Recently in Culture Category
A few friends have told me that they're enjoying my book but feel a little embarrassed to be carrying around a book from the Dummies series. In fact, ValleyPR's nice book review also alluded to that fact. Well, I've got two thoughts - don't be afraid to be a Dummy and keep in mind this is Un-Dummy Dummy book!The Dummies series is the number one selling book series in the world primarily because these books lets you learn a subject in a quick, easily digestible and engaging format really quickly. It is not necessarily about learning the absolute basics only. People like the books because they bring you up to speed on a topic quickly and give you the confidence that you've learnt everything you need to know.
Secondly, with this book in particular, it is probably one of the more Un-Dummy Dummy books as someone pointed out to me. What he meant was that it puts a lot of emphasis on explaining advanced, fresh and exciting social media marketing concepts in easy to understand language. In other words, its taking some very new concepts (especially around influencer types and how they matter at each point in the funnel) and makes them accessible and available. Remember,this is not a book about social media or how to use Twitter but one about the evolution of marketing with social influence across all of digital.
I was interviewed by Mary Ellen Slater of SmartBrief last week on key social trends for 2010. I'm a member of the SmartBrief Social Media Advisory Board and was excited to do this interview. Below is an excerpt of those trends. Find the full interview over at SmartBrief.
Social media is evolving quickly. What are the three trends on the horizon that business leaders absolutely must keep up with?
Social brands. The most successful brands in 2010 are going to be the ones that evolve into social brands. This means that brands that have social voices -- real people participating and talking on their behalf to customers in an engaging, conversational manner. The company must be willing to let its employees and its brand advocates become the face of the brand. Consumers demand that, and brands like Best Buy that are evolving into social brands (think Twelp Force) will be the ones that win. Every brand is going to need to become a social brand at some point.
Real-time brands. Companies that become dynamic and responsive in real time to their customers and their needs will be the ones that succeed. This doesn't just mean real time customer service but real time market research, real time product development, and real time customization and personalization of products and campaigns alike. This also means that the products will need to have a digital pulse in them.
Identifying, nurturing and managing relationships. Customers increasingly are also influencers (expert, positional or referent), and companies will need to know who those people are and how much influence they actually have. A lot more effort is going to go into this. Along those lines, understanding how customers come together as communities and make collective decisions will be important, too.
Read the remainder of the interview at SmartBrief on Social Media and don't miss their year end report.
This is a much watch interview with Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody. The twenty four minute video clip is well worth the time.
Absolutely loved this graphic that I had to republish it here. Click to this Barcelona blog for the original.
Every now and then I read an article that startles me. It is usually not for the deep insights (though there are many sometimes) but for the brutal honesty and humility. Here's a perfect example. Reading the excerpt below in the latest Businessweek is somewhat shocking. Coming from a 15 year Professor at the Harvard Business School gives it all the more gravitas -
I have come to believe that much of what my colleagues and I taught has caused real suffering, suppressed wealth creation, destabilized the world economy, and accelerated the demise of the 20th century capitalism in which the U.S. played the leading role.
We weren't stupid and we weren't evil. Nevertheless we managed to produce a generation of managers and business professionals that is deeply mistrusted and despised by a majority of people in our society and around the world. This is a terrible failure. - Shoshana Zuboff
The articles goes on to explain that by focusing too tightly on economic value and encouraging students to think about shareholder value above all else, HBS did a disservice to its students and to society. She's probably right and the problem extends beyond HBS too. Interestingly, some people probably feel that we do not have a strong enough alternative model in place. One that can rebuild the trust of Americans (only 10% of Americans trust big business today) in the corporate world.
I believe that trust has been weakened forever. It will never be the same again. That's not bad as instead we're going to trust each other - peer influence is going to rise in importance everyday especially as we're able to organize collectively, tap into each other's intelligence and harness collective wisdom for individual action.
Today's New York Times has a great story on Aardvark and how it uses your social graph to help you find answers to questions. It works rather simply - you pose a question via email or IM and Aardvark channels the question to people in your social graph (currently that's just your social graph on Facebook) and then brings back the answers to you. Users who don't respond aren't exposed so there's no discomfort created. As a result no social capital is expended either.Currently, Aardvark works only with Facebook and pings your friends and their friends for volunteers to answer the question. So it take the question to ties that are once removed from you. But it just doesn't ping everyone automatically, using its proprietary technology it pings only those friends who are most likely to have the answer and to respond to the question. It also organizes the responses and determines when it has received enough feedback. If no one in your network answers, the question is extended to second and third generation ties.
Why is this special? Because it leverages human capital and algorithms to determine who are the most likely people to be able to answer a question as well as who will be most willing to do so. It makes your social influencers work for you. It's built fundamentally around the concept of strength in weak ties recognizing that people in your network (and maybe the weakest ties) are most likely to be able to answer the question and will probably bring back the most trusted answers.
Is it more of a decision engine than Bing? Time will tell but what is certain is that by applying an intelligent filter on my social graph it is making it far more meaningful to me beyond the obvious social, entertainment and networking purposes that the social graph serves. Check out Aardvark and ask yourself what else would you like filtered through your social graphs. Or ask Aardvark to ask that. Maybe which ads to watch....33Across and Media6Degrees are already exploring that territory. It is just a matter of time before we see the world through the lens of our social graphs. It'll make life easier but here's a warning - it may limit our outlook on everything too.
Can this be the Future of Advertising?Quite possibly but in my and in some sense the future is already here twitpic. My only question is how much is it going to displace traditional advertising. And is this advertising or just consumer behavior?
Grant Owens who's a friend of mine at Razorfish and a planner wrote a piece titled, "Looking for a Pulse Online in 2009." He's a planner who believes that there's a lot we can learn from radio. In his language, radio holds the pulse because unlike the iPods it keeps us alive, and connects us to our communities and the world around us. It's not a lonely device.
Interestingly, he explores that concept to put forth the notion that in 2009 it is technologies that have a pulse that will succeed. Those are technologies that are social but instantly reactive too. For him the technologies that have a pulse include activity feeds, micro-blogging, distributed sampling, live streaming media, data centric media devices and real time analytics. He asks companies to focus on pulse taking products this year.
I like the concept but what I find most interesting is that the first two technologies that he mentions are social applications - activity feeds and micro-blogging. Arguably, some of the others like distributed sampling also leverage crowd-sourcing an inherent social concept too. I feel that the most pulse taking technologies are the ones that are social - we're interested in each other pulses (to use that language). That's what drove the social media explosion. Something else for us to consider. Philosophies around social will take many different forms in 2009 and may not be instantly recognizable as being tied to social. That's a good thing too. What do you think?
For the other Slant articles that cover microblogging, cookies, online video advertising and email marketing click here.
We got a few nice shout outs over the last few week or so. The first of course was AdAge and AgencySpy picking up on the news that we won the Mercedes Benz Agency of Record pitch today. This is obviously very big news and we're very excited about it. Its going to be fun having Mercedes as a client here in New York.
Future Changes highlighted Going Social Now as a blog to watch in 2009. It was one of 15 blogs highlighted. Also included in the list was The App Gap, a group blog on social in the enterprise that I also contribute to.
The Buzz Bin ran a post on the 25 Signs that You've Got a Strong SM Consultant or Agency. The third item listed was that the agency looks at social in the context of broader marketing objectives. We were sited as an example of an agency doing that. It is nice to see that our philosophy about social media is being noticed).
Newsweek asked us how we'd help the Republican Party revitalize its brand with Gen Y audiences using social media. I worked with the office social media leads and the ad creative team to send some ideas their way. In support of print media, I'm no going to give the idea away here (hint its the iPhone app). Buy a copy of the magazine and see for yourself! <i>Follow up to the post - Newsweek has published the ideas only now. You can find them here.
I'm back from vacation now so expect regular blog updates once more. I hope you had a wonderful holidays.
It has undoubtedly been the most difficult Thanksgiving for me with the Mumbai terrorist attacks starting virtually the moment my holiday began (around 2:00pm EST on Wednesday). Having spent several years in Mumbai as a child, I know both the hotels that were attacked rather well. I used to visit them often and I would drive past the Oberoi on my way to school every morning. But closer to home an old friend of my parents (who incidentally was at my wedding this January) was dining at the Taj Hotel when the terrorists attacked. His wife was able to escape but he was marched up to the 18th floor of the hotel by the terrorists and later shot. Yesterday, my mother attended the funeral of a fellow journalist who also died. All in all a horrible, tragic few days. And I can't begin to imagine how it must be for the families who were directly affected.
Nevertheless, I've been impressed by the courageous citizen journalism that kept the world abreast about the crisis as it unfolded hour by hour and minute by minute. It was another example of ordinary people using social technologies to get the word out, give each other faith, provide needed information when the authorities weren't communicating and help save lives too. Twitter, Flickr, SMS and the blogs were just some of the social technologies used as people communicated with the hotel guests holed up in their rooms telling them when to escape out of the buildings. In fact, 80 messages were being sent to Twitter every five seconds about the attacks. Twitter also reported that there was still gunfire inside the Taj Mahal hotel long after the mainstream media had said it was finished.
Sure in some cases sensitive information may have been transmitted but the social technologies and social media more broadly once again proved how central and useful it can be in times of crisis. But to me the most important benefit is that social media allows our all our ordinary voices to be heard loud and clear. The most encouraging and dynamic response to the terrorist attacks that I've come across is that of the Mumbai Twitter users. They decided to meet for beer at Leopold Cafe (one of the targets) yesterday. Why? Because they wanted to stand up defiantly and show the terrorists that nothing will stop them from living their lives the way they want to. How were they able to organize this so quickly? By using Twitter.
Nothing is going to lessen the pain of the tragedy for anyone even remotely connected to it. But we can all draw strength from the courage of others and recognize that as ordinary individuals that may get caught in the midst of events that are well beyond our control, there are social technologies that can help today in ways that we never thought possible even fifteen years ago.
I was interviewed by Jennifer Jones at Marketing Voices on Social Influence Marketing recently. You can view the video clip below.
I delve into how marketers should best use peer influence to their advantage and where I have seen peer influencers have the greatest impact.
I delve into how marketers should best use peer influence to their advantage and where I have seen peer influencers have the greatest impact.
Over at The Atlantic Monthly, a provocative piece by Nicholas Carr titled "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" discusses how the web has changed the way we interact with information. He argues that the hyper-multitasking of the Internet has made people less introspective, reflective and thoughtful. Rather than simply blame the Internet, Carr also argues that the way we use the technologies is having a profound affect on how we think and act.As usual, Carr is onto something. And I think this quote in the article describing a conversation that Nietzsche had with a friend about the use of a typewriter changing his writing, captures it perfectly.
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
But Carr also misses some important factors that should have been discussed in his article. Firstly, these changes aren't anything new. Each time a transformative piece of technology enters our lives, it influences our cognitive abilities in unusual ways. The discovery of the printing press changed the nature of knowledge forever (and us too) as did more recent and less dramatic inventions like the typewriter, the radio, the television and now the Internet. Is there something dramatically different about the Internet?
Well, I believe there is. It is not that we have immense amounts of information at our finger tips. Most people aren't journalists like Carr and that information doesn't matter as much. The difference is that we're connected with each other so much more. Our lives are a perpetual dinner party. We're in multiple conversations, continuously moving between circles of friends and the bar. Activity on the Internet resembles how we digest and exchange information when we mingle at parties.
The point being that it is a dinner party because we're connected to each other. Its not Google or the Internet that's making us stupid, it is the fact that we maybe spending more time at virtual dinner parties than we should.
Some of the more controversial responses to Carr's article include:
Don't let this opportunity to be a part of something incredibly special go by. Pangea Day is a special, global event to bring the world together through film on one day. The idea is to help people see themselves in others and in their stories. Starting at 18:00 GMT on May 10, 2008, locations in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked for a live program of powerful films, live music, and visionary speakers. The entire program will be broadcast – in seven languages – to millions of people worldwide through the internet, television, and mobile phones.
Participate online or better still through one of the community events. You won't regret it. You can also show your support on Facebook, MySpace or YouTube. I'm proud to say that Avenue A | Razorfish played a small role in the Pangea Day effort by designing and building the website. We talk a lot about social media and online communities, well there's nothing more special than showing we're part of a global community that cares.
