The Internet is a Strategic Planner’s Paradise
The world wide web hasn’t changed human behavior. The Internet isn’t an evolution in communication, but it is a tool that amplifies our human, narcissistic tendencies. What needs to evolve are finite, archaic marketing planning processes developed in the last century.
The Internet as a Tool
The Internet is not an evolutionary leap in the history of human communication – at least not yet. It is an important tool that magnifies what has already existed. Subsequently, the web hasn’t intrinsically changed human behavior but it has offered more immediate access to information that consumers use to make decisions.
The Internet is also a tool that offers the opportunity for mass collaboration, which will probably be viewed as its most valuable attribute when historians look back upon the 21st century.
But during these waning moments of the second decade of the Internet (aka web 2.0), the web is a planner’s paradise. The Internet is a platform to broadcast our human narcissistic tendencies. Social exchanges are a way to gather real-time and real customer feedback inexpensively. Opportunities for real-time response offers additional insight and it can dramatically change how brands are perceived in the digital conversation.
Rethinking the Planner’s Role
To take advantage of these strategic communication opportunities, planners need to re-think their fundamental approach. The audience is networked – they can communicate in real-time to each other AND we can eavesdrop on those ‘conversations’. The role of the planner becomes less about ‘the brief’ and more about ‘the framework’ for real-time, authentic, transparent communications, powered by the brand. An interconnected audience also means that companies need to think about communication much more broadly than the silos of PR, Advertising and Marketing.Revise the Planning Process
Traditional marketing planning has been a deductive reasoning process since its inception: what is the problem we must solve through communication? A hypothesis is developed (generalization) and data is obtained to support it, frequently through focus groups and other observed behavior. This process is implicitly flawed by bias – both consumers and the planner.
Database marketing offered the introduction of inductive reasoning into ‘below-the-line’ communications planning with the introduction of marketing analytics. Planners are able to observe actions to identify what is happening, not seek/ask opinion to identify why the (user) thinks it’s happening. Bias is reduced, although not entirely removed, particularly when validating the data-based insights with a focus group.
The web offers the potential to eliminate bias, provided planners revise their insight process to leverage this powerful tool. Instead of the linear progression approach with a finite end implicit in both deductive ‘traditional’ account planning (pyramid) and inductive analytics-oriented approaches (inverted pyramid), a digitally-centric approach to planning should be viewed as an ongoing process (rather than finite).
Planning becomes an ongoing series of diverging and converging inflection points (double-helix) that can start anywhere: with a generalization based on a sentiment, a collection of specific actions (clickstream analysis), conversation sentiment (generalizations), velocity of content spread (data points) and so forth – all mapped in real-time. In this model, there isn’t a real ‘beginning’ or ‘ending’ as the planning process, like the subsequent communication, is continuous.
Keep Asking
The questions planners need to ask are the same as we have always asked, starting with: how can we make best use of the (new) media for the message?This post was originally published by Lori Laurent Smith on ThreeMinds at Organic as a counterpoint to Jonathan Cohen’s statement about the evolution of information communication.
The Road Trip as Social Media Strategy Analogy
Just got back from a great summer road trip with my family. It was quick, memorable and fun. As we drove home, the parallels between planning an outstanding road trip and creating a successful social media program are very striking. Here’s an easy to remember approach:
Where Are We Headed?
Select a place that everyone is excited about and make sure everyone is on board. If the social media program is designed for inspiring facebook fans of the brand, but it’s not a unanimous decision, keep talking. One dissenter can lead to indifference or worse, impatience, when things go wrong.
Take your Time
In addition to the major destination, plan lots of pit stops leveraging influential long-tail communities to pick up new fans and meet enthusiasts. The pit stops should be based on the insights derived from a listening platform but also peppered with opportunities to connect with brandividuals — brand influencers who are well-connected via social media. It’s also helpful to take bathroom breaks once in awhile and check your online research with people in real life at the rest stop.
Make sure your plan is flexible enough to accommodate new insights without torturing your team or brand fans. A road trip and social media are both as much about the experience as getting to the destination. If your priority is getting there quickly, be prepared to spend lots of money.
Do Your Homework
Just as your car needs to be serviced and running well, so does your social media team. If your plan rests on a popular site, already be woven into their social community so when you reach out to their sales folks, you can focus on your destination instead of spray and pray (spray your messages all over the map and pray it all works).
Be sure to keep all the members of your team — not just those on the same payroll as you — on the same page via collaboration tools. Check in with the team regularly — at least daily. Just like you would secure your home before the trip, have a scenario planning meeting or two with folks who are responsible for the product or service at the heart of your program. If you’re uncertain about what may happen when the program launches or some of the places you may find your content being posted, familiarize yourself with the horror stories, including how the brand or company recovered.
Pack Smart
Pack with your brain, and your heart. Most brand managers and marketers are tempted to throw everything ‘out there’, but that only creates more noise and confusion. Less is more. Don’t force your brand fans to sit between a cooler and a tent — let them pack the proverbial car through content they love to create. Remember — you’re the driver and navigator.
Bring Music, Video, Games and More
Don’t forget the entertainment! Stop ‘selling’ and start entertaining with games, video, and music. Let the community create a ‘road trip’ soundtrack or movie for your brand.
Road trips, like social media programs, are a lot of fun when they’re rockin’, but they are also a lot of detail-oriented, roll-up-your-sleeves, “thinking and doing” kinds of hard work.With big payoffs for people and the companies they work for. Instead of telling a travel agent (agency) to ‘book the flight and a car’, travelers do the heavy lifting themselves. The road trippers have to participate in social media communities to understand how they work and know what kinds of sites and tools are better for which kinds of tasks. There’s much more upfront planning time and people needed.
The payoff?
1. Social media programs cost a lot less hard cash in total (than paid media programs, for example, when a new product is launched),
2. The company gains access to and education from a variety of people with different skills and life experiences
3. Cross-functional employees get to know each other and customers a lot better.
4. Deeper loyalty from brandvocates
And just like a real road trip: those involved in the social media program share the memories and experience of the adventure together. Forever.
Flickr Credits: chartno3; Usonian; mahalie; Torri 479; eyetwist
Why Do You Work?
Most of us would say money. And yet money alone does not motivate better work or increase job satisfaction. Do we work for money because there is an underlying premise that people don’t like to work and must be bribed to do it?
That may have been true for the industrial revolution, but a key difference between the industrial economy and the digital economy is that the role of the worker has shifted from brawn to brain. Knowledge is now a key differentiator, so is it also time to revisit this most fundamental value equation?
A year ago, Seth Godin wrote about the passionate worker:
A new class of jobs (and workers) is creating a different sort of worker, though. This is the person who works out of passion and curiosity, not fear. The passionate worker doesn’t show up because she’s afraid of getting in trouble, she shows up because it’s a hobby that pays. The passionate worker is busy blogging on vacation… because posting that thought and seeing the feedback it generates is actually more fun than sitting on the beach for another hour.
A recent Businessweek article, “Will Work for Praise” describes how web entrepreneurs are making money through armies of volunteers willing to work for free to build their own personal brands. In a web 2.0 world, there is an implicit symbiotic relationship in place around resource exchange: entrepreneur(s) with money provide(s) platform and technology, volunteers with time provide relevant content to build a personal brand and help others.
Adam Smith, who is widely regarded as the father of modern economics, lived and wrote during a similarly challenging transition from an agrarian to industrial society. Before he published The Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote a classic treatment of ethics that laid the foundation for his free-enterprise classic. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith proposed that beyond economic pursuits, there are moral pre-requisites to capitalism. Human nature isn’t just about self-interest but it also includes important motivators: sympathy, empathy, friendship, love and the desire for social approval.
The Wealth of Nations draws on situations where man’s morality is likely to play a smaller role — such as the laborer involved in pin-making — whereas the Theory of Moral Sentiments focuses on situations where man’s morality is likely to play a dominant role among more personal exchanges.
If people want to work and are willing to do it for free or some other value exchange in the digital economy, should businesses adapt to this new sensibility?
This entry was originally written by Lori Laurent Smith (moi), edited by Marta Strickland and posted on Threeminds.
Brand Identity and the URL
Bud Gibson had a great comment on my last post, asking how do you establish identity with out a URL? The simple answer is: you don’t. Here’s why…
The corporate or brand URL / website as a keystone for both information architecture (I/A) and content strategy has already passed its zenith.
First of all, the majority of site visits no longer begin on the homepage i.e. http://www.brand.com or http://www.brand.com/product. When was the last time you typed in http://www.amazon.com? What about the last time you visited Amazon, how did you get there? More often people click on a link and recognize the ‘storefront’ but not because of the URL. Similarly, search engines have been serving up deep links for years, bypassing the master brand URL entirely in some instances.
As human behavior has adapted to the navigation of the world wide web, we have gradually dropped inclusion of ‘www’ and ‘.com’. Even the reduction of URLs into a more convenient format via TinyURL or Bit.ly for Twitter. What is more important is the relationship between the referring party to the TinyURL – that the referring party is trustworthy and is viewed by the referee as an authority in some way. The result is based more on individual needs and desires and the brands, products and services to meet them rather than the URL.
Underlying all this techno-stuff is a more important fundamental shift in the movement of the value provided by content, more sophisticated users. The brand is being defined by the consumer perception of the capabilities of it to meet their needs rather than broadcast its own unifying message. As smart content strategy practices accelerate and the underlying semantic web structure develops, content will seek out relevant viewers rather than enticing users to seek relevant content.
Having pondered this for a few days, now I have a much larger question: is the web site dead?
More to come…
Cubism as Inspiration for the Semantic Web
We are in the early days of a revolution being played out in pixels across the digital landscape. A hundred years ago, social revolutions spawned global avant-garde art direction, namely Cubism, which in turn inspired many of the major art movements of the 20th Century: Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism, De Stijl, Bauhaus, Constructivism, and others.
Today’s information architects, content strategists, designers, developers are the artists, musicians, writers, and philosophers of yesteryear. Historians will one day regard social media | web 2.0 as a pivot point in the evolution of our information society, much as Cubism emerged as a lynchpin between the classical aesthetic begun in the Renaissance era and the Modernism of the 20th Century. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art:
The Cubist painters rejected the inherited concept that art should copy nature, or that they should adopt the traditional techniques of perspective, modeling, and foreshortening. They wanted instead to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the canvas. So they reduced and fractured objects into geometric forms, and then realigned these within a shallow, relieflike space. They also used multiple or contrasting vantage points.
Dutch artist and professor Wil Uitgeest wrote in Aardschok – Bliksemflits, that the art movements of the 20th century were no longer about painting as a window to re-create a temporal reality but instead, these movements reflected macro changes in our collective consciousness as well as our actual, individual experience. Cubism, in particular, shifted perspective from the external to the internal, where artistic expression became individual self-identification viewed through a collective prism.
In web 1.0, the non-technical users were observers, visiting sites and slowly learning the vernacular of the digital medium. Gradually, the discipline of information architecture (I/A) emerged as a way of organizing web sites based on principles derived from library science, design and architecture. Like a Renaissance painter, the information architect wanted to make their ‘picture’ (web site) easily viewed by their community of relatively unsophisticated users who, in turn, could easily understand the content. As the medium matured, content strategy emerged as a compliment to the information architect so the I/A could focus on the structure and design of the more robust site experience, leaving the strategist to populate the framework with appropriate content for the user.
There is a strong parallel to be drawn between classical art forms pre-20th century and web 1.0. Just as Cubism played a critical role in the evolution of art history, I believe we can look to Cubism and its many progeny for cues on evolving the digital medium beyond the web site towards the promise of the semantic web. Instead of a single perspective (e.g. the ‘brand web site’) with limited demands, web 2.0 challenges the very definition of content strategy and information architecture to manage multiple, simultaneous perspectives against a human discourse in real-time.
With a robust content strategy distributed through disciplined and carefully constructed forms of I/A, like the Cubist painting: fractured yet cohesive, an individualized 2.0 experience can be developed and guided through rhetoric and content, freed from the framework limitations of a traditional web site.
