with the technologies.

Dan’s post says “When everyone in the world is a social media expert it loses meaning” I agree with the sense, but strictly speaking he’s wrong. When everyone calls themselves a social media expert, including people that clearly aren’t, it causes people to question the credibility of people making the claim. At least it should, and that isn’t a bad thing. It also makes it much harder to find the people who are actually the experts. Suw continues:

I can’t think of any other professional field where is is frowned upon to simply call oneself an expert. Indeed, in every other field I can think of, we actively seek out experts. If you have a bad problem with your drains, you call a drainage expert without even thinking about it. If you want to learn about the nuances of the Bard’s great works, you seek out an expert in Shakespeare. If your MacBook conks out, you take it to an Apple expert.

There’s nothing wrong with being an expert in these fields, so why is it wrong in social media?

Now we get to the troublesome thing about being an expert, and it’s a problem that isn’t specific to social media: How do you know you are an expert? How do you know if someone else is an expert?

You start off knowing, roughly, nothing. You learn something. You learn some more things and you start to feel a bit of an expert. You learn a few more things, and you start to call yourself an expert. You learn a lot more things and you realise that you weren’t an expert before, and you probably still aren’t one now. You learn a huge amount more things, and you aren’t so bothered about calling yourself an expert anymore, but everyone else starts to call you one, so you start to call yourself one too. You’ve earned the right too.

I’m trying to gently say that expertise is generally established by a third party. Traditionally, it was a matter of formal qualifications. However, the academic system struggles to keep pace with technology. It will be a while before we see the first degree course in social media, and even the thought of it causes an uneasy sensation in the pit of my stomach, so don’t get any ideas. Academic qualifications aren’t it then, although there are some highly relevant ones.

I jokingly mentioned the word “pundit” as a substitution in the maligned “social media expert” phase. Strangely it didn’t go down too well! Interestingly through, it is one of the words listed under “expert” in my trusty Mac OS X Thesaurus, and whilst I’m in that reference library, here is a quote from the dictionary definition of expert:

In specific fields, the definition of expert is well established by consensus and therefore it is not necessary for an individual to have a professional or academic qualification for them to be accepted as an expert. In this respect, a shepherd with 50 years of experience tending flocks would be widely recognized as having complete expertise in the use and training of sheep dogs and the care of sheep.

Please note, for the avoidance of doubt, someone who got their first sheep 6 months ago, herded them into a pen once using their dog, and tells lovely stories about herding sheep, is not an expert. Twitter account or no. 30,000 followers or not.

There is still the Naive Consumer Problem: Say I need to buy a skateboard. Shocking as it may be, I know very little about skateboards, other than they have wheels attached to a board, and that you skate with them. After talking with a few people that seem to know about skateboards, I quickly grasp that I may be missing some details. The kind of important details that justify a set of wheels costing slightly more than my first car. Perhaps.

I know just enough to know that I don’t know enough, so I rely on other (independent) people to tell me who the experts are. Usually we really on other experts to tells us who the experts are. The nature of social media makes that process hard. As new entrants scramble for links, mentions, follows, retweets and generally anything that will give them credibility – that much needed “social capital” – objectivity flies out of the window, and everybody calls the person with three months more experience “an expert”. Meanwhile, new tools and best practice move on like an express train, on a day without strikes or leaves on the line.

Social media is such a young space that in some areas there may not be anyone with direct experience or knowledge. This is a new frontier, still under construction in many places. Someone once quipped that “everyone wants an expert, even when there isn’t one to be had” – I remember seeing an ad wanting someone with 5 years experience in a web application. I’d been the product manager from the start of its development, and I didn’t have 5 years experience with it.

BenjaminEllis: @euan When I needed surgery that involved going close to my optic nerves, I was looking for someone who was called an expert in the field.

euan: @BenjaminEllis and I was nearly fitted with a pacemaker I didn’t need by someone who was also called an expert.

The nature of expertise means that experts still make mistakes. Expertise is domain specific too. Social media is a huge and vaguely defined area, covering much of what constitutes the web today. I don’t think many would argue against calling Sir Tim an expert on web matters. However, even he says that we know longer understand the web. An expert knows their bounds.

Incidentally, Gordon Brown has appointed Sir Tim Berners-Lee to help “open up” government data. Great news.

Back to a definition then, since finding a social media expert is starting to have all of the characteristics of a wicked problem. The root of the word expert is  ”expertus”, which means to have tried. Trying implies something else: failing. As noted by Charles Cohen at Being-Digital this week, the most valuable lessons come not from success, but from failing.

The advantage of getting into the game early is that you can make mistakes that enable you to learn. That’s one of the reasons that business should get on board now, not later. Another couple of years and you’ll be doing the equivalent of putting animated gifs on your home page in 2003.  The fact that I didn’t “get it” when I first saw Sir Tim’s prototype browser didn’t matter… Two years later and I was building web sites. By the time I was designing connectivity and security for on-line banks, making mistakes was no longer an option, for anyone. The web had matured.

I got to know what worked and what didn’t, not because somebody had told me, but because I had done both. There is more to expertise than just experience tough, back to Suw’s post:

A super-user is not the same as an expert – it’s not about knowing how the tools work, how to make a new blog post or set up a new wiki. It’s a much more nuanced job and involves constant learning from sometimes unexpected sources. I never thought I’d end up talking to psychologists about email when I started as a consultant, but understanding why people are wedded to their inbox helps me to understand the problems I will face when trying to introduce them to a wiki. Being an expert in social media means that you are constantly pushing to understand the non-obvious, constantly questioning the assumptions and the so-called common sense explanations for why things happen the way they happen.

I have to confess that I had retreated to calling myself a social media practitioner recently. It was a vague attempt to make the point that I have “walked the talk” as opposed to just talking it. However, “practitioner” isn’t it, as friends have gently pointed out. Mastery is a process, and doing is just the first step. Being an expert means knowing when to break the rules, and eventually helping to making the rules. That only comes from experimentation and experience.

Perhaps the best question to ask the next expert you meet is “tell me about your failures, and what you’ve learnt from them.” The answer will tell you a lot.

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The whole ‘free’ thing is worth wrapping your head around. It is probably worth starting with Chris Anderson’s article from last year, but then reversing out a bit with Alan Patricks two great posts on Freeconomics: PART I and PART II and his notes from the panel: CHINWAGGING or the podcast). You can read a journal of the panel session on the Bluedoor blog, where Abigail has blogged her tweetage, as it were, and there is a full write up at Brandrepublic.

You see, ‘free’ isn’t really free at all. It’s been funded by the VCs and selling data, and the VCs aren’t playing anymore. The concept of Anderson’s free is that transactional costs (the price of ‘doing things’) tends to zero on-line and at scale. However, transactional costs tending to zero is very different then them being zero see… Someone’s got to pick up the tab, see Nic Brisbourne’s post, and I quote:

The other takeaway that I hadn’t considered fully is that for many services in reality the marginal cost of delivery is not zero.  This was made most forcefully by panelist Alan Patrick, but also by panelist Bruce Daisely of YouTube who made the point that the worlds favourite video service now accounts for 10% of total bandwidth consumption – which I’m sure costs Google a lot of money.  This point knocks a sizeable whole in the ‘free’ argument, although ‘free’ fans would argue that these costs are going down all the time.

So, I threw in a question at the end, on the basis of these three forces “Won’t free end up eating itself?”

1. Free Attracts The Freeloaders.

If you advertise your service as free, hoping to up sell people to a paying service later (the freemium model), you may well be attracting the wrong crowd. I don’t mean in the sense of bad people, but rather the people that want something for free. That leaves those who want to pay as potential customers for a competitor. More importantly, you have probably attracted ‘customers’ that choose on price (free), rather than features. I put the word customers in quotes there very deliberately. Since they aren’t paying you anything, they aren’t really customers. They are prospects. And that is where ‘free’ is interesting: As a marketing ploy. It is a good one. But wait up…

2. Free Drives Value Out of the Market.

Imagine there’s a nice bar. A really nice bar. They charge £10 per drink, but it’s nice and you like it there, so you pay your £10. Now, someone opens up a bar next door. The drinks are free. I mean £0 free. You’re going to check it out aren’t you? Seriously. At least once? The £10 bar is going to loose at least some revenue, if not customers. You’re running the £10 bar. What will you do? Drop prices? A buy-one-get-one-free offer?

Markets are elastic. If someone enters the market with a lower priced offer, it drags prices down. It’s called competition, and it’s generally a good thing. As customers, we like it. However, when someone enters the market at ‘free’ it isn’t the usual ‘more efficient competitor’ entering. No, it’s a value destroying monster. Value will disappear from the market. That inevitably means that companies will too, which will reduce competition in the long run – and that isn’t good. And the competition that’s left? Oh, it’s bad…

3. Free Spreads Across Markets.

Traditional competition focusses on price. As marketers, we try and combat price competition by introducing features that (in our minds at least) create value and preserve the price. Some choose to build more efficient businesses, so that they can compete on price, but maintain margins. In the world of ‘free’ you can’t compete on price. You have to compete on features (or quality, which I’d argue is a feature anyway). That means wherever two players are in the same market with a ‘free’ offer, the temptation, if not the action, will be to gradually add more and more features. Think about the value for the market. More and more of what was revenue, ends up as ‘free’. Remember those ‘freemium’ businesses, giving you free stuff, hoping to upgrade you? There is less and less to upgrade you to that isn’t free.

Free is a Short-Term Win and a Long-Term Lose

‘Free’ feels good, but it is really an inevitable race to the bottom, ensuring that markets are destroyed by low price expectations and poor (service) quality. Watch the providers of ‘free’ – as advertising revenues (and tolerance for advertising) falls, and VC money dries up, expect them to come asking for money or to start selling your data to the highest bidder. The end of ‘free’ might well come from the strangest of places: mobile e-commerce. The latest iPhone software let’s you make payments within iPhone apps themselves. That’s iPhone apps that you probably paid for in the first place too! Nokia, Microsoft and a host of others are planning similar offers.

The Way out of Free is Utility

As much as product marketers bang on about the latest much have feature, one thing that we do pay for is utility. I can make a local phone call very cheaply, if not for free – depending on where I am. That same phone call costs significantly more on a mobile/cell phone, and yet the technology took off. People were paying for utility: being able to make calls from anywhere, not just when they were stuck in the house or the office. It made great sense as people became more and more mobile. And, as the technology took off, people got more and more mobile in their work and social lives, driving the technology even faster.

So far, the Internet is just catching up with the whole mobility thing. Web browsers are improving in leaps and bounds, as is the provision of mobile-friendly websites and improved screens on phones. Mobile Internet is taking off. And do you know what? It probably isn’t going to be ‘free’.

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Today’s Internet is a curious mix of problems seeking answers and answers seeking problems. Later in the week, the EPSRC Research Cluster on Innovative Media for the Digital Economy held it’s Springboard Event. Both were thought provoking, and I will come back to them, especially the session with Charlie Leadbeater in another post. First though, some thoughts on the recurring challenge that came up in both events: The issue of trust in the on-line world.

What Does Trust Mean On-line?

Trust is a troublesome topic to study, partly because it occurs in so many different contexts, but also because it is so hard to nail down a definition. Rousseau and her colleagues offered up the following definition:

“Trust is a psychological state comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behavior of another.” Rousseau, D. M., Sitkin, S. B., Burt, R. S., and Camerer, C. (1998). “Not so Different After All: A Cross-Discipline View of Trust,” in Academy of Management Review, 23, 393-404.

Quite a mouthful. Let me simplify a little: Trust is being ready to do something (risky), in the hope that it will work out. It is something we do everyday, especially when we carry out a interactions on-line. However it is something we probably understand less well than we would like to think.

Personality theorists have argued that some people are more likely to trust than others, based on how their trust has been rewarded in the past. That doesn’t tell us much about the mechanisms of trust, at least not in a way that we can action personally, or use in running a business.

Most academic papers divide trust into two types. At the early stages of a relationship, trust is “calculus-based“. We carefully calculate how the other party is likely to behave, looking at the rewards and punishments for being trustworthy or untrustworthy. In other words, trust is driven by some form of accountability. We are more likely to trust if we know that when the other party does something ‘bad’, then something ‘bad’ will happen to them in response. In these days of blogs, on-line review sites and social networks you can see how that can work on-line – even if imperfectly.

As a relationship develops, shared values and goals start to emerge. This allows trust to move to a different level, towards what is sometimes called “identification-based trust“. At this point, both sides have grasped and digested the other’s desires and intentions. They understand what the other side cares about to the point where they can act in each others interest. This kind of trust forms an emotional bond between the parties, one that drives valuable things like loyalty and the desire for mutual satisfaction.

In one direction, trust, in the on-line world at least, points towards accountability, and from there to transparency, openness and confidence. Trust is traditionally based on social relations, but in the on-line world that anchor is often substituted for another one: Confidence – the belief that things will unfold as expected. There are distinctions between trust and confidence. Confidence is based on familiarity, and it is something that can be designed for. An important point when building websites.

In the other direction, trust points towards compliance. This is perhaps not as obvious, but think about it for a moment. If you carry out a transaction on-line, you have effectively complied with the desires of the other party. Be it purchasing something via a web site, registering for a whitepaper or just signing up to join the latest social networking site, you essentially did what that other party wanted you to do. That might sound a little oppressive, but it is never-the-less a fact, and a very useful one if you want to understand how that happened.

From Trust to Persuasion

The more friendly face of compliance is persuasion, and recently I reread an old Robert B. Cialdini book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion“, although I’ve lost my copy somewhere between London and Austin. I hope I can replace it, as it’s a good read. Cialdini introduces six principles of ethical persuasion:

• Reciprocity
• Commitment/consistency
• Scarcity
• Liking
• Authority
• Social proof

These concepts have become so popular that you are probably familiar with the terms. They are techniques used by sales and marketing professionals day in and day out around the world.

Reciprocity is an extremely powerful influence. That’s hardly surprising, since it is one of the underlying behaviours that enables us to have a society where we can have specialist roles and engage in trade. People generally feel obligated to return a favour. This tendency is often played on by offering a small gift to potential customers. Studies show that even if the gift is unwanted, it will influence the recipient to want to reciprocate, usually by buying something. A variation on this theme is to ask for a particularly big favour. When this request is turned down, a smaller favour is then asked. Having refused the first request, it becomes that much harder to refuse the second.

Ever been given a “free” taster and then ended up buying something you wouldn’t have otherwise? Or recommended or helped out as a result of a service that gave you a “free” account. You were probably motivated by reciprocity.

Commitment and consistency are important factors in trust, and also compliance. Our desire to appear consistent in our words, beliefs, attitudes and actions is very strong. Society values personal consistency exactly because it enables trust – if we are consistent, our future actions are predictable, and that leads to confidence and so to trust.

Being consistent in our decision making also provides a useful shortcut: By sticking with decisions that we have already made, we don’t have to go through the stress and effort involved in continually reprocessing all the information that enabled us to make the decision in the first place. Consistency gets us through the complexity of our modern existence. One merely needs to recall the earlier decision and respond in keeping with it. Given the choice between deciding we are wrong, and simply changing our opinion by rearranging the facts to support our existing opinion, we will generally re-arrange the facts. As an additional shortcut, we are completely unaware that we re-arranged the facts. Google ‘cognitive dissonance’ if you want to scare yourself.

Scarcity is a fairly self-evident motivator: Offer closes today. Last 5 places remaining. That exclusive event that has tickets that always sell out before you get a chance to buy them. We hate missing out, and that influences our decisions.

The last few factors (liking, authority and social proof) can also be interpreted in terms of social influence or social trust. People trust, and comply with, people they like and that they perceive are like them (i.e. have similar values). That is why broadcast media advertisers pay large sums of money to have celebrities feature in them. Similarly, sales people look for shared interests between themselves and you.

This is simply another way of reducing the complexity we are faced with daily, using the decisions other people have already made, to reduce the ones that we have to make. People affect other people and are affected by other people. Social media and social networking sites almost codify this practice. We conform and comply based on the perceived views of others. Social Impact Theory (Latane, 1980) suggests that the amount of influence depends on:

1. The number of people who agree (although as the number of people increases, the number is less significant).
2. Strength (the status, expertise and power of the influencers).
3. Immediacy (the proximity of the influence).

Conformity from social proof is immensely powerful. If you are in any doubt, look into the origin of the phrase “Don’t drink the Kool – Aid” often kicked around in tech circles. It comes from the Jonestown tragedy, a mass suicide in 1978.

The most common form of social proof used in marketing is case studies – people like you purchased this product. Social proof is most influential at moments of uncertainty. If a situation is ambiguous, people are more likely to look to other’s behaviour and follow it. Further, people are more inclined to follow the lead of ‘similar’ people, see liking, above.

We also respond to perceived authority and expertise. The exact nature of our compliance varies by the situation, but generally we are most influenced by job titles, clothes, and even the cars that people drive. Again, these are techniques commonly used in advertising. Thumb through the adverts in any glossy mainstream magazine and count the examples.

There are two takeaways here. Firstly, as a company looking to build trust in an increasingly on-line world, there are a number of mechanisms open to you:

• Be open and transparent.
• Be predictable and consistent.
• Be visibly accountable.

Summarising Trust for Businesses On-line

In short, be part of your customers’ community. Yes, in the short term, you could get away with just the ‘appearance’ of these activities, but if you want to get to the highest levels of trust with customers, you will actually need to carry them out fully.

As individuals, we need to pay careful attention to how social media influences us, and where we place our trust. Social media plays curious games with otherwise highly effective psychological mechanisms. Just because a number of people write a positive review about a product on-line doesn’t actually make it good, although it may feel that way. At the very least, you are looking at a self-selecting group: people who chose to buy the product, rather than ones who chose not to because they perceived it to be poor.

People writing reviews are prone to exactly the same mechanisms that you are: Consistency and commitment means that they are unlikely to write a bad review for a restaurant they have patronised, since they have already paid for a meal there. Sometimes trust is broken so much that other forces come in to play, hence the occasional ranting negative review.

In face to face communication, as an effective barrier against many of these compliance techniques is to congratulate the persuader on their skill in using them. That isn’t so easy when you are dealing with a website. Give yourself time and space when making decisions. A simple self-enforced cooling-off period can work quite well.

Our life experience has probably made us suitably cynical about advertising in broadcast media. The on-line world is evolving so rapidly that we haven’t yet settled on well-adapted behaviours to deal with it.

I’m not intending to be negative here, just keen that we build real trust and real communities via the on-line world. With that in mind, I am off to the Centre for Applied Positive Psychology’s Creating Flourishing Communities Conference this week (details here), more on that later.

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South by South West Interteractive was even more of a whirlwind than I imagined it would be, and I had imagined it being frenetic. The event brings together people from the film, music and digital interactive spaces, which provides a rich context in which to talk about the future of marketing.

In between the Digital Mission events I caught a few panels, and (in true SXSW style) had lots of corridor conversations with industry verterans. For me, one of the highlights was meeting with Hugh MacLeod, aka GapingVoid. Hugh was one of the first bloggers I started to read, and I’ve been a long-time admirer of his cartoons (a warning: some strong language). I think it would be fair to describe him as an accidental artist – in fact I’m sure those are his words not mine. I have come up through an engineering and technology route to the marketing world, or as Hugh put it, I’m a “geek.” Hugh started in the marketing agency domain, before arriving into the technology world via blogging, back at the beginning of the century. That gives him a unique perspective on both the old and new marketing worlds.

As we sat in a favourite SXSWi watering hole, the Ginger Man, I quizzed him about where he saw marketing going and listened to his stories. I also sat in on the blog to book panel towards the end of SXSWi, but more of that later – and on Hugh’s upcoming book Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity (sample excerpts  and pre-review)

Over the last year I’ve come to the conclusion that it is best to interpret broadcast media, and the broadcast marketing that comes with it, as an anomoly. Since the invention of radio and TV advertising, marketers have been able to “buy” our attention by inserting adverts into content that we choose to consume. I distinguish radio and TV from earlier billboard and poster advertising, since they are media that already have our attention before the advert. With poster ads, marketers had to win our attention; with broadcast ads marketers simply need to make sure that they don’t loose our attention.

Arguably, broadcast media has laid waste to innovative marketing and made marketers lazy. Big brands have lived off of the program-ad-program sandwich “bait and switch” format for a generation, but we aren’t playing the attention game anymore. About the time that our second child was born we got a large screen TV. Not for us – the TV is hardly ever on when we are home – but for our baby sitters. Having a big screen TV made us an attractive employer for sitters.

Times have changed. Just before I headed over to the US for SXSW, our baby sitters arrived. They didn’t ask for the TV remote, they asked for the WiFi password so they could surf the web on their laptops. The younger generation is increasingly switching from watching TV to surfing the Internet. The older generations are too. The story is just by way of example, the broader trend is supported by industry statistics too.

Along with the switch from the big screen to the “small screen” we’ve become increasingly immune to advertising. Experiments that monitor eye-scanning patterns of web surfers show that they quickly learn where ads are placed in the page, and avoid looking at them. Our attention can no longer be so easily bought. The web doesn’t support bait and switch. If people (and the brands that employ them) want to get our attention, then they are going to have to be much smarter than they have been in the past. They either have to get better and better at grabbing attention, or to switch from interuption-based marketing, to conversational marketing.

In parallel, the growing domination of web search as the means of information gathering has changed the way that people look for products. Marketing is increasingly about discovery, rather than broadcast. A transition from from push (broadcast) to pull (discovery) seems increasingly inevitable.

Of course, we know all this, but old marketing habits die hard. The short term answer has been for companies to do more and more (broadcast) advertising, aided by the falling cost of media. That has simply exasperated the problem, saturating audiences and diluting attention. There is no point carrying on with the old model and hoping that it will still work. It won’t, at least not unless you have a huge budget. You can compensate for efficiency by pushing harder, but eventually things will still break.

The future of marketing lies in its the past. Companies have to switch back to authentic conversations with customers, building communities and finding the influencers and amplifiers within them.

Some shots from the Ginger Man and out and about in Austin.

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It stimulated lots of thinking, and there are certainly some big issues to deal with. The three speakers were:

• Charlie Robertson of Red Spider.
• Andrew Howells of Zype.
• Quentin Boyes of Honeycomb Software.

For those that missed then, Qik‘s Mireira Fontbernat vidoed the sessions: Videos from “Should Brands be Broadcasters?”. I’m not sure the event being broadcast via Qik falls into the “ironic” bucket or not. Regardless, very useful, and a sign of the times: One person with a mobile phone can broadcast an event across the globe, receiving questions in real-time from the viewers. It feels a little like the future.

• Traditional broadcasters are moving into community building.
• The big brands are using their own broadcast media to create interaction.
• Individuals themselves are becoming broadcasters (via blogs, vlogs, Facebook, Twitter, …). 

Charlie spoke about some of his work in creating more interactive, community-based experiences for broadcasters. Enough to be worth a whole separate post on the nature of community. Andrew talked about Honda’s recent marketing (see the Honda channel on YouTube to see some of their content) and the use of Homechoice (owned by Tiscali) as an interactive TV platform. The fact that a company most known for being an Internet Service Provider bought an IPTV service provider tells you something about the changes afoot.

Of course, the idea of broadcasters and brands having a conversation is really an illusion. The problem with conversations, as Twitter users know, is that they don’t scale well. The reason brands used broadcast media in the first place wass the ability for a few people to reach several million.

There are costs to that efficiency. Traditional broadcasting is one-way. That makes broadcasting efficient for the sender, but not for the receiver. When I watch a broadcast, it isn’t tuned to my needs or where I am at right now. My only control is to turn it off, just as I turn it on. Broadcast is also a time sink. If 100 of my friends start broadcasting even 1% of their life, keeping up with it all would consume 100% of mine. I wouldn’t even have enough time left to do my own broadcasting! Shocking. Some would say that might be a good thing. Just one minute of broadcast video could consume hundreds of hours worth of other people’s time.

When media was expensive to create, there were man barriers – good and bad. Volume was low, quality was (usually) high. With low cost broadcasting, thanks to the Internet and much more affordable video kit, those barriers have moved. Loose a day watching YouTube and you’ll feel how.

New media is blurring the lines between broadcast and personalized two-way communication. I can watch a Qik video broadcast and send comments back to the person filming. With services like Blogstar the producer not only has chat, but they can also turn the camera on the audience members – as I discovered during Phil Cambell’s The Gravity show. It certainly ramped up my participation!

What conversations have, that broadcasting looses, is that ability to listen. Listening creates interaction and context. In a conversation, I can listen to the other person and understand where they are coming from. And perhaps what they want too. I can tailor what I say to take account of what they already know, and better explain what they don’t. That conversation is unique.

A conversation is a kind of negotiation, or a knowledge journey. Traditional marketing fails at this, spectacularly. That is why it wastes so much time (for the receiver and the sender). Being efficient is more about the listening than the speaking, and listening takes an investment of time.

In the workshop I ran this week, looking at creating service level agreements and managing to them, the big take away was the importance of listening. Companies and people are all too keen to ‘get their message out there’. More often that not, a little listening saves a lot of talking. We need some technologies to balance all of this new broadcast media – filtering or switching off is only part of the answer.

When we listen more, we need to do less.

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Seth focussed on the book, making the point that this is the moment of our revolution. Seth says there have been 3 or 4 or 5, revolutions depending how you count them. Every time one happens, the people in the middle of it get busy, but don’t realise that they are in the middle of it. They end up fighting against it, and getting stuck in-between the last thing and the next thing.

He said that when you look back on the revolution, it is easy to see it. e.g. looking back at Henry Ford’s production line, it is obvious, looking back at it. Seth scoped out what happens when a revolution occurs, and how we end up living with the vestiges for a long while.

Factories are arranged in a line. Why? Because when steam was first used for power, they would build one steam engine at the end of the factory. That drove a shaft, which powered all the machines, so you had to line them up along that shaft. Factories are still laid out this way, even though they don’t have to be. Old habits stick around for a long while.

What is sticking around now? We grew up with TV, and TV thinking. A world where anyone with money could interrupt you. The could buy an interruption – an ad. If you want to interrupt a lot of people, you better have something of interest to lots of people. That leads to average stuff for average people. That leads to a focus on ‘lower the costs, keep the quality, …’ Seth says this is the line shaft of the modern age – the ‘meet ball’ – safe, predicable.

But now there is a revolution. That interruption engine is broken. Not slowed down, but broken. Direct mail, with 1% hit rate, is considered good. But people don’t open junk mail any more. TV ads don’t build brand anymore. In the US not one brand has been built from scratch via TV ads in the last 5 years, may be more (according to Seth). Interruption media is falling apart. 50 million people in the US joined the do not call list within 3 months of it being started in the US. People don’t want to be interrupted anymore

So what happens to average stuff for average people?

Seth went back to talk about Josiah Wedgwood (mentioned in the book – a great brit) He invented sales people paid on commission, water-based logistics, showrooms and lots of other revolutionary business ideas. Josiah’s brother lived and died poor, he didn’t listen to his brother’s ideas. Josiah was richer than Bill Gates is today (in adjusted terms). Years later, Josiah’s wealth funded the science projects of his grandson – one Charles Darwin.

So what do you need to change? Seth says change your meatballs. A company like Gillette isn’t part of this new world, because of their meatballs. They don’t have a ‘right’ to our/my attention. Seth said you have to be old world or new world. You have to make a choice. It isn’t about new tactics on old things (the idea of Meatball Sundaes).

Seth book lists 14 trends, but he ran through these on the call:

1. New media allows everyone who makes something to establish a direct connection with the people who use it. No middle men. Directly connected players have an advantage over indirectly connected ones.
2. Every single person person you interact with is the equivalent of a major newspaper critic. Everyone has a printing press. All customers are equally capable of spreading the good or bad news about your product, through blogs, youtube, facebook, and so on.
3. Speed. Things are fast. And getting faster. People who organise themselves around speed gain an advantage, that appears to be more sustainable.
4. The Long tail (Steve Anderson’s concept). In the ‘limited’ shelf space era, we worried about the bulk, the short tail. The long tail introduces the idea that when inventory becomes infinite, the long tail wins – it is 50% of what is sold today on Amazon and other on-line sites. Lots of things long forgotten in the short-tail world.
5. Outsourcing, as a competitive speed advantage.
6. Dicing the world into little tiny bits and rearranging it for the user. Seth gave Google as an example. You don’t choose where your content goes anymore.
7. Infinite media channels. There are hundreds of channels, every Google search is a media channel, every blog is a media channel. Those people are in front of you with the message that you wanted at that moment. If you can find a media channel that matches what you have to offer, you win.
8. You can win by enabling connections, because you can profit by enabling connections.
9. Who and who many. Too many people are focused on how many, rather than who. e.g. how many people read my blog (tell me about it Seth!). If you are selling wireless spectrum, do you want the twelve multi-million dollar bidders reading, or the twelve million people who want to read about Paris Hilton? (Hmmm… I’m sorry Hilton fans, I am going to have to cut you loose. Thank you for joining for the ride so far)
10. Gatekeepers are going away. But new gatekeepers are coming in – they are leaders, with a tribe.
11. The Seinfeld curve – which is an upside down bell curve. One the left, scarcity. On the right, ubiquity. you need to be at one end of the other. Don’t get stuck in the middle (Seinfeld gets to be at both ends – ubiquitous via his TV shows and scarce via his personal appearances).

Seth listed some other switches, of which the following jumped out at me:

1. Limited number of media outlets, versus countless (the Internet).
2. Limited media versus countless.
3. Horizontal applications, versus small vertical niches.
4. Marketer-to-consumer versus consumer-to-consumer communication.
5. A barrier between consumers and makers versus no barriers.
6. Spam vs permission.
7. A product line limited by the line you own versus limited by your imagination.
8. Features versus stories.
9. Advertising funded versus innovation funded success.
10. Customer support versus community support.
11. Focus groups versus launch and learn.

Seth’s closing words? Stop pondering and start now – go!

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There are also conversations that are awkward for a business. A discussion on the web about problems with a product, poor financial results, internal conflicts – all made public. I have seen all of these recently, and as a marketeer I know that they ‘damage the brand’. The conversations may or may not be factually accurate. Regardless, people still take something away from them, and a mark is made.

Most people see PR as about getting the message out. It has turned into Press Relations or Media Relations, rather than Public Relations. The new world of PR will be about engaging in conversations to persuade people, which was the very old world of Public Relations.

If you are in the business of persuading people, it is much easier if you are persuading them of something that is believable, credible. Something that is true and defensible. Thus the demand today for authentic companies, for ‘authentic brands’.

I observe, with an ironic twinge, the parallel growth of the personal branding industry. Will people and companies swap places? Will we end up with a juxtaposed world of authentic businesses, with people trying to project an image? Don’t misread me. I think that personal branding has a contribution to make, but as a marketeer I know that it also opens up Pandora’s box.

Good branding today is about being authentic, but most branding theory comes from the old ‘one way’ days of “sticking lipstick on the pig”. There is a big difference, one focusses on the message, the other on the messenger. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people, all of the time. With one way media and PR, the branding conversation was a tricky one to manage, but it could be managed.

With social media, some of the people are connected with some of the other people. Customers are better connected and the media doesn’t own the conversation anymore. It isn’t clear who will own it, if anyone. And, actually, it doesn’t matter. A new set of skills is required. Now we are all PR people, but we must focus on the messenger, more that the message. Who is it that you are? What’s your brand?

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