A profound lack of understanding of social media is being used to support the reluctance of agencies and marketing companies to fully embrace it.

I was passed along a link to a post on the brandgym blog titled “Social media yet to show me the money”  and I felt the need to comment.

The argument calls social media a fad which is sexy but yet to deliver. The argument is based around the following 5 points.

1. Engagement is not new.
2. Engagement is a means to and end not an end in itself.
3. That the thought that interruption marketing is dead is an oversimplification.
4. That it is penetration not loyalty that drives growth.
5. The point the writer regards is a killer is that people have no appetite for participation.

Without addressing each one of the points I must point out that the argument is a straw man, although probably an unwitting one. It confuses social media with using social media platforms as a media channel to carry advertising messages.

To briefly clarify then, we need to understand that all marketing is about spreading ideas.  My brand is an idea and that choosing my brand is a better choice than choosing your brand is also an idea. Brands and ideas only exist in the minds of people.

Interruption marketing is the process of interrupting people doing stuff with a message which if repeated often enough is expected to change attitudes. The people interrupted could be people driving down a road interrupted with a billboard, people catching up on the racing results on the newspaper interrupted by an ad or people watching football being interrupted by a banner or a branding message.

This works when people are prepared to be interrupted, when they trust the source of the message and when the message is unchallenged as the only real source of information on that particular idea (product, service, brand, category etc). None of these conditions hold true any longer.

The emphasis in social is connections. Its how ideas spread through massive networks of connections that needs to be understood.

When you run an ad on facebook you are doing interruption marketing, tightly targeted mind you, but interruption none the less, Google Adwords are also interruption but they make up by being incredibly relevant based on keywords. If you run a “viral” youtube ad once again you are attempting to interrupt. The Old Spice man is an example of using digital media to extend an interruption marketing campaign.

When you are operating in the social realm you are doing something completely different, you are engaging in the conversation between people who are talking about your stuff or things like your stuff. You are providing them with the tools to help them talk about it and you are facilitating that conversation.

Your objective is to engineer some kind of new discourse around the idea, not to get gather meaningless hoards of facebook fans or “loyalty,” as the point is correctly in the blog post, loyalty is more a personality characteristic than a brand one.

Interruption marketing is certainly not dead and will continue to play a role in social campaigns, the growth in social is slow to begin with and can be helped with traditional announcement awareness provided by broadcast communications.  But interruption is extremely expensive and pretty ineffective for the reasons mentioned above, we can compensate but make it even more expensive by buying bigger and bigger audiences so that the we can successfully interrupt more albeit at still a low percentage.

Contrary to the view stated by the brandgym blog, social is not a “nice to have” add on to the media plan – its the core element for the simple reason that people trust people they “trust” and act on the recommendations and the opinion of their peers and less on the self interst of brand messages. In this world the media plan now becomes the “add on” to support the launch and facilitation of that conversation. Its likely to stay a huge budget item not because of its effectiveness but the opposite.

It’s kind of obvious that the bulk of people in any social network will not generate content. People fulfill differing roles in society, some are discussion starters, some are question people, some are answer people some are bridges or connections but most are followers, but that does not minimise the impact of the people they are following, they form tribes around ideas and the conversation is between people as it moves between online to face to face and back again.

The final reposte to the claim that social media has yet to show the writer the money is to suggest that he ask ex Egyptian President Mubarak what he thinks. Time magazine names the protester its person of the year 2011. The movements it referred to, the Arab spring, the Occupy movement, the Russian unrest, slutwalk and many others beside are all social media enabled movements. None would have happened in 2011 without social media and some like the Occupy movement which spread around the world in a few weeks would never have happened at all.

Advertising agencies and marketers need to start facing the overwhelming evidence, instead of doing the ostrich thing.  To remain relevant they need to start trying to understand how ideas spread in a world where media is no longer only a source of information but a site of coordination.

Picture by Roads Less Travelled Photography

Posted via email from Organic Marketing…

Posted via email from Organic Marketing…

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Posted via email from Organic Marketing…

Although Vodacom has won the battle at the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), I think that it will lose the war. It’s fascinating how often the management of organisations get involved in their little skirmishes and lose total sight of the big picture.

It seems to me that Cell C has in the past pushed its advertising and claims too far and has, by doing so, lost credibility, the reality in this case is that the Cell C offering is the superior experience. I have been using a Cell C stick given to me by Lars Reichelt for some months and although I have been vocal where it fails in less than perfect coverage, where it is properly set up it flies and performs just as Cell C claims.

Although Lars Reichelt maintains that his campaign is not cheeky I disagree. I think it’s opportunistic and takes advantage of the massive and, in my mind, extremely extravagant spend of the Vodacom rebrand with humour and is certainly cheeky. I am sure that you remember the Nando’s campaign doing exactly the same to Cell C.

To its credit the Cell C marketing team took it in exactly the right spirit, and sent each of the key Nando’s players a speed stick.

I am not going to spend much effort on the ASA but they certainly seem to have “boobed” on this one by not properly considering the technical evidence.. But having said that isn’t the ASA a remnant of a soon to disappear, legacy marketing environment — an environment dominated by consumers fed information over broadcast media and not empowered as they are now by the power of connections in the always-on world? Cell C learned, to its detriment, the power of this world to voice its opinion when it astroturfed the Trevor Noah thing.

Is it possible that Cell C has struck a nerve in the Vodacom command complex? Is it just possible that Vodacom know that Cell C has a superior offering and Vodacom are in the process of trying to muddy the waters hoping that it can stall the move of the data customer to a product it can’t match? Why else run to the ASA?

My advice to the new marketer is to understand that the war is not won in the cobwebbed council chambers of the ASA. It’s won by the customer’s experience.

The way to win this war is with delivery — simply give the customer a superior experience and they will tell their friends. People trust their friends more than they do advertising and PR spin and in this real time world where thoughts travel around the globe in a wink, the word will spread.

Vodacom are busy turning Cell C into the underdog, and themselves into the playground bully a little too big for his boots. Steve Jobs managed to build Apple into the colossal success it is by casting Microsoft as the enemy. Perhaps this is exactly what Lars Reichelt has managed to do to Vodacom and it’s possible that, like Jobs turned Microsoft into a challenger and Apple the champion, that a similar thing is happening here.

My advice to Vodacom – get your act together – the consumer doesn’t care what the ASA says. They care about what you do.

Walter Pike

Posted via email from Organic Marketing…

The whole thing started with a video posted on YouTube on Wednesday 28^th July. The video was supposed to be a segment of comedian Trevor Noah’s comedy show in which he ripped into all the South African cell phone networks.

The fairy tale was that the Cell C CEO was so concerned on seeing the video that he placed a full page ad of apology to Trevor Noah and all of South Africa, promising better service and within a few hours offered Trevor Noah the job as the CEO (Customer Experience Officer) a kind of independent referee on Cell C customer service called telltrevor . In these few hours they also set up a rather large website development.

For good measure Cell C also changed their logo and announced how they were going to change the standard of cell phone connections with a new network.

The only thing is that it’s all a fantasy.

I had been pulled into the controversy firstly by commenting favourably on the Cell C apology, naively as it turns out. You see I had never expected a major marketing company to pull a stunt you would really only expect from “Honest Joe’s Used Cars.”

I was full of praise that at last a South African corporate had understood a little of Social Media strategy – listening and then responding, swiftly and with gravitas to a complaint. Why Cell C’s Full Page apology was a Marketing Masterstroke.

I was really disappointed when I found out from blogger Marc Forrest, Cell C the Joke is on you that it had all been a stunt. I felt it important to respond and did so here Cell C is Astroturfing, What a Joke

This was picked up by Radio Highveld news and Media@SAFM. And Mandy de Waal wrote a really good article with comments on Daily Maverick

This is a pulling together of my thoughts.

1. The media landscape has changed. Customers are connected and vocal. Dan Gilmour calls them the ‘Former Audience” because they have the power to generate as well as consume content. They are active participants in the branding process.
2. The first step in new marketing is listening. Listening to what the customers are saying and responding with solutions adding to their experience  as well as with honesty and so building relationships based on trust.
3. The second is building an experience for your customer, an experience that they will value and tell their friends about, in other words build brand fans.
4. The principle underlying marketing in an always on and always connected world is that the customers have control. This could be described as a democratisation of marketing because in this world your communication is a discussion not a lecture. Brands can no longer tell customers what they should believe and with enough media spend, shout at them until they believe.
   1. New marketing is really about preparing the environment for the idea (which is what a brand is) to spread. It’s like as a farmer prepares the field creating the right environment for the crops to grow, the marketer must nurture the brand in a partnership with its fans.

So what has Cell C done wrong?

Strategically:

1. If you are going to poke the sleeping bear with a pointed stick you had better have a well thought out plan, because it may wake up.  The core of this is the customer’s experience.
   1. Does Cell C have a demonstrably better network than either Vodacom or MTN?
   2. Does Cell C have demonstrably better customer service?
   3. If not then they have set themselves up for a very bloody nose.
   4. If you want to have a relationship with your customers, the foundation of that relationship is trust.
      1. So is it a good idea to try pulling a stunt and spinning a yarn?
      2. Is it a good idea to pretend that a new independent customer service system had been set up?
      3. Why would I want to tell Trevor instead of Cell C?

Executionally

1. You don’t try to hoodwink your customer, even if you think its funny. Don’t make a fool of him, especially if your intention is to make him a hero.
2. Once you start a relationship with subterfuge it taints the rest of the relationship.
3. Customer service is a company culture thing. Pretending to outsource customer service to a comedian with no record as a consumer champion is bizarre.
4. Is appointing a comedian as your customer experience officer a message to tell everyone that your customer service is a joke.
5. Cell C has launched a new logo – but their TV ads still carry the old logo, that is just sloppy, and a message in itself.

What I would suggest:

1. Cell C get your network working, your outlets working and make sure that your customers are getting a superior experience.
2. Your customers don’t care how good you say you are, they care about their cell phone service
3. Then develope the tools to let your customers tell the rest of us about it. Because they are going to do it anyway.
4. Then go on and invite the rest of us in to join the conversation, using all media.

I am reminded of an article I read in the Huffington Post yesterday, called The dark side of vitaminwater it reveals that Coke’s legal team, who are defending a consumer protection lawsuit claiming that Coke has misled its customers into believing that vitaminwater is healthy, with the argument that “no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking vitamin water was a healthy beverage.” What twisted logic. Is Cell C under the illusion that they can treat their customers the same way, follow the same kind of strategy and same kind of defence if they get called out.

The fairy tale is just a fairy tale and we now know that. What we also now know for certain, because Trevor told us, is that the Cell C network is terrible.

Glasses

The newspaper industry is in denial. It is myopic.

When I read the comments of newspaper man Rupert Murdoch and read the reports on the recent keynote speech by Mark Cuban in which he called Google a vampire that must be vanquished I cant help be reminded by the management thinker Theodore Levitt and his great HBR article Marketing Myopia which although written in the sixties has perfect applicability here. The death of newspapers is not the death of news, its just the death of news on paper.

Levitt was one of the founders of marketing as a concept and the key thesis of this article is that businesses and industries fail not because of a failure of the market but because of the failure of management. Management typically puts its own needs ahead of the needs of its customers, who because their needs are not being met move on and before long the industry is in decline, being replaced by another.

The classic is the story the demise of buggy whip manufacturers, who knows what would have happened if they had seen themselves in the transportation business.

Newspapers are dying not because people don’t want to read, because they don’t want news. Newspapers and book publishing are dying because there are better and lower cost ways of reading than ink on dead trees. In fact people are reading more and more, the massive growth of the Internet has actually translated into the fact that people are writing and reading more than they ever have – and its now much easier and cheaper to get the stuff to read.

If newspapers rethought their business and realised that they are not in the news on paper business but are in the news analysis business, or the news spreading business, or the entertainment business or the information business, they would see opportunity not problems.

The appropriate action is not to try to defend, because the forces are too big and inevitably the garrison will be overrun – the choice is to understand exactly what value you are bringing to customers and focus on that.

To borrow a thought from Seth Godin the art is not in the artifact, music is not vinyl or plastic so too is journalism and news not paper. The demise of newspapers will not bring an end to journalist – with more people reading I suspect the opposite.

NO we are not looking at the end of news, we are looking at less control in the news, cheaper news, more and wider analysis of the news, more people getting the news – we are looking at the golden era of news, of  journalism, of writing and of publishing.

. . . and of forests.

Photo Credit Greything

In the US Domino’s Pizza has come under a lot of flak for their new marketing strategy.

For admitting that their product sucks, that the pizza base tastes like cardboard and saying sorry and then as a response to what their customers said developing and launching a new recipe. Crazy stuff Dominos, say the critics, you are alienating your loyal customers who presumably love cardboard and you are damaging your brand.

You can read the criticism on eConsultancy and Advertising Age by clicking on the links. While you are there read the comments. and when I tweeted the article today almost all the responses were the same, surprisingly disagreeing with the criticism.

Traditionally you would have either defended the product and shored up the brand or launched the new recipe with a “you always loved the old pizza but we have made it better”type of line.

But actually in today’s market that’s a very risky strategy.

• Domino’s customers all know the Pizza sucks, they buy it for convenient fast delivery.
• Their friends all know it too.
• They are connected to their friends.
• If you lie they will tell their friends that you are a liar.

So this is what domino’s did:

Now’s time for another story. In the late 80′s I was Client Services and Strategy Director for one of the hottest agencies in South Africa. One of clients was the biggest wine and spirits distributor. They had a dog of a wine brand, it had been promoted on the basis of its heritage – it was named after the birthplace of man who had opened a refreshment station at what is now Cape Town for ships bound from Europe to the East Indies in the spice trade.

Only one of the products was doing anything, a sweet wine loved by drunks in the Eastern Cape.

The heritage positioning was so thin that I suggested that we should throw it out and call it what it was “a good everyday drinking wine” the kind of stuff you would drink with your friends, people whom you had no need to impress.

Much to the horror of the Brand Manager but with the support of the senior management, who had decided to give the brand one last shot. So we told the truth about the brand and implemented that positioning, won a Bronze Lion at Cannes and saved the brand.

The foundation of good marketing is not just great advertising its great product and great experiences. What’s the point of trying to tell your customers stuff they already know is bull. Why not show them a little respect, show them that you care, maybe they will give you the benefit of the doubt.

Maybe this campaign will get customers to have a fresh look.

Well done Domino’s – Telling the truth may just be the Killer Strategy.

Photo by cafemama on Flickr

The notion that there is a divide between digital marketing and traditional marketing based on whether the technology used is analogue or digital is really a little ridiculous.

This thought was all sparked by a conversation I had with a prominent industry person yesterday. We were talking about the state of digital and traditional marketing in South Africa. During that entire conversation I felt that we were on different planets, as though our point of departure was entirely different. I concluded that I must be  communicating badly and when I thought about it I realized a reason.

The marketing, adverting and for that matter digital industry often think of digital as a medium. That your job is to have a smart idea that you push onto the customer and you use the media they use because then they will see it. This allows traditional ad agencies to think that because they have a digital or interactive section they are in the game. That digital is a channel. This is where the thinking is flawed.

Marketing needs to change because the way people find things out, how they learn, how they connect and so how ideas spread has changed. Its a fundamental behavioural change.

People are still people and brands are still brands, but neither behave the way they once did.

If you use new channels in the same way that you used old channels then the new channels wont work, they wont just work because they are digital You can rethink the way you use the traditional channels – so that they do work.

The divide is not between digital and traditional, or new media and old or anything like that. The divide is between those who cant understand the changing consumers and those who can. Its not a debate between media types its a debate about how ideas spread.