Posts Tagged ‘CampaignME’

Night of the anonyhaters

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

Anonymous SurferOur use of online media platforms is providing a challenge in terms of how we ‘behave’ online compared to offline. Many people find that they are more outgoing online, that they go that little bit further than perhaps they would in a face to face situation. This is particularly true when anonymity is brought into play – people wearing a mask, believing they face no consequence for their actions, are capable of remarkable cruelty.

There is passionate debate over this – the issue of online freedoms is always brought to bear, but there are increasing calls for ‘something to be done’, with a number of recent tragic events promoting outraged editorials and calls for the platforms themselves to be held responsible.

This is obviously insanity – you can no more moderate the content being posted onto platforms such as Facebook and YouTube than you can count the stars. But what platforms can do is act quickly to remove dangerously offensive content. Where a moderated forum contains such content there is, of course, an onus on the forum to act much more quickly and take an early judgement call, even where leaving contentious or hurtful content up can be good for their page views (the life blood of forums). The penalty for not acting, in the UAE at least, could well be harsh – a local ‘e-magazine’ in the UAE found itself, literally, in the dock over comments made by its users.

So what can you do if that comment’s about you? The first thing to do is walk away, don’t get involved in a slanging match with a troll. It’s hard to resist, but it’s always better in the long run. If you’re lucky, other members of the community will weigh in to your defence. If you’re not already using a range of online platforms such as LinkedIn, Xing, Facebook, Twitter and others get going. Start a blog. But lay claim to your name online – remember, people Google people and you want them to find plenty of stuff about how simply amazing you are, not the comments of some raving drunk posting his views of your personality on a forum at midnight.

If the comments are actionable, dangerous or homicidal, you’ve got a good chance of having them taken down by the platform – all have some form of escalation path for complaint. If it’s a local or regional forum, you’ll be able to get faster action. If you don’t, brief a lawyer and let the forum know you’re doing that – they are likely, if judgements we have seen so far are anything to go by, held responsible in law (in the UAE at least).

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

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Disintermediation, General, Internet, Online marketing, public relations, social media | No Comments »

We’re no longer wowed…

Sunday, February 14th, 2010
Marketers can no longer expect this reaction to every new tech product

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.

Tags:, , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Content, Customers, Internet, Middle East marketing, Online marketing, Publishing, public relations, social media, strategy | No Comments »

Social media isn’t socialist media

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

Social Media BudgetThe idea that social media is a new way of running marketing communications on the cheap is a beguiling one and, sadly, totally incorrect. It is also a piece of thinking that is increasingly common. In fact, using social media for marketing is time consuming, expensive and dangerous. The Internet is filled with examples of companies that have tried to ‘go viral’ with campaigns and been held up to public contempt as their lame efforts are pilloried and it is quickly filling with companies that have ‘gone social’ and suffered a similar fate.

It is easy to get social media wrong, particularly easy if you approach it in the same way as you would an advertising campaign. In fact, the thought processes and attitudes that underpin social media are precisely the opposite of those behind ‘traditional’ one-way marcoms, replacing one-way asymmetric communication with a two-way symmetric model. In other words, you have to listen to people and talk to them using social media, not view them as a passive consumer of your message.

Once you get going, actually listening to and talking to people takes quite a bit of time. You’re no longer looking at getting a message out to millions with a simple payment for airtime or space – you’re looking at actually creating engagements. Even worse, you are confronted, probably for the first time, with some uncomfortable facts, such as the fact that nobody other than you cares two hoots about your products for something like 99.9% of their lives. In fact, we are remarkably dispassionate about a large number of things, which is why we had advertising in the first place. To put them in our heads and create preference for one product over another.

Social media additionally gives you the problem of communicating with people who don’t necessarily talk product – and who don’t want to talk to a brand so much as a person who represents a brand. Companies using social media now really do have to live up to their brand values in every way, not just tack them up on a mission statement and forget about them. The organisational challenges can be significant – and expensive.

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

Tags:, , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Internet, Middle East marketing, Twitter, brand marketing, social media | No Comments »

Scorn

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

It’s perhaps interesting many of the marketers who are taking social media seriously are seeing a campaign platform rather than a fundamental change in the way the business communicates and, indeed, behaves. That’s fair enough, it’s a wise person who dips a toe in the water before going for the full-on dive bomb and it doesn’t take the wildest imagination to see what’s going to happen to Young Roger as he faces the directors in the mahogany-panelled boardroom and suggests they might like to gamble the future of the company on Twitter.

But a campaign-led approach to social media really does need to be framed in the context of a wider move to adopt social platforms to transform the company’s communications, it can’t just be a tactic.

That does mean writing a new rulebook and challenging some very entrenched attitudes and procedures – it’s an early adopters game, too, requiring a willingness to take a transformational approach to aspects of the business. It can be a two-track process of gradual change, there’s no need to try and change the world overnight, but it does have to involve an element of change.

Declaring that you’re cool and down with the kids then running a Twitter competition to win a super prize is not what social media’s about – and neither is tacking a Facebook page onto the tail end of that expensive regional TV and outdoor campaign.

Agencies and clients alike have to be careful of 2.0wash – the temptation to stick a blog, Facebook fan page and Twitter ID on every pitch PPT. Although that might sell to the credulous, it’s not doing the client any favours in the long run, just creating a range of disparate, off-message and wild communications with no follow-through. You wouldn’t recommend that kind of behaviour with a ‘conventional’ campaign, so why do so with social media?

Without a planned, consistent communications strategy behind it, a social media campaign as a tactic is in very real danger of making the client look flaky. And social media, incidentally, has evolved a very special way of treating such campaigns – public scorn.

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

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in General | No Comments »

Mr. Futurist

Friday, July 31st, 2009

The way we talk to technology and the way we talk to each other is changing at a pace that I can only describe as frightening.

You understand, the ‘f’ word is coming from a life-long technocrat.

Right now, we type on mobile keypads to retrieve or dial a number. We sit, fingers crashing down on nasty, analogue keys or dragging mice around in order to instruct our machines to do stuff or to send text to each other. But innovations afoot today are going to change the entire nature of our relationship with enabling technologies.

The keyboard will be a thing of the past in a few years’ time – we’ll use voice and hand movements to manipulate systems and objects on screens, walls or other surfaces. We’ll be able to take our ‘stuff’ and deposit it wherever we want – on walls, products, bulletin boards or public places (‘digital graffiti’ will become a problem) or add stuff from those places to our stuff if we want. We’ll be able to interface to systems and query them about products in supermarkets or people, to send messages or update friends or special interest groups which we belong to with new information. We’ll get used to a world where everyone, potentially, knows everything – and where consumers can access peer reviews, scientific information, manufacturer claims and third party viewpoints at any time.

We’re going to share video and voice more than text – we’re going to become digitally tactile and our world is going to be based on streams of information served up to us through ‘real-world’ interfaces to information networks. We’ll likely access all of that through one ‘network device’ which will be camera, credit card, database access tool, megaphone and information system all in one.

It’ll be smaller than today’s mobile phones.

The totally empowered consumer will be a result – a process that is also evident in the way today’s markets are changing. The game is about putting the right information in people’s hands when they want it – reliable, believable, credible information. Even today, as we look at this brave new future world, consumers are increasingly information-centric.

And they’re already buying the steak, not the sizzle.

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

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in General | No Comments »

Snarky

Friday, July 31st, 2009

The ability to be cynical, negative and rude is one of the strongest assets of a good public relations practitioner.

If you have someone inside the tent who’s able to take a look at what you’re up to and see the downside, to ask the hard questions that media and the public will ask, then you’ve got an opportunity to factor that likely feedback into your plans. You then have the opportunity to change the plan, if that is what is required, or to prepare a well-thought out and clear response to the question that presents your point of view clearly and cogently. That includes looking at the searching, negative questions you’d rather not have to face, let alone answer.

We call the collection of those responses a ‘rude Q&A’: it’s a document that summarises the worst things you can expect to have thrown at you, that asks the difficult or dangerous questions and that proposes a response to those questions. It means that your team is better prepared – they have had the chance to consider the factors involved and they all have access to a formal, unified response to the most challenging of questions.

A rude Q&A can make the difference between taking and managing the most probing query in your stride or standing around looking like a slightly surprised goldfish while you try and think up some off-the-cuff response to that bolt from the blue. It also avoids the awful situation where more than one spokesperson is in that situation and they both give completely different responses in their panic. Both responses may be perfectly valid, but it still ends up looking like the proverbial left and right hand disconnect.

Putting together a rude Q&A means being realistic about the other point of view, looking at the issue with fresh eyes and challenging it. It means having a downer on your good work, being cynical and snarky about your virtues and focusing on what’s bad about you. It means having the impertinence to ask the most inappropriate and searching questions of yourself. But it’s important that you do – before someone outside the tent does it.

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

Tags:, ,
Posted in General | No Comments »

How do you manage a social media campaign?

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

How do you manage a ‘social media’ campaign? The breaking down of barriers that Internet communication has encouraged is probably faster and more fundamental than many communications managers realise. One major problem is the challenge of speed – you can no longer take a few days to respond to a media enquiry while your exec finishes travelling or deals with ‘more important’ business. In a social media environment, people expecting total access and answerability from your organisation are beating on the door right now. There’s no gatekeeper anymore, remember?

It’s also worth bearing in mind that social media is user-driven so you’re leading a conversation and, like all conversations, it will have ebbs and flows. You can’t expect relentless positivity but are aiming to have an overall dialogue that puts your position and proposition.

Another issue facing social media campaign managers is that of approvals. In the old paradigm, your agency made sure that every single communication was approved. It would never do, for instance, for the agency to be speaking in your place. And agencies, for their part, wanted to be indemnified from clients’ actions and liabilities. If you’re running a campaign that cuts across websites and interactive, ‘social’ media, someone needs to be posting, responding, commenting, Tweeting, filming and uploading content on your behalf. And that either means that you, as a campaign ‘manager’ need to be 100% engaged 24×7 in your campaign or you need to redefine the rules so that your agency has a wider scope of responsibility, empowerment and response-ability. That means you have to let your agency take more risks on your behalf, and therefore that your agency is sufficiently indemnified to take those risks. Dispensing with indemnity can be an expensive game for the hapless communicator.

Likewise, you need to be sure that you’re working with an agency that understands those risks, that gets where the pain points of social communication lie, but also that understands the issues of corporate governance in this changing environment as well as new expectations of corporate behaviour. It can be a complicated trade-off – ensuring that the company is answerable at every level and yet also responsive at every level, that it is transparent and yet decisive and that it communicates with its stakeholders appropriately, despite the immediacy and ubiquity of online ‘social’ access.

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

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in General | No Comments »

Social media predictions

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

Here are some ‘social media’ predictions for 2009, just for fun. Why social media? Well, my first prediction is that we’re going to see a lot more fuss about ‘social media’ here in the Middle East in 2009. And the trick there will be sorting the wheat from the chaff – because you’re about to see a load of ‘experts’ talking with great authority on the subject. And, as usual, the expertise on offer will all too frequently be scant. I recently had an advertising agency offer to ‘infiltrate the forums’ on behalf of a client, for instance. That to me is a signal of quite how bad it’s going to get before we settle down and work out who are the practitioners delivering new and insightful programmes using the social media tools that are revolutionising communications practice elsewhere in the world.

So I think we’re probably going to see one or two high profile social media gaffes in our region, quite a lot of weighty pronouncements and agencies rushing to show how they can package their ‘unique insight’ into the social media paradigm for clients. This is what my very good friend Gianni Catalfamo, the uber-geek and European Web 2.0 guru, calls 2.0Wash. Like Greenwash that preceded it, 2.0Wash is when every programme contains a blog, just because, well, they should all contain a blog these days…

In the meantime, I think we’ll see an increasing pressure on regional telcos to stop blocking these social media networks – orkut, flikr and other important components of the ‘Web 2.0’ mix remain blocked. These blocks continue to contribute to retarding our region’s use of some of the most powerful communication tools to emerge since Thomas Caxton started thinking about Ps and Qs.

My final social media prediction for 2009 is that we’ll start to realise quite how powerful the grassroots movement towards using these tools can be. It’s already happened in other world markets and it’s late arriving here precisely because of the blocks. But more people in the Middle East are using FaceBook than read any single newspaper. More people in the UAE are using FaceBook than read any single newspaper. And FaceBook is only one of many, many social media platforms…

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

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in General | No Comments »