Mr Blue Sky

The Big Why Question

One of the other biggies I have spotted so far in this social media thing - alongside identity, time and stories - is the Big Why Question.  Everyone seems to be rushing headlong into this - lets do a blog, lets make a podcast - but my experience so far is that not enough people have really asked themselves why.  To do these things well involves becoming more social and more conversational - and that is not an easy thing to do if you haven't worked out why you should have a conversation with someone or more importantly why they would want to have a conversation with you.

At the moment, these things are the new, shiny and interesting tools of the communications business and that is the main reason people want to use them.  I have seen that Tom Murphy has flagged as much and is also going further in suggesting that getting carried away with the whole PR 2.0 thing is a potentially dangerous distraction.  That may be a step too far because I do think this thing is ultimately going to be revolutionary in its impact, but there are going to be a lot of mistakes made along the way - almost all of them because people haven't asked themselves the Big Why Question.

Monty Python did a classic sketch where an accountant, Mr Anchovy, went to a recruitment agency and announced he wanted to become a lion tamer.  When asked why, he said it was because he was bored and had got the hat.  When it was explained what becoming a lion tamer actually involved, he realised that he had confused lions with ant-eaters and therefore decided to make the move to lion-taming via banking.  How many Mr Anchovy's are there out there saying to their agencies "I want to be a podcaster, I want to blog"?  I have met a few already - and it is always very hard when you have to have the Big Why conversation with them. 

Time - at the centre of things

I have finally found the time to think about Time.

It feels to me as though time is going to be one of the drivers at the centre of this social media thing - but not much has been written about it yet.

Time - as in time shift and the ability to select and consume content in your own time.

Time - as in the large amount of spent by teenagers in front of computer screens instead of frolicking in the sunshine and hanging around Tesco car parks and all those other healthy, wholesome teenage activities.  Surely it can't be long before some tabloid raises this as the new "scare".

Time - as in the amount of it required to create and manage your own space, identities, blogs, read other blogs, manage your RSS feeds, listen to the For Immediate Release podcast and generally Stay on the Bus.

Time - as in the fact that content can't be 30 seconds any more - its got to be longer, and last for longer, and lurk potentially for ever in the cyberspace dustbin.

Time - as in the amount required by marketing departments if they are to have conversations with consumers rather than fire the sporadic salvos of short-burst communication, currently known as Campaigns.

Time - spent making content rather than consuming it, or consuming the content made by traditional media.  I note that Ron Bloom of Podshow is talking about the 5/50 prediction - i.e. within 5 years, 50 per cent of the media consumers consume, will be produced by other consumers.  That means - among other things, that the bandwidth available to the traditional media will be cut in half, because we are not going to be spending a huge amount of additional time consuming media. 

Time - as in where are we going to get it from.

Digital identity

I was pleased to see that Elizabeth Albrycht has chosen the issue of digital identity as the subject of her thesis.

The whole question of digital identity has been lurking in the back of my mind for some time - hence the nature of this blog, which is in part an experiment in the creation of digital identity.  I have also intuitively felt that understanding digital identity, alongside the whole issue of Time is going to become one of the defining issues for understanding social media (I must find the time to post about Time).  As a relatively new entrant to this whole Thing, what has struck me is the amount of effort required in setting up and maintaining digital identities and also the opportunities this presents to shape and control an identity in a way which differs from the way you do this in the off-line world. 

As communications professionals it is has always been difficult understanding what people think and do and therefore how to talk to them.  A whole industry - the market research industry - has been set up just to do this.  Now, however, the audience has become schizophrenic.  The ways in which we talk to people in the on-line dimension could end-up being totally different to the way we would talk to the same person in the off-line dimension - to say nothing of challenges presented by talking to virtual people in virtual worlds. 

There is also the question of digital corporate identity when a corporation or brand decides it needs one in order to participate in social media or as part of an attempt to be more socialised.  At the moment, it seems the only way brands or corporates have participated in social media is to establish their digital identity as the sum of a number of individual personal identities - for example individual corporate bloggers.  I haven't seen a corporate or brand which has been able to develop an identity or voice for itself.  Will it be possible to build a single digital corporate identity which can operate as an acceptable social citizen within social media - or in this new world can collective identity only exist as the sum of individual contribution? 

I look forward to seeing more from Elizabeth on this.

Women - the key to the development of web 2.0

Could it be that one of the key drivers of social media and web 2.0 is not going to be RSS feeds, tagging or any other form of technology - but rather the fact that for the first time in the evolution of the techosphere, women will have the opportunity to make a defining contribution?

At the moment - technology is dominated by men.  Most bloggers appear to be men.  They talk about technology and gadgets and they build more technology and gadgets.  However, at the end of the day, all this technology is simply a set of tools and it is what we do with it that counts.  The dominant themes here are all about conversation, networking, engagement, participation - things that women are better at than men.  Already I see that female commentators and pundits (in the rare instances you can find them) have a much greater appreciation and understanding, on the whole, of the real future direction of social media than men.

I don't know if this has been done - but I would guess that there are (or will shortly be) more women subscribed to My Space than men and their role in shaping its usage and development will be considerable.

Could it be that one of the role-outs of social media is that for the first time since male dominated, mono-theistic religions set the rules for the (limited) participation of women in society, we have an opportunity to create a society with a much more balanced and productive role for both sexes?

More on stories

Just to add a thought concerning the importance of stories.

It is clear that the command and control process which has determined much of media and brand communication is becoming eroded.  Since it is now more difficult to control the channels and messages, brands and organisations will therefore need to focus instead on things which they can control - which takes us back to the story.  Those that haven't defined their story and worked out how to use this as the basis for conversation are therefore going to become a bit like ships without maps or compasses.

Marketing departments to become conversation departments?

I was recently in a research debrief where the latest ad was being analysed.  This was a regional ad and people from many countries were linked in via phone.  Around the table was the regional brand manager, marketing director, two representatives from strategic planning as well as the regional and global planning directors from the ad agency.  All-in-all a huge level of resource all focused around the production of a 30 second piece of content.

It made me wonder how marketing departments are going to cope with the "bandwidth requirements" of producing and controlling the greatly increased amount of content they are going to have to manage if the become more socialised as well as the fact that this process is going to have to be more interactive and real time.

Perhaps they will switch money away from spend on traditional broadcast media to convert themselves into conversation departments - or at least set up conversation departments within marketing.  These will be staffed by brand dialogue managers whose job it will be to manage the brand's presence in all the various social spaces it is represented in.

Its going to be very interesting.

The importance of stories

I have been trying to work out a model or process which can help a brand or organisation become more socialised.  This has taken me back to an idea which I have been thinking about for a long time - the importance and centrality of stories in creating the brands of the future.

In becoming socialised, brands are going to have to shape their communication along more conversational and expansive lines and will need a platform to base this on that is richer, deeper and more credible that a simple brand or advertising proposition.  What they need is a story which encapsulates where the brands comes from, what it does and delivers and what authority it has to be trusted.  I am not yet quite sure what form these stories will take, where they will live and who will look after them - but they will be used as part-creative brief and part-gospel when it comes to designing brand activity.  Defining and nurturing these stories may possibly become the central task of all brand guardians in the future.

The executional challenge for brands will be to build a portfolio of content (or creative) assets and participation mechanics around these stories.  The new media space presents the environment in which to do this - but some of these things (like a conventional 30 second TV ad) will continue to live in traditional one-way broadcast media for the time being.

Content assets could be described as the things a brand needs to produce to fuel a conversation about the brand.  They are probably going to have a longer and more evolutionary life than much of the creative that brands currently produce.

Participation mechanics can be seen as the infrastructure a brand needs create to engage consumers and I imagine these as experiences that will compete for space in consumers' personal digital theme parks.

Sitting between content, participation and the brand story may be a thing called an activation idea which is perhaps ab evolution of what used to be called the creative idea.  Unlike other elements this could be quite short-lived and correspond to what are currently seen as brand campaigns.  The key is recognising that that this element is probably the least important and may not need to exist at all - whereas under the old model this element was the principal driver of activity.

This is what the model looks like.

Download draft_planning_model_for_socialised_brands.jpg