The Mashed Up Value Proposition

[Image nicked from www.thehalfpat.com - thx guys]

I think we're entering a new era of value. Human value, brand value, product value, living value -- customer value.

As we fitfully - hopefully - emerge from the worst economic downturn in a generation, I think we are marking not only a cyclical economic moment but a more singular step- change which is the second phase of the digital living evolution.

The first 15 years of the consumer digital living ‘revolution’ was as disruptive and chaotic as it was exciting and value-laden --- for brands and consumer alike.

This next phase is an evolution of that disruption to a more settled state --- a state where consumers are a lot more comfortable than brands and product marketers in how to live in this converged world, how to navigate it’s terrain, how to extract and inject value according their increasingly personalised and immediate needs.

TT The brands that get this, first and truly, will be the new winners of this next phase, this “post-digital phase” of the consumer, brand and marketplace ecosystem.

T To get this – regardless of your category – a brand must learn some very specific lessons from the first “digital” phase of this revolution.

· Access is ubiquitous

· Content, media, applications & services have merged

· Consumer expect “free” more often than not

· Although access is everywhere, old-school toll-roads still remain

Most brands continue to plan, wage and react to the last war.

Brands ready for this post-digital fight are plotting to apply their lessons learned in critical, strategic ways ---

· The consumer day is fast exceeding 24 hours of consumption/input/output/productivity/entertainment (thank you multi-tasking)

· The ones to watch and engage with – regardless of your category – are the young.

· This emerging customer relates and engages with brands in very different ways than the traditional customer

· Value is king – the always on consumer cares more for the immediate and enduring value of the brand provisioning than for the ‘essence of the brand’ itself.

We are not fungible, but we are mashable ---- our value is now understood, requested, delivered, consumed and SHARED in a totally fluid, messy mix of other brands’ value

This mashing up of both perceived and real consumer value requires a brand to change the way we inhabit the competitive, consumer – post-digital ecosystem,

· We must create new elastic & opportunistic partnerships and synergies with our ‘frienemies’

· We must be prepared to sit in the back seat of consideration, as we optimise towards the front

· We must utterly re-assess our pricing strategies to map to this new value ecosystem

· We must re-imagine our true and deliverable value proposition to meet the consumer in this mashedup world that they are creating

This - the next and current generation of consumer - are creating this world of mashed up consumption, input/output, purchase, sharing every minute of every day. Smart companies - brands, marketers, NGOs, political parties - must become as ‘always on' as they are. This is, essentially, our new table stakes.

Those institutions that figure this out and get there first with a fresh, available, high-value repositioning of their core product/service and brand proposition – will win.

Technology Smechnology

Ancient Forrester Social "Analysts" - Back then, they got out a little more often.

For a deeply committed Irishman (who just happened to be born and grow up in NY with my 1st generation parents) I coulda had a yiddishe mother. Oy - those guys @ Forrester really get my Jewish, I mean Irish up.

The most recent wrongheaded bleat from them is their "updating" of the their cheerily mis-guided 'Groundswell' promotional mechanism 'their social technographic' study and model. Sounds so fancy shmancy, dunnit?

Fuchachta i tell you!

The newest news is - are you sitting - Forrester has uncovered a previously unknown species of online consumer --- (can you feel the beginnings of a "persona" forming ...? No?... huh. me neither....) --- which they've christened the "Conversationalist". These exotic hot house flowers apparently, again, brace yourself Brigid, like to send Twitter messages and update their Facebook pages.

Are you kidding me? This is a good enough reason to steal expensive digital print inches on Ad Age from worthy things like the latest Leno time slot dirt or a decent Apple bitch slapping Amazon screed? Just so Josh "Sweetness" Bernoff can try to flog yet another edition of a book that was wrong and dated before it ever hit the desks of thousands of clueless wannabe CMOs... who wouldn't know a real customer segmentation model if it walked right up and gave them a front-side wedgie whilst singing the planners' national anthem in full voice! (It's a song by Pere Ubu. If you need to ask, you can never know...)

Ok, so here's the thing: this whole way of viewing consumer behavior within social streams is so, I dunno, 2005! Which is when I think – correct me if I err - this facile "ladder" construct was first imagined.

Now this is one lone voice in the decidedly un-Forrester-like wilderness, but my experience in developing and optimising SMO programs tells me that - as a planning or targeting model - this ladder metaphor, suggesting graduating degrees of socialness, bears almost zero resemblance to the way that people actually behave.

We're simply not a world of neatly bucketed 'creators' or 'spectators' or - especially! - 'conversationalists'.

Josh - you listening, bubeleh?...

A blogger ("creator"!) around vintage cars may spend a big part of their social day actually "spectating" aka lurking in social streams about technology.

A grandma who wouldn't dream of blogging or even tweeting, spends the majority of her online life posting pics of the grandkids and vacations and the cats to Flickr and sends emails with links incessantly -- many of which the kids retweet and reshare, and push thru their Facebook feed - amplifying Grandma's influence and affect considerably.

A teen who sends and receives 500 txts a day wouldn't be caught dead opening a Twitter account.

Which bucket - I mean rung - do these peeps belong in Mr B? Huh?!... [sigh]. why do I bother...

The warp and woof of our individual and communal social graphs may have been somehow pegged to "technography" in the mid-2000s, but, c'mon guys, the "technology" itself has become almost invisible, fungible – dare I say trivial in the few short years since. Mapping social behavioral characteristics to graduated scores of "technology adoption" is - I hate to be so pointed and harsh but - meaningless.

What matters, and what has meaning for us marketers, is how people behave in these social environments when they discover, research, talk about, share, engage with - our clients' brands and products. You don't need a ladder to help you plan for that. Or a fixed set of buckets to plop your customers into.

You do need, first, a robust listening program that can inform a very specific SMO program design - true to your brand's essence, promise and product set. A program with clear and agreed strategies with actionable - and measurable – SMO (and SEO!) tactics that can optimised and refined.

Then you need a test plan, a measurement platform & some decent optimisation tools. No ladders. Ladders?! Pipes maybe, I can even see using ropes, maybe, for certain tasks, but ladders? uh-uh...

Only by doing, testing, learning will a brand - and their marketers - arrive at a workable planning and implementation model for "social" --- one tailored for reaching, engaging with, activating and driving loyalists towards social conversion.

So, gosh, Josh --- I feel like I'm repeating myself, am i repeating myself? --- lose the ladder, my dear and lovely Forrester tweep. Maybe it's time for a new working metaphor (see pipes and ropes as above).

If I fail to convince, Josh, please just dig this: our next generation of consumers is growing up and into a world where the idea of "social technographics" will be about as foreign, meaningless and non-applicable to them as a fax a machine, a paper phone directory or my old Prodigy account.

Google versus everything

As usual, the most salient, even tempered and relevant tech / digital writing writing on the interwebs is over on ReadWriteWeb. A great piece today by Kilpatrick gently critiquing the Hitwise "report" re Google vs Facebook.

Below is my comment on that thread but it also got me thinking of how much time the digerati spends wringing hands and reading tea leaves over Google v Apple and ... well, Apple v Google and now always not just versus each other but Facebook and Amazon and, well Twitter and Facebook and Amazon and uh, Apple and --- oy....we're obsessed with applying apposites as a dialectic towards analysis itself.

I reckon that's the nature of business writing as a spectator sport. Here's the link to the RWW piece -

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_facebook_social_networking_search.php#comment-182395

and my thoughts below.

It's an intriguing question. On one level, who says that, just because in sheer page views, visits or usage, "search" gets edged out by "social" means as much as it would seem. What matters, is what people are doing there.

When I search either on a traditional search engine or on ebay or Youtube or Netflix or Craigslist, I am usually more inclined to be responsive to advertising or other types of commercial stim.

When I am tickling about in my Facebook or Friendfeed or Twitter worlds (and btw using realtime search in the latter two is where search is REALLY growing) I am utterly undisposed to commercial intrusion.

So Google shouldn't covet too strongly my time spent away from their SERP on Facebook. It's not like Facebook is taking money out of my pocket that might've supported an ad Words advertiser or two. In fact, FB's recent exposing of massive user content to the spider just indexed 350 million photos of people as they looked at least several years ago... that's symbiosis not competition.

What makes this not an easy either/or question is not only the distinct and unique behavioural components of conusme time spent in each domain, but also that other intriguing stat that the Hitwise data doesn't get at --- but potentially suggests --- what if this is not zero sum?

What if - like with other media - I don't consume less of one to consume more of the other.

You saw the study this week that measured teens' time consumption of new media / tech and when you add up their video, web, TV, txting, phone calling, IMing etc it turns out the average 14 year old actually clocks about 36 hours of digital infusion each day. (Man - if they had that in the 70s when i was a kid, I'd be 90 by now...)

But back to one of your first and most critical points Marshall re the questionable sky-is-falling interpretation of the Hitwise data --- further suggests that Google can't be too nervous, because arguably YouTube is a search engine first, a media company second and a social network third. Huh.

If we triple its count like that, the average 14 year is probably going to run out of time to sleep before Apple releases a tablet or Nokia releases free global sat nav. ; >

Toys for Post Digital Girls and Boyz

At the risk of appearing old and outdated even before some of these opportunistic nuggets age-out ... here's my topline take on some of the areas we need to be pressing forward on in the coming minutes, hours, months...

TED Thread re Thinking / Doing

Pretty interesting discussion going on over on the LinkedIn discussion group of ed knowitalls.

Here's my topline thoughts with the link to the thread at bottom...

In marketing there is constant tension between thinking and doing - but at least we have optimising, which I'd suggest is the critical third leg of value creation, at least in marketing.

Marketing is a messy system - with many variables some easier controlled than others. But perhaps not too dissimilar to product creation, systems management, solutions delivery, retail supply chain etc.

It would be curious to apply this model to other domains. In my world, ideas are actually the easiest part to do (and my favorite ; >). The doing part is a bit trickier as it involves manifold new parts, people and the variables increase.

Optimising is where it all gets worked out, or at least that's the idea. The abiding challenge is to ensure that each three stages are infused with sufficient levels of creativity and bravery and, sometimes even, intelligence.

http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers&discussionID=10115817&gid=138801&commentID=9570425&trk=view_disc

Facebook Steps in It

You gotta love how much, they like so totally want people to think of them as Google. Ironically, just as more and more of us are starting to think of Google as we did the old Microsoft (who, if you're as old as TK, you'll recall replaced the old IBM as being the mofo sinister and rapacious technology brand...) here comes Son of Beacon - new Faceook privacy rules introduced with Orwellian connivance and doublespeak.

Look closely at the new Facebook privacy rules and the curious way the increasingly treacly Feeps @ FB steer you towards setting "your" settings and ask youtself - what's wrong with this picture.

For today's lesson, I screen-grabbed above mine (in mid-edit), which I clicked thru to from their due- diligency 'takeover' announcement for users first visiting their page after this week's change and announcement.

Here's what I see, tell me if I've been reading too much Lenny Bruce lately: What the FB team has done with these radio buttons and their options is create a false choice environment - one where the user doesn't have enough information easily at hand to make truly informed choices. Choices about stuff that kinda sorta might matter a lot about who owns, uses and shares my FB data. And, to make things worse, they also put the psych on us out by changing the filter groups you can choose from within the different "privacy areas". Wtf?!...

So - and this is why they engineered the form the way they did - since you don't necessarily remember what filters were set for your "old settings", without the laborious effort (I did it, it's an ugly and confusing form, unlike this one...) of drilling down and revising all your privacy settings - the average user might be tempted to to defer to my "old settings" and be done with it.

But that's what FB wants us to do, (and frankly, as a selfish marketer, I kind sorta do too, but that's just the ROI-talking, I'll be better by the end of this post...). You see - you may not change the "old settings" but unless you read really carefully their "new rules" you won't know what sort of permission you may be granting without doing anything.

Ruh-roh. Do you see what I see? It's called "passive opt-in" and it is freaking totally uncool marketing worst practice. Dum-de-dum-dum...

Here's the thing: Facebook is a really really really really bad place for anything close to traditional brand advertising or even "social media". So FB struggles mightily for ways it can "monetize" it's members. Exposing their content and profiles and streams to public search indexing and marketers yummily opens up new and fresh opportunities for that potential monetization. Nom nom nom...sorry.

I'm all for them figuring out cool new ways to pay for keeping the clean and well-lighted space's lights on. In fact, if they were really inventive from a business and marketing standpoint, they'd concentrate on how to innovate and monetize the incredible property they picked up earlier this year and my fave socnet - FriendFeed.

But please, don't start being deceptive yet smarmily unctuous about how uber-privacy conscious you are. Especially when you use evil forms design infected with uncool marketing practice to drive people to make choices they might not otherwise make.

At least not just to increase the number of peeps who mistakenly expose their Facebook selves to hungry, venal marketers like me. Nom, nom, nom... I lied.

Social Manifesto

1.We are moving beyond seeding, WOM, digital PR.

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2.Our tools help us to engineer social contact with our brand by making our content & messaging more visible, relevant & authentic.

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3.Social activation aims at engagement… which will spark advocacy, even love, for the Nokia brand.

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4.Findability & sharability are as important as impressions and clicks.

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5.We are precise --- social can be targeted, tagged, tracked & measured.

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6.We do not work in a vacuum --- social is planned, integrated & optmised within the organic Nokia ecosystem e.g. ATL, retail, Comms, Care, etc.

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7.We will take responsibility for driving incremental commerce from social.

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8.We will rationalise shifting digital budgets from bought to social.

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9.We will translate all this into demonstrable lift in your SU’s ROMI --- driving device & solutions sales, service activation & new active users – from social.

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