Apr 29, 2012 | Change, Customers, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
It is simply a fact of life that digital media is evolving faster than the existing institutions around it, particularly the regulatory ones.
The decision during the week to reverse the Federal Courts decision on the streaming of “almost live” NRL and AFL games by Optus, determining that after all, it was a breach of copyright, is a case in point. Regardless of the merits of either sides case, and the logic that the continuing success of the professional codes relies on funding from TV rights, the world has moved on, but the business model of the professional games has not.
We will wait around for another year or so until the high court comes down with a decision, and there will be a winner and loser, but from a long term perspective, both will be losers, simply because another year has been wasted trying to shore up the gunwales against Digital Darwinism, and we all know how successful that has been in the music industry, newspaper publishing, and a host of others.
If both games wish to engage with youngsters, those who will be around for a while to fund the games by watching, buying branded gear, attending events, they need to consider how these youngsters consume entertainment, and adapt.
The current copyright law was conceived in the 1700’s, and whilst it has evolved, it no longer is a reflection of society, but a distorted shadow vainly trying to keep up with technical changes happening at digital speed.
Apr 27, 2012 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales
The costs of advertising only get counted when you do lousy advertising.
When you place an ad, and you get a great response, the costs are never considered, but place a lousy ad, getting little response, then the cost is alarming.
Therefore the task is to be sufficiently compelling to a targeted audience to bring a quality response, then the cost is not considered, because you get an outcome that (presumably) makes commercial sense.
My son recently sold a car on line, it was a good car, but not one that would be for everyone. He thought he would just put up an ad, and it would just sell, easy, because it was a good car, and the price offered good value.
Failure, this first ad got almost no response, and those that did respond were not interested in the car, just getting it at half the advertised price.
We had another shot at writing an ad, putting in much more detail, and then placed it more specifically to attract a specialised buyer, one to whom the particular characteristics of the car beyond the provision of a transport device would be of value.
It got a number of responses, several very good ones, and it sold very quickly at the full price.
The cost of the second ad was irrelevant, but he is still complaining about the first placement.
Apr 26, 2012 | Collaboration, Social Media
Emotional intelligence, EI has a whole lot of psychological mumbo jumbo surrounding it, a search will turn up almost a million articles. So, I’ll simplify all that by saying it is the capability a person has to empathise and then engage with another individual and/or group.
It is the thinking that underpins effective use of social media. We can all figure out how the algorithms work, and the how the interactions play out, but it is EI that creates the engagement.
I get a lot of stuff in my inbox , some, obviously, gets deleted immediately, some I share very selectively across my contacts, some I share with specific people, and some get spread via Twitter, Linkedin, et al. Why? Because what I share, plays a role in how others see me, and I want to be seen differently by different people, and groups of people.
It also varies by platform.
For example, there are a lot of hits on celebrity foibles when reported in online news sources, but they do not get shared much. However, we tend to share the pictures and stories of the tsunami in Japan, or the interesting article we find on a blog.
We humans are social animals, we spend a lot of effort to shape the way others see us, as that will contribute to our acceptability in differing groups and situations, and what and how we communicate is more important in this connected age than ever before.
Apr 24, 2012 | Branding, Collaboration, Communication, Marketing
Trust is a greatly over-used word in management conversations, and has therefore lost much of its meaning, becoming a cliché for “lets hope”.
People trust brands when they deliver consistently over time, but trust is like a bucket with a hole in the bottom, you need to keep pouring water in to keep up with the inevitable losses for a whole range of reasons. Stop adding to the bucket for a moment, and you lose ground that is very hard to make up.
In discussing collaborative structures of various types, “Trust” is grossly overused, and should be replaced by an alternative description, “Reputational Capital” which implies more of the appreciation/depreciation continuum better understood by managers.
Collaborations work only in the presence of people who individually work to ensure that by their efforts others will benefit, and the whole system remains healthy. This is consistent irrespective of the size and nature of the collaboration, from major corporate initiatives, to self managed teams on the factory floor, the local tennis club, and web based sharing platforms like Zipcar. The Reputation of all participants is paramount to collaborative success.
Amazon, Zappos and Ebay rewrote the book on reputational capital with their review systems, and the principals used are now in wide use across many web platforms to provide buyers and sellers with certainty.
How long will it be before there is a web-wide statement of our activity, that accounts for all our activity, irrespective of the platform, an accounting of our Reputational Capital, a “klout” type score that measures not activity, but the satisfaction delivered to the people on the receiving end of all the transactions an individual originates.
Apr 23, 2012 | Change, Innovation, Social Media
This is a term coined by Clay Shirky to describe the ideas, skills, knowledge that resides in peoples minds, and on enterprise shelves, unused, ignored, and sometimes actively avoided.
His argument is that there has been a huge shift in behavior, no longer are we passive consumers of media, our expectation now is that we are also able to produce and share, and we all want to, hence the growth of social media. The story of the little girl looking for the mouse behind the TV screen towards the end of this talk on his notion of Cognitive Surplus, says it all.
It seems to me however, that we can push the idea a bit further, fragmenting it, focusing our thoughts a bit more, to recognise the potential value of the pieces.
A product development brainstorming is nothing more than an effort to identify the knowledge, that sits around in peoples heads, research labs archives, unwanted prototypes, incomplete projects, solutions to customer problems suppliers have but do not recognise, and so on, but they are wasted because nothing is being done.
An Innovation surplus?
An idea that has exploded around Australia is that of “Mens Shed” an organisation that uses the skills of older blokes to make a contribution to their community, some retired, others just wanting to do something useful . This may be an example of a “Social Surplus”.
When you look around, there are many situations where unused brainpower and skills can be used better than they are now, finding a way to do that is leveraging the surplus that exists, and we all benefit.
