Hi world, I'm Alex Dalidakis, a Melbourne based Y-gen working in a role that is some-what social and involves a variety of media, i guess in social-media. I have a background in marketing but nowadays look more towards how marketing can integrate traditional thinking into new media. This is my thinking bubble on the web.
So you're a retailer and you have a customer loyalty program, nothing new there, everyone does. But until now this has been a mostly one-to-one relationship. Maybe you're a forward thinking company like Sears and have built a community for your loyalty program or like Best Buy and built a youth community for a specific segment of your customers. Breaking the one-to-one mould and exposing loyal customers to each other, great.
This means big bikkies to create a community platform from scratch and one of the down sides of this is that your brand is essentially insulated within its own community boundaries. For smaller retailers there is an alternative that can generate exposure as well as community.
I originally got on this train of thought when I read a blog post by platform vendor Lithium and their integration of Foursquare into their platform. This was more of a comment on bringing outside community mentions into an enterprise community, but the concept of blending inside and outside communities is essentially the same.
And now I have come across Tasti D-lite, a US ice-cream chain that has really taken social media integration to the next level for small business.
You can read more about how Tasti D-lite have brought social media into their loyalty program here, but essentially what they have done is leverage the power of their customer's existing free and public networks to promote their own loyalty program.
For USD$10,000 Tasti D-lite integrated Twitter and Foursquare into their loyalty program and POS system so that when a transaction is made using the loyalty program card a Tweet is sent with how many points were awarded and a check-in is made in Foursquare for the customer.
Setting aside the mammoth amount of small business activity in Facebook, this example shows how for relatively small amounts of money small businesses can leverage the power of their customer's existing networks to build brand and loyalty together.
A house nearby recently had a syntheic lawn installed in the front yard (not the one pictured) and it made me contemplate how far, or how little, we have come in adapting to the realities of today's climate.
It would seem that in society today we are happy fantasize about green lawns through synthetic dreams in the vain hope saving precious drops of water.
One might be tempted to link this to notion that says Australians are not yet willing to drink potable recycled sewage.
How vain we must be that we would rather live in a synthetic dream than adapt to the realities of today.
In Victoria today we are building a de-salination plant to supplement our thirst for water which, if recycled, we would have in abundance. Houses across the nation are installing water tanks to 'do their part' in capturing rainfall for use on the garden.
It makes me wonder, what do Victorians treasure more, their vanity or their gardens? It would seem that if the we reject recycled water and prefer synthetic gardens then our vanity wins out.
It might just be because I'm the guy within my company that is most frequently using video services, but I'm predicting that over the next five years the need for professional video services will grow sharply.
Here's how I have arrived at this prediction . . .
Without a doubt increasing bandwidth capacity is seeing the phenomenal growth of videos online which in-turn is fuelling more demand for video delivery of content, from news and sports to entertainment and education.
From my own personal experience, the demand for access to conference sessions via streaming video increases with each event. With conference producers like TED leading the way, all other conference producers are recognising that the potential numbers of conference attendees don't end when the bums on the seats are filled - there's a world of other potential virtual-attendees out there.
Online video interviews included in advertising and marketing industry blog, Mumbrella, shows another example where the need for video services is expanding. The delivery of content online is seeing new and old media sources (even Fairfax is included here!) use a mix of written and video news, whichever is most appropriate for the story.
Now, some might say that the You Tube phenomenon means that this increased demand for online video content is being supplied by amateur producers and that traditional video services will wither against the rise of the professional amateur. I think this argument is short-sighted. Yes, amateur video is a factor in the growth of online video, but at the same time as supplying the sector with content it is also creating a larger demand than it can supply.
Case in point are the events that I work on. Up until now we have filmed, in-house, a small number of sessions to be delivered live and on-demand to expand the reach of our conferences. But this type of amateur filming is un-scalable. I can only ever film in the one place at a time, and editing in-house takes time. To meet the increased demand that the initial videos created I need to be able to scale the filming of events to a national and international level. This is where the initial amateur supply has created an out-sized demand for educational video and has in-turn fuelled demand for professional video services that are scalable.
And this is what I predict will be the next five years for online video and its associated services: a small supply of amateur producers creating a larger demand for scalable professional producers.
What makes a company good? And by 'good' I mean good for everyone, the world, the whole box and dice. Talk to some economists and they would say the only responsibility a company has is to its shareholders. Make sure the shareholders get as much cash as possible and let the individual make the decision. Talk to others and they'll say a company can be good only by being a good corporate citizen. This is more ill-defined, but generally one would say this means ethical business practices, giving back to the community, lowering carbon emissions and the like.
I've been put on this train of thought because of an article written by Umair Haque on the HBR blog. The Great to Good Manifesto largely explains this phenomena and picks out Pepsi's latest 'Refresh' campaign as a key example.
While the scale of this good company principle varies immensely, especially from industry to industry, it would seem that at least in the FMCG and bulky-goods industries, the more holistic style of good company is rising.
Examples of how these FMCG companies are becoming good companies seem to be coming through more and more frequently. Using the criteria of ethical business, giving back to the community and lowering carbon emmissions we see that industries are increasingly seeing the commercial benefits of being good companies.
From an ethical point of view green is the new black and companies far and wide are both promoting their green credentials and giving customers the option of greening their products (a la carbon offsets for flights and car-hire). In the FMCG market one of the highest profile decisions has been Cadbury's decision to become Fairtrade certified in its Dairy Milk branded chocolate. You can read more about their efforts on the Cadbury Fairtrade blog.
By far the hottest good thing companies are doing at the moment is giving back to the community. The idea of integrating good corporate citizenry and marketing promotions is really taking off. You can debate whether this is opportunistic or not until the cows come home, but there is a clear trend towards customer purchasing decisions being made based on a company's propensity to 'give-back'.
FMCG organisations are going on the 'give-back' offensive across the board and it has started in the tween and teen market. Social networking is increasingly giving tweens the power to decide en-mass and their role in purchasing decisions cannot be under-stated.
A third good company criteria is the company's carbon reduction actions. This strategy, partly driven by legislation and probably more focused at the adult community, is more prominent in essential FMCG goods and shareholder information. Woolworths in Australia has committed to reducing CO2 emissions through improvements in store operations (example: refrigeration) and logistics. In the UK Tesco now identifies the carbon footprint of its milk products on the product label.
What is a good company? It would seem the days of measuring how good a company is solely by shareholder return are numbered. If the promotions by Pepsi, Best-Buy and Starburst are anything to go by the holistic good company is on the rise.
I've started reading Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture and even though I'm still just on the introduction the story that he's telling really resonates with me. The convergence, as I understand it, is that a story is its own self and is not beholden to a delivery medium. The story will reveal itself to you in the most appropriate manner to have the biggest impact. Thus, the delivery medium/s of a story converge to become a single ecosystem in which the story unravels. Today, more than ever, this convergence is available to the story-teller.
I'll get back to you with more stuff that I learn from Mr.Jenkins, but for now I'll leave you with some fun convergence you might be familiar with...
... Amazon reviews!
I love comedy, I love it even more when it is set in a context that you just wouldn't expect it. The lampooning of products on Amazon is some of the funniest stuff I've read on teh Interwebs. And what's more, Amazon, with its 'helpfulness' ratings for reviews, is complicit in helping these reviews be just as popular, if not more so, than the products themselves.
Crap Amazon products and comedy, there's convergence for you!
Here's some of the classics, please comment with more if there are!
The Secret (Hardcover), by Rhonda Byrne (Ari Brouillette review still no.1 after two years!)
Welcome to 2010! Bad Religion may have been a couple of billion people off predicting 10bn in 2010, but we'll let that one slide.
One of the other things that is upon us in 2010 is the long tail of social media ratings and measurements. My previous post started a list of ways online communities and websites are now managing a measuring reputation and community involvement. Now what I am finding is that, like many ideas on the Web, the long tail of obscure and sometimes half-baked ideas is stretching the usefulness and relevance of community input variables. I mention this because today Jeremiah Owyang pointed towards the KickApps mood widget (right) on the NBC New York news site. You can now rate how an article on the news site makes you feel. Based on a pre-defined set of moods you can help define how the city of New York is 'feeling'.
This made me recall the Yelp review widget where you can say whether a restaurant review was useful, funny or cool (below). These 'mood' or semantic ratings seem a little odd to me. There are two reasons for this feeling. One, as a reader or community member I do not see value being created by defining articles by semantic terms unrelated for the most part to the actual article. In Yelp's case, would I choose to go to a restaurant because a reviewer the reviewed the restaurant is considered funny? Or will I post more restaurant reviews because people think my reviews are cool? I dunno.
As for the moods on NBC New York, do I get value out of the fact that readers are thrilled about an article on Marijuana and bored about an article on politics? As a rating it does not make one thing more valuable than another because the variables are nominal. Possibly I might want to search for 'thrilling' articles, I probably wouldn't search 'boring' articles.
Which brings me to point two, browse-ability and search-ability. Presumably these ratings/variables have been created to be useful for website/community users. But if you cannot filter any of the variables then how can they be useful? A good rating or social measure in a community should both provide value to the content creator (people think this is great!) and value to the rater (that article is great! I'll rate it 5 stars so more people can see it). Update: Thanks to reader JZ, they've pointed me to the NBC Mood Board where you can filter based on mood.
Both Yelp and NBC/KickApps have gone half way with their semantic ratings, and there is nothing wrong choosing nominal variables to try to define a mood or a feeling, but thats only the half of it. The other half is the usefulness half, ask, "how will other people find this useful?"
Ratings, reputations, rewards, and now feelings, are all ways communities are trying to promote the value community members receive from the community, but for these things to catch on the members need positive and tangible results from their interactions that can further deepen their connection with the community.
Earlier in the year I blogged about rewarding community involvement online and came up with this 2x2 matrix to help me categorise the millions of methods of rewards out in the ether.
I thought that the best way for me to keep the momentum going on this train of thought was to begin a list of examples from the web that showcase all the different methods communities are employing.
This list will be updated periodically as new examples come to light. Enjoy!
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Legend: Location: Reward (How attained) Scale
Measurements of rewards are based on social sciences scaling using either individual attributes scaled as either Nominal, Ordinal, Interval or Ratio or as a composite measure such as an Index or Typology. (Please excuse me if I don't get some of these measures correct and do comment to help me improve!)
As a brief re-cap I am defining subjective as any kind of reward where human interaction is needed in some part of the process where objective rewards are based solely on a pre-determined formula. Subjective Periodic
eBay: Power Seller (eBay awards power seller status based on a mixture of objective achievements and subjectively adhering to community policy) Index
Yelp: Review of the day (Be the reviewer of the day in a Yelp city) Nominal
Subjective Perpetual
Amazon: Badges (Get a 'real name' or 'The' badge if Amazon thinks you are popular enough) Nominal
Twitter: Verified (If you're a celebrity Twitter can verify you are the actual account holder) Nominal
Twitter: Translate (If you help Twitter as a translator you get Translator badge) Nominal
Wikpedia: Barnstars (Peers award barnstars for participation in Wikipedia community) Typology
Yelp: Elite (Annual badge awarded for influential people in a Yelp city) Nominal
Yelp: Compliments (The community awards users compliments on reviews, compliments shown in public) Typology / Ratio
Objective Periodic
Ad Age: Power 150 (Marketing blogs ranked by aggregate of measurements) Index
Amazon: Feedback (Rating of transaction out of five stars) Ordinal
at15.com: Best-Buy youth communityPoints (Complete activities to earn point, points directed to charity donation quarterly) Ratio
eBay: Helpful Reviewer (Be one of the top reviewers in eBay) Ratio
Foursquare: Mayor (Become mayor of a venue by being the person that checks in the most) Ratio
Technorati: Authority (More links to your blog mean more authority, calculated and updates frequently) Index
World of Warcraft: Reputation (Earn reputation points through doing deeds for other, reputation fluctuates based on whether you do good or bad deeds) Index
Objective Perpetual
at15.com: Best-Buy youth community Icons (the more points you earn the 'blingier' your icon becomes) Ratio
Facebook (Translations app): Awards (earn icons for quantity and accuracy of translation submissions) Ratio / Typology
Foursquare: Badges (earn points and badges by completing tasks, eg four bars in one night, be the first to review a venue) Ratio
Sears: Badges (earn points in MySears to enter the "Friends" - "Chairmans" Circle) Ratio
Soundunwound: Records (number of edits gets you coloured record) Ratio
World of Warcraft: Experience / PvP Rewards (earn items through increased game play, items traded for honour and other experience points) Index
Virgin.com : Badges (Rise from groupie to roadie then rockstar) Ratio
In the old marketing text book that I used to read at University there was a great section on informational advertising and transformational advertising and I really took those two theories to heart.
It was pretty simple really, informational advertising was used in important decision making processes. It was to remove fear like medicinal advertising or explain complex expensive products (you know those car comparison ads that list how many cup-holders a car has?). Then there was transformational advertising used either to gratify the ego with a minor purchase decision like how a can of coke will get me a whole lotta chicks in bikinis, or to satisfy the ego with large purchases like how when I bough my new Macbook I just knew that I would become hip.
But what I'm experiencing nowadays is that there is definitely a middle ground. And I think this middle ground is growing with the growth of online communities and networks.
Let me explain. Transformation feeds the ego and gratifies the individual while information gives the individual the required understanding of the needs required to go from being without satisfaction to having satisfaction. What better way of getting in the clique than by joining a community of experts and conversing and learning from the experts on how to transform yourself.
It is these online communities and networks that I believe fill the middle ground between information and transformation. This is the trans-informational advertising. Get this space right, create a space for the expression of emotion and transfer of knowledge, feed it with the occasional talking point of content and the community will can self-sustaining.
Example: The 2010 Ford Mustang The new 2010 Ford Mustang is in anybody's book a pretty big purchase. To sell one of these babies you need to latch onto a heap of emotion, give lots of sexy information about the power of the beast, and of course have a space where fans and potential buyers can salivate together about this animal.
Let's start with tansformation. This is a beast of a car and has no practical use on the speed regulated roads whatsoever. But it is sexy, fast and down right red-blooded Amrerican muscle. Tell me this doesn't transform you:
Now information. You want specs? I'll give you specs. Take those details and shove 'em up your imported piece of plastic. As much as information is there to remove the fear of purchasing an inferior product it can also be used to reinforce your decision for buying an over-specced rocket on four wheels.
And the middle ground. I love these videos, I think this car is awesome, I want to salivate with someone over the fact that I could get the top of the range model for under $50k Australian!!! (if you didn't take into account import taxes, and every other obvious barrier under the sun to getting one in Australia).
Ford services this middle ground with a very healthy Facebook fan page with over 350k fans and a very nice assortment of photos, videos and applications to play with and discuss intimate stories about abnormal love affairs with inanimate objects. Facebook, as you can see from this example is the perfect platform for servicing this new and exponentially growing marketing ground.
The trans-informational middle ground is one of the most promising developments happening in marketing today. The opportunity to combine emotional transformational wants and rational informational needs in a living community of enthusiasts, executed thoughtfully and in the community's interest, can only strengthen a brand in the eyes of its core market.
*For more awesome mustang photos I recommend the Mustang fan page.
I like getting to the nub of things, you could say I like returning to the basic ;-)
And in the spirit of returning to the basic I have decided to out those that write reports, emails, presentations, whatever, in deliberately excessive or academic terms. The act of dumping as many three and four syllable words as possible into a sentence however irrelevant or excessive (much like this sentence!) is unnecessary to say the least and obfuscatory to say the most! see!?
I will thus politely comment that "what you have written good sir/madam, reads like a Chinese t-shirt."
I hope that such an obtuse remark might actually make them think twice about how to clearly and concisely present their information to me.
The debate over marketing as an activity within an organisation is nothing new. In retail organisations it's a pretty simple model that product management and marketing fit snuggly together whereas operations/sales-force and customer service go together on their merry way spruiking the line they've been given from the former departments.
Service organisations can be a little more blurry between departments but the general principles still exist that one side manages the product and message and the other side manages the customer and company operations.
But the socialising of consumption and business is melting these generally held principles and we are now seeing a multi-coloured pool of muck on the floor and a metaphorical "watch out, slippery floor" sign has gone up around the whole marketing/customer-service model.
Laurel Papworth has been championing the 'social business interactions belong in customer service' thing for a while, here's her category posts for customer service, so like I said it's nothing new.
BBH-Labs has also picked out some juicy points in its review of Razorfish's third annual digital brand experience report. Particularly BBH-Labs points out "... the silo walls between marketing & customer service teams in particular need breaking down; they are increasingly one and the same thing ..."
I know at my own job the business is only just defining its voice in an online world: is it customer service, news service, sales service; is it formal, informal; pro-active or reactive?
It's possible to even take this one step further and ask if it is even possible for a business to define its online personality, or is it the customers that define it for them? I think, just like a steamy first date, the relationship will be defined by the mimicry of interactions between the two.
All these philosophical questions aside I agree with both Laurel and BBH-Labs that the socialisation of business will ultimately draw marketing closer to customer service.
For a marketing manager that has paraded from advertising agency to sponsorship events and around the board table to have to grind away the hours with customer service and on the shop floor will be too much for some. Some businesses will refuse to change, refuse to engage with the customers. I believe that those that refuse to adapt to this new division of marketing labour will struggle to grow.
So I say to the marketing managers that are asking 'their agencies' to create a social media campaign for them, stop. It's not sustainable. You have to look within yourself and your brand, as the brand ambassador only you can create the social business your brand deserves. And it will include talking to customers yourself.
