Nov 4, 2012 | Communication, Social Media
Mitch Joel writes one of the more thoughtful blogs dealing with the changes in our digital environment, he seems to be able to articulate what others amongst us just feel as a vague itch.
In this post, from 2011, he considers the implications of us now all being publishers, what responsibilities do we undertake, and how can we do better? After all, 140 characters does not constitute an article of any real value.
Similar questions, and a number more, were asked by Mark Colvin, Colvinius on twitter, during his Andrew Olle lecture on Friday evening.
Essentially, the publishing environment has undergone a huge disruption, and there is more coming. How we deal with the changes, personally, socially, and economically impacts on every one of us, so it is worth some thought.
Colvin is a great Australian journo, wedded to the facts, yet able to mix the facts with a humanity that is all too rare, as he explains and reports. Thanks to the wonders of our new digital world, his thoughts can be shared, and re-shared, and we will all grow just a bit as a result.
Thanks Mark.
Oct 29, 2012 | Change, Management, Marketing, Social Media
One of the many paradoxes of our on-line social life is that to engage, we give up a part of our personal life, we become available to anyone else who cares to look for us, within the boundaries of increasingly better privacy hurdles in social media tools.
In the past, our personal lives were almost all we had, simply because of the inconvenience, inefficiency, indeed, impossibility, of telling everybody, anything much about ourselves.
The earlier incarnations of social media removed those barriers, and suddenly we realised that we had created a monster, a perfect environment for stalkers. All sorts of unsavory and undesirable people, and those we had no desire to know suddenly had access to our details, and so we started designing out the access, but it is a binary process, a filter is “on”, or it is “off”, no “maybe”.
So, how do we design it out? We design back in some of the elements of the inefficiency we had until a decade ago, put in hurdles that need to be crossed before you get to the personal stuff. Clay Shirky, one of the great minds thinking about this stuff does it again in this Zeitgeist presentation from 2008. I only just found it, but the message is as relevant now as 4 years ago, perhaps more so.
Oct 26, 2012 | Communication, Marketing, Personal Rant, Social Media
Millions of “writers” are now publishing blogs, and as a result there are many sources of “how to” write a better blog, and get it seen.
However, it seems to me that most of the advice is rehashing pretty basic stuff, and focusses way too much attention on the medium of publishing, the web, rather than offering advice on the writing. If there is any merit in the idea that a well written blog will outperform a poorly written one, perhaps we should ignore most of the new-age advice, and go to the experts on writing.
Having an ability to write, to express an idea memorably, with clarity, and in a manner that creates understanding and an action from the reader is not a result of the net, it is just as hard as it always was, it is just that now the good stuff has far more visible competition for attention from the crap.
David Ogilvy is an acknowledged expert, the original Mad-man, who wrote some of the best advertising of all time, also wrote this internal memo advising his employees how to write.
The advice holds for those trying to write blogs, tweets, and advertising copy today, as much as it did of O&M employees in 1982.
Oct 17, 2012 | Branding, Marketing, Personal Rant
This is a situation where a modest intellect has learned the language, and so can spew out a bunch of marginally related clichés. They understand some of the obvious stuff, can look at the numbers, and have a superficial understanding of customer behavior, and the context in which that behavior occurs, so they can babble about brands, marketing, and communication sufficiently well to fool some of the people, at least some of the time.
Real marketing is done by a very few very smart people who get to the deeper reaches of motivation and behavior, who are able to scrape off the over-burden of verbiage, and get to the real guts of the strategic and communication challenges being faced.
Marketing is inhabited by a group that is pretty ordinary, just look at the UAI’s required to get into the various marketing courses around the place. The smart people are doing something else. Is it any wonder that there is a real lack of good strategy and marketing intellect at the top of organisations, the people at the top who make the succession decisions see the lack of depth in the marketing “profession” and act accordingly.
This rant was motivated by a bloke I was pitching to in a sufficiently senior role to say “No”, who not only failed to grasp the basics of the argument I was putting, which could have been put down to a lack of communication skill on my part, but he also asked a number of questions that demonstrated he knew nothing, and to top it off, talked about himself a lot.
Save us from the idiots making decisions with nothing more than dartboard tools.
Oct 16, 2012 | Communication, Marketing
The way most of us see things is dependent on what we expect to see, and how it affects us. If you were a farmer with a just planted crop, rain is a great day, but if you are about to go on a picnic, rain sucks.
Similarly, marketing is about setting the context in the way we want our customers, and potential customers to see out product.
The iphone is widely understood to be a disruption of the phone industry, but as John Gruber of daringfireball points out with great insight, it is not. Rather, the iphone is a redefinition of the mobile computer, it just happens to have as one of its capabilities, the ability to make and receive phone calls, but that has almost become a minor item. What is really important is that it put the net into out pockets at all times.
Those phone makers left high and dry by the iphone, RIM, (Blackberry) Nokia, Motorola, at al, all tried to outdo the iphone by addressing the disruption, and building a better phone, but failed. It took those with the capabilities in software and computer hardware to get it at least partly right, Samsung, Google, and perhaps more recently Microsoft (although yet to be successful in the market) to make headway. These guys had little to do with phones, they built computers and the software required and evolving, and are flourishing.
Much is made of the “sameness” of the iphone 5, it is outperformed by Samsung’s galaxy on most objective parameters, but is still making all the money, so which is the more successful? Depends on your context doesn’t it.
Oct 5, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Social Media
My 28 year old son recently tried to get a mobile phone on a plan, and couldn’t, he did not have a credit rating. A bit unusual perhaps, but this is a young bloke who has been a self-funded student for a long time, always paid his bills, always met all his commitments, financial and otherwise, a far better bet than most that his mobile bill would be paid. Now graduated, he wanted to start being “normal” as he put it.
“Personal brand” is a term increasingly bandied around as we build an identity underpinned by on-line behavior. Headhunters are increasingly using it as they seek to find the best fit for roles they are filling, so are looking to social media as a behavioral metaphor for actual behavior in a workplace.
But it is going much further, much quicker than anyone anticipated.
The reputation you build in one place will be increasingly transferrable to another. Why shouldn’t your hard earned EBay and Amazon rating be considered when you want to rent a car or flat, borrow some money, or even take on a simple phone plan?
Collaborative consumption is a term coined by Rachael Botsman to describe the evolution of behavior made possible by the removal of the transactional friction we are used to by the collaborative capacity of the internet. We can now rent someone’s home on airbnb, raise venture capital on Kickstarter, share a car on GoGet, get the chores done by taskrabbit, and find thousands of other potential partners in peer to peer transactions that were impossible just a few years ago. In these circumstances, your reputation, your brand, is as good as money, just different, it has a value that others will consider in an exchange, and decide if they will proceed.
In this emerging digital economy trust is everything, trust between strangers a necessity for these types of collaborative consumption transactions. It follows then that we need a mechanism to replace the face to face interaction that through human history has built trust because you can see the whites of the other parties eyes, and make a very personal judgement about them.
Your reputation, the sum of all your behavior, will increasingly become manageable and transferable across platforms, and act as currency.
