The image below is a screen shot of the last 7 posts on this blog in PostRank’s Analytics platform. We’ll discuss this tool a bit more in a moment, but the main features are that it tracks the number of engagements per post – most pertinently, the number of Tweets, Google Buzzes, Delicious Bookmarks and other social networks, in addition to unique visitors, reading time, etc.

Look and see how many comments this post gets, compared to how many tweets:

This isn’t just a trend over the last week. Almost every post I write has more comments than tweets. Also look at the reading times. I’ve highlighted the highest ones. This average time means people are reading the posts and reading the comments.

This means that my RSS subscribers are the real source of engagement for me. According to Feedburner, I have 148 people subscribed in Google Reader, and 48 who have subscribed to this blog in email.

So, time for some analysis:

Value Analysis 1: Keep Your Retweeets

A value based blog doesn’t need lots of retweets to get engagement. I want you and need you to understand right now that whilst more tweets about your posts will get it more coverage, lots of retweets are not necessary for and do not guarantee engagement.

If you were to ask me for my number one metric of success on my blog, I’d tell you instantly it’s comments. It’s the number of the them, and it’s the depth of them – because it means we actually have participation, not just blind retweeting.

Value Analysis 2: Backwards Engagement

According to PostRank, “80% of the conversations about your content happen off-site” (link.) Well, PostRank tels me that for my blog, 60% of the conversations about my content happen on-site. Value-based blogged is totally contradictory to standard volume-based blogging. The engagement is totally the other way around.

I don’t know of any top blog that gets more comments than retweets. In fact that only other blog that I can find that does is Robin Dickinson’s blog.

There are sometimes when admittedly, I wish I had more retweets. Sometimes it annoys me to see how many shallow blogs get so much coverage. But I will tell you this:  no blog post that has received lots of retweets on my blog has ever had lots of comments.

80% engagement off your site is … well … worthless in my opinion.

Value Analysis 3: It Works

It’s one thing talking about a value-based blog if in actual fact it didn’t work. But it does. On an average of 10 tweets per post and 15 comments per post, this blog:

1. This is the 5th ranked blog on leadership on PostRank (last week I was #3)
2. This is the 2nd ranked blog on social business on PostRank and 9th ranked for social media marketing.
3. This is 185th ranked marketing blog on the AdAge Power150 (I would be higher if more people linked here. My InLink score is very low.)

For 10 tweets, this is very good. Most of the blogs on AdAge get a very high number of tweets per post. My AdAge rank is lower, as it takes PostRank (which focusses on engagement), and also considers other measurement platforms that track InLinks, volume of tweets, etc.

But more than these stats, the proof it works is that Like Minds works and engages hundreds of people because of the discussions we have here. It works because someone saw this blog and was so warmly invited when they commented that they saw a link to the Like Minds Club and bought membership right away. It’s also got me a lot of recognition and love.

It works because authors have found the ideas here (that we formed together through the comments), and put them in their books (they tell me so!) It works because the thing that we discuss have changed lives.

Your Leading Thoughts

I know I’ve kind of preached us full here – but there is room for a very important discussion here. Many of you guys are likely discouraged, distracted by wanting to get your content recognised with retweets and such. I’m keen to know

1. If you’ve been blogging for 6 months and over, what are your statistics on engagement?
2. Be honest – how much are tweets and ‘attention’ a motivator for you?
3. Where on the web do you enjoy engaging in value-based blogs?

This thought comes from Scott Gould's thinking blog for thinking people. Scott is also on Twitter and Facebook.

Case Study: Value-Based Blogging

There’s only one problem with Apple’s model, and it’s an issue of anticipation and expectation. Namely, it is this:

Apple do such a good job of hyping and showing the new thing off, that when I get my hands on the new thing, nothing is new anymore.

You know what I mean here. I remember touching the iPhone for the first time, and as cool as it was, the demonstrations on the website had done such a good job of showing the device to me, that physically holding it had little new about it.

The Power Of New

I always say that the two most powerful things in products and the marketing of them are newness and usefulness, and the most powerful of these is new. If something is new (and marketed powerfully as new), then it can even surpass it’s own weaker usefulness. This is the story of the iPad itself. While many doubt its utility, everyone is certainly swept up in it’s newness.

The whole Social Media world is based on the power of new. If you link to your blog post, it may get retweeted. But if you announce it as a “New Blog Post”, you’ll get a lot more attention. Massive sites like TechCrunch and Mashable all function on the pulling power of new. Everyday millions of bits of information are shared on Twitter and Facebook – most of it, new. Of course this new is really nothing new in itself – it’s what journalists have known for years – hence the pressure to always break a story first, because people don’t buy old news.

Getting back to Apple, as I described above when I first held the iPhone, the problem for me was that although the device was new, when it came to holding the device, there was no longer anything new about it. This is what I expected from the iPad – for people to finally hold the thing, but have nothing new to report or review.

But this time, Apple created newness on another level by delivering surprises that no one knew about. This article from Gizmodo, “10 Essential iPad Tips and Tricks” reveals 11 new things that you can do that people didn’t know before. This is smart, because when people are now reviewing and talking about the iPad, rather than just discussing it’s usefulness (which people are debating), there is something new to discuss – the new features! And what we know about the Social Media hype machine is that it loves new.

Creating New

The reason why I’m excited about this is because back in January I wrote about Apple needing to employ this new level of new in their whole buzz experience. You can read it here. The main point I brought out was a framework to explain how Apple uses suspense to market their products, which I call the Pyramid of Expectation:

In this model (based on Pine and Gilmore’s in The Experience Economy – affiliate link), we see four levels of experience that the customer can have based on the level of their expectation.

When a consumer has an expectation, it is like a promise that the brand has made with them. The promise says that “we will deliver what you expect”, and this expectation is built on a range of things, from marketing to trusted referrals. Of course the idea is that the brand manages these expectations as best they can – but you can read more about that here.

Quite simply, according to this model,

• Sacrifice is when the expectations aren’t met
• Satisfaction is when the expectation are met
• Surprise is when the expectations are exceeded
• Suspense is the experience of anticipating an experience

Therefore, to create new, one needs to look at this model and ask themselves where their customers expectations are? In the case of the iPad, most people are in suspense mode. They are having the buzz experience of anticipating the launch – but traditionally, when they get their hands on the product they go down into satisfaction mode – their expectations were met.

What Apple did this time was rather than letting them drop into satisfaction, they instead delivered a surprise – something new that they were not expecting – and therefore exceeding expectations.

Lisa Barone wrote a great peice for Duct Tape Marketing in March this year on “How to use Surprise to Generate Word of Mouth“. In it she lists the following axioms to create surprise:

• Show Up Where They Don’t Expect
• Go Further Than You Have To
• Give Them Something Different
• Listen When They Think You’re Not
• Make The Little Things, Big Things

By just using these, you can immediately find simple and effective ways to add that element of new into what you do.

Your Experience of New

Experience happens in the senses of the beholder, and what one experiences as new and useful, another may not. Of course, correct profiling can generate target audiences, but still, with each person having different dominate senses and motivatiors within a target audience that is based on sociological information, there is a need for marketing and products to be both multi-touch and multi-sense.

I’m curious, then, because what I percieve to be new may be what you percieve to be old. So what I’d like to discuss with you is:

1. How much is new a driver for you on a daily basis?
2. How much is usefulness a driver for you on a daily basis?

Thanks for reading – and I look forward to talking with you.
Scott

This thought comes from Scott Gould's thinking blog for thinking people. Scott is also on Twitter and Facebook.

How Apple Created a New Level of ‘New’ with the iPad

Today’s post is a continuation: What should Nestlé do now? It’s easy to say what they should’ve done – but now that they had this mess on their hands, what is the way forward?

I’ve got 4 steps for them, that if they do, I believe could turn this around for them.

1. The Focus: Change Perception

I said yesterday that it no longer matters what the facts are. The whole sitution was sparked by a Greenpeace video that claimed Nestlé were using a certain oil from a certain supplier that was destroying rainforests.

Whether this is true or not is irrelevant.

Because whether or not Nestlé do or don’t use that oil, people now only perceive that 1] they do use the oil, and also that 2] Nestlé are covering up, doing Social Media badly, and only care about profits.

Ask yourself: how do you know, for sure, that Nestlé buy this certain palm oil? But that doesn’t matter – because you perceive that they do, and we believe that if the crowd perceives it, then it’s probably right.

Of course, many people don’t even know about the palm oil part of the story. They just know that Nestlé have been tragically managing their Facebook page.

Hence their focus now should not be to change the facts. Their focus must be to change perceptions. A hard job.

2. The Concept: Match Spreadability With Spreadability

The protesting against Nestlé is viral. I’ve been discussing the qualities of ‘viral’ in a series of studies on Spreadability vs Reach. Direct reach is what broadcast media is all about – the number of eyeballs they can get their message directly in front of.

Spreadability, however, is not about direct reach, but about the ability for a message to spread organically from eyeball to eyeball, based on the nature of the message (exemplified in this case study on the Rage Against The Machine vs X-Factor).

The campaign against Nestlé, and subsequent anti-sentiment, is spreadability. Nestlés poor response was to issue a press release – a direct reach tactic – that simply does not match the power and the spreadbility of the campaign against them.

The solution for Nestlé lies in creating a spreadable campaign to match the spreadable campaign against them.

3. The Change: Fully Embrace Social Authenticity

Nestlé have two options.

They could ignore it all. Most people don’t know what’s happened online, and it will blow over in a number of days. That’s the nature of Social Media. But Nestlé will not able to get away with it a second time, because Social Media will have grown.

The better option is to embrace it all. Nestlé must realise that the three parts in this terror, 1] the video, 2] their poor handling and 3] the public backlash, all stem from an inherent Social disconnection on Nestlés part, both ethically and relationally. Nestlé are in denial.

Nestlé, in the face of this total Social disconnect, denial and inauthenticity, must fully change and embrace Social Authenticity. This is not a fake authenticity. This must be a full, repentant and sincere turn around.

Only fully embracing Social Authenticity will change the perceptions about them.

Only fully embracing Social Authenticity will create the necessary spreadability to match the spreading protest against them.

Ask yourself: if Nestlé issued an unprecedented style of apology, and took an unprecedented level of action, wouldn’t you take notice?

4. The Execution: A Campaign Of Transparency

To embrace Social Authenticity, Nestlé must do what people believe it is not doing: be transparent.

Being transparent means being open about its practises, and also open about what people think about it – the second of which they lost through censoring the comments. My campaign woud be thus:

First: I would suggest they create a nestlereviews.com website, similar to ASOSreviews.com. This website shows the sentiment that people have about them. This act would show the sincere change in Nestlé, and highlight that they are no longer censoring, but want to know what people are saying, and provide that info back to the public – even to their own detriment. A bold move that demands attention. They then set a goal to shift this sentiment.

Second: They need to become personal and not corporate by filming videos of themselves openly apologising and stating their change – with no excuses or further waffle. This shows that they are no longer trying to hide.

Third: A campaign to change their ethics, over a period of time. On the back of the first two suggestions, this would be the place for Nestlé to educate people on how they aren’t as bad as people to perceive to be. The point is that no one is wiling to listen at the moment, so the first steps must be carried out to earn people’s attention again.

Cost Factor:

• A nestlereviews.com would cost them no more than £30,000.
• A smart Social Media consultancy to assist them for a little while – let’s be generous and allocate £80,000.
• Posting regular videos (firstly the apologies) and then updates on their progress (which they have already in their press releases) – no more than £20,000.
• Changing their policies on palm oil: already happening.
• Apologising: swallowing a lot of pride.
• Total: £150,000. Social Authenticity doesn’t cost much. It just takes reality.

Conclusion

I’m not saying Nestlé are or are not ethical. I don’t know. I do expect people think they are worse than they are due to the hype. But the point remains that if they are indeed ethical, no believes they are. So they must shift perception before they can educate.

Only an exceptionally strong move by Nestlé can turn this around – hence my plan above. If they did this, with sincerity, it could be a turning point in their organisation. But it won’t happen overnight. They have years of bad vibe to shift.

I expect some of this is controversial. With all the anti-Nestlé sentiment, a suggestion that Nestlé can resolve this probably seems blasphemous. But for me, this only illustrates all the more that what they face is a highly emotive and spreadable protest that can only be addressed through an equally spreadable and compelling campaign.

More importantly, what do you say? Would you go with this plan if you were Nestlé?

This thought comes from Scott Gould's thinking blog for thinking people. Scott is also on Twitter and Facebook.

What Nestlé Should Do, In 4 Steps

The latest Social Media disaster happened last week as Nestlé got literally slammed on Facebook. Here’s how it happened, what lessons we can glean, and what Nestlé should’ve done:

1. A Social Media presence doesn’t inherently fix your offline problems and perceived questionable ethics.

It began with a Greenpeace campaign attacking Nestlé who are pupportedly purchasing palm oil from companies that destroy rainforests. Greenpeace created a video (which is sitting on their homepage) that rebranded the popular Nestlé chocolate bar brand, Kit Kat, into ‘Killer’, with the slogan ‘give the orang-utan a break.’

Nestlé asked YouTube to pull the video under copyright infringement, but the video had already gone viral. The summary in this comment by alecast gives an excellent and succinct order of events.

Takeaway: Be prepared for Social Media to amplify offline opinion.

2. People don’t mind if you don’t get it right, but they do mind if you get it wrong.

Mass protest then began on Nestlé’s Facebook page, which as you can imagine, quickly became swamped with not only outrage against their use of this palm oil, but also their pulling of the video.

As the Facebook hate piled in, Nestlé updated their Facebook page to reflect the sentiment of ‘we’re still learning’. As much as people say that it’s ok to get it wrong, in the Social Media mob’s eyes, it isn’t.

Takeaway: Like Eurostar, if you don’t have all the answers, people don’t care about your reasons. Have the answers ready.

3. Do Not Censor

Censoring the video in the first place is what exacerbated this war. People started making the Killer logo their profile picture, at which point Nestlé repeated the intial mistake by issuing the following update on Facebook:

please don’t post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic – they will be deleted.

The Streisland effect is used to describe the phenomenon when censorship causes something to become even more widespread. Don’t do it. And especially don’t do it twice. The net is at such a place that whatever you delete is pretty retrievable – and even if it isn’t – the whole thing with mass protest is that it is based in perception far more than reality. Censoring fuels this emotion.

Takeaway: Had Nestlé not censored, this would not have reached this size. Don’t censor.

4. Old Media Does Not Understand Social Crisis Management

Old Media thinks that removing a comment because the user’s profile picture is infringing and damaging your brand is the way to go.

Old Media is stupid. Old Media doesn’t consider that digital and social means will make two profile pictures spring up in the place of every deleted one. And Old Media doesn’t understand that text is more powerful than images when it comes to Google search and Facebook comments.

Even worse is telling users you will delete their comments – as if that will make people stop. If they were so concerned about their brand, they should’ve deleted the comments without telling anyone.

Takeaway: Social Crisis Management never takes the form of censorship or editing. It takes the form of creating new solutions.

5. Do Not Retaliate

The biggest mistake Nestlé made was by the person running the Facebook page who appeared to take every criticism personally. Just scan through this screenshot on this post.

Retaliation also invokes the Streisland effect.

Takeaway: Nestlé should’ve not responded to anything. Nothing they could say would make it right anyway, so rather say nothing.

6. The Truth Doesn’t Matter: Perception Does

Nestlé issues a press release on Wednesday, “assur[ing] you than Nestlé does not buy palm oil from the Sinar Mas Group”

It’s irrelevant – whether true or false.

When you get it wrong be censoring and retaliating, you reinforce the perception that you are trying to cover your tracks.

Takeaway: Don’t focus on facts, focus on perception.

7. Respond With The Same Weight

A press release does not combat screaming hatred against a brand. You must match fire with fire. The only way Nestlé can turn this around is to carry out something that has the same weight as the criticisms and viral nature that attacked it.

Takeaway: You cannot respond with traditional methods. You must match viral protest with viral solutions.

Conclusion

All of this, in my opinion, was Nestlés terribly misguided attempts at managing crisis through censorship of reach. Crisis management of spreadability is totally different.

When creating a Crisis Management process, you must never censor. You must create. Simply because spreadability requires us to create new media, as you cannot censor what has already been spread!

You can read a great summary from start to finish of what happened here.

Do you have any more points to add?

P.S. I’ll be talking about this on Thursday 25th March at WOM UK if you’re in London.

This thought comes from Scott Gould's thinking blog for thinking people. Scott is also on Twitter and Facebook.

The 7 Things Nestlé Should’ve Done

I spoke a while ago on the idea of what I’m calling ‘brand mystery’ – we looked at JJ Abrams’ TED Talk and Lost, and how he tells a story by suspense. He never provides the complete picture, and this is what keeps you hooked. This is contrary to what one copywriter thought when he said “every advertisiement should tell the complete story” – to which I wholeheartedly disagree. Discovering a brand, and unravelling its mysteries, is such a rich experience (and one that I’ve been enjoy since childhood) that it ties you emotionally into it for years to come.

I wrapped some of these ideas up under the word ‘Suspense‘, which I describe as the experience of anticipating an experience. Today, using Star Wars, Apple, Lost, Louis Vuitton, Like Minds, and general meandering between them and other examples, I’m going to hit you with three (long) pointers, and then open this up to discussion to expand our ideas. Let’s begin.

Episode 1. Anticipation is tied into expectation.

No greater example of dismally failed expectations exists in my life than when I saw Star Wars Episode II: Attack Of The Clones. For 3 years leading up to the film I had been building it up and up in my mind, imaging how the events of the next episode in the saga would unfold. For the months leading in I read everything about it that I could, re-watched the trailers ad nauseum, read every ‘theory’ on what would happen from other geeks fans as deduced from the trailers, and even made my own costume to wear to the premiere, complete with glueing a Jedi-inspired braid into my hair. Yeah, I know. Diehard.

Suffice to say that nothing could match my expectations. They were huge. As my suspense peaked at galactic heights just before the credits rolled, the ensuing 3 hours just slowly sucked away my love for Star Wars. From then on, I was bitter. They had lost a brand advocate.

Suspense begins with expectation. If I don’t expect anything, then I have nothing to anticipate. But if I expect something, then I anticipate it, and woe betide anyone who fails at delivering on expectations. So it is required then that my expectations are correctly managed, motivated or manipulated (depending on how you see it), in order to increase in my levels of anticipation, and therefore, my experience.

This provides lesson 101 of suspense (and indeed, much of marketing), which is, what expectations does your product/event/org/service set? When I look from afar at the product/event/org/service, what do I expect to get when I transact (purchase) it?

This expectation is very sensorial, even though we often find it hard to express our expectations. Certainly in my research, I’ve found when people’s expectation’s aren’t met, there is a mix of ‘feel’, ‘look’, ‘sound’, ‘taste’ that weren’t right. They are all built up in the mind by expectation.

So then, we enter the world of branding, and language, semantics, images, connotations, etc etc. The question to ask yourself is: what are you making people expect? I think this might be an even more important question to ask than “what are you making people feel?” Branding, marketing and advertising can make people feel things, but I’m more interested in getting their suspense built up than just playing with emotion.

I could give lots of examples here of how this works, but I don’t want to make this too long, so I’ll present one from this week. Yesterday I was drawing up an advert that we’ve been given space to put up for Like Minds in February, and rather than getting bogged down into the details of the event, given the small size of the advert, I created this:

Yeah. It’s little. It doesn’t say much. But you expect three things from it: 1. that this event is so well known it doesn’t need to say when it is, 2. that this event is so well attended that it doesn’t need to say when it is, and 3. that this is a statured event, because it doesn’t try to promote when or what it is. The result of those expectations? Hopefully, that you’ll click the link, and come, based on an impression of stature and a hint of mystery (more on that later.)

(Also, just to cover my back here, I’m not saying that those things are necessarily true about Like Minds and I’m not being all arrogant – we have a long way to go.)

So, getting back to the story – the original story, that is – how could this Star Wars disappointment have been circumvented? I’m not sure it could’ve – this is a very extreme case because I had been building up to it obsessively for years (I’ll tell you more why that matters in a moment.) But I think there is a lesson that can help others not make the same mistake that lies in what Apple does:

Episode 2. Expectation is best when the end is not known (and also why Customer Satisfaction is a load of rubbish.)

As we know, a few times a year when Apple is getting ready with a product launch, they leak a little bit of information which subsequently gets the rumour mill going. The rumour mill creates mockups, ideas and conspiracy theories all around this stuff, and stock begins to rise like an eagle as the world braces itself for the latest Apple innovation.

Yet no one knows what this latest innovation is. They’re all caught up in suspense. (Side note: yes, stockholders get caught up in suspense too.)

Haven’t you ever wondered how this happens so well? Well…

When the end isn’t known, you allow what Guy Kawasaki calls ‘letting 100 flowers blossom’. People’s minds just go to work letting 100 flowers blossom that have nothing to do with the actual thing they’re making. And this is a good thing – it’s your message spreading. This is what’s happening with Apple – people don’t know the end (the product) so they go off in 100 directions and create all new and wonderful ideas which in turn keep the buzz up and the shares rising.

The beauty of this is because no one knows what the thing is – what the end is, that is – they know they might be wrong. When they know they may be wrong in the first place, they are acknowledging that “if you disappointment me, I know that it was because I was expecting something that you didn’t promise.” So if Apple doesn’t do exactly what they had in their mind, they are emotionally prepared for it, and don’t feel disappointed because Apple broke a promise – the promise didn’t exist.

This idea of promise here is a big deal in my opinion. ‘Customer Satisfaction’ is talked about like it’s the great goal to achieve, but satisfaction is really just what happens when someone receives what they were promised. It means my expectation is met. If I get less than what you promised to give, then I’m not satisfied – I’ve had to sacrifice. You have not fulfilled my expectations. And if I get more than you promised, then you exceed my expectations and I am very satisfied – or rather I am surprised. But satisfaction, really, is no big woop. Seriously, in this day and age we should be beyond just delivering what we say we will.

You may be wondering where suspense fits in. So glad you asked. If you continue to surprise me, then what happens? I expect the next surprise – which is an experience of  anticipating an experience. That’s suspense.

This model below explains the four levels. I’ve modified it from something similar that Joe Pine did in the Experience Economy (good read, and an affiliate link)

The diagram reflects that most people are in customer sacrifice, and most companies are delivering to that level. Then we make our way up to the heady heights of suspense. Just to note, some great advice on using this is available on my blog, on the subject of ‘Under-Promising, Over-Delivering.’

So, going back to Apple – that’s the secret of their product launch success and cult fandom? Well the better question is, what do they wonderfully avoid doing when they leak these bits of info about their new products? They avoid making promises. Bingo. That way, the fan’s expectations can’t be met, over met, or under met.

They essentially avoid dipping (for the most part) below satisfaction because they never made a promise to sacrifice on in the first place!

Well, they didn’t make a promise, except for one little thing:

Brand Promise.

This is the big promise that is in everything you do. Everything. So although Apple avoids making the smaller, more specific promises, it has to deliver on the big promise. It must check the big promise box, which for Apple, is innovation.

I told you earlier I’d say why Star Wars could never make this work. So, why didn’t Star Wars work? Because I knew the end. I knew that they had to fit certain storyline elements in – things that I had imagined how they’d happen for years – meaning they had to compete against the whole world that I had built in my mind. I experienced customer sacrifice. And there was no way that I could be wrong here, because it wasn’t like I knew that that I was wrong, as in the case of the Apple fan that dreams knowing they are only dreams. In this case, it was just a matter of how.

And we know that how you do something matters a lot to a lot of people. When people don’t know how, or are marvelled by how, you have magic. But when people scrutinise how, then you have criticism.

Think about it. When books become films, what do people say?

So we’ve now got two guiding principles. Let’s go through one way to make this work – at the end of which, I’ll tell you how Apple could do an even better job with their product launches.

Episode 3. The trick of mystery is all in what you don’t see

I began this peice by discussing brand mystery. I prefer this to the idea of brand story to be honest. A story is something you read, but discovering a mystery is a game you play. It’s far more involving. It’s far more participatory. It’s far more spreadable.

If you watch Lost or 24 (two of the most enrapturing programmes on television), every clue or peice of information is made out to be of vital importance. Of course in a few episodes time, that subplot won’t matter much any more, but for the time being, it is all you can see, and accordingly your mind fixates over it with the questions “what does this mean?” and “what happens next?”

It’s funny isn’t it. What you see has made you think about what you don’t see.

(Where else does that happen? Oh yeah, with Apple!)

Take, for instance, the recent release Daybreakers. After seeing that trailer I was hooked. Questions running through my mind like “how did they become vampires?” and “how does this humanised vampire society function?” and “what’s going to happen?” The trailer didn’t make me say, “I want to go to the movies to just see that same scene again“. It made me want to go the movies to go and find the answers to all these questions that I had.

It’s like lingerie – lingerie beautifully accentuates a woman’s body by glamourously covering her up. It’s about what you don’t see as well as what you do see!

In letting “100 flowers blossom”, and for your audience to begin anticipating, you need to consider what you aren’t showing them (and what they will want to see) by what you are showing them. Philosophical I know. You could also put it this way:

People want to see what they can’t see.

If we go back to my advert for Like Minds, what am I showing them? I’m asking them “what do the thinkers have in common this February?“, so on the surface, I’m telling them that there is something for ‘thinkers’ and that it is in February. From what I have shown then, what do they not see, that they want to see?

I’m guessing they want to see what the thinkers have in common. They want to see what who the thinkers are. They want to see why there’s such little information here.

So now they have a level of suspense. Really, it’s ignorance. They don’t know what they don’t know. They probably have wrong impressions about Like Minds. I remember thinking a whole bunch of things about Nike trainers that were wrong. It’s part of the game.

Say they visit the website – now they have information, and enter a new phase of suspense, in which they’ve acquired some information. This is important. If you allow someone to feed off of ignorance for too long, then they cement their false expectations. Of course, you don’t give them all the info they need: just enough to make their expectations more aligned to reality, and enable them to make their next discovery. It’s like planting a trail. Each part only leads onto the next.

After information, comes intelligence. This is when they can decipher the bigger picture – which is still exciting, and still full of suspense. One major reason why this phase is perhaps even the most exciting is because up until this point you might not have ever purchased the thing you are in suspense and playing the brand mystery game with. Let me provide a personal example with the help of Louis Vuitton.

The first time I heard the name, I assumed this guy Louis was alive. I knew he made hangbags, because someone said they dreamt that “Louis Vuitton had asked them to make handbags”, and I had to no reason to think that Louis was dead, or that he was actually a fashion house! (On another side note, I know my friends have whacky dreams. Mine are even whackier.) At this stage, I had ignorance.

Then after sometime I began to acquire information. Louis Vuitton made a bag that has his initials on, and in actual fact, he was around a hundred years ago, and so was no longer living, except through the fashion house in his name. At this point, though, I thought all they made were bags. The intelligence started coming when I started searching online and found fakes on ebay, found they did other types of bags, and even did bags for men. But it was when I first went into a Louis Vuitton store that intelligence completely set in and I understood that Louis Vuitton was more than bags. And as I said above, at this point, I had not bought anything from Louis Vuitton – yet I was enamoured over them. I had the bigger picture.

This was many years ago, and to this date, I have not bought a Louis Vuitton item. What stage am I in now? Intention. One day, I will purchase this item. I intend to do it. Of course I do – we have history!

The below model presents these stages in the same way to the Pyramid of Expectation:

Intention means I am poised to purchase when I am in a position to. And the waiting game makes this intention stronger in many cases – especially with luxury goods.

Epilogue: One More Thing

So what about Star Wars? Did Episode III regain my trust. No. But it wasn’t as bad. And subsequently I’ve been less and less disappointed with movies. You know why? Because I don’t expect much from them anymore.

And this is the danger when your audience experiences customer sacrifice, they stop expecting. They stop getting too excited.

There is a lesson here for Apple. It’s hidden in all this thinking, but hear me out:

When Apple announced the iPhone there was fanboy hysteria. There it was, in Steve Job’s hands in January 2007, and over the following 6 months I, along with many others I’m sure, browsed the pages of the iPhone website over and over, watching tutorials and seeing how it would work. When it came to seeing the phone for the first time, there was still hysteria. I was pumped to get my hands on it (I was in America for the launch), and when I laid my hands on the thing after this 6 month wait .. I surprisingly .. had little to do with it.

You see, Apple had done such a good job of pre-selling the iPhone, that when it came to holding it my hands, there was nothing new for me, because I’d done it all over the 6 months.

You know what would’ve been cool? If there had been one more thing. Steve’s awesome product lacked his defining line.

What if there had been something on the phone that they didn’t tell you about upfront? A surprise. What if when you held the phone, there was an app, or something that it did, that made you hold the thing for longer and really want to explore it because you hadn’t seen it online and read about it ad nauseum?

That would’ve created a whole new surge of Fanboy interest – the fact that there was something on the phone that you could only see if you went and held onto it – not just looked at it online. That would’ve been innovative. But it’s not too late, Steve, if you’re reading – you still can do it with other products!

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I pointed out brand examples I’d use at the beginning of this post, and a few times said I’d get to discussing a point in full later in the article – and took a while to get around to them. My expectation would be that you might’ve forgotten about those by now – but when you read them, they created just a little bit of suspense that helped you get through this post!

So let me hear from you. I’ve used these ideas for numerous events and campaigns, but I wonder if you’ve been using them too. I’m also curious about how you think this works with Social Media and a ‘connected lifestyle’. For instance, didn’t the article title create a little bit of I want to see what I can’t see in you?

Finally, there’s one more thing: there’s more in the post than there was in the title. That doesn’t seem to be the case with many blogs today, where there’s more in the title than there is in the preceding 400 words. One more thing – the hidden thing – is what you put in when you are more interested in connections that crowds.

At the end of every play I see at the theatre, I feel so connected to the actors that I always wish I could go and have a drink with them and thank them. It’s as if they’ve given a part of themselves to me. If I wait around long enough, I get to talk to them. But I can’t just see the headline of the play, I have to experience all of it, and get to the end.

The one more thing that I put into Like Mind,  and those of you who read this blog regularly, is me. It’s not in the title. It’s hidden.

You have to get to the end to get it.

Scott.

This thought comes from Scott Gould's thinking blog for thinking people. Scott is also on Twitter and Facebook.

How Apple Creates Suspense, Why Satisfaction Doesn’t Matter, and A Lesson From Star Wars

2009′s end of year news came in the form of the Amazon Kindle e-book reader: on Christmas Day, for the first time ever Amazon sold more e-books for the Kindle than they sold physical books (Amazon.com). Charlie Sorrel, writing in Wired’s article, points out that this surge most likely comes from customers who received the Kindle as a gift, but acknowledges that whilst this doesn’t mean e-books outsold physical books over the Christmas period, “what this still means is that e-books are now mainstream.” Mashable made a similar remark, saying “e-book sales still pale in comparison to the countless paper books that were sold this Christmas season. We do have to give credit where it is due, though; it is another milestone for the constantly-growing e-commerce giant.”

2010 began with news surrounding the event that attracts the largest advertising budgets in the world: The Super Bowl. Namely, that Pepsi has decided to invest the $20 million earmarked for the Super Bowl instead into Social Media (ABC News). This is tantamount to saying that Pepsi sees more value in Social Media than one Super Bowl event, and whilst sure, Social Media has more longevity and legacy over a year campaign (especially with a $20 million spend) versus a few minutes of advertising, Super Bowl is a time-honoured tradition that Pepsi (and other superbrands) has been keeping for 23 years, and is the most watched televised event in the world.

You know me, and that I don’t want to repeat what’s already been said on these matters. What I do want to do is draw some commonality from these two headlines and draw some conclusions from them. In addition to my own thoughts, I’d recommend you read Augie Ray’s analysis of the Pepsi headline at the Forrester Marketing blog, as it provides further examples of other brands following suit.

Case 1: What is Real? aka A Problem With Intangibles

When I started reading the articles regarding Amazon’s selling of more Kindle e-books than physical books, I picked up on the something the continual reference to ‘the real world’ as opposed to the internet/digital world/social media. Amazon writes that they sold more Kindle books than “physical books”, but every other article that quotes them on the subject says “more kindle books than real books.” This translation from physical to real highlights one of the biggest barriers to generating revenue through digital media – that the perception is if physical equates to real, then non-phyiscal equates to non-real.

I’ve taken a bit of a jump there, but I believe it’s a right one. For most people, it’s ‘digital books or real books’, as it is ‘digital life or real life.’

So inherently, the problem is not only that digital goods are intangible, and therefore I feel like I’m paying for very little – people also believe, some-what subconsciously I expect, that digital goods are not real. I’m not going to get into whether this is correct or not, nor look at the ideas of augmented reality and the such and whether a ‘book’ is a ‘book’ even when it’s not bound like a book – I just think it’s a very practical way to get into the mindset of a early majority customer: imagine you’re buying something that isn’t real and tell me how you feel.

How do we overcome this? I’ll be honest with you, my expertise is in getting people together, so when it comes to selling products, I’ve got more questions than answers. There was a big discussion on this recently regarding the $47 ‘Beyond Blogging’ e-book, the comments on my friend Jim Connolly’s Ideas Blog being very interesting. This talk of charging more for intangibles over tangibles is a bit of a deal, and this is where I really do want to hear back from you! My thoughts on it are as follows:

I think education will take place, over time, and people will value intangible goods more (like they are starting to with music and video on iTunes) over time. iTunes is actually a great case study to consider – it provides a way to catalogue and ‘see’ your digital goods, creating a sense of tangibly owning them – (Coverflow, anyone?) This is despite the fact that iTunes is itself an intangible, digital product, used to purchase more intangible digital products. It has taken them all of last decade to chip away at the mindset, but now the mainstream is completely au fait with purchasing intangibles from them. Given that the Kindle is the tangible item that is used to purchase, archive, and access the intangible goods, then we have a way forward. And yes, the mainstream is au fait with purchasing digital goods from iTunes, according to these statistics.

What I am certain about is that loosely and independently downloadable files (like buying a ebook in PDF from someone’s website, via a redirect from PayPal) will simply not work with the mainstream. It’s not a tangible intangible. It’s not filed (customer: ‘where is my ebook now that I’ve downloaded it???’). It’s not carried out through a trusted channel. In other words, it’s not like the Kindle or iTunes. Like I’ve said above, iTunes and the Kindle make the intangible tangible, or as per my original point, make the non-real, real.

And yes, I know that the innovators and early adopters are happy to purchase e-books direct from sites – but think mainstream with me, because that’s where most people live. If I use my wife as an example, she’ll happily buy through Amazon or iTunes because she trusts it and it keeps her purchases together. She doesn’t just buy files from sites.

One way that I’ll be applying this for my clients is when it comes to book publishing. I have good contacts in a few publishing houses, who I’ll approach with the following proposal: print a small run of physical books, and make a digital version. Put both on Amazon, and only spend marketing budget on getting the physical book placement in very targetted locations. My agency then does it’s Social Media magic to promote e-book sales on the Kindle (with a physical version there too, available on demand after the initial availability is gone.) This gives the author stature, and access to a tangible platform for their intangible product, at a very low cost.

[On a side note, this also means the publishing house has very little risk, very little spend, very little work, gets a free Social Media campaign testbed (because hey, I'll be pushing the book anyway), and if it works, gets a Social Media case study to take to the board. In return, I get published without going down the costly self-publishing route. I think this'll work - I'll let you know when I try it.]

Case 2: Brand Association and Social Media, aka It Doesn’t Work Without Purpose

We’ll discuss that tomorrow. Tomorrow, dear friends, tomorrow. Until then, do you want to discuss tangible intangibles with me?

Photo with thanks to libraryman.

This thought comes from Scott Gould's thinking blog for thinking people. Scott is also on Twitter and Facebook.

A Tale Of Two Case Studies: Amazon, Pepsi, and Tangible Intangibles

So there’s lots of buzz right now about Eurostar’s mass travel delays following a train failure mid-Channel Tunnel, and the subsequent issues surrounding the handling of their Social Media presence by self-called ‘Conversation Agency’ We Are Social.

I am not intending to repeat much of what’s already been said, nor lay out the background of the situation, which is neatly summarised at TechCrunch. You can read what I have found to the best articles on the theme of this being a Communications problem as opposed to a Social Media problem at BrandRepublic, Digital Stuffing and at Rob Fenwick’s blog, with thanks to Mack Pack for pointing me there with his good summarising post. My aim is to discuss the flawed view of the majority that is held towards Social Media.

Before I begin, I’ll say that this is in no way an attack on We Are Social. They have chronicled their trials and tribulations in the last days on their blog, and as they state, had no agreement in place with Eurostar for crisis management. The reason why I’m tackling this case study is because it’s current, and because it reveals what the majority mindset is.

So here are the flaws that Social Media Agencies and their Clients are facing that have been highlighted by the Eurostar situation:

Flaw 1: Conversations, not Communications

We Are Social are a ‘Conversation Agency‘, and if that’s what they are selling, then that’s fine. But the misunderstanding for many is that Social Media is just about conversations, and this is where problems set it in: because it’s not. First of all, Social Media is communications (of which ‘conversation’ is a part), and secondly, not all conversation, nor communication, is verbal, or written, or video, or audio, or links.

The fruition of this thinking means Social Media doesn’t do anything outside of ‘Conversations’ which is often code for ‘soft-sell marketing’. As we have seen, and as many are writing, this Eurostar debacle should illustrate once and for all that Social Media is not just about marketing – and any campaign that does so is an unbalanced and doomed campaign, because people – your users – are always going to ask you about things that are nothing to do with marketing, such as customer support – why? – because it’s a communication platform and that’s how they see it.

Neilsen identified 5 areas of use for Social Media (Customer Service and Support, Insight and Research, Product Development, PR Reputation and Influence, Marketing), all of which require both internal and external communications, which are probably managed by Social Media (you know, email, basecamp, etc.) This means communication infrastructure needs to be built – more on this later.

My other point is that thinking about ‘Conversations’ as a one-size-fits-all is another flawed mindset. Sure, Social Networks are a place for conversation – but users talk with their friends – not incessantly with brands. At Like Minds Immersive: Developing Social Media Strategy I pointed to a lack of profiling one’s actual Social Media audience as hit and miss quicksand. Just because a demographic will have a conversation with others about you doesn’t mean they want to have a conversation with you – perhaps all they want is a discount code? Correct profiling should prevent you from overestimating their participation with you. Also when we look at Social Media as Communications, we can stop thinking that the only lexicon we have is ‘engagement’, ‘conversation’, ‘participation’ and ‘discussion’.

Flaw 2: Little or No Strategy

We Are Social’s plan for Eurostar was a low-level, introductory experiment called ‘Little Break, Big Difference‘ (again they discuss this on their blog.) The site looks quite nice, but when I also consider their Twitter account and Facebook page, I am left feeling that there is little strategy here. I don’t get how this really connects with their audience, or in any way lifts restrictions to provide their audience with previously unrealised value.

This lack of strategy is now common place for Social Media campaigns. For me, I consider a large contribution to this is the lack of strategic frameworks for Social Media programs. Perhaps people are too busy trying to Social Celebrities. Anyway. Very few people seem to make frameworks and models, and most are really not that beneficial but just tactics. I’m sure it’s very arrogant, but I think this is something I do well. I’ve drawn up a number of frameworks that don’t just point out tactics but help you identify what strategic approach you should take.

Basic questions that should be answered by a good strategy:

• What purpose do the Social Media profiles have? Which of the 6 presence types are you using?
• How are your profiles lifting restrictions for your target audience?
• What provision are you making for non-conversation activity?
• What levels of participation is your audience profiled at?

We’ve all said it, but let’s say it again: tactics aren’t strategy. So please, Mr. I-Did-A-Twitter-Course, add some strategy to your understanding of the tools. And this goes for the agencies too!

Flaw 3: Little or No Integration

When it comes to Social Media you’ve got to know that, being a communications platform, people will tweet you for things that a marketing agency can’t resolve. If you view your Social Media activity as purely marketing you are stuffed. Case in point: people still reply to @SkyNews  with questions, even though it clearly states that it’s not there to provide responses and is automated.

Integration goes to your 360 degree management structure – who reports to who – where to go for information – classification of engagement to ensure correct responses and subsequent internal communications – ensuring that each message is systematically resovled.

Look at Eurostar’s Facebook and Twitter accounts and there is apparently none of this. Wall posts with no resolution (as per image above), Tweets with no responses – and if they are being done in private, then why aren’t they being done in public?

Where is the linkup between PR, Marketing, Support, C-Suite and Social Media? Who integrated this? Who thought ahead and considered some worst case scenarios?

When I work with clients at Aaron+Gould, we create guidelines that detail exactly how we execute everything and how we report, including classification of Tweets, Facebook messages, blog posts, scales of urgency and response, complete with the entire procedure for resolution and sample 140 character updates to use. Over time I’ll be sharing a lot of this with you, but if you want some great advice on crisis management and Social Media, read this article from FreshNetworks.

Flaw 4: Non Experiential

Question: do you think the user cares that, on the Eurostar Twitter, it says “Official Eurostar Twitter feed. Not Eurostar customer service but trying to help get information out to our customers as received. Thanks for understanding”

Answer: no one cares. In fact, few even read it. People just want answers – like I’ve said three times in this post on the same point now.

There is a real problem with delivering user experience for most Social Media campaigns, like this case above. I find it highly ironic that, seeing as We Are Social believe that, we, the people, are social, then why on earth is there a complete lack of Social Support? The message from We Are Social and Eurostar here is clear: “When it comes to marketing our message to you, we’ll talk and we are social. But when it comes to solving your problems that we marketed you into buying, then sorry, we’re not social anymore.”

So…

That’s my take on it. Like I said in starting, this isn’t an attack on We Are Social – and I really do feel that they have received the unfortunate brunt of what was a problem out of their control. But they had not architected a Social Media strategy correctly, and it is approaches like theirs that continue to muddy the industry and create further ‘conversationalists’ who lack any care for integration that actually benefits organisations and users in the long run.

What I haven’t done is said what I would’ve done. Firstly, because it’s too easy to say it, and secondly, because I think the correct actions fall into place when we change our thinking about Social Media as I have tried to do above.

Thoughts?

This thought comes from Scott Gould's thinking blog for thinking people. Scott is also on Twitter and Facebook.

4 Flaws To Learn From Eurostar

In case you didn’t know, the UK is experiencing, right now, one of the greatest Social Media case studies ever. The headline and subtext from the BBC is this: “Rage Against the Machine beat X Factor winner in charts: Rock band Rage Against the Machine have won the most competitive battle in years for the Christmas number one”

But the real headline here is this: that 3 months of prime time television marketing and audience engagement are beaten by Social Media.

Now, I’m going to try and say this all without too much waffle, but being such a landmark event, I’m going to make sure I fully unpack the case study, illustrate how things are changing, and also show off how my framework predicted this (hey, when you’re this right about something, you need to celebrate yourself, even if no one else will. It’s how you remain sane, right?)

Spreadability beats Reach

I presented a framework a while ago that illustrates how spreadability is increased the more ‘dynamic, home-made, personal relationship’ and less ‘static, factory-made, public relations’ a message is. The thrust of my argument was that word of mouth has always been about spreadability rather than reach – and whilst reach can get the message before lots of people’s eyes, spreadability gets the message into the right people’s mouths and in turn into the right people’s ears. This is important, obviously, because in order for people to spread the message, it needs to be in their mouth, not before their eyes.

I’ll share the framework in a moment, but first lets look at the facts of the case study and the associated stats.

The X-Factor 2009 took 17 weeks of primetime 1.5 hour Saturday and Sunday night TV programming (as well as spinoffs, etc), with an average of 13.9 million viewers per show and an average 45.9% of the viewing audience (from Wikipedia). Every Monday the papers were full of either front or second page news from the drama surrounding the contestants and the judges fuelled from a rumour mill designed by the world’s best (bar-politicians) to keep media coverage and reach as high as possible. The peak audience was for the final show, totally 19 million viewers and 53.2% of the viewership. The maths are that an average 13.9 million people watched over 50 hours of The X-Factor.

So certain had the tradition become that the X-Factor winner would be the UK Christmas number 1, that bookmaker William Hill was planning to abandon its 30 year tradition of betting on the outcome. Until as you know, some guy (Jon Morter, to be exact, who had attempted a similar stunt the year before) decided to push Rage Against The Machine’s ‘Killing In The Name’ through Facebook to be top of the charts.

Jon and Tracy Morter created a Facebook group and started promoting, and then made a back-up group due to some glictches that the main group on Facebook seemed to experience. There were also a number of ‘fake’ Facebook pages and groups created that made it hard to distinguish which ones were created by Jon. These two ‘official’ groups contained the latest news, carefully instructing people to not buy the single until the week commencing Monday 14th December, as well as warning people that “bulk purchasing will disqualify that entire purchase you’ve made form the chart count”. The tipping point, according to the The Guardian,was:

…helped by the comedian Peter Serafinowicz, who on 15 December urged his 268,000-plus Twitter followers to join in, and it snowballed from there. By the time Paul McCartney and former X Factor winner Steve Brookstein had pledged their support, poor McElderry seemed doomed.

When I spoke to Jon on Twitter he said that it was actually UK celebrity Phil Jupitus who first tweeted about the campaign to his 50,000+ following when he retweeted a request from a follower.

Their numbers, in contrast to the X-Factor’s mainstream medium reach, were almost 1,000,000 members when combining their two groups – however this does not include the members of ‘unofficial’ groups and pages. The Twitter hashtag, #ratm4xmas, was a trending topic for a large part of the week – however the TweetReach stats are very low: just over 12,000 (#likeminds had over 200,000.) What’s also certain is that none of these people spent an hour, let alone 50 hours, on consuming the contents of the Facebook group of page.

The numbers come down to this:

1. A reach of an average 13.9 million (peak 19 million) viewers, with over 50 hours of consumption, purchase 450,000 copies of Joe McElderry’s single.
2. Spreadability, of not even 1 million locked-in, sharing individuals, leads up who knows how many impressions, purchasing 500,000 copies of Rage’s single.

That fact that a Social Media induced campaign, that admittedly did get attention in the press in the sales week, beat the weight of an average 13.9 million people consuming 50 hours of ‘message’ over 17 weeks, is not only a case study, but the case study to illustrate the power of Social Media. I really am astounded that people aren’t making more of a song and dance about it because this is huge.

Luckily, here I am to make a song and a dance.

I’ve been writing about this for most of the last 6 months (a collection of links here), but a lot people kicked back against what I was saying. Now, we have the case study. I wrote, also a while ago, that personal relationship is the new prerogative over public relations, and that Social Business heralds the shift from managing people like machine parts in a factory process to developing people and accessing the potential they have to learn and grow. In quite a poetic sense, this really is rage against the machine.

Down to my Framework

So, it’s about time we got to my framework and just a lil bit of bragging. I put this together in September this year to illustrate how spreadability is increasingly more important than reach, as I said above (“whilst reach can get the message before people’s eyes, spreadability gets the message into people’s mouths”, remember?)

As per the image below, you’ll see that I place TV as the pinnacle of spreadability for a static and governed medium. However with a dynamic and guided medium, a far higher level of spreadability is achieved. Note that this is not reach, it is spreadability. Spreadability is not about the message getting to everyone, it’s about the message getting to the right ones. By taking hands off of governing the message, and instead allowing the community to guide the message, the message becomes dynamic rather than static, entering the realm of ‘personal relationship‘ as opposed to ‘public relations‘. Anyway, here’s the framework:

Why this guidance, dynamic, homemade, personal relationship talk matters is because it allows the message to take on multiple forms and therefore becomes more personal and more relevant to more people. Quite litterally, people can make it their own. Another word for this is ‘translating’ – the understanding that you need people who can take your message and translate into the right motivational language for the hive that they influence. It’s like taking your message that’s 2D and then making a a multi-faceted diamond, each different facet communicating the same message in a slightly different way to meet the needs of a slightly different audience.

When you look at the X-Factor campaign, it has governance all over it. Professional at the highest level, every bit of hype, buzz, drama and emotion is factory-made and manipulated to push the audience towards financial commitments (just how the audience can take multiple sob stories of how “this is my whole life” every week just baffles the mind.) It’s also worth pointing out that the X-Factor is incredible expertiential and itself a very good example of the personalisation and Glocalisation that is happening in marketing.

Meanwhile the Rage campaign is not at all professional, but it is personal. Then didn’t create a Facebook vanity-url, have any kind of branding or copywriting expertise, or even run some kind of strategy from a centralised website full of share buttons. But when you look at their Facebook group you see community. You see people uploading the videos that motivate themselves, and in turn motivate others. You see people pitching in ideas, feeding back on sales and numbers, and warning each other not to buy bulk copies of the single. Other than a small note on both presences saying “Jon and Tracy”, you’d never know who was running the thing – the whole message belongs to the community – compared to the X-Factor, which has 13.9 million average viewers, none of which are under any impression that the X-Factor could ever belong to anyone else other than Cowell.

I’d like to be able to pull apart for you the exact components of how the Rage campaign won, but the mechanics are pretty simple:

• The climate was one of some unrest about the predictability (and the factory-feel) of the mainstream. This helped the campaign tip, and for any Gladwell fans, illustrates the Law of Context.
• The song choice mattered. The mainstream had well oiled machine with vast momentum, meaning the Rage campaign song had to be provocative in order to get any kind of attention – which is was. This meant more was at stake and a more emotional response was provoked, meaning there was a higher chance of action.
• Converting passion into action happened. There had to be little inertia between joining the Rage campaign on Facebook and then purchasing the single – which there was in the form of digital download. This meant people could quickly turn their passion into action, and buy the single in a few clicks seeing as they were already sat at their computer. This probably wouldn’t of worked if people had to go and buy the single instore.
• The campaign secured the right kind of online viral status through the above points. What helped it become viral was the totally homemade feel, and complete lack of branding, vanity urls, professionalism, etc. This makes it even more newsworthy, and more in line with the renegade spirit that it attached itself too.
• The community was pretty tight, as seen by the high degree of commenting on wall posts on the Facebook page and group. This signifies self-moderation by the community. At this point, information travels very quickly between the community and subsequently out of the community. The fact that any action taken inside the group or page comes up on the users’ newsfeed means the message was continually being spread to their friends even if they didn’t intend to be do so.

So

In the end, Simon Cowell purportedly offered jobs to Jon and Tracy, but Jon says that haven’t received any offer (as far as they know), but have spoken to Simon on the phone. What if Simon Cowell has offered them the job? Wise move? What do you think? Do you think this kind of thing can be reproduced by corporates? Or does big business lack the authenticity and personal relationship to pull off not only viral campaigns but movements like this?

What lessons can be learnt here?

Let me hear you comments below.

This thought comes from Scott Gould's thinking blog for thinking people. Scott is also on Twitter and Facebook.

Rage Against The Machine: The Case Study In Spreadability vs Reach

The first thing to address is the medium. This ‘curated unconference’ ran as follows: 80 or so of us get into a room, and sit at one of many tables, inevitably with 5 or so other people that you already know. Then someone talks for 5 minutes on a subject, after which we, the participants, not attendees/delegates/audience, discuss and debate the subject, each person around the table adding their point of view and experiences.

Result: I got a lot more out of this than a traditional conference. Why? Because we formed an answer, together, through the combined knowledge of every person at that table. Each person brought unique experience that the others hadn’t had, angles and views that the others didn’t have, and criticisms that the others hadn’t come across. When someone delivers a keynote, we rightly place value on that one person, but consequently only get one, albeit very well formed, opinion. This model is person-to-people, a delivery of an expert to a crowd. But yesterday’s model was truly one of people-to-people. Sure, some would guide the conversation more than others, but then in the next session, and as we moved around from table to table, others had expertise where others did not. As far as value goes, there was loads of it. Moving on…

A person-to-people model is necessary where a person of greater expertise addresses a large crowd of people with lesser expertise, and disseminates information through inspiration, education, story-telling, whatever. But in this emerging field of Social Business, where the guidelines are still being written, anyone who is doing Social Business is finding out what the way forward is in the context in which they are working. It is the people-to-people method I experienced at #1pound40 that far better serves the dissemination of information: sharing experience on a level playing field where every practitioner is adding their truly unique value, no matter if it’s Corporate, Charity or Church – because none of us yet have the complete picture, and by sharing we get a better, more integrated view of what it is.

I’m not articulating this well, I know, and I need your help to flesh this out. There’s also some other things I noticed about the day, in regards to guiding through people-to-people, and not governing by person-to-people, which actually relate to Twitter’s growth as an eco-system with unspoken community-made rules. It all focusses on what I have been blogging about regarding the shift from governance to guidance. My first thoughts are:

1. Guidance first of all requires leadership. #1pound40 required event organisers and Twitter required it’s founders. There has to be leadership, otherwise the people would never get together. I spoke about this in a discussion on Uniting People Around A Platform.

2. Guidance requires passion. Let’s get something clear right away, guidance doesn’t motivate through finances, so it requires a lot of strength and potency to get going, which are the natural byproducts of passion. No passion lacking yesterday, or on Twitter. In fact, Twitter is fuelled by passion. Passion means there is not a job’s worth mentality towards guidance. It could be late at night and you’re tired, but because of passion, you’re guiding others.

3. Guidance requires influencers. It’s not enough to have vision or passion – there must be the influencers and translators who bring their followings to the table. Case in point: @ilico  invited me to #1pound40 and @andjdavies  got me on Twitter – in neither case did the leaders/founders come and personally invite me. Obvious, but needs to be said. Otherwise, we experience burnout by trying to personally guide everybody. Doesn’t work.

4. Individual engagement encourages equality. It’s not enough to say that everyone has equal right to pitch in, you have to show it. This requires a smaller group size, at some point, to ensure people are individually engaged. In a big room, people get lost, and there is not the mechanism for everyone’s voice to potentially be heard. The whole setup of yesterday was geared towards this, and as for Twitter, the first ‘feature’ that the community made was the ability to @ someone, making the tweet individually engaging. Once people are individually engaged, they start engaging others, and together they create culture. Then:

5. Influencers canonise culture. I watched yesterday as the influencers in the room helped facilitate discussion. In any group, some brought great ideas, other’s had very strong opinions, still some had powerful experiences, and others silently waited to the prime moment to bring their niche of expertise in. But it was the influencers who helped draw the conclusions. They were often the ones who brought the conversation back to focus – not with authority, but gently guiding it back after the person had had their say. Whatever came up in discussion, it was the influencer who canonised it into a simple meaning. When it comes to Twitter, the same happened. The culture of retweeting, hashtags, #followfriday, the anti hard-sell sentiment and anti auto-DM sentiment – it was the influencers who took the culture that was rising from the tweets and canonised it into a repeatable and standardised format.

I remember watching a documentary about a group of deaf children in a remote European village who had formed their own sign language. It was an engrossing watch, as they dissected the concepts at work that had literally made a language from nothing. What they found was this: an influencer was canonising the culture. There was this one girl who took the different new pieces of sign language that came from the kids, and then she used the ones that seemed to be more adoptable for the whole group, and canonised them. I realised yesterday that any growing ecosystem is the same.

6. The many moderate. There weren’t any instances of this yesterday, but taking wikipedia as a case study, the fear that many people would ruin the content was never actualised. In actual fact, the many moderated. The startup strength I spoke about in point 2 is needed for this. It would appear that under guidance, as opposed to governance, there is an open contract that participants subscribe to and this creates accountability. In other words, people feel accountable for both their own actions and the actions of others, and therefore they moderate. From what I understand, this is because the reward is greater under guidance than it is under governance – as well as the consequence of making a public failure which causes public embarrassment (even if no one around you is at all judgmental, you still don’t want to let them down).

7. Collaboration starts big, becomes small, and then becomes bigger. Vision is pitched to everyone. Everyone takes this away and in a smaller setting where there can be individual engagement, equality is in action, and the collaboration grows as knowledge is shared, people become more confident, and ideas are refined. With greater confidence and clarity, either the group can ‘report back’, groups can be merged, or the groups can just become bigger. At this point, even if one person now reports back on behalf of the group, all the voices are contained within the report.

8. There must be the potential for any person to become the focus. Everyone must know that their voice matters, and that if they want to speak up, their voice will be heard. Taking this further, knowing that their ideas could be taken and brought before the whole crowd reaffirms equality. I know this may sound silly, but I really got the feeling yesterday that at any point, if I had a really great insight, I’d end up on stage sharing it. It’s the same with Twitter – potentially, anyone could start a meme that goes all around the Twitterverse – and this makes things feel potentially equal. This is mostly a feeling, and seldom a reality, but a very important feeling at that.

9. Encouragement. Another obvious point that’s not often done, but yesterday I saw it over and over again. I’ll just be real: there were people there yesterday (and you know the type), who are wonderful people with ideas that they massively overestimate the importance of, because it is such a revelation to themselves. Hey, I’m often one of these people. But what I saw yesterday was that this type of person was continually encouraged by the influencers at the tables even when the ideas were either very paediatric or off target. I’ve experienced the same on Twitter – I remember when I was first retweeted and was so thrilled that I was shouting about it – to which someone replied with congratulations. Like wise someone else said that there tweets weren’t getting much attention, but as soon as she tweeted that she felt that way, immediately people encouraged here.

10. Build legacy in phases. Guidance means documenting the efforts of the people, firstly because it was by them and they deserve the credit, and secondly, because people can point to it and refer back to it as both a mark of success, and a resource for the future. This can’t be just the comments left in a hashtag – this has to be like what we did with Like Minds 09, where we linked to every blog post about us, have the video and photos right up there, and display some of the best tweets. Creating this legacy provides momentum for the future as it ties up the end of one ‘guidance’, celebrates it, and documents the success that it was. By finishing in phases, we get a boast from each success that gives us energy to guide the next phase.

Well, I know that for many people, there’s nothing new here, and I’m sure people have done far better jobs of identifying them than I have – if you know of them, point me to them.

This, for me, is a starting point for outlining the collaboration that we’ll be guiding for Like Minds 2010 in February. Whilst, because of our mix of audience between practitioners and freshers, there will be some person-to-people, there will also be people-to-people, both on the day, but more importantly, in the lead up. The thing I think #1pound40 is missing is the conversion of this thought-collaboration into collaborative action – we have shared all this discussion together, created friendship, but are not being guided from friendship to fellowship around a cause. So that’s what I’m thinking about for the time leading up to February.

Anyway, enough of me. I’m really keen to hear what ya’ll have to say…

Photo courtesy of Benjamin Ellis.

This thought comes from Scott Gould's thinking blog for thinking people. Scott is also on Twitter and Facebook.

10 Insights Into Guidance, As Opposed To Governance

Who attended the event? I personally knew not even a quarter of the attendees. Through our social media marketing on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and both the official blog and this blog, we had 188 registered attendees, and 561 online viewers.

We were even featured in the Express & Echo and the Western Morning News – but again, only through the efforts of other social media practitioners, whom we had engaged with through social media.

Ignore the fact that this conference generated buzz and rode on the back of the social media fad, the point is that probably 90% of the 188 attendees, 10 speakers, 561 online viewers, and undetermined number of hashtag followers were marketed, generated, and connected to solely through social media (except for a handful of students who we invited to come, via an email.)

Hey, even if it was only 50%, what an astounding case study. And again, let’s remove the fact that it was about social media – because a good deal of people in that room were not existing social media practitioners, nor were they existing Twitter users, which was where the majority of the marketing was carried out. This means, and I know it because many have told me it was the case, that our social media engagement translated into the spreading of offline word of mouth through the brand advocates that we created (and BTW, that’s a secret to the success right there.)

As I tweeted – frequently – in response to those asking for ROI – it was all around them if they just had the eyes to see it.

So let me say it again: if you turned up, you proved the ROI.

And if you need more help with understanding ROI, check out Olivier Blanchard‘s Social Media ROI.

The Bigger Issue

I have to tell you right now that you can be a master Social Media ROI guru and have every answer for every measurement qustion, but unless you know how to

1. develop a strategy, integrate it, manage it and measure it, and,
2. how to connect with and motivate your target audience to action,

then you will achieve nothing.

Social Media suffers from the same signal-to-noise issue in the regular marketing space: in other words, if you think the magazine rack is full of noise, then you don’t want to go near a Facebook or a Twitter feed. There is content from all angles, and it doesn’t matter how much you know about ROI, unless you know about people, and how social media must be used as an enabler for connecting with them, then you are probably just another horrid, soulless PR agency waiting to die.

This new form of media requires engagement that motivates people to act, and you are constantly up against a wall of noise that is flushing out your message every minute. When you get that message to your target person, it must fulfil its purpose. Therefore:

The successful social media practitioner is not a master of ROI, but a master of people.

That’s the bigger issue. And that’s why so many are dodging it – because they are awful with people.

I find it funny that everyone is amazed by the spreadability of Like Minds (many are calling it a ‘movement’ already), but few have bothered to ask how we did it.

If I were wanting to integrate social media into my marketing mix, that’s the question I’d be desperate to ask. Just a thought.

This thought comes from Scott Gould's thinking blog for thinking people. Scott is also on Twitter and Facebook.

You Proved Social Media ROI. Yes, You.