a strategy:
Increase organic growth by exposing audiences to the brand through breakthrough viral communications
get yours here WHAT THE FUCK IS MY SOCIAL MEDIA “STRATEGY”?
nathan williams | simiant.com
finding the shit. so you don't have to.
5 things i’m thinking about now
meme: so following on from Ian…
Apple: Creating a tightly controlled walled garden of content distribution & consumption. Use as much hyperbole as you like Steve, walled garden’s aren’t groovy, and in my opinion ultimately fail.
Mobile: Now a 2 horse race. With Nokia now irrelevant, and Microsoft never actually being there anyway, it’s down to Android vs iOS. My money’s on Google (#skynet)
Cloud: It’s what mobile is actually about, not the handsets / OS’s (despite my last point). Google is the clear leader here, but I’m kinda interested in how Intel relates to all this, as whoever owns the server farm, their tech is in there. I think that’s untapped. Finally, we still haven’t realised as consumer the real tangible and emotional value of what we have stored in the cloud.
Presences & Interfaces: I only have 2 basic online identities, my name, and my old school handle. Identity isn’t the issue, it’s the presences I’ve created with these identities across multiple platforms. Identity management is easy, presence management isn’t. I’m interested in the next generation of interfaces that enable us to mage these presences.
of life tech brands: AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft. What’s the point anymore? What do they stand for?
Why doesn’t Microsoft wall-off Windows (the entire frickin ecosystem) into the enterprise and create a linux based consumer os from the ground up?
An ill-informed post about b2c social media interactions and the legal issues therein
OK, so I say ill-informed as I’m not up to date on the latest UK legislation, my knowledge is a couple of years out of date, so please excuse me if this is utter guff, however something occurred to me on the commute to work this morning…
So yesterday via Twitter I received two identical tweets from the same ‘company’. Being a little more specific, one form the ‘official’ Twitter feed of that company, the other from the ‘personal’ Twitter account of the MD of that company. I say personal, however in the profile he states that he is MD of X…. so in my book, that counts as a representation of that company is a ‘pseudo corporate’ feed. So, two identical tweets, sent from the same ‘company’, to the same individual, me, in the space of a few seconds.
Now if that happened with email, to which I had subscribed, i.e. which is permission based, as is Twitter… I’d be annoyed and think ‘what a stupid company’. Well the same thing happened with those tweets, I thought ‘what a stupid company’. Just because they are short, possibly less intrusive than email, it’s still really dumb to send identical messages over different accounts when you have the same person subscribing to both accounts on the other end! We wouldn’t do that with email would we? And as the business that did this was, surprise surprise, a social media agency (ROFLMAO)… that makes it, as we say on the Internets, an EPIC FAIL.
So, to an extent you have to say ‘bless’, let’s face it a lot of people working in social media, on the face of it, aren’t that experienced in the grand scheme of things, email is for old people right? But more seriously it points to the fact that platforms such as Twitter, even when combined with some of the 3rd party corporate tools, are still massively lacking in maturity and functionality to run at the same level of ‘permission’ and accuracy as email or more traditional direct communications. To my knowledge, (I did say this was ill-informed) no tool exists to manage Twitter subscribes across a companies multiple accounts in the same way as email (i.e. with really thorough, get prosecuted if you mess up, list and subscriber management… yes I get that Twitter is a little less complex in that if you unsubscribe that’s that, to an extent). If it does I get the impression many companies aren’t using it. As far as legislation goes, again I’d welcome an update on this… however, if the law doesn’t hover channels such as Twitter in b2c communications, isn’t it about time it did?
What's value of 'Forrester's Interactive Marketing Agencies' Wave survey?
So Forester’s ‘Interactive Marketing Agencies — Web Design Capabilities, Q2 2009′ Wave survey is out, and makes predicable reading. A few years ago I helped get an Agency through it and thought the process was a little flawed as the questions asked were very dated, we’ve moved on, even back then. Anyway, the thing is to feature in the report…. you have to do the questionnaire, interviews etc. If you don’t, your not on it. So what’s the value of it. There are a number of agencies in Europe, big and small that should be on there to make it worthwhile, but as they’re not, who’s it of use to?…
[A copy can be downloaded from Sapient's web site here]
why a lot of social media marketing talk is bollocks
OK so latest ‘storm’ is Habitat’s somewhat misguided forray into twitter. Of course, this will generate a few thousands tweets (it allready is). Several hundred blog posts, like this one, and make a great case study of Twitter Fail in our Powerpoint decks. And of-course all social media experts and the marketing press will brand it a big old fail and dirty bag of disaster. Will it hit Habitat’s bottom line however? Will it fuck. As you were Habitat, carry on. Learn from it.
However the one things that’s quite funny here, is that already people are slating this as ‘push marketing’. Well uh, it’s not…. it’s permission… you make the choice to follow, they just messed up on the hash tag spam, that’s the mistake. Dell, who everyone lauds as being a twitter success do just that. They just do it with a little more finesse.
Oh and before anyone says it will impact their reputation as a brand, well it might, but only amongst social media experts. lol.
Sung Park on techniques for innovation
So I saw Sung (Umagination Labs) talk at WPP Stream08 and though he was awsome, I struggled to get hold of his deck but here he is giving the same talk at Nextlab.
Umagination Labs: Innovation Techniques presentation from nextlab on Vimeo.
21 Questions for developing new products
So I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about (product) innovation and its place in expressing and re-iforcing the values of a brand. Anyway, blah blah blah, I came across this list of 21 questions from Kevin Coyne, (full article on Harvard Business Review) and thought you might like them, so here they are.
“De-average” buyers and users
- Which customers use or purchase our product in the most unusual way?
- Do any customers need vastly more or less sales and service attention than most?
- For which customers are the support costs (order entry, tracking, customer-specific design) either unusually high or unusually low?
- Could we still meet the needs of a significant subset of customers if we stripped 25% of the hard or soft costs out of our product?
- Who spends at least 50% of what our product costs to adapt it to their specific needs?
Explore unexpected successes
- Who uses our product in ways we never expected or intended?
- Who uses our product in surprisingly large quantities?
Look beyond the boundaries of our business
- Who else is dealing with the same generic problem as we are but for an entirely different reason? How have they addressed it?
- What major breakthroughs in efficiency or effectiveness have we made in our business that could be applied in another industry?
- What information about customers and product use is created as a by-product of our business that could be the key to radically improving the economics of another business?
Examine binding constraints
- What is the biggest hassle of purchasing or using our product?
- What are some examples of ad hoc modifications that customers have made to our product?
- For which current customers is our product least suited?
- For what particular usage occasions is our product least suited?
- Which customers does the industry prefer not to serve, and why?
- Which customers could be major users, if only we could remove one specific barrier we’ve never previously considered?
Imagine perfection
- How would we do things differently if we had perfect information about our buyers, usage, distribution channels, and so on?
- How would our product change if it were tailored for every customer?
Revisit the premises underlying our processes and products
- Which technologies embedded in our product have changed the most since the product was last redesigned?
- Which technologies underlying our production processes have changed the most since we last rebuilt our manufacturing and distribution systems?
- Which customers’ needs are shifting most rapidly? What will they be in five years?
[Breakthrough Thinking From Inside The Box , by Kevin P. Coyne, Patricia Gorman Clifford, and Renee Dye, Harvard Business Review,December 2007]
Go home
An old one from , i hate to say it, Seth Godin, but it struck a chord none the less
If you’re a knowledge worker, your boss shouldn’t make you come to the (expensive) office every day unless there’s something there that makes it worth your trip. She needs to provide you with resources or interactions or energy you can’t find at home or at Starbucks. And if she does invite you in, don’t bother showing up if you’re just going to sit quietly.
via Dean in the data warehoue
this is good
The Integration Triangle
View more PDF documents from Mat Morrison.
How do you have a conversation with 172,000+ people?
So following on from my remarks on BrandRepublic yesterday, this celebrities on Twitter thing is bothering me a bit, as it is others. So yes Twitter has to monetize, charging brands is a good thing, and yes celebs should fall in the same category as brands right (those with in excess of X followers)?
‘But clebs are individuals too’ you say! Rubbish. A celeb is an individual if they run their network as a normal person would with nothing to promote i.e 10′s or a few hundred followers/ing max. Can anyone really honestly believe that Stephen Fry is using Twitter as a personal means of communication with 172,000+ followers? And that he is only in it for the ‘conversation’? Come on, the guy engaged a social media agency to advise him on using Twitter! It’s a PR tool for him and we’ve swallowed it hook line and sinker (look at what mega PR agency Porter Novelli are up to).
‘But he’s helping make Twitter mainstream!’ you say. So what? Twitter’s the same for me if he’s on it or not, and if it’s mainstream or not. Actually with people like him on their it’s actually noisier with all the lame ‘@stephenfry wow you bought a doughnut! ooh your so ironic’ replies. OK more mainstream might equal more funding which might equal longevity of the platform and a few extra or premium features.
Anyway I digress, what I would be interested to hear (from Mr Fry or any celeb with a silly amount of followers) are answers to these questions (yes I dont expect a reply because who the fuck am I right):
- Per tweet, how many replies do you get?
- How do you manage these replies?
- How many do you actually, honestly, read?
- Do you use some bespoke UI with clever filtering of tweets to manage this?
- What is the longest sustained conversation you have had with ‘an ordinary’ via twitter?
- Have you invited any ordinaries ‘for a pint’?
- What do you feel ‘your public’ are getting from this?
- Has it become a monster and how are you finding it now?
So I guess the point i’m making is this: I’ve read time and time again that Stephen Fry and other celebs ‘understand the power of conversation’….. ok I get that, I work in marketing, but what I can’t quite get my head around is how the fuck you have a conversation with 172,000+ people?
EPIC FAIL – OF GALACTIC PROPORTIONS
That utterly bizarre McCann Erickson Manchester video is back online again. I mean seriously, what the fuck?
Custom Gold business card by Mitsubishi
Utterly, utterly bizarre, though I wonder if anyone has ever ordered a whole box of 100? Patrick Bateman perhaps,?
Custom Gold business card by Mitsubishi
What better way to impress am important guest or potential partner than to hand him your business card…coated in a gram of pure gold?
[From Lifestyle - Custom Gold business card by Mitsubishi - Japan Trend Shop]
The Do Lectures
A mini conference thing that I did not attend, however the talks are available online now and are quite good. Get em here. Oh and you can download them as mp4′s which is quite nice…
Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy
The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies.
When Microsoft and Apple were founded.
Branding & Startups
So I’m keen to talk to people in the Tech Startup space about Branding. Questions like: How important is your Brand? How did you come up with it? How much do you spend on it? Do you see it evolving over time? Is it just a logo and colour palette to you? How much does your brand steer and influence your products and services?
Anyone who’d be happy to meet up / talk over the phone please ping me at nathan@simiant.com. Any help much appreciated!
about
simiant.com is a blog by nathan williams and 10,000 monkeys. nathan is a miserable welshman who designs digital brand experiences for big companies. the monkeys are kept in the basement and occasionally let out for flying lessons.
scan to bookmark to your device:
my shizz on ffffound
My shiz on Flickr
my shizz on svpply- Baxter of California - 45th Anniversary BladeCategories: Accessories, $200-500 Found by disconotdisco […]
- C.L.E. Clothing — BEWARE OF DEAD MAN'S CURVE (Mens/Womens)Categories: Apparel, $20-50 Found by lauraszarek […]
- Retro Modern TWEMCO Alarm Backlight Flip Clock Bk AL-30 on eBay (end time 02-Aug-10 18:35:43 BST)Categories: Home, $50-100 Found by JonnySpeed […]
- Compass Mobile iPad StandCategories: Tech, $20-50 Found by eargang […]
- Modern & Contemporary Design Portal / Daily Blog / DESIGNSPOTTER.COMCategories: Home, $100-200 Found by JonnySpeed […]
- AXE ARTCategories: Home, $20-50 Found by madelinw […]
- Karmaloop.com - Global Concrete CultureCategories: Apparel, $50-100 Found by missarah […]
- :: Expedition WS4 ::Categories: Tech, $100-200 Found by JonnySpeed […]
- Polaroid Keep Calm GalleryCategories: Home, $20-50 Found by blsulliv […]
- 1968 LHD Porsche 911 2.0 SWB For Sale on Car And Classic UKCategories: Tech, $500+ Found by JonnySpeed […]
- Revo Heritage Stereo and iPod Dock – AlphaMaven - Cool Gear, Style, Scene, and More Stuff for GuysCategories: Tech, $200-500 Found by JonnySpeed […]
- QompendiumCategories: Accessories, $500+ Found by HunterGatherer […]
- Baxter of California - 45th Anniversary Blade