Eggblogg

Ask not what you get from the social web, but what you will give to it

I just read an interesting report on the We Are Social blog about recent research from Insites Consulting which found "a positive correlation between the extent of social media integration and the company’s financial results." The summary is in the form of an infographic (complete with at least one spelling error - the bane of infographics, alas) which I enjoy reading, but always end up with more questions than answers.

Apparently, the pharmaceutical and financial sectors are the least adoptive of social media at the moment. No surprises there really. That indicates to me that where issues of control, regulation and compliance are at the heart of a corporate culture, there will naturally be resistance to 'social'.

The report focuses on business deliverables and suggests that the way to start becoming more social is via pilot projects, one of which is 'build a community of fans', which sounds to me more like a big goal rather than a pilot project. Especially as one of the biggest difficulties when told to get busy on social networks and 'build a community of fans' is that most people don't have a clue what that involves. What should they talk about? How do they find their fans? What will turn people into fans?

And the hardest one of all for companies focused on the results they want to see from social media: what should they be giving rather than getting from their social involvement? I wonder if sometimes the question isn't really asked.

 

Welcome to 2012 and the growth of long-term thinking... maybe!

What's going to be significant in 2012? I tend to leave the annual predictions up to others, but at the start of a new year it's very tempting to at least reflect and take stock.

Last year my loose round up of promising trends included QR codes, a new 'blogging golden age' and the growth of storytelling. Blogging does seem to be as strong as ever, but I'm not sure QR codes are being used effectively - at the moment they are 'the thing to have', appearing on billboards and newspaper pages like a rash. But who knows if anyone is actually scanning them or finding them useful.

However I do think we're going to hear a LOT more about storytelling and narrative, particularly as businesses start to better understand the real impact and potential of social media.

I also have a strong feeling that Google+ will grow in popularity and usage. For example, just today I read this post about how more US retailers prefer the Google+ button to Facebook like buttons. But whether its 'Twitter moment' will come this year I don't know. Although we're continually bombarded with information about the speed of technological change, attitudes and habits take longer to form. (As does the infrastructure. While gadgetry improves at the speed of light, we still have to put up with phone networks which seem to be from the era of the horse and cart. Frustrating.)

Something I'd like to predict, but I don't think it's going to happen any time soon for many businesses, is the move from short-termism to long term thinking. Quick wins, campaigns, micro-monitoring... I believe there's a danger in taking too narrow a view of things at the expense of achieving long-term results and systematic change. I realise that sounds a bit of a general statement, so I promise to follow up with examples of what I mean.

Company Christmas cards - traditional, electronic or none at all?

If you are a B2B business, do you send traditional Christmas cards to customers and partners, or opt for an electronic alternative? Or send none at all?

A few years ago I went through a stage of sending e-cards, (although always created in HTML in the body of the email, no Flash, attachments or the need to follow a link to view the card on the web.) The card included a greeting and 'thank you for your support/business' message, and a note to say that I made a donation to charity in lieu of buying and posting actual cards.

But I went off the idea after a couple of years. Perhaps it was the fact that e-cards had become so common, I suspected that people no longer opened them. Or that I started to feel that as my client/suppliers/partners list wasn't huge, it really wasn't too much trouble to send an actual, handwritten card, and it was a nice way to make personal contact with people I've worked for for years but rarely see face-to-face. 

It's now that time of year again and I'm being regaled with various e-cards ranging from the simple & fun 'big fat merry christmas thank you' variety to the the sightly take-it-or-leave-it 'I'm not sending cards this year but here's the charity I'm donating to if you're interested' type of message.

Much as I applaud the charity angle, as an alternative to sending Christmas cards I tend to feel it's been done. Why not adopt a charity and support it in small ways, year-round, and send a few personal Christmas card 'thank yous' once a year in your own handwriting, one person to another? It just feels a little warmer, particularly in a recession. For me it will probably mean missing out some work acquaintances (it's easier to add a ton of contacts to an e-card list than to write everyone a card, agreed) but  hey - I can't see anyone being that offended at not making the cut. (Others feel more strongly about alternatives to corporate 'holiday' cards - here's Chris Brogan's post on it.)

Do you agree? Are you an e-card or a traditional card sender, a bit of both or none at all?

TrendsPlus conference part 2 - more key takeaways

This is a continuation of my last post, a rough and ready round-up of what I took away from the TrendsPlus conference last week at the Cavendish Conference Centre in London.

After lunch (I think, the order changed on the day and I didn't make notes on all the sessions) the speaker was Paul Edwards of Hall & Partners with some important messages about how we make decisions and the implications for communicators. "What you say is not as important as what they hear." Paul used the analogy of a bird's nest - that all of our experiences, behaviours and choices are made over the duration of our lives and are stored away in a kind of structure in which we are cocooned - at least that's how I interpreted it.

Those stored decisions include brand preferences and all kinds of default choices often burned into your brain from years ago.

Paul talked about Type 1 and Type 2 decisions - Type 1 being the automatic, the habitual choices that happen in the subconscious - interestingly he called these the 'pre-rational' decisions, not 'emotional' as they are sometimes called. Type 2 decisions are the ones we like to think we make all the time - rational, requiring thought, analytical. But in reality very few decisions (relatively) are made like this, because they are harder work for the brain. They're also much slower.

"The faster you influence people the less chance they have to engage Type 2 decision making."

Decisions can be disrupted, however, and it's working out how to do that that is the job of communicators wanting to change people's behaviour.

This theme of the two types of thought/decision making came up in more than one presentation, and I was interested to see that the old dichotomy between left brain/right brain and emotional vs rational response seems to have moved on.

Phil Barden of Decode Marketing made a similar point, talking about the two decision making processes being 1) perception/intuition and 2) reasoning. He likened the two to the autopilot vs the pilot. Autopilot decisions happen unconsciously  - we can't 'get at' them retrospectively - and they happen fast, in computing terms at 11 million (bps) bytes per second, as opposed to pilot decisions which happen typically at 40 bps.

Perception/intuitive decision making: heuristics, fast, parallel, effortless, automatic, associative, slow learning (over time), implicit, autopilot

Reasoning: rule-governed, slow, serial,  thinking, reflective, explicit, pilot

Post-rationalising of Type 1 decisions doesn't reveal the real truth, which is why insights from focus groups and other qualitative research isn't always effective.

"A brand should aim to be selected without conscious thought" said Phil, and it seemed to really make sense. It also poses problems for the traditional models of marketing based on AIDA and all its derivatives, since they are based on linear progressions through the decision making process, when in fact many of our decisions are likely to be fast, individual and inexplicable.

I have to give an honourable mention to mills™ who was billed as the CHIEF WONGA™ at ustwo™. Ordinarily when I see this on the agenda, my cynical heart sinks a little. But he came over as a naturally entertaining speaker who broke all the rules (admitting failure, using sound effects in his presentation) but got away with it!

I think to start with the whole audience was aghast at his stories of the apps his company had built, all failures in the sense of losing money. But mills™ turned it around by explaining that they were actually doing very well with client work, turning over 7 million, and the money they lost only represented 10% of that which did actually sound reasonable when put that way. 10% of turnover into R & D? For a company in the fast moving technology sector that sounds sensible. And he also showed us how the failed projects nevertheless created a shedload of publicity, worldwide awareness and kudos with clients. So not a failure at all - a "succ-ailure"!

*****

PS I haven't included here anything about the excellent '12 consumer trends that will kick ass in 2012' given by Henry Mason of Trendwatching, mainly because he said his whole presentation would be available to us afterwards, so I concentrated on listening. I'll talk about these in a later post!

What I learned at the TrendsPlus conference, part 1

Yesterday I was at the TrendsPlus conference in London learning from a very interesting bunch of speakers. I was tweeting much of the time but looked up enough to catch some of the great slides and video clips.

I think it was also the first conference in a while I've been to where people seemed happy to introduce themselves and make conversation and not just hang out in their little company cliques. Whether that had anything to do with the fact that it wasn't the usual digital crowd I'm used to, I couldn't possibly say!

During the day we not only did a couple of Mexican waves but also watched the classic coffeeshop scene from 'When Harry Met Sally'. It was certainly different!

I took a few notes, so here are some of the memorable things that stood out for me.  I've split this into two parts as it's rather long!

Bruce Daisley from Google (but soon to be at Twitter) talked about how brands aren't as liked as they would think, and how their efforts in social media too often look like they're trying to be cool and failing miserably. In fact, people just aren't interested in brands or ads per se (a theme that came up again later) or jumping through hoops in order to 'engage' with brands via social media.

He told a story of his time in local radio when car bumper stickers were all the rage, and being told by the management to 'get more stickers out there.' But in actual fact, radio audiences don't grow through exposure to more and more bumper stickers, but because they like what the station puts out. In other words, don't confuse the sticker with the show - focus on the thing that creates the emotional pull.

Nick Morris of Canvas8 showed us some really interesting stats about cultural change and how the US and the west is no longer the centre of things, and how this is already affecting a 'new world order.'

In fact 'Asia First' was a recurrent theme - we heard how Harrods now has 75 mandarin-speaking staff and a cash machine where Chinese shoppers can access their Chinese bank accounts, resulting in a 40% increase in Chinese customers in Q1. Impressive! Things like airport signs in Denmark in both English and Chinese, BA introducing its new 1st class service on flights to China, not the US. and Hermes launching its high end sari range first in Mumbai, then Paris later. The message was clear - we need to be awake to the emerging new world order, respect the change and reflect it in our communications. 

The scheduled speaker from the Cabinet Office pulled out but Sam Nguyen was sent in his place, and did a solid and very confident job of presenting on the subject of behavioural insights and their applications to marketing.  One thing that stood out for me was the insight that people buy more quickly the closer they are to the goal. The example given was a loyalty card where you buy ten coffees and the last one is free, versus the same card with a small difference - there are twelve coffees to tick off before you got your freebie, but the first two are already credited to you as 'bonuses'. In tests, because it looked as if you're already two coffees towards your goal, it was found that people actually filled their cards more quickly. Even though the number of coffees they needed to buy was the same as on the card with no 'bonuses'.

Before lunch we had a presentation from Mark Earles of Herd Consulting which had one very strong message, 'I'll have what she's having', other words, people copy those around them, often subconsciously. The point was illustrated in many ways including getting the audience up and jumping and with reference to the behaviour of shop-lifting rioters in the summer. It doesn't matter how much advertising you blast people with, if there's a choice to be made, in the absence of any strong feelings either way they will basically do what their friends and those around them do.

Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy delivered a cross between a presentation and an after-dinner speech, without slides ('as I will only overrun') and laced with plenty of non-PC opinion! But in between the funny stories and throwaway insults there were many fascinating insights, clearly the result of a long career in the business and a razor-sharp analytical brain.

A couple of things I noted: framing is important. For example, the way that student loans were introduced was a disaster, said Rory, as is the way that people are offered 'compensation' for giving up their house if it sits in the way of a new road being built. Most teenagers wouldn’t have worried about taking out a student loan, firstly if it wasn't called a 'loan' and secondly if they're told, 'you'll only start paying it back when you're nearly 30 and earning £40k' because that’s a long way into the future and may never happen. And the house owner, by being offered 'compensation' is already seeing losing his house as a grievance and a loss, whereas if he was offered a £5k a year bonus, in perpetuity, for moving house, he'd probably be very happy.

Another Rory-ism - 'satisfising' - ie we don't want perfection, we just want what we had before, what we know and trust. 'The avoidance of disappointment is more important than perfection' - hence the popularity of MacDonalds.

That's it for now - part 2 to follow shortly...