Tim Shier announcing the new Brandseye

When I started the Digital Academy a few years back it was because I realised that technology does not always save on labour. In fact effectively marketing on the internet will probably require even more people. You will require crowds to analyse and interpret the wealth of data that is available.

One of the huge issues with online reputation management  (ORM) is how to judge sentiment because it requires an intelligent response. What does the description “sick” mean as in “wow that’s really sick” are we talking about amazing or putrid. In the same way is an apple a fruit or a tech company. This confusion in interpretation, which is often regional, makes for incredible complexity in judging the sentiment of comments made online.

Local business Brandseye have come up with an elegant solution; they have crowdsourced it.

Crowdsourcing is a simply asking the crowd (anyone in the world), usually in an open call to solve a problem. The crowd is massively scalable and can be accessed regionally.

In this case in addition to the algorithm built into Brandseye, the system allocates members of the Brandseye crowd real-time mentions, the rater gauges if each mention is relevant and judges the sentiment, the location of the person that made the mention and the media type. Local context and local language subtleties are critical – along with the intuitive sense humans have for what other humans are trying to say. Computers are not great at picking up irony, sarcasm, humour… or rage. People are. Based on their peer-reviewed accuracy, the BrandsEye Crowd are paid for their effort.

The benefits for Brandseye and Brandseye clients is greater accuracy, for the raters a source of income in the form of micro employment which they can access anywhere where they have an internet enable device and an internet connection.

I think that this is a really clever and an elegant solution and although I have not experienced it in real life I can’t see any reason why this won’t work. Well done Tim Shier and the Brandseye team.

Declaration: Tim is a member of a think tank I have organised called ideaorgy, a place where ideas come to meet and mate. But we have never discussed any of this I regret to say.

Posted via email from Organic Marketing…

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

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.

The traditional marketing industry is based on two key assumptions. Consumers are ignorant and believe what they are told. Without this advertising can’t work nearly, not nearly, as well. Yet we have seen internationally that both those assumptions have proven to be false. 2010 could well be the year the penny drops, but probably not completely.

The assumption was once true: consumers were ignorant – they got their information from the company, from salesmen from advertising. Customers also used to believe what they were told; they trusted advertising – business controlled the brand message.

Not only does research around the world show that trust in advertising has declined but we also know that through the Internet and by their own connections, customers have access to an unbelievable mountain of information, opinions and comments. Just these facts have changed marketing forever. It’s with this backdrop that I make my predictions for 2010.

1. Someone will notice that, in spite of conventional wisdom, South Africans are connected. I mean, more than 30% of us access social sites on our cellphones alone on a daily basis. Everyone has a phone, even at the lower levels of society, with the majority capable of connecting to the Internet. But they won’t know how to use this information.

2. Marketers will be the first to cotton on. They will be influenced by their international contacts and will finally realise that the excuses of “but the majority of South Africans don’t use the Internet” and that we just don’t have the bandwidth are exactly that: excuses. With the new undersea cables coming into South Africa and Africa, bandwidth as a problem will soon be a thing of the past.

3. Local advertising agencies will be leaning back, secure in their misunderstandings but becoming slowly unsettled, as they listen to their international colleagues talking about the international media bloodbath and the need to rush to digital. They will see their international associates buy digital agencies – or even start a division of their own. BUT they won’t be the core of the business.

4. Agencies will still see digital and online as a media channel and start integrating into them more and more, not realising that the key characteristic of the Internet is that it’s a social creation. It’s about people connecting, not about the technology, or even the sites themselves.

5. Internationally, the lead will be taken by thought leaders – who realise that social media is not separate from the individual’s total life experience – making sure that digital eventually becomes the centre of the brand connection, not an adjunct.

6. From a technology point of view, manufacturers will be accelerating their efforts to make sure that connection to the Internet is ubiquitous and cheap. At the high end, Apple’s iPhone is already carrying more web data than any other mobile device; but there are netbooks, tablets, the Android phone and the soon-to-be announced Apple iSlate all making sure that, more and more, the web experience is accessible and separate from the technology.

7. The way people are finding stuff on the Internet is changing; this may start having an effect on traditional digital marketing. The filter that most users will place on getting the data they want will be their friends. SEO optimisation techniques will be under huge pressure from new search algorithms and as “friend” filters and real-time search guide web users.

8. There will be a lot of flapping in media circles as traditional media morphs. The resistance movement led by the News Corp relics will continue to resist and will become increasingly irrelevant. Media entrepreneurs led by the former journalist will reinvent the way the news is spread and the financial models related to that.

9. With every major change in society, new players will emerge, new approaches will take form and the cards in the pack will be reshuffled. I believe that we will see the first major signs of that in South Africa in 2010.

Marketing will change because consumers have changed. Consumers are no longer ignorant, whether they are 25 or 52 and living in Diepsloot or Dainfern; they have unprecedented access to information, they are buying online and are part of massive electronic networks.

Maybe the penny will drop, maybe it won’t. Then next year’s predictions will be to guess how big the splash will be as the dinosaurs fall into the marketing tar pit and their new competitors, more nimble, like mammals, create a new marketing ecosystem.

This post first appeared in Bizcommunity trends report.

Picture by The invizible on flickr

Related articles by Zemanta

• IOL Technology – SA Internet users increasing – study (ioltechnology.co.za)

Sent out by email the invitation asked their clients to pass on to 10 of their friends and to claim a free treatment.

The take up was beyond any one’s expectations and responses were suddenly streaming in at an alarming rate. In fact so much so that they crashed the system.

I spoke to Mike Herbert the General Manager of Gary Rom Hairdressing about what he learned from the campaign. I could tell that he was under huge pressure from the client base some who thought it was a scam. They had had to close the promotion a few days after launch.

It wasn’t it was just an amazingly successful campaign that worked thousands of times better than anyone expected and worked right here in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Please watch Mike Herbert talking about what happened and  the lessons learned:

Related articles by Zemanta

• Digital is far too succesful for this Jozi company! (walterpike.com)

Numbers by stewf on flickr

Why are marketing people so obsessed by numbers and measurability? Especially with large numbers which are often assumed to be better than small ones. This obsession clouds judgment and so we seldom stop to think much about those numbers, what they stand for and even to understand what a good number looks like, and we often measure what we can measure rather than what is meaningful to measure.

In broadcast media planning we look at Gross Rating Points (GRP) and opportunities to see and audience numbers, in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) we want to drive  people to our website, and we are looking for unique visitors and conversion rates, on twitter we are looking for followers – the more the merrier.

But do these particular numbers have any real relevance? I understand the need for a large audience if you are flighting a TV ad, if say only 20% of people notice the ad its better that its 20% of the largest possible number. The same goes for SEM driving as many unique visitors as possible to the site, really for the same reason.

But this assumes that the purchase process is a linear one (steo by step from awareness to sale) which increasingly its not (The new customer Journey : The OPEN Brand), it also assumes that the objective, the end of the purchase journey is THIS sale instead of this and all possible future and related sales.

Furthermore If the major task of marketing is idea diffusion then do the numbers matter?

I don’t think they do, I would rather have 100 of the right people engaging with me, on my site or wherever, my customers about whom I am passionate about or people who could be passionate about my product and influential enough to spread the word, than 100 000 randoms. In this case 100 is a far better number than 100 000.

The numbers that would make sense would measure the quality of our engagement and the quality of the interaction.

I was challenged regarding my last post on how marketing is changing about whether Twitter is a broadcast medium.  That my point regarding word of word to spread ideas was a nice but vaguely naive notion. The argument was that it Twitter is used in a one to many manner, I send out a tweet which all of my followers read  – that equals broadcast.

The answer I suppose in that simplistic context is that it can be used that way, in fact many of the tools being used to get followers (none of which I subsribe to) have been created to turn Twitter into a broadcast medium, but its inherent character is not that. Its character is a massive simultaneous conversation in which people listen, talk back and then talk to thier friends. In any conversation the person talking carries some status in the community and in twitter its no different. The words some people say are just carry more weight than others. These people have influence and this is derived from the nature of their relationship with others

Influence, not numbers, is the currency of the internet  and they are not related. Numbers on the other hand are the important factor of broadcast media which is aimed at getting eyeballs (opportunities to see) but the conversation stops there, the audience sees and may notice, but there is no way that it becomes a conversation, people cant answer back and people cant share.

For a medium like twitter its who sees and the influence they can have as they pass the message on. A massive difference in my mind.

As an example I very recently came across a tool called Topsy, its a twitter based search engine and it ranks its search results on the basis of the tweeters influence. To quote them, “Topsy sees the Internet as a stream of conversations. Topsy treats people differently from the webpages they create and the things they say. And Topsy sees that people in every community are connected in a web of relationships, where each person influences other people to read, talk and think about things.”

This is a cool idea and specifically cool because when I checked my status I was amazed to find that it ranks me as highly influential (a status reserved for the top 0,2% most influential of twitter users) and I have only just about 2000 followers. As with all of this I think that you can take yourself too seriously and I take it with a pinch of salt, but it does illustrate the point.

Walter's status on Topsy

My argument about the change in marketing is just this phenomena. The object of marketing has always been to spread an idea, the idea that the consumer should buy my product or service instead of someone else’s. The  best way in the past was to broadcast it over and over until the audience did, but as broadcast media loses effectiveness the best way in the future will be to produce something remarkable and get the former audience to talk to each other about it.

That’s why you need think of Twitter as anything but a broadcast medium.

photo credit: x-ray delta one

At the TEDx event TedxNewtown I spoke about how marketing has changed since the Internet. This is what I said.

Once upon a time someone would stumble upon some stuff or craftsmen would start making something that they thought people would buy. They would then take it to a place where they thought people would buy it. If people liked what was on offer they would buy and they would tell their friends and pretty soon there would be demand.

Then along came industrialisation. The way business won the industrialisation game was to standardise offerings because by doing so they would enjoy the economies of scale, reduce costs and maximise profit. The focus was therefore productivity and efficiency and this is why companies are still run by efficiency experts.

The process of getting the word to spread so that people could buy in volume was taken out of the hands of the customer because modern broadcast media was far more effective at doing so and too expensive for ordinary consumers. Television was the most effective of them all. Branding attached the meaning the marketeer wanted for the brand and it was broadcast over and over again until it was believed, where else was the consumer to get the information to dispute it?

It was the widescale  use of broadcast media such as television that sparked the invention of the discipline of marketing in the 1960′s and supported the underlying principle of mass marketing, in the words of Seth Godin selling average stuff to average people (the most acceptable product to the largest possible market)

The Internet changed that. It changed it because it has altered the balance of power in the transaction.

Power can be thought of as having been derived from three sources, the threat of violence, from wealth or from knowledge and information. The Internet changed the source of information from the brand to the masses because it made it easy to access trusted information and opinion from friends and your network.

Brand control evaporated as information became searchable and free.

At the same time the Internet provided the cheapest and most effective tool for the spreading of ideas for the consumer, the one to many channel of television could be replaced by the more trusted one to one channel of the Internet. The consumer now had the knowledge, the information and in his hands the cheapest and most effective tool for idea dissemination ever invented.

How do you market products and services when the basis of modern marketing has been eroded?

The answer is simply that that you go back to the core of the process which was established long before marketing was even invented:

You make stuff that people want and you offer it in a way that is remarkable – so that people talk about it and so they will spread the word for you.

The website appears to be nothing special although I refer you to a Business Report article in which Mike Sutcliffe, who is the eThekwini (Durban) city manager, said that the technology that would be used for the website was generally not in use in South Africa. “My understanding is that it is really state-of-the-art stuff.”

Internet guru Arthur Goldstuck noted in the same report that the city’s World Cup website appeared to be using technology that was already available and it did not require new software to be developed. “It doesn’t make sense for that kind of money to be spent on this kind of site,” Goldstuck added.

It may be tempting to take advantage of a naive client, but a professional business would understand that this is the time to be the “trusted advisor.” AdaptIT, are doing this site. They have reportedly declined to comment and appear to be an IT company and not a internet marketing company. The site has a communications role.

If all this is true they are doing the entire industry a huge disservice. This is still a new industry and we really don’t need to be seen as fly by nights.

. . . is this a case of “Trust me I’m a doctor?”