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Archive for February, 2010

Tweets like grains of wheat

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

"By Zeus, I was sure that old grain of wheat gag was one of mine!"

The story appears to be apocryphal – I’d always thought it was Archimedes but apparently there’s also the inventor of the chessboard (an Indian bloke, according to certain online sources that can’t be used in scholastic research) and a Roman geezer. Everyone has done the old ‘one grain of wheat on the first square, two grains on the second and so on doubling with each square’ trick.

The exponential growth of figures through the 64 squares of a chessboard results, of course, in more wheat than could be grown in the kingdom – 18,446,744,073,709,551,615, to be precise. I do like the version of the story that has the ruler agreeing to the impossible bargain, but insisting the mathematician count each grain of wheat individually to be sure the ruler wasn’t cheating him.

The same mathematics potentially applies to the humble retweet, of course. It’s one reason why news can travel so astonishingly quickly over Twitter. If I find something interesting and share it with my followers on Twitter, they can in turn share it with their followers. If we assume for the sake of simplicity that each of my followers has 100 followers of their own, then if five followers RT my Tweet, we’ve just reached the eyeballs of 500 people, as well as the original audience of followers.

If five of their followers RT the Tweet, we’re looking at 2,500 people. And if we play that scenario again, 12,500 people. One last time gives us 62,500.

That’s pretty impressive – and it doesn’t begin to take into account the potential for average growth of a Tweet – which would be more likely based on a percentage than an absolute five number. The percentage would, of course, be based on the broad appeal of the Tweet or the link it contains. In other words, a Tweet can quickly reach large audiences of tens of thousands of people – millions, if it’s big news.

A more realistic everyday example would look at the thousands mark – and Tweets can easily reach audiences of thousands – and generate significant traffic to links, too. As the Internet’s current ‘go to’ darling, Twitter is great at allowing people to ‘discover’ stuff and share it with followers – I recently Tweeted a link with ‘This is funny’ and saw over 250 people hit the link within minutes.

It’s actually hard to track Twitter traffic in absolutes because people will tend to use their own link shorteners and so on, but you’d have to agree that any tool that can generate 250 views on a Website within minutes – in return for an investment of three words – is pretty powerful.

An analysis of random Tweets by a team at Microsoft found that 11% of Retweets contained a Retweet. At 11%, by the way, my ‘test tweet’ above (which would have to be, obviously, pretty sensational!) would in four steps reach over 2 million people. Which is slightly scary, isn’t it?

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Tags:Alexander McNabb, Archimedes, buzz, communications, Internet, marketing, mathematics, news, online, social media, tweets, Twitter, website, word of mouth
Posted in Content, Internet, Online marketing, Twitter, public relations, social media | 1 Comment »

We’re no longer wowed…

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

Marketers can no longer expect this reaction to every new tech product

In my thirty-odd years of involvement with technology, my favourite acronym remains TWAIN. In an industry so littered with acronyms, that’s some achievement. You may well recognise it if you’ve ever used a scanner hooked up to your computer – changes are that you’ll have been told you’re using a TWAIN driver. To my continued amusement (so I’m puerile, sue me) it stands for Technology Without An Interesting Name.

However, this is about as interesting as technology gets these days. We’re no longer wowed by operating systems or ooh-aahed by CPUs (if many of us ever were). We tend to get excited about iPhone apps or new smartphones, but we don’t actually tend to spend hours poring over hardcore technology – we want it to do what it says on the box, simply and consistently. And beyond that, we don’t actually want to invest a huge amount of energy or emotional commitment into the technology we use – unless, say, we run data centres as a day job.

Alongside this change in consumer attitudes to technology comes a series of changes in the way in which people inform themselves of new things. That information flow, which used to take place across magazine pages or at exhibitions, now takes place online 24/7. The technology publishing market, once artificially inflated compared to the publishing seen in other vertical market sectors, has shrunk to virtually a handful of titles.

This commoditisation of technology is something of a challenge for the marketers tasked with trying to make it relevant to all of us. We don’t care about it most of the time and we’ll serve ourselves with the information we need from online resources when it comes to decision time. There are all too few publications that reach consumers – and broader business titles, say, tend not to buy technology stories.

What’s the solution?
Companies that are recognising that their technology isn’t perhaps the most important thing in the world to their customers are coming up trumps. In recognising this, they are able to take a realistic approach to what is important to customers and how they map to those priorities, provide content that is relevant to consumers and position themselves appropriately within that content. By maintaining an ongoing relationship that is based on providing content that customers actually want (as opposed to just saying whatever you’re doing is what customers want) and also by being ‘valued members’ of communities, these companies are standing in the wings when customers actually do say ‘I’m interested in you today.’ It’s a sea-change for marketers used to buying the right to access customers with dollars – increasingly they’re having to use a different currency.

This piece originally appeared as one of the chucklesomely named ‘A Moment with McNabb’ columns in Campaign Middle East magazine.

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Tags:advertising, campaign, CampaignME, Carrington Malin, Internet, iPhone, marketing, online, product launch, technology, TWAIN
Posted in Content, Customers, Internet, Middle East marketing, Online marketing, Publishing, public relations, social media, strategy | No Comments »

Is social media making the Middle East more ’social’?

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

I’ve been a big fan of LinkedIn since I signed up just after it launched in 2004. I immediately found lots of my technology industry friends and colleagues were doing the same and were more than happy to introduce me to their contacts. I spent hours browsing LinkedIn user records looking for useful contacts, business prospects and old friends and over the years LinkedIn’s introduced me to new clients, new staff and other useful new business contacts. However, LinkedIn is a very business-focused social network and, for me, using LinkedIn has always been about business. Moreover, it’s a way of keeping in touch with lots of people, without actually meeting them very often.

For many of us in the Middle East, we started using Twitter this way too. Twitter has been great for following what people are up to and, for the most part, those that we have a business interest in finding out about, learning from or keeping in contact with. In early 2009, when Twitter had just 1,000-2,000 users across the whole region it was the business social network users that were there first (and excited about the prospect of discovering more business contacts!). Well, one year on, things have got a great deal more ’social’. With some 30,000-40,000 Twitter users across the Middle East and North Africa (Spot On’s estimate), there seem to be many more people these days that use Twitter day-to-day for their social lives (read Eman Hussein’s ‘Life without Twitter?’). Tweetups and other offline gatherings have been springing up all over the region, bringing together people with shared interests, introducing new connections and putting faces to Twitter handles.

2010 has already seen tweetups held all over MENA including Jordan, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, plus GeekFestBeirut in Lebanon. These meetups happen for many different reasons at different types of venue, both as public open invite events and private gatherings. GeekFest Beirut, held on Friday February 5th at the Art Lounge in Beirut (see Alexander McNabb’s report on FakePlasticSouks ) drew about 120 people to socialise, talk geek and listen to geek speakers. On the same day in the Sultanate of Oman, 45 tweeps gathered at Muscat’s Indian Embassy to meet visiting Indian Minister of State for External Affairs Dr. Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor on Twitter, read Digital Oman for a full report), who now seems to have penciled in a Dubai tweetup for sometime in the near future. On Saturday January 30th a group of more than 30 Jordanian Twitter users met at Wild Jordan in Jabal Amman to meet ‘the faces behind the tweeps’ (see full report on Under My Olive Tree) and there have been at least two more Amman tweetups since! Meanwhile, more than twenty tweeps met at the Riyadh Tweetup on February 2nd. Organisers are now looking at bigger venues to hold a Riyadh Tweetup on the first Monday of every month.

As one of the volunteer organisers for the first Twestival Dubai held in February 2009 (by the way the next Twestival Dubai takes place on March 25th), which followed a month after the first ‘big’ tweetup in Dubai organised by @rida, I remember the air of mystery that used to surround organising a tweetup. Many were unsure of the etiquette (or twettiquette!) involved in hosting a tweetup. Many, also, were used to keeping ‘online friends’ and ‘real friends’ compartmentalised, never mixing the two, and never meeting the former! Now is seems Twitter has helped bring the walls down and people are more comfortable inviting people to an event over Twitter than they are over the telephone. People are inviting other people that they would normally have considered to be ’strangers’ to meet and socialise all over the region, making new contacts and yes, even friends.

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Tags:Alexander McNabb, Carrington Malin, culture, Eman Hussein, GeekFest, Jordan, Lebanon, LinkedIn, MENA, Middle east, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, social media, society, Twitter, UAE
Posted in Internet, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Twitter, social media | No Comments »

The coolest agency in the world

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

Campaign planning is the easy part!

The coolest agency in the world can’t execute brilliant social media campaigns if the client doesn’t want to invest in the idea – not just of using social media as a megaphone like an advertising replacement, but of actually changing things around to make open social communications a long term investment. That investment necessarily takes a number of forms, too.

It’s not just about assigning a budget, by any means. The investment in time and effort required from the client in executing sound social media campaigns is nearly always greater than that required by advertising campaigns. Engaging with customers over social media platforms can mean some pretty big changes at the client’s side. They don’t all have to happen at once, but it’s important to map out some of the expected change points and commit to them in order that a long term programme of value is created, not just a tactical ‘quick hit’ with potentially negative consequences.

Is your management ready?
You have to ask if your company is structurally ready to undertake social media engagements – a process that involves some difficult questions. Do the management and reporting structures you have in place map to social media? Can you escalate issues quickly and effectively to all your different departments? Can you guarantee to respond quickly? How do your current HR policies map to social media? Who is responsible for that unhappy customer on Twitter – marketing or customer service? And how are you going to resource manning your social media engagements? (because if you think the agency is going to take the full 100% of the load and handle it, you’ve got another thing coming! If your agency says that you don’t have to be involved day-to-day, get another agency fast. Really.)

The next investment comes before you ever tweet a tweet or book a face. It’s in defining your social media guidelines, working with HR to make sure that these are embedded as a core element in the company’s process. Next up it’s making sure that staff are aware of what those guidelines are and, ideally, have the chance to question them or clear up any areas which appear difficult to understand or apply to a given person’s situation.

Now there’s a process of defining roles and responsibilities – who owns what platform and what are the internal processes and ownerships?

Once the job of deciding the niceties is out of the way, things like the naming conventions you’re going to use, building the graphical elements of your ‘social identity’ and deciding on the tools you’re going to use, you’ll need to work together with your agency on selecting platforms based on your target audiences, planning the use of those platforms and their rollout. Part of that process would include working out which platforms your key audiences frequent and what you can contribute to the communities you’re joining – what their informational preferences are and how you can help to improve things for them.

In fact, the key challenge that social media poses for companies, particularly those that consider themselves to be ‘customer centric’ is that they have to re-think their processes in order to be truly customer-centric via social media.