Social Location Optimization

It’s been exciting to witness the impact that the Internet has had on media as well as consumer journeys. A large part of my time at work goes into defining the ultimate mix of activities/investments behind own, bought and earned media (from a digital perspective). From a search perspective, own/bought/earned media can be defined as SEM (paid/performance media), SEO (own media optimization) and SMO (earned/social media optimization). All of these activities, in my opinion, are working media. Recent studies have shown that 80% of internet sessions start with a search of some kind. Searching as such has undergone a huge transformation, evolving from the “linear” search engine search triggered by a particular need, to “real time web” searches/feeds, which instantaneously tap into your own social networks and contact base. Depending on the industry (physical goods), percentages of consumers referring to online sources at some stage of their purchase decision, can be as high as 91%. If nearly 80% of these internet sessions start with a search of some kind, capitalizing “on the search window” becomes immensely important. However, albeit being interesting and extremely relevant within digital environments, it got me and some colleagues thinking further about the whole relevance that ties everything back to the “real world”.

My point being: SEM, SEO and to some degree even SMO are practices that emerge from the world of the PC based Internet. PC’s don’t know exactly where you are, who you are and what friends are around you. From a business perspective, you’re trying to capitalize on overall traffic interested in your brand based on keywords, but you can’t filter it down to a time/context specific grid. It’s challenging to sell a product online that a consumer needs at 8:45 Pm in West Helsinki. (Finnish stores stop selling beer after 9pm) Mobile devices allow you to do this. This brings along an entirely different type of ecosystem for brands to optimize against. A consumer searching for Adidas sneakers in downtown Manhattan, becomes a “golden lead” for any retailer that happens to operate a shoe business within that proximity area. Your virtual experience leads to a physical experience, which we all know is much more personal, intimate and (yes), social. Brands start seeing direct correlations between digital media and its attribution to physical sales. A topic argued over in several instances and forums.

While efficient SEM/SEO/SMO allows you to grasp the global internet population around the topic, you can’t tie it to an instant need that is time/context sensitive. Mobile devices will bring along an entirely new kind of media practice, which one could label as social location optimization, or as SLO just to add another abbreviation

Built to live, not to die

Built to live not to die

Just over a year ago, I met some creative minds from Isobar, one of  Nokia’s digital agencies. One of their strategic leads used the term “built to live” in his presentation, to describe the right kind of presence that brands should have when going online. Around a coffee table discussion, we would all agree that you can’t just “copy->paste->print->web”, but sadly enough, that is often the case.

Since the birth of the internet, companies of all sizes have been entering this exciting  “always on” media with different levels of  “corporate ambitions”.  This new environment forced companies to re-think their definitions of media, but also brought more fundamental questions to the core attributes of the brand itself.

Although technological innovation has accelerated insurmountably in the last 10 years, i feel there are still certain building blocks that remain relatively unchanged, when it comes to a successful brand presence on the Web. I’ve taken a stab at defining these in more detail below.

Meaningfulness

In the digital space, the experience IS the brand. Edward T. Hall, a non-verbal communication genious once said that verbal communication (in terms of words) accounts to only a fraction of the actual meaning delivered in a conversation. All the non-verbal ques such as gestures, tone of voice, bodylanguage and cultural/social context comprise of the largest part of the deciphered message. Analog brands are used to talking at consumers. Brands in the digital space are the brand they express through their actions. A great creative mind at N2 Helsinki, recently made the comment on how brands used to be the the visual objects that talked down to consumers. In this time and age, brands in the digital space are equal to any personal brand. Barriers are broken, people have the power and successful brands need to be “good people” if they want to succeed.

In practice, this implies that corporations need to think about the meaningfulness of their brand in the digital space. Meaning is derived from values, self-esteem, character and composure; all attributes that can be found (in one form or another), in the brand guidelines of the company. The interpretation/implementation of these guidelines, is what often goes wrong. Analog brands PRESENT the brand. Digital brands ARE the brand and deliver on the brand promise through good behavior and useful doing.

Sustainability

Another cornerstone for success in the digital space is built around the notion of continuity. John Willshire created a great presentation in which he referred to advertising as being like “fireworks”. They come in a nice package and you just light them up and shoot them off to the sky. You get a lot of reach and at best, people say “WOW! Nice firework” and then return to whatever they were doing. Bonfires are social gatherings. People are at the heart of them and the process takes time/effort, but the fire can be infinitely re-ignited from the burning coals in the fireplace. Fireworks are just as common in the digital environment. Campaigns are in essence “built to die” as they have a window of 2-3 months after which they are taken down and planning starts for the next “firework”. Good brands think about continuity and sustainability in their marketing efforts. Ask yourself, what’s the “red thread” between the communication streams i’m creating. Do i just shoot off fireworks or do i build bonfires and actively participate in them?

With such great web 2.0 tools available, there shouldn’t be an excuse for shooting fireworks. Stop replacing time with money, hire some community managers and social media optimizers and start building a sustainable presence for your brand. Your advocates will love you for it.

Scalability

Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, establishing a scalable presence on the web takes time as well as “machinery”. When i refer to scalability, i mean 2 different things:  platform & presence. Platform scalability in terms of using technology that is easy to use, deploy, expand and build upon. A few months ago, i had the privilege to meet Raanan Bar-Cohen from Automattic, the company responsible (amongst many things) of keeping this blog up and running. Raanan mentioned how the core of WordPress is only a few megs and how everything else can easily be built onto plug-ins, thus allowing easy customization that can be scaled when new platform releases come out.

Although scalability from a platform perspective is important, it’s the presence side that i feel is even more vital. Many of the platform related scalability issues fail when the web presence is treated as an end destination. In today’s web, there is no end destination. Consumers navigate through purchase funnels that are not linear, and investing in brand presence scalability should have an emphasis on expanding the brand’s presence across the internet. In practice, it means leveraging both man & machine. “Machine” in terms of mechanical SEO, SMO, SEM, and “man” in terms of active community, content, editorial and analytics management.

Measurability

A digital marketing manager cannot have the excuse of saying “50% of my advertising works, i just don’t know which 50%”. Investing and using measurement tools as a standard indicator of the performance of your web presence is critical. Often marketing managers get caught up with the “key selling points”, “tone of voice”, “messaging strategy”, “visual language” and “creative concept”. In many cases, you can just let the data tell you the truth as a large part of digital marketing really begins once the campaign or initiative is out there. You can even see this in the way internet services are brought out to the market. They are often released as closed alphas, then expanded into invitation only betas until expanding to the “final version”. Similarily, marketing managers obviously need to think about the concept and strategic intent of the initiative, but significant effort should also be placed into the actual “tweak it as you go” initiatives. AB testing, weekly/daily paid media optimization, changes in ad copy, reactive spin-offs generated through consumer responses etc etc. This obviously requires investing in the right measurement tools and training your staff to make use of them and have the flexibility to react rapidly to changes.

In the end, many of these streams and thoughts are very straight forward and simple to implement within any corporation where there is the desire to do so. Having the desire and courage to do the right things is the final (and often) most challenging piece

Introducing the PESH model

The idea with this model, is to help brands think through their social media presence. We’ve all seen brands enter into social media venues, whether opening a virtual office in Second Life, creating a fanpage on Facebook or taking steps to build a community of their own.  What’s been surprising to note though, is the lack of focus and long term thinking in many of these initiatives. Twitter channels are created around events, then left to wither and die. Campaigns are launched, but only have a lifespan of a few months. More deep engagement and commitment is needed.

The PESH model

Depending on the nature of the company, certain engagement methods work better than others. I’ve taken a stab at defining them below:

Participant

This is very much about mapping the venues and initiatives that give a face to the brand. It’s not so much about what the brand says, but what it actually does.  Involving consumers to different initiatives, creating time during which consumers can immerse themselves in a positive brand experience. It’s not about pushing the hard sell , but more about raising brand awareness and driving increase in measures such as net promoter score. Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice on was a quite nice tie in to using an existing community in a manner that raised overall interest about the brand.

Enabler

Some brands are great in connecting people through their services or technology. The brand itself isn’t at the forefront of the dialogue, but acts more as the enabler of the experience for the community. Nokia has done this quite nicely with Royal Artist Club. In essence, Nokia technology is utilized by the bands, to create their mobile blogs while on the go. Fans can get exclusive backstage footage of their favourite band and have the chance to comment and engage in conversations on a more personal level. There’s no money exchanging hands, it’s just about “giving love, to get love” in this case. These initiatives are more driven by generating sign ups to your enabling platform.

Supplier

In the end, each brand needs a business model that brings a positive cash flow, in order to keep the wheels rolling. Thinking about where and how you want to go for the “direct sell” is just as important as mapping out where you do not want to do this. RSS feeds or Twitter channels that are specifically skewed towards communicating the latest offers are dimensions that need to be clearly defined before launching. There’s a lot of dialogue about how brands should “sell” within social media. My take is that all dimensions on the PESH model will generate sales, but they all do it in their own manner. In the “supplier” initiatives, brands should identify the best venues for driving their performance driven sales initiatives and be open about the purpose of the initiative. Transparency and openness.

Helper

Social media and care walk very much hand in hand. In many companies, the social media teams are part of the care organization, as it is so closely tied to the ongoing online monitoring and need for reactive actions. Social media provides great venues for listening, but at the same time, these need to be clearly identified and utilized in a way that helps consumers find help when they need it and not a call to action to participate in the latest marketing campaign.

In essence, this model is not meant to be a black & white chart, where activities need to be “locked” into a particular compartment. Many of the activities (for example participant) will include other dimensions (supplier / helper), but this model should help plan and differentiate the primary brand initiatives within the space and allows better focus both internally and externally.

The art of listening

They say that good listeners make friends, have solid marriages and even succeed as salespeople. The art of listening is a virtue that brands often miss when thinking about their social media presence.

A colleague of mine made a comment on why are most sales and marketing terms somehow war related? We map out our “target” audience, we “execute” our media plan that aims at “converting” leads into sales. Our “guerilla” tactics involve “commados”. It’s like orchestrating a full scale battle in which an “enemy” = “competitor” is defeated and the consumer is “conquered” through “blasting” the brand message out there.

When thinking about social media, many brands spend most of their time identifying opportunities to shout their own messages to consumers. This goes against what we want as human beings. We want to be heard, we want someone to listen and value our input. However, as bad listeners, bad brands don’t really seek for opportunities to listen, instead, they look for a chance to speak their own message as soon as they have a chance. Brands & people that are bad listeners, don’t really listen. They hear what people are saying, but subconsciously they are just waiting for an opportunity to shout out their own opinion on the matter and seeking for points in the conversation that would make their own case more successful.

Brands underestimate the underlying importance of listening. When looking at most monitoring tools, a great emphasis is placed on the “robotic”, math driven monitoring tools that measure the conversions and click throughs that are anchored in the traditional, linear funnel thinking. Machines can gather and interpret linear, yes/no data, but they don’t have emotions and creativity.

 The modern monitoring layer is much more of driven by a “cyborg”, data smart, yet creative monitoring layer. Today’s purchase funnels are not linear. Consumers cross reference data on the web, read reviews, consult their peers and search for additional promo codes that might work in online stores. This new funnel creates the demand for a completely different kind of sales and marketing organization. We need less media planners, less marketing strategists, less traditional marketing managers to play smart when evaluating print ads that the creative agency produced.

Today’s age calls for listeners. Listeners are great community managers, webmasters, customer care reps, social media optimizers. Their job is to listen to what is happening and react, connect, help, participate. This type of media is not expensive, but it’s not free either. It simply means that modern working media is about time. Listening takes time, but it converts much better than shouting.

Neighborhood marketing

After a refreshing week at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, i find myself more motivated and energized than in a long time. John Maeda, the President of RISD gave a great presentation on creative leadership, while Tara Hunt shook some corporate foundations with the Whuffie factor ideology. In essence, my personal key take away from the conference was extremely liberating: we can be more human again. As crazy as it sounds, the information age has evolved heavily around information processing, where programs and computers are created to exercise calculations way too arduous for any human brain to complete day in and day out. This strong technology focus has and continues to be important, but we are also witnessing a pendulum shift towards utilizing the technology to be more human again. Being human is more about having conversations, collaborating and sharing. Social networks are enabling us to come together as tribes again, but simultaneously the same tribal rules apply: give love to get love. This is especially important for brands who wish to operate in this space.

Tribes work very similarly to a neighborhood. Different types of people come together to live their lives, have conversations, create relationships and make a living. A brand that wants to be a part of a neighborhood, needs to EARN their right to be there. Unfortunately, since the industrial revolution, brands have become accustomed to simply intruding the neighborhoods by bombarding their messages down consumers throats. It’s been easy for brands to do this, when you channel your advertising budgets through analog/one way media. The more you pay, the louder your microphone becomes. However, in the digital era, brands can’t replace time with money. Involvement in social media takes time and time is becoming the “new money” that companies need to see as their new working media.

Different brands can play different roles in the neighborhood, but it all comes down to bringing more value to the venue than what you take. Companies like Google are providing tools like their maps service, that allow other companies, communities and consumers to make use of their service in their own context. This has enabled Google to successfully expand their digital presence across the internet, as they are providing value in return for their service usage and visibility on other web properties. Other brands are using the Google API’s for creating marketing campaigns, mashing up their own services and recording their traveled journeys. Threadless on the other hand, is all about connecting people that share a passion for design and t-shirts. They have enabled an environment where you don’t only go to to buy nice t-shirts, but to submit designs and receive feedback from the community on how you could improve as an artist.

When i think about the 2 examples above, i think there’s some great references to brands being a part of a neighborhood. Google has provided the neighborhood with free electricity. The consumers can use the electricity as they please, while companies need to pay a small fee for it. Other brands can build more appliances that work with electricity and maybe each light bulb in the house has an ad that Google serves based on the type of household it is. (ok, maybe going a little too far there) Threadless on the other hand has built an art gallery that is open for anyone to submit their work and sell it. They have taken care of the facilities and even have a payment system in place. In both cases, the brands are being good neighbors by being enablers for the society and giving love to get love. These kinds of neighbors earn trust, respect and in the end, (yes, gotta say it), money.

Working the non-working

One of the top creative minds in the advertising industry, Nicke Bergström from Farfar, has often used the notion of “creating time” as a cornerstone of any piece of communication that a brand puts out to the consumers. As consumers are bombarded with thousands of marketing messages each day, brands need to earn their place in the hearts of consumers. Simple one way propaganda won’t do it anymore, brands need to be relevant to make a difference.

Many companies use working vs non-working measures as a good reference to the overall cost efficiency of marketing creation vs exposure. Before the internet age, this was a relatively good and simple way to measure. On average, companies would invest maybe 10-15% of their budget on the marketing concept creation, another 15-20% on the actual production of the ad and finally, the remaining 65-75% on buying media. In practice, the concept creation and production would be listed down as non-working, since the agency time in the creative “think tank” as well as the production of the print or TVC would not be seen by consumers until these were placed in front of them through TV, outdoor or print.

In today’s world the split between working and non-working media has changed. The concept creation of a marketing campaign still remains a non-working pack of powerpoint slides and some flash files, but as soon as you produce something that is published on the web, it becomes working media. A lonely girl can become an internet celebrity, an 80’s hit song can rise from its grave, all without having to pay 1 cent of media buy.

In essence, this implies big changes in the way that marketing/media budgets should be allocated. By putting more time and energy into the concept creation, you can ensure that you are creating a package that is “born to live, not to die”. (another great quote from Nicke). The way that your marketing campaign is produced, has an even bigger significance. It’s easy to copy, paste, print to web, but that’s a total waste of the ecosystem. Good marketing creates conversations, creates time that consumers want to spend with the brand and in the end, it earns media for the brand as consumers become advocates. A well produced piece of digital marketing gives the concept a chance to fly, spread and even take a life of its own. In practice, the media split starts looking more like a 30% concept, 30% production, 40% media buying. And traditional media agencies are not gonna like that…

Watch out for the analog people

Hi world. Was thinking about an attention grabbing title for my first post on this blog and this seemed like a pretty good one to capture the essence of what i wanted to say.

To give some context to this title, the term “analog people” is a reference that we have used at work, for troops within the sales and marketing industry as a whole, that refuse to get used to the fact that the industry has evolved beyond the 30 sec TVC and the print ad. I work in sales and marketing myself and a lot of the topics i will be writing about, will focus on digital marketing in particular and the interesting scenarios that technology disruptions cause within the work environment.

However, this title also has a deeper meaning and refers to a stereotypical person that is a victim of their own previous success and resists change from the norm. In today’s business environment, these challenges emerge from the inevitable disruptions within the industry.

We all know that the web has been transforming the way that people consume, share, organize and search for data. What has also become evident, is that the sheer novelty of this channel has generated a “generation mind gap” between the staff inside any company. Nokia’s Anssi Vanjoki has often made references to Internet Immigrants (people who had to “learn” the internet) and Internet Natives (people who have grown up with it always being around) within his speeches. This gap between two generations is one that is having a larger impact on corporations than many would have originally thought.

With the emergence of the internet (both fixed and mobile) as the new mass medium, analog channel expertise has become less relevant and the digital channel understanding is often in the heads of young professionals that have not had the 15 years of experience to climb up the corporate ladder. What this causes, is a disruption to the status quo in which smart companies embrace change and empower people inside the company to become change agents, while ignorant ones stick to their old ways and resist change.

This is not a new phenomena. My grandfather used to work in a Finnish saw mill during the early part of this century. At this time, the first wave of punch card technology was hitting the industry and he was pushing to have this technology reviewed by the board of directors as an alternative and much more effective solution for managing the overall demand supply network. The topic was eventually covered by the board and the conclusions were to keep investigating this emerging technology, but no larger investments would be made until the chairman has retired (and will not have to deal with the hassle) … Go figure

We too often tend to become slaves to our old habits and refuse to change as times change. I work at Nokia, where the speed of change is one that seems to give heart attacks. Combining the fastest paced consumer electronics industry with the overall service industry on the internet, means that there’s no time to keep an ego and think that you know everything. That’s also what i love about Web 2.0. People connecting with other people and sharing, learning and achieving together. Nobody can claim to be the ultimate guru in this field, but we’re all allowed to participate and learn. That’s why i wanted to start this blog. To participate and share some humble thoughts that have come to mind across this journey.