Sep 19, 2022 | Analytics, Communication
Social media platforms all compete for your attention, not just with other platforms, but with the rest of your life. Then, once you have given it, the real test begins.
What do you do with it.
The nature of social media is almost instantaneous. When something comes through your feed, an increasingly rare event for unadvertised material, it has a second, occasionally a couple, to grab and hold your attention, and encourage you to take the next step, whatever that might be.
It is not the long slow romancing of that great looking person in a bar, or at dinner party with friends, it is more like Tinder.
Swipe left, or swipe right. In or out. More information please or no thanks.
Your marketing task on social media, if you are to use it effectively, is to pass the initial tinder test, and have the other party look for more, and then pass on the post to their networks.
So how do you achieve that end, the referral of your material to others?
Most of the advice around is pretty accurate:
- Promise an explicit outcome to a specific cohort of potential customers.
- Photos of people should be front lit, and eyes not looking directly at the camera. This is to avoid the photo looking like a mug shot from the local cop-shop.
- Simplicity and consistency of design
- Make a clear and explicit call to action
- Make it easy for them to contact you
Remember always you only have a second to make the impact that will encourage them to swipe left, then the challenge is to add value, so they stay.
Better make that first second count.
Sep 12, 2022 | Customers, Marketing
What we purchase and what we pay for it can be a deeply psychological process.
The cost is one element, the value or utility delivered is often an entirely different matter.
The vast majority of purchases of a car represent a mix of the rational with the irrational, heavily weighted to the rational. Reliable transport to get to work, meet the specific needs of the individual and family, and take the kids to soccer safely. Some cars absolutely defy this rational logic. Why would you need to pay a million dollars for an Aston Martin, or $23 million for a Rolls Royce boat-tail, with plenty of options between these two if the rational was to prevail?
Economists who work with mathematical models have trouble reconciling the irrationality of behaviour with their rational models. This is why the seminal work by Daniel Kahneman, published for public consumption in ‘Thinking fast and Slow’ is so important. Important enough to win him the Nobel prize in Economics when he is a psychologist.
It is also why your value proposition and the definition of your ideal customer are so intimately entwined.
Your ideal customer will find some mix of objective and subjective utility in your product not available elsewhere, and be prepared to pay for it.
The cost in dollars is the same for everyone, and everyone understands it. The utility derived from ownership is entirely personal.
Peter Drucker said many things, amongst which was ‘The only purpose of a business is to create a customer’
And he was right.
To create a customer, you must offer them value they cannot get anywhere else.
To create value, you must understand ‘Utility’: the physical and psychological benefit customers receive from owning and using your product.
Utility is highly personal and context sensitive, driven by psychology.
Germans are stereotypically rational, process oriented people. It seems unlikely that they would be as susceptible to emotional purchases as say, Italians, who have the opposite stereotype.
Not so. Two classic examples from Frederick the Great of Prussia, and his great great grandson, also Frederick.
The first Fred, king of Prussia from 1740 until 1786, saw the potato’s potential to help feed his nation, and lower the price of bread. In 1774, he had issued an order for his subjects to grow potatoes as protection against famine. The refusal was absolute. Nobody wanted potatoes, nobody liked them, even the dogs would not eat them, so why should they? Faced by this general refusal Fred had to use psychology.
Trying a less direct approach to encourage his subjects to begin planting potatoes, Frederick got creative. He planted a royal field of potato plants and stationed a heavy guard to protect this field from thieves.
Nearby peasants naturally assumed that anything worth guarding was worth stealing, and so snuck into the field and snatched the plants for their home gardens. Of course, this was entirely in line with Frederick’s wishes.
Fred number two needed to fund the war against Napoleon. In 1813 he urged all families to donate their gold and silver jewellery to the cause, and replicas were given to them made from caste iron, by a specific iron foundry in Berlin. The wearing of caste iron items became the symbol of the sacrifices the family had made to the war, and was highly valued.
When you can articulate and reflect the utility your ideal customer will receive from you in terms unmatched by competitors, where else would they go?
Is the price simply a reflection of the exchange of value made up of both rational and non-rational componets?
Aug 24, 2022 | Governance, Leadership, Management
There has been an awful lot of trees cut down to accommodate the blather about the new world of post covid work. In an effort to condense the ‘debate’ and save a few trees, the following is what I have gleaned.
Humanity.
We humans are social animals, we need other people around us for our own psychological health and creative productivity. Therefore, the idea of general remote work becomes a potential mental health time bomb. We will adjust to it by mostly going back to the office. it is very unlikely to be 9 to 5, there will probably be more satellite offices, short term but regular meeting schedules, but back we will go in some form.
Proximity.
Physical proximity enables deeper communication than any other form. Even the distance apart in the office makes a difference to the nature of the communication we have with each other. Not just about work, but the tiny things that we do not notice until they are not there, and even then, often with hindsight only.
Trust.
Trust enables teams to work together. The less face to face contact, the harder it is the generate that trust, making teams harder to assemble, generate productive outcomes, then disassemble and reform for another project or purpose.
Belonging.
We are sustained by a sense of ‘belonging’. We are drawn to ‘people like me’ but when we do not see them, or see them only occasionally or over Zoom, the sense of belonging frays, leading to eroding productivity and sense of community.
WFH.
Working from home for many has been great, not having that commute every day. It is convenient for many. However, convenient is not always good for us. Going to the gym every day may not be convenient, but it is good for our health.
Leadership.
Leadership and the nature of that leadership has never been more important. In the past we had a few leaders, and a lot of managers. In a world where remote work is a consistent part of the output, just being a manager will not cut the mustard. We need more leaders, and have not trained them, which indicates problems for many, and opportunity for the few in the coming few years.
Alignment.
The alignment of priorities and performance measurement and the place each individual has in the scheme of this is critical. When an individual cannot see how their efforts contributes, to both those in their immediate vicinity and to the overall objective, the effort will become diluted. Working remotely in the absence of that focus on priorities and outcomes will lead to real productivity challenges for the enterprises, and personal ones for the individuals.
Culture.
Culture is a function of the leadership, and how the leadership permeates the organisation. Building a culture in a remote workforce is more challenging than when face to face is the norm. Some have done it well, but mostly they are the enterprises that have started life as remote enterprises, so those who join, and remain, have the right ‘remote work DNA’ from day 1. The holding company of website builder WordPress, Automattic springs to mind. Founder Matt Mullenweg set out to make the company completely remote from day one, but even he has co-working spaces in places where employees are concentrated.
Technology.
Technology is what has made this remote working possible, but it is also planting the seeds of our own disassociation with those we need around us for our own well-being. Like most things, too much of anything good becomes a problem.
Clearly, we are not yet ‘Post covid’. However, the workplace has changed over the last 2 years, and while the jury is still out, when it comes back the status quo will not be the same as pre covid.
There has also been a lot written about the great resignation, and its relationship to covid. My suspicion is that it is not covid specifically that has driven the change, although covid was the catalyst. The model we have been using to get the work done was over a century old, and getting pretty creaky. Covid acted as the catalyst for many to simply reconsider their working lives in the light of the tools that have emerged in the last 10 years, and they chose to make a change. Enterprises must adapt to these new models of work. Those that can’t will become rapidly extinct.
What have I missed?
Header cartoon credit: Tom Gauld
Aug 8, 2022 | Innovation, Marketing, Strategy
Black and white thinking is easy, there is right and wrong, you decide which side of the fence you are on, and stick to it.
Luckily, life is not like that. Life is a mass collision of colours, ambiguity built on ambiguity, built on uncertainty. That is what makes it interesting, and worth living.
Following the previous post that offered 9 strategies for more impactful decisions, it seemed appropriate to observe that the great advice in that post is useless in the absence of being able to see a problem from a number of perspectives.
In other words, see all the colours.
Most problems we face in strategy development are wicked ones, where there is no obvious right and wrong answer, where there are nuances on top of nuances, second order impacts, and where definitive data is hard, if not impossible to find.
Thinking in a binary manner means that you dismiss all these opportunities for creativity because it is somehow inconsistent with your existing views.
This also means you lose sight of most of the stuff from the alternative choices, which is where the richness usually hides.
Differences of opinion cause tension, discomfort, and room for conversation which become challenging for a binary thinker.
Thinking and then communicating in a nuanced way is an enormously valuable skill.
Relationships that last can accommodate the differences caused by the grey areas. It requires that you can hold seemingly inconsistent ideas in your mind at the same time.
Binary thinking means you cannot hold those conflicting ideas.
The question every time in a disagreement, is the extent to which the tension created by differences in opinion are healthy.
We are used to seeing things in a binary manner, it is the automatic response, but we need to find a way to manage the inconsistency and ambiguity. We need to be flexible, as well as being driven by the rules.
The biggest challenges we face have the need to be able to dance with the facts, what works today, may not work tomorrow.
Overdoing structure removes the flexibility, and the opportunity to see things that may become important.
We think most problems can be solved, that is the base assumption we always have, but the conventional wisdom does not always work.
As a kid I lived on the beach, surfed a lot. The water pushed into the beach by the waves needs to get back out somehow, so you have ‘rips’. The area that allows the water to return from the beach. When surfing, you go with the rip, it will take you out, try and swim against it, you will just get tired and make little or no progress. You need to be able to swim at an angle, use the rip to take you out, then move across towards where the waves are.
This skill works in problem solving, finding bits of a problem that are resolvable, like getting a single wave in a session in the surf, you get the thrill of that great wave, use the rip to take you back to catch the next one. It is a process
Tension between people who hold differing views is healthy when managed well. This is when there is a recognition that there is no right or wrong answer to a wicked problem, just the better choice at this point. Then the differences in opinion can better hold the outcomes of the decision to account, it will increase the opportunity to pick up the problem molehills before they become mountains.
Ambiguity and bias can be used constructively.
Embrace your opposites. It indicates you recognise there are differences, give permission to voice the unfamiliar perspective. This is the opposite to just having people with you that agree, then there is no tension, no opportunity to see the differing perspectives.
One side of any question is rarely completely right, and the other completely wrong, we must be curious to see the reasons that the others see it differently.
This is how we produce creative new options that reflect life.
Header cartoon credit: Tom Gauld in ‘New Scientist’ magazine.
Jul 6, 2022 | Marketing, Social Media
My inbox is filled every day by emails from random people assuring me that their secret social media strategy will see me as rich as Bezos.
Some have my name and email address; most are more like; ‘Hi there’ and many now start with the ‘Re: our conversation about social media strategy.’
Spamming by those who are trying to sell themselves as experts at selling on social media.
What Nonsense.
If they are happy to use that sort of rubbish to market their own services, what sort of crap would they dish up to you?
Social media is a tiny part of the tactical armoury of marketers, or should be. It is the very end of the process, not the beginning, or middle, it is the very end only.
Social media is simply a tactic, amongst an armoury of tactics to achieve a goal.
The metrics of social media are irrelevant when your objective is to sell widgets. The only measure of success is how many widgets you sell, not how many people view, like or share your content, although the last one can be useful.
In the absence of a reason to take that next step towards an objective, the post is a waste of resources.
‘Content is king’ is a horrible cliché, but it is true.
It is the ‘content’ of your posts that describes in some way the value you deliver, the problem you solve that matters, nothing else.
Almost all the junk I see has no strategy. It does not reflect any understanding of the drivers of behaviour required to achieve a goal.
When you want to find a social media ‘expert’ to work for you, start with someone who has way more than the knowledge necessary to plug a post into Facebook, Instagram, or Reddit. You need someone who understands what it takes to find a prospect, then take them through the process that creates a customer!
Header cartoon credit to social experts Scott Adams and Dilbert.
