Nonlinear Thinking

How Content Becomes Viral

This terrific graphic from Infographic World has been making the rounds quite a bit lately, but I thought it was such a great visualization of how content (presumably good content) can so easily go viral, I wanted to pass it along.

Compendium/Miscellanea/Almanac 01.12.2011

Stuff that I find interesting.  Maybe you will too.

• Budgets, Innovation Squarely in CMOs' Sights in 2011 (Advertising Age) 
• Clouds, big data, and smart assets: Ten tech-enabled business trends to watch  (McKinsey Quarterly) 
• How Tech Will Be Critical to Corporate Sustainability in 2011 (Greenbiz) 
• Light My Fire: The Matchbook Makes a Cultural Comeback (Fast Company) 
• How Aha! Really Happens  (Strategy + Business) 
• Swimming Against the Tide: How Technology, Media, and Telecommunications Companies Can Prosper in the New Economic Reality  (Boston Consulting Group) 
• Eric Berlow: How complexity leads to simplicity  (TED)  
• The AI Revolution Is On  (Wired)  
• The Battle for Control of Smart Cities  (Fast Company) 

57 (Marketing) Channels and Nothing On

“A message came back from the great beyond
There's fifty-seven channels and nothin' on
Fifty-seven channels and nothin' on”

Bruce Springsteen

When Bruce penned those lyrics almost 20 years ago, the not so subtle suggestion was that the expansion of cable TV choices had not resulted in a concomitant elevation in overall quality.  Now, with 600 to 700 channels, that indictment has been writ large as any number of  cable/satellite/Internet channels deliver far too little in the way of edifying content.

Ancillary to this, but perhaps much more important, the competition for “eyeballs” has driven an increasing polarity in the way individual channels position themselves.  On one end, we have the many “news” channels that “ape” each other in the pursuit of the sensationalistic stories that hold the audience rapt with anticipation for the next salacious element in the narrative.  At the other, much more plentiful end, are the hundreds of boutique/niche channels whose core mission is so narrow as to obviate any chance of delivering something unique on a 24 X 7 basis.  Copying, stealing, sharing, repeating --  to the point of extremely diminishing returns.

In the digital/social media universe, we are risking much the same type of dilution of message that has become endemic in television.  As enterprises increasingly avail themselves of every channel that might, at its endpoint, find one of their prospective customers, there exists the same risk of watering down the intent of the positioning/ messaging in which so many have invested so much.  

I am cognizant of the foundation for successful branding and positioning strategy - consistency and repetition of the message across all media.  But in the constantly expanding digital environment, where many of the channels have little or no cost to the user, might the competition for “eyeballs” devolve into an exercise that dilutes the core enterprise story and value proposition?  Alternatively, with the increasing requirement to narrowcast to reach an expanding population of niche sub-segments, doesn't the new channel strategy become incredibly more complex as individual channels are allocated to serve a single unique niche target customer group?

As we complete the transition from marketing 1.0 to marketing 2.0, the advent of marketing 3.0 challenges marketers to adapt the strategy, planning, and execution of the marketing effort to embrace this increasing complexity and work to ensure that their chosen channels are delivering a message that their target constituencies find to be clear, concise and valuable.

Don Draper's Head Explodes

I think we are long past the time for substantive debate on whether the traditional marketing model is dead.  There is NO question that we are deeply in the model that is alternatively referred to as Marketing 2.0 or Social Media Marketing or, well, you pick the cutting edge nomenclature.  individuals and organizations will be forced to adapt or will perish (quickly or slowly and painfully - their choice) as they always are when the unstoppable force that is technological innovation challenges their stasis and makes their comfort zone not nearly so comfortable.  Sort of like global warming for the world we have known as marketing 1.0.

Marketing in the traditional model has, for the most part, been a very linear process.  Market research and analysis identifies both latent and active market opportunities, strategy aligns those opportunities with organization strengths (core competencies), products and services are designed/developed, positioning and branding strategies are created, value propositions are broadcast or narrowcast to the market via communications and advertising channels, and, hopefully, customers are nurtured and cared for in an effort to retain and expand share of wallet, feeding data points back into the market research effort.  This marketing 1.0 model has been primarily a closed-loop process that engaged external constituencies (the customer, partners) generally in a controlled fashion.

Social media and the digital platforms that enable it have made marketing much more about the ad-hoc, the organic, the open-ended conversation, than traditional marketing ever could have.  This is no longer the classic linear, closed-loop process of the 20th century. In this world of the marketing 2.0 model, Don Draper's head explodes as he and the team at Sterling Cooper attempt to get their hands around what it means to no longer control the dialogue that surrounds a company's products and services.

David Armano on the Micro-Sociology of Networks

Just more good content from one of the very best at articulating the emerging social business design environment.  David Armano seems to have a real knack for sifting and synthesizing the many strands of content and context with regard to the broadening social media/network/business universe.  And, as always, he is visually very entertaining.

The Micro-Sociology of Networks

Online Reputation Management

The rapid and pervasive advent of social media and it's aggregated impact on marketing has generated an entire sub-strata of emerging marketing strategies, programs and campaigns.  Concurrently, there is also an emerging need for disciplined management of the enterprise's brand and reputation in an environment where user-generated commentary can have unintended and negative impacts.

This short overview on Reputation Management from VizEdu sets a pretty nice baseline for how to deal with such an eventuality.

Unconventional Marketing

David Armano is the VP Experience Design for Critical Mass.  His writing has been tremendously influential on the topic of social media’s impact on marketing.  

In a short article published this week in Advertising Age, he discussed the impact his blog has had on marketing himself and, more specifically, how blogging and other social media would suffer as marketing initiatives were they to be subject to a conventional marketing process.

I've been thinking about this for a while because after having some exposure to large organizations, it occurred to me that there is a desire to do more "unconventional marketing" but the machine that's in place is actually "conventional" -- all the things that have been done in the past. For example, it's common and understandable for the "What's the ROI?" question to be raised during an unconventional marketing initiative, but that question could derail the entire effort before it has a chance to ever get off the ground. Sometimes the ROI is simply insights and lessons that are gleaned from actually doing the initiative. Other times, the direction of the initiative changes midway through in unexpected ways that could not have been predicted. Many times for the better -- let's not forget that Twitter was never meant to be what it ended up being today. 

This terrific visual David created outlines the contrast between the conventional and the unconventional.

You can read (and see) more by David here and here.

More On Social Media and the New Marketing

We do try to present both sides of the argument on topics discussed on this blog, but my bias towards the game changing impact of social media on marketing tends to be a tad transparent.  Came across this post on B-to-B Magazine that is just one more nice articulation of where I think this is going and the impact it is having on traditional marketing.

A few years ago, people disseminated information to their contacts through a one-way process of dialing the phone and sending e-mail. Today, they edit a profile, upload a photo or post an invitation to their social network, and everyone they know is immediately in the loop. Then they use the network to touch base frequently with contacts via information captured in that member's profile

Smart marketers are using this power to transform their profession. They're tapping in to their contact lists to enable discussions between people who might otherwise never have met. They're introducing media contacts and business partners to each other and, in the process, demonstrating that they're connected, relevant and valuable. And they're doing it at very little cost.

Social networks can raise marketers' visibility and prestige. Marketing has always been about managing human relationships, and today's online tools make that task far more efficient than it has ever been. In the old days, marketers delivered messages. Today, they can enable discussions. Which role do you think has more value?

For Enterprises Today, Blogging May Not Be Bliss

For any enterprise today, launching and maintaining a blog as a matter of course is a poor investment of resources.  If conversational marketing is to become the coin of the realm for business development success, enterprises necessarily must become adept at starting conversations and listening to conversations in their target markets.  Blogging is one tool for effecting conversations but it cannot be disconnected from the raison d'être of the organization.  How to achieve value from investments in blogging, as well as other social media, is a question that remains in search of an answer for may companies.

Forrester Research recently released a study entitled “How to Derive Value from B2B Blogging,” containing many containing many valuable insights into the state of B2B blogging and its adoption today.

Some key findings from the report include:

• While adoption of corporate blogging has been growing over the past few years, the number of new blogs established in 2007 declined versus 2006
• Corporate bloggers can’t seem to keep the conversation going.  The challenge for many B2B marketers seems to be that writing for a blog is often more conversational, while many B2B marketers have been trained to write with a strictly business or technical focus
• Because B2B marketers aren’t trained to write for blogs, many blogs read like press releases and that is no way to start a conversation.
• Many blog users experiences are poor.

B2B marketers are struggling to integrate online and traditional marketing tactics in a marketing mix that results in more robust pipelines and improved brand recognition. To realize any sustainable success in this new environment , marketers must abandon time-worn broadcasting strategies and adopt community-focused marketing. Community marketing replaces traditional offer-response strategies with communications that foster dialogue; embrace community issues and values; and position brands, vendor experts, and products as valuable community resources.

Social Media and the Revolution in Marketing

Every single company I have spoken to in the past six months has simply not understood social media and the implications for their business.  More distressing is the failure of the marketing organizations I have spoken with to realize how fundamentally social media is changing the rules of their game.

Francois Gossieaux has thought about the problem as well and posts on his blog, emergence marketing, that social media is more than just another channel. 

Unlike email, which was a new channel of communication with customers, social media is not a new channel. Social media is what transformed the rules of marketing. By providing a platform of participation to your employees, customers and prospects, social media has changed the fundamental pillars of the marketing game. Not only have the rules of game changed, so have the players, the scope, the tactics and the added values - to use the game theory elements of the game.

So the end goal of marketing has not changed - it still is to create a customer. It is everything in between to get to that goal that has changed! And you will not get there by monitoring the new social media channel. The only way you will get there is if you understand the new rules, the new players and all the other elements of the marketing game.

The understanding and, more importantly, the application of social media in the "new" marketing mix possesses all the characteristics of a game change.  If you are a marketing professional, you need to make yourself one with this new media and here is a primer, courtesy of smashLAB, to get you started