Numbers by stewf on flickr

Why are marketing people so obsessed by numbers and measurability? Especially with large numbers which are often assumed to be better than small ones. This obsession clouds judgment and so we seldom stop to think much about those numbers, what they stand for and even to understand what a good number looks like, and we often measure what we can measure rather than what is meaningful to measure.

In broadcast media planning we look at Gross Rating Points (GRP) and opportunities to see and audience numbers, in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) we want to drive  people to our website, and we are looking for unique visitors and conversion rates, on twitter we are looking for followers – the more the merrier.

But do these particular numbers have any real relevance? I understand the need for a large audience if you are flighting a TV ad, if say only 20% of people notice the ad its better that its 20% of the largest possible number. The same goes for SEM driving as many unique visitors as possible to the site, really for the same reason.

But this assumes that the purchase process is a linear one (steo by step from awareness to sale) which increasingly its not (The new customer Journey : The OPEN Brand), it also assumes that the objective, the end of the purchase journey is THIS sale instead of this and all possible future and related sales.

Furthermore If the major task of marketing is idea diffusion then do the numbers matter?

I don’t think they do, I would rather have 100 of the right people engaging with me, on my site or wherever, my customers about whom I am passionate about or people who could be passionate about my product and influential enough to spread the word, than 100 000 randoms. In this case 100 is a far better number than 100 000.

The numbers that would make sense would measure the quality of our engagement and the quality of the interaction.

I do a night class on Digital Strategy and we did a discussion last evening on Social Media. It struck me how many of the solutions proposed were so traditional, ok granted I have only just introduced the topic of Social Media and many have been working in the agency world. I told the story to the class of a major FMCG company whose marketing director has said that they think social media is dangerous because people can talk about you. I find that such an “interesting” comment

I also picked up Jason Falls‘ post on social media explorer Advertising Agencies And Social Media: A Culture Clash last night and I think that he is right. There is such ingrained thinking in marketing and advertising circles that its really hard to change.

There is a tactical problem because social media fits into the agency business model with difficulty. There is also a significant philosophical issue and to quote Jason Falls “Social media is, in many ways, the antithesis of advertising. Advertising is one-way communications aimed at large groups of consumers. Social media is two-way communications that requires listening as well as speaking. It can also be said that social media is a multiple-way communications method as brands can speak and listen, but also watch other consumers talk to each other.”

After my talk at the TEDx event last Friday a young strat planner intern from a  major agency came up to me and asked me how we were going to change peoples thinking. Wow its going to take time and maybe many just wont change because its just so different.

Maybe the change in thinking will come from people like those in my Digital Strategy class but also when brands and agencies realise that their customers are already participating in social media, even if they aren’t.

Photo Source: Flickr Author: Darwin Bell: License:

I was challenged regarding my last post on how marketing is changing about whether Twitter is a broadcast medium.  That my point regarding word of word to spread ideas was a nice but vaguely naive notion. The argument was that it Twitter is used in a one to many manner, I send out a tweet which all of my followers read  – that equals broadcast.

The answer I suppose in that simplistic context is that it can be used that way, in fact many of the tools being used to get followers (none of which I subsribe to) have been created to turn Twitter into a broadcast medium, but its inherent character is not that. Its character is a massive simultaneous conversation in which people listen, talk back and then talk to thier friends. In any conversation the person talking carries some status in the community and in twitter its no different. The words some people say are just carry more weight than others. These people have influence and this is derived from the nature of their relationship with others

Influence, not numbers, is the currency of the internet  and they are not related. Numbers on the other hand are the important factor of broadcast media which is aimed at getting eyeballs (opportunities to see) but the conversation stops there, the audience sees and may notice, but there is no way that it becomes a conversation, people cant answer back and people cant share.

For a medium like twitter its who sees and the influence they can have as they pass the message on. A massive difference in my mind.

As an example I very recently came across a tool called Topsy, its a twitter based search engine and it ranks its search results on the basis of the tweeters influence. To quote them, “Topsy sees the Internet as a stream of conversations. Topsy treats people differently from the webpages they create and the things they say. And Topsy sees that people in every community are connected in a web of relationships, where each person influences other people to read, talk and think about things.”

This is a cool idea and specifically cool because when I checked my status I was amazed to find that it ranks me as highly influential (a status reserved for the top 0,2% most influential of twitter users) and I have only just about 2000 followers. As with all of this I think that you can take yourself too seriously and I take it with a pinch of salt, but it does illustrate the point.

Walter's status on Topsy

My argument about the change in marketing is just this phenomena. The object of marketing has always been to spread an idea, the idea that the consumer should buy my product or service instead of someone else’s. The  best way in the past was to broadcast it over and over until the audience did, but as broadcast media loses effectiveness the best way in the future will be to produce something remarkable and get the former audience to talk to each other about it.

That’s why you need think of Twitter as anything but a broadcast medium.

photo credit: x-ray delta one

At the TEDx event TedxNewtown I spoke about how marketing has changed since the Internet. This is what I said.

Once upon a time someone would stumble upon some stuff or craftsmen would start making something that they thought people would buy. They would then take it to a place where they thought people would buy it. If people liked what was on offer they would buy and they would tell their friends and pretty soon there would be demand.

Then along came industrialisation. The way business won the industrialisation game was to standardise offerings because by doing so they would enjoy the economies of scale, reduce costs and maximise profit. The focus was therefore productivity and efficiency and this is why companies are still run by efficiency experts.

The process of getting the word to spread so that people could buy in volume was taken out of the hands of the customer because modern broadcast media was far more effective at doing so and too expensive for ordinary consumers. Television was the most effective of them all. Branding attached the meaning the marketeer wanted for the brand and it was broadcast over and over again until it was believed, where else was the consumer to get the information to dispute it?

It was the widescale  use of broadcast media such as television that sparked the invention of the discipline of marketing in the 1960’s and supported the underlying principle of mass marketing, in the words of Seth Godin selling average stuff to average people (the most acceptable product to the largest possible market)

The Internet changed that. It changed it because it has altered the balance of power in the transaction.

Power can be thought of as having been derived from three sources, the threat of violence, from wealth or from knowledge and information. The Internet changed the source of information from the brand to the masses because it made it easy to access trusted information and opinion from friends and your network.

Brand control evaporated as information became searchable and free.

At the same time the Internet provided the cheapest and most effective tool for the spreading of ideas for the consumer, the one to many channel of television could be replaced by the more trusted one to one channel of the Internet. The consumer now had the knowledge, the information and in his hands the cheapest and most effective tool for idea dissemination ever invented.

How do you market products and services when the basis of modern marketing has been eroded?

The answer is simply that that you go back to the core of the process which was established long before marketing was even invented:

You make stuff that people want and you offer it in a way that is remarkable – so that people talk about it and so they will spread the word for you.

If you were given the challenge of  attracting young South African high school people to consider a career in advertising when they leave school, what would you do?

I would probably consider that even squatter settlement kids are connected on mobile phones, more than 70% who have their own phones of which more than 80% are WAP enabled.

I would consider the fact that 29% of South Africans are accessing mobile user generated content (UGC) on a daily basis and the projections that the South African Mobile user generated content market will reach $476 million by year end 2013.

I would consider that mobile UGC services like MXit and The Grid have already become the perfect communication platform for many South Africans especially teenagers and young adults (13 – 25 years old) JBB Research Report July 2009

I would talk with them in an environment that they are comfortable in because they are there all the time. I would build a community in which they could share a passion to communicate, to write and to reach out to their world.

But would I actually do that?

No . . .  probably not. that doesn’t represent a career in advertising. Not now.

I would probably do a poster campaign.

The website appears to be nothing special although I refer you to a Business Report article in which Mike Sutcliffe, who is the eThekwini (Durban) city manager, said that the technology that would be used for the website was generally not in use in South Africa. “My understanding is that it is really state-of-the-art stuff.”

Internet guru Arthur Goldstuck noted in the same report that the city’s World Cup website appeared to be using technology that was already available and it did not require new software to be developed. “It doesn’t make sense for that kind of money to be spent on this kind of site,” Goldstuck added.

It may be tempting to take advantage of a naive client, but a professional business would understand that this is the time to be the “trusted advisor.” AdaptIT, are doing this site. They have reportedly declined to comment and appear to be an IT company and not a internet marketing company. The site has a communications role.

If all this is true they are doing the entire industry a huge disservice. This is still a new industry and we really don’t need to be seen as fly by nights.

. . . is this a case of “Trust me I’m a doctor?”

PiKE Thinking at altconference Jhb thanks ZA5 for photo

At the alt conference in Joburg I spoke about the way we think about social media and marketing and the disconnect.

The key impact of the Internet is a social one. We really cant look at the changes brought about and see it in either technology, SEM or traditional marketing terms.

Branding works because we believe can build brands by strategically adding performance, image and emotional associations to a product or service offering, and if we do it often enough and convincingly enough through our advertising our brand will gather a loyal following.

Advertising thinks about how to effectively interrupt people by producing advertising that is RELEVANT (or else it has no purpose) ORIGINAL (or else it wont be noticed) and IMPACTFUL (or else it will make no lasting impression)

Search engine marketing (SEM) especially SEO (search engine optimisation) is concerned about building a road map so people can find your site, and driving as many people as possible to that site.

Brands only exist in the minds of consumers, and branding as a strategy can only work if brand owners can manipulate perceptions. In an environment where the power which comes from the control of information has evaporated as consumers have almost unlimited access to brand and product information the brand building process is in the hands of the consumer, its now their experiences and the experiences of their “friends” that build the brand legend.

The power of social media are aptly demonstrated by the role of twitter in the Iran elections, the shootings in Mumbai and the earthquake in China. These demonstrate that the links between people are more important than the channels, one way in the case of traditional media or even two way in the Web 2.0 sense.

To be successful, I suggest, we need to think of the internet as the most efficient disseminator of stories, of word of mouth (to give it a label) ever invented and to engage with the market in the way we would build relationships in the local pub. Until a century or so ago we all lived in villages, tightly knit communities and we had those skills. Industrialisation robbed us of them and now the technology has allowed us to revert to our natural state.

The world is once again a village, we all talk to each other and we all know each other as people.

To understand how to market in this “New” world we need understand how we marketed in the “Old” world. That this is nothing to do with technology that has recreated the village nor branding nor marketing its about society and social dynamics.

To market in the new world we have to give the market the tools to build our brands for us.

Thanks Paul for setting up #altconf

Cambridge University

This changes the way we look at education, especially tertiary education.

There is no reason why the standard academic textbook cannot be replaced by electronic versions constantly updated in a wikipedia type process by teams of academics (after all its all the same stuff and doesn’t need to be reinvented over and over again – Maths 101 is much the same in Cambridge, Harvard as at WITS), and made available to students for free, academic books are very expensive. Just think the best lecturers on specific topics writing their chapter and delivering lectures via services such as iTunes university.

It also changes the role of the traditional academic, doesn’t it? Allowing them to spend more time on research and more time tutoring, mentoring and guiding and less time preparing lectures and notes. It must also mean that the average quality of teaching will improve as the best teachers can spread their influence over millions of students around the world, instead of only those in their own classrooms.

So how will Schools, universities and colleges adapt? maybe their new role is to add value, student support instead of reinventing the academic wheel?

Textbooks available for free, lectures from the best and available to everyone also for free, now that is equality of opportunity.

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Good is the enemy of great.

Seth Godin published a very short but very powerful post on his blog today. He called it “On the road to mediocrity”

We all face the opportunity so often. To settle for good enough, when actually nothing is really good enough we settle for it so often in our life’s, in our jobs in our relationships and in our lives.

My hugest disappointments as an academic (which I only very recently became) has been the number of students who expect to be spoon fed to their qualifications. Those who resist the opportunity to learn while working in the richness of the real world as they are taken through real live projects and I attempt to mentor, rather than tell them what to do. Those who look no further than their notes and their lecturers (let alone the text book) in order to harvest the marks required, surely its knowledge and skills they need instead.

I am reminded of a creative director with whom I worked with at The White House, a top advertising agency, and who often said “how can you fly with eagles if you are scratching with fowl” and he was correct. We need to decide what our standards are and not accept anything less. If we catch ourselves scratching, we owe it to ourselves to shake the dirt out of our feathers and fly.

Jim Collins wrote a book about it “Good to Great“  in which he explores why most organisations settle for the ordinary. Every day we make the choice over and over again, and we are the losers when we settle for ok instead of the best, when instead of being remarkable we are merely competent.

As Godin say’s “the only way to get mediocre is one step at a time.”

Its an interesting anaylsis, but really it sees social media really very much through an advertisisng lens. Social media is really about conversations not promotion. This quote kind of sums it up:

Businesses who jump into the conversation and broadcast a message but fail to interact are failing miserably at the art of marketing within social media. It is important to realize the potential of what David Armano calls micro-interactions where you the brand are responding only after you have listened to what your customers are communicating.Kyle Lacy, Social Media – Indianapolis, May 2009