FLUID MARKETING

Twiteria: Who and Why I Folllow

This post is two years late.

Most of us pimped the size of their follow lists long ago whether Twitter delivered real value or not. Twitter became, as @armano eloquently opined today about Facebook, like high school, more of a status heirarchy than value driver.

Putting celebrities and their followers aside for a moment, marketing analysts, planners, and pundits began figuring out the how's and why's of Twitter over the past couple of years. It took me a while, but the fluid marketer in me has found a sweet spot. So much so that I don't foresee going back any time soon. Why? Because Twitter delivers three things I need:

1. Brand marketing information from a wide variety of quality content publishers that would otherwise be difficult to obtain at all or as quickly as Twitter can deliver; 
2. Access to perspectives from bona fide analysts, planners, and brand leaders in close proximity to cutting-edge marketing and consumer-focused strategy;
3. Incisive commentary that about the larger world from likeminded (okay, and some not so likeminded) cohorts that typically either makes me think deep or crack up.

Creating a Twiteria of meaning turned Twitter from an also-ran to a must-use channel. Here's my Twitter "who" and "why" short list. Some are on the marketer's usual suspect list, others you might not have heard of or thought about. Have fun:

• @jowyang: No hyperbole here -- Jeremiah Owyang is a thought-leader; social influencer; and marketing / strategy pundit. Able to consistently push envelopes in under 140 characters. Every day.
• @charleneli: Both my mentor (from my former life working for her at Forrester) and mentor to brand leaders around the world. Charlene Li spawned the Groundswell (with J. Bernoff) and set the bar for social marketing. Great writer, too, able to see things most others don't.
• @edwardboches: I've not met Edward Boches but he seems to be the rare blend of "creative" and "strategist" many of us pretend to be. Clearly understands the interplay of media, brand, and person.
• @nickbilton: Gotta love the New York Times because people like Nick Bilton have transformed the way we think about and consume electronic media.
• @armano: It's one thing to make pretty pictures as a designer. David Armano tells marketing stories unlike anyone else, uniquely mixing marketing savvy with great design abilities.
• @briansolis: I like the way he develops strategic constructs out of simple points or disparate inputs. He also gets the interplay between messaging and the medium, has been instrumental in defining the role social media plays within brands in terms of both PR and consumer convergence.
• @cr1sa: Wired mag founder Chris Anderson doesn't post a lot, which might be a good thing, because like a lot of others I admire speaks when he has something interesting to say, not just to say something. In typical Wired fashion, it's usually interesting and different. Free, too.
• @psaffo: For those of you who know Paul Saffo, you'll know what I'm talking about. It's simply not possible to interact with him -- including reading his Tweets -- and not think differently about the world. And in most cases chuckle at it. Can bend time by looking both around the corner and through it at the same time. The world's smartest, funniest curmudgeon.
• @karaswisher: Love Kara Swisher's posts -- an unwavering snark. Knows what the difference is between what is news and what isn't; brings it to us first and provides meaningful context.
• @dberkowitz: David Berkowitz just knows his social-stuff. Consistently shares high-value digital media perspective and information.
• @marobella: @wirestone co-worker and mentor, Paul Marobella knows electronic media and how to post. Marketing, retailing, and hockey in his dna; great comic sense too.
• @the_real_shaq: Funniest man alive. Laugh freaking out loud Tweet-monster.
• @lancearmstrong: Cycling fan or not; cancer survivor or not; Lance is great to follow. Funny, insightful, and intuitively keen on Twitter's best and highest use.
• @fastcompany: I pick up new information and perspective on marketing and digital technology nearly every day from these guys. They've set the bar for transforming print to digital and social. Really high-value information, their tweets help me as a planner / analyst stay informed and smart.

A New World, A New Word: Digitization

In my recent post, 2011: Year of the Wave, I proposed that digital applications, experience layers, game play, and social commerce are massive, rising waves, elevating brands who understand them out to new heights, potentially crushing others that don't. 

Today, my co-worker, and [wire] stone's analytics guru Wendy Ertter found an eConsultancy blog post full of account planning presentations (here). Sorting through the fluff lurked an intriguing-yet-simple framework from Zigurds Zakis called "Account Planning in the Digital Age" slideshare:

Looks pretty simple, right. The big issues, interconnected. Technology is clearly now a key part of the account planner's formula, as Zakis represents here. Adding "technology" to the standard mix of people, culture, and economy -- the general landscape -- is a major step forward. The right planning perspective.

Viewed through the account planner's lens, however, there's a lot more to consider. There's a problem with the word "technology" -- it falls short in capturing the essence of how transformational technology has become. Technology change moves faster and in many respects is the catalyst for cultural, economic, and human behavior change at an increasingly faster pace, some would argue with a more pervasive scope. 

Clay Shirky's prescient review in Foreign Affairs argues that social technologies are have become the catalyst for driving political transformation -- amazing that he published literally within a month of 26 year-old Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation. Paul Saffo recently quipped, “Connectivity has become like oxygen. If you don’t have it, you notice its absence at about two seconds,” and has for years projected a vision for human behavior change transformed by digital technology -- "We're going to put eyes, ears and sensory organs on our computers and our networks in absolutely unprecedented ways. We're going to ask them to observe and manipulate the physical world on our behalf.”

For years, account planners trained themselves to look at the world through the eyes of the brands they serve; really talented planners honed an innate ability to construct 360 degree views of the environment within which brands connect with people -- key social, cultural, political, economic, and scientific inputs. No small task. And none of this has changed. Except to say that the planners universe has become infinitely more complex, on orders of magnitude, by the tsunami of digitization and the spinning, convulsing "waves" digitization continues to create.

I'm a planning hack, like most of us trying to figure it all out. My gut tells me, though, that "technology" just doesn't capture the essence of it all...that we need a new word. I'd propose replacing "technology" with "digitization". From artificial intelligence; to cracking the genome; to validating string theory via the LHC (which might actually happen); to the elevalation of women's rights in the Middle East; to Watson winning on Jeopardy; to bio-engineering; to virtual worlds; to transforming the way we teach and learn...the common thread among all of these things is the digitization of everything, along with the interconnectedness created from it.

To ensure we truly capture the breadth and depth associated with our task of bringing a 360 view to our business, account planners must see a the new lens of "digitization" as the filter that provides perspective beyond the nuts and bolts of new digital hardware and software -- to truly "be insightful", we must grok how human behavior adjusts and responds to our increasingly digitized world.

 

2011: The Year of The Wave

While we can't see most of them, waves of all different shapes, sizes, sounds, dimensions, and dynamics crest and crash around us all the time. I’ve been thinking a lot about waves lately -- 2011 is shaping up to be the "Year Of The Wave".

From the most astounding we can imagine (Japan's quake, resulting tsunami, and still-unfolding recovery and nuclear meltdowns); to the bizarre (anti-union and small-government movements in the US and Europe); to geo-political transformation (Tunisia, Egypt, maybe Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ivory Coast), these things don’t seem like isolated moments in time.  

For global brands, the world is no less undulating. Troughs and crests seem to rise and fall at unprecedented scale – Facebook and smartphone adoption are two obvious examples. But this year, a few are beginning to crest into massive forces -- and brands find themselves going back to school to re-learn the physics of wave dynamics. Here’s a short list of others to consider:

 Apps: 

• From a recent Pew Internet and American Life study: “Every metric we capture shows a widening embrace of all kinds of apps by a widening population. It’s too early to say what this will eventually amount to, but not too early to say that this is an important new part of the technology world of many Americans.” In or out-of-browser, people are increasingly consuming information and media as applications. And the US trails app adoption in countries like Japan, India, and China;

Layers:

• The ability to overlay various types and levels of information to digital experiences on any device is has changed the way people expect their interaction to unfold. Digital information, media, and entertainment are now mashed-up aggregations of content designed to enhance and expand the relevancy and depth of any digital experience -- augmented reality adds social information to smartphone cameras; iTV overlays shopping opportunities to standard television viewing; Bing adds the social graph to Facebook search; soon, Kinect-enabled gaming will feature social connection; and global positioning -- already standard -- will soon bring remote experiences to us wherever we are via any connected device. Our expectations of media and information are no longer uni-dimensional;

Game-play:

• Gaming — and the protocols inherent in game-play -- have leapt out of the playroom and devices and are increasingly defining the protocols for how people interact with the world at large. Airlines and weight-loss hucksters perfected behavior modification through game mechanics. Today, banks, political campaigns, media organizations, governments, and educational institutions employ game-play to motivate and reward behavior. With or without joystick, online or offline, people respond to playing games…even when they don’t think they are playing.

Social Commerce and Social Gaming:

• The confluence of social media / marketing and e-commerce. People can browse and buy almost anywhere, anytime through an increasing variety of connected devices -- social commerce adds the dimension of social connection (see previous post on personalize shopping here). Some great statistics provided by social commerce analyst Paul Marsden:
  
  • According to a recent comScore report, nearly one in four Twitter users (there are 15 million active accounts) follow businesses to find special deals, promotions, or sales.
  • A study by iModerate Research Technologies found that people are 67% more likely to purchase products from brands they follow on Twitter and 51% more likely to do so if they follow a brand on Facebook.
  • Research from Efficient Frontier indicates that to-date, 53% of retail transactions involving Facebook directly convert from Facebook to checkout
  • The online gaming market is worth $15 billion today; In 2009, social gamers bought $2.2 billion in virtual goods; this is predicted to increase to $6 billion by 2013. (NPD Group).

So if you’re the George Clooney of your brand, captain of the marketing ship trying to avoid the “perfect storm”, how do you deal with big waves? How does a brand avoid getting rag dolled? How does a brand set up to drop into the tube and ride the delicate dance? Global brands have to figure this all out as the next digital decade unfolds.

Last week I attended Forrester's Marketing Forum where Chris Stutzman and Emily Riley detailed ADAPT To The CORE, their prescription for brand positioning in an era of transformative waves. Stutzman’s ADAPT construct drives home the requirement for brands to establish both the mindset to move quicker than the market as well as the organizational flexibility to reset as change unfolds:

 

 

Emily Riley’s CORE framework springboards off ADAPT by delivering the formula for optimization – it’s a roadmap for how brands should do the work.

What I found equally as thought-provoking, though, was L’Oreal’s interpretation of engagement. The $27 billion global beauty leader simplifies their engagement approach and aligns their “digital” marketing ecosystem to these four pillars -- enabling both ADAPT and CORE along the way:

What struck me most is L’Oreal’s emphasis on innovation. Like Kraft's Dana Anderson recommends (interviewed here by Forrester's Christine Overby; covered by David Berkowitz of 360i here), brands need become badass, and “pilot, pilot, pilot!” (i.e., try new things all the time). L’Oreal is steadfastly committed to developing new technologies, communication techniques, and thought leadership. In this view, complacency is failure. Moreover, L’Oreal strives less for pragmatic KPI’s in favor of a psycho-social vision of success – without passion, consumption and loyalty are always at risk.

I am fortunate to work at a company that, from its very beginning more than a decade ago, has always known how to surf. [wire] stone’s DNA is a double-helix of adaptability, integration, innovation, and digital. As marketers AND technologists, we’ve created a formula for helping brands achieve their ADAPT To The CORE vision and foster long-term passion. We call it Experience Engineering. More on EE in my next post…