James Cherkoff's Collaborate Marketing Blog

It can be quite hard to be clear about the effect social media has had on brands and the broader marketing landscape.  Some people would have you believe that the online global conversation that social media has unleashed is a revolution that brands simply have to be involved in if they are to stay relevant.  Others say it's only really significant within specific, albeit important, areas of marketing such as customer service.  Either way, there can be no doubt that social media in its many guises has changed people's habits and expectations and therefore it remains an area of ongoing fascination for brands who pride themselves on being close to their consumers and the marketplace.  However, for such brands to join the conversation in a credible way...

...is generally easier said than done.

How Did We Get Here?

Firstly, it’s worth reminding ourselves how quickly this global conversation has evolved.  Only five years ago, the sight of their customers spilling out onto the open web and talking about their lives and more importantly their views on products and services came as a shock to big brands.  Such people were, initially, dismissed as mad or irrelevant.  For example, six years ago, the BBC noted that, 'there is a perception that bloggers are sad, joyless people in their underwear who sit in front of their computers all day'.  The idea that people could collaboratively write an online encyclopedia was thought to be - at best - bizarre.  Social networks were seen as outposts of the brain dead, depraved and even the dangerous. And Tweeters were initially open to ridicule by the great and the good.

However, that gradually changed over time.  The blogosphere became a professional space for informed and often erudite discourse, Wikipedia became an online Britannica, social networks grew into multi-gazillion dollar businesses and Twitter developed into a global information network of such standing that many of the world’s most influential people signed up.  

Social Experiments

During that time, many different experiments were conducted by corporations trying to lever their brands into the conversation and to gain some valuable relevancy and buzz.  Many of these approaches were greeted with the sound of silence, others were attacked as irrelevant or worse, and a few have been judged as credible and gathered that elusive – and commercially valuable – social currency. 

However, the global conversation remains a tricky area for big brands where the gap between success and humiliating public failure is small.  For many, the resulting high-wire act can just seem too risky to make it worthwhile.  The DNA of the marketing industry is about command-and-control, reach-and-frequency and the delivery of big concepts, not a chat over the garden fence with whoever might happen to show up on the day.

What's The Problem?

So why is it so difficult for brands to take part in conversational spaces that are becoming such a normal part of everyday life?

Part of the difficulty is that the online conversational environment itself is changing so quickly.  For a good while, conversations were in nerdy forums or restricted to comments on the bottom of blog posts.  However, slowly the conversation broke out of these niche areas thanks to, among other innovations, Facebook’s newsfeed, Twitter’s growth and YouTube’s webcam culture.  The rise of the smart phone extended the reach of conversational spaces still further creating always-on, personalised digital grapevines.  Today, the global conversational environment remains in a state of rapid flux as networked media becomes more sophisticated and prevalent.  For example, many new devices have conversational features baked-in and new innovations allow people to use non-verbal ways of signaling to others – just as they do in real-life.

Additionally, it can be very difficult for a brand or corporation to identify what is and what is not a credible conversation for it to initiate or join.  It's just too easy to assume that because it seemed like a valid subject for an advertising or PR campaign it will also be credible in a conversational space.  'Of course people will want to chat about the effectiveness of our corporate social responsibility programme - they loved the TV ad!'  This particular aspect can be really challenging in a world where many share the view that you can only invest in what you can measure.  A view which can lead to brands initiating conversations about unique selling points, product extensions or category insights which for the general public carry all the allure of an invitation to an internal brand positioning meeting.  In reality, sometimes the best way to join a conversation isn’t to actually say anything at all but simply to help others speak and interact with one another - but that doesn't fit very well in a KPI.

Finally, there is the additional dimension of how a brand approaches and deals with people beyond an initial conversation and into more meaningful interaction with their online identities.  This aspect is - maybe - the one going through the greatest transformation currently as people’s online identities become an increasingly important part of their overall personas.  Which means there's more scope for brands to take that initial conversation with consumers (aka people) further.  However, there's also means there's more opportunity for them to get it horribly wrong - both at a micro and a macro level.

The Conversation Grows

Not that long ago I used to have conversations with marketing executives about whether social networks were just a fad, or not. No one talks about that today. The global conversation looks set to become bigger, more influential and more sophisticated which means it’s likely to maintain its allure for brands. However, whether people are listening to brands or care about what they say is maybe the real question - and the real challenge.

Want To Know More...?

One of the digital strategy sessions I run for clients looks at some of the issues involved for brands wanting to join the global conversation. It's usually a provocative subject and there’s no shortage of thorny issues that arise. The session is called ‘Brand Conversations – Is Anyone Listening? (And If So Do They Care?)’ and I’m doing one for the IPA on February 6th as part of its Energiser programme. If the ever-changing swirl of the global conversation and networked media is of interest to you, then sign-up and come along. Alternatively, drop me a line and we can organise a bespoke session for you and your team.

‘Fail-Fast’ is a software development mantra that has slowly permeated into other areas of the commercial world.  However, it doesn’t translate to mainstream marketing – yet.  The term is bandied around a good deal these days but basically refers to a project management style where, instead of excessive pre-planning, an idea is quickly put into practice and monitored closely.  The focus is on the continuous examination of performance and smart, speedy reaction to the marketplace.  In light of poor results, the aim is to iterate, change direction (sometimes euphemistically known as ‘pivoting’) or kill off the project altogether.  Thereby preventing long, drawn-out 'zombie' projects that suck up valuable resources before anyone notices they have joined the walking dead.  Crucially, to work effectively Fail-Fast requires an environment of constant, real-time feedback loops - which is exactly what you get when launching new initiatives, for example applications, onto the web or into purely digital media.  However, most brand marketing environments don’t look anything like this.  They remain approximations of what might be happening, in contrast to networked and digital media that show what is actually happening.  For instance, in the UK, the audience, cost and efficacy of TV advertising is determined by the British Audience Research Board (BARB) and its Television Measurement Service which is a panel composed of 5,100 homes.  Far from being a software-driven mirror of actual events, BARB's panel doesn’t measure...

...many aspects of today's TV environment.  Viewers' behaviour such as fast forwarding or rewinding live or recorded content goes unseen, leaving too many data blind spots for Fail-Fast to work.

Over time, this is all likely to change as an increasing range of media, including TV, is drawn into the networked world.  Such developments will extend the crucial data rich environments and live feedback loops that make Fail-Fast thrive.  Increasingly perfect market information will allow computing power to deliver different TV ads to different people depending upon their individual behaviour - just as occurs online today.  The long-held dreams of brand owners everywhere, such as personalised TV commercials and more complete audience information, can then become a reality.  (Not something everyone is happy about).

In the meantime many companies and brands are trying to work around the gaps.  For example, in categories where the point-of-sale is only a click away, TV commercials can be judged partly on their ability to drive online traffic and lifetime value.  A client of mine said he rejected any BARB-based audience figures and preferred to negotiate with media owners on the ability of the TV programme to deliver traffic to his website because that was his only retail outlet.  He wasn't quite operating a Fail-Fast approach but he had created a feedback loop based on his own data that meant he could Fail a little Faster.

Within the sphere of media and marketing, clients and brands are struggling to meet their long-term requirements for business value - be that sales, loyalty, differentiation or share – due to more fluid, unpredictable networked media environments.  Such concerns can make Fail-Fast can sound like an enticing, albeit contrarian, starting point.  However, to be really effective, the approach requires a near perfect level of data about the marketplace.  Until mainstream media is more fully drawn into the networked environment and greater levels of consumer activity are tracked in real-time, the required Big Data and essential feedback loops simply won't exist.  Which means, for the moment, outside of digital, Fail-Fast is more likely to just mean Fast-Fail.