All posts tagged social

The content conundrum

I was in Germany recently. My agency’s global network has a challenge shared by many media agencies, I suspect: how to formalise its development and distribution of content on behalf of its clients.

Content distribution is pretty much what we do already. Sure, the content we use and the channels available to us are proliferating at lightning speed, but the core principles of navigating a consumer towards a brand (as opposed to the way around) haven’t changed.

But media agencies developing content? Really?

Media agencies have for a while seen themselves as the angels on a client’s shoulder. We’ve been telling them the world has changed. That campaigns need to be more ‘engaging’ or three-dimensional.

All to easily we’ve probably characterised ad agencies as the devil on the other shoulder. They tempt the client with yet another expensive, short-shelf-life, we-open-on-a-beach-and-here’s-the-production-bill-thank-you ad production.

But, inevitably it’s that sort of agency, well-versed in production and selling things that need to be made, that are benefiting most from our sell. While media agencies talk in terms of potential, ad agencies go and make.

Increasingly, in a digitised, ‘social’ world, it feels like ideas are once again the currency of a successful agency.

Why?

Because advertising is based on interruption. Media facilitates this interruptionby allowing brands to buy their way in to people’s routines.

But interruption doesn’t work when the normal rules of intervention don’t apply. You can’t buy your way in to social media.

Mel the other week apologised to me from the stage for advocating great ideas that don’t need paid-for media.

But really I couldn’t agree with her more. I think if you have to resort to buying attention then you’ve failed.

So, paradoxically, while media agencies can tell clients about shift in traffic, or the increasing control consumers expect over their media, they’ve not always been able to articulate how a brand should respond.

Because developing social media strategies meant going without reach, frequency and other buyable metrics to cling onto. We often struggled to convert our expertise into much more than a strategy or ‘approach’. We’d end up with an empty vessel waiting for the actual idea that populates it and brings the approach to life. Our inexperience in helping clients visualise the actual content that would get made stopped us from benefiting from our own foresight

Now, I don’t believe for one moment that’s because media agencies aren’t capable of coming up with those ideas. But when you’ve grown up evidencing recommendations with promises of eyeballs and traffic it comes as a a surprise when clients, in the absence of being able to see the film/poster/message/game/competition/whatever,  don’t meet you halfway.

So media agencies are potentially just as disrupted as ad agencies nowadays. If we’re not buying the space, just what do we do? Put that way it’s easy to see why ad agencies, who have always created ‘content’ in its most obvious form, believe they have an equally central role to play in a new world unconfined by old-fashioned notions of 30″ or, if there’s lots of money, 60″ or, if  we’re feeling really brave, 90″.

But here’s the thing.

Ad agencies don’t make ads.

They might write them, and make their account man stand up and read out the scripts in order to sell them, but they don’t make ‘em.

They use, have always used, production houses, directors, etc to bring to life what clients have bought before it’s even made.

How about that, media people? Creating ideas powerful enough to make clients want to buy that they’ll pay you for no matter how they turn out, or how effective they are?

That’s what we need to get better at.

I’ll say, now, though, then I’m not particularly happy with the word ‘content’. It turns out to be incredibly difficult to define.

Try it.

I asked Twitter when I was in Germany debating this.

Stu said this

Pretty good.

Lisa said this, which I love.

I love it because Lisa is a journalist. In fact, she’s beauty and style editor at Marie Claire, so she knows a bit about turning ideas, trends, product, whatever, into content. It’s a helpful reminder that there’s a world of people and disciplines that do all this already.

Matt then said this.

Nice – utility, consumer value, etc

Liam got punchier, or more self-effacing anyway.

And after all this I realised something strange.

What media agencies currently sell – the box around content – is easy to describe, but on its own can’t sell a strategy because it’s so abstract.

What we want to sell – content that sits in the box – is quite an abstract thing to describe, but a relatively easy thing to sell.

For media agencies, it’s like content is negative space.

It’s what the eye is drawn to, but we’ve given more definition to what surrounds it.

Like this.

What gets media agencies into the content conversation is, of course, ideas. Ideas give definition to content. They fuel what sort of content needs to get made. And ideas are what clients actually want.

More on that soon, hopefully.

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by jimcaig on October 19, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Creativity, Perspective, Work
Tagged , , ,

Posted by jimcaig on October 19, 2011

http://seewhathappensblog.com/2011/10/19/the-content-conundrum/

Grey areas and colourful arguments

While I’m not expecting anyone to have particularly noticed, I myself am very conscious that I really have been criminally negligent in tending to this blog of late.

The usual reasons: holiday, insanely busy at work, other projects that are very exciting but need loads of attention..

Once I returned I finally got around to looking at some of those drafted-but-never-finished posts that sit there waiting for you to decide what to do with them. Some just included a lone URL, clearly saved in draft form in a bookmarking capacity, never to be fully worked up into a theme. But a couple of embyronic posts were ones I really wished I’d got round to publishing.

One such draft was on an interesting piece of research that got published just under a year ago, by the LSE. It was written by Sonia Livingstone, Head of the Department for Media & Communications there, and was entitled ‘Media and The Family’.  The research examines quite closely the trends and developments in the way these two institutions are slowly re-shaping each other. There are conclusions, but they’re wisely tentative – in such a perennial debate the idea of things being fixed for too long is unlikely.

Anyway here it is in full.

There’s some fascinating tensions here.

If a fragmented media makes for a more varied set of values and influences within families, then it also enables a more diverse and empowering way for family members to assert their individual identities.

Younger internet users might well be considered ‘digital natives’, but they frequently are ill-equipped to get the most from their use – sometimes there can be problems from a lack of maturity, or sometimes from the pure lack resource or access.

None of this stuff sounds disruptive or earth-shattering. But balanced ambiguity rarely does.

(Mark always did say how useless I’d be on a rally – me and my love of grey areas.  What do we want? Well, that depends. When do we want it? When we’ve reached some kind of consensus between all interested parties…)

At the time, though, I thought it a nice riposte to those discussions you have where one faction says that the internet is terrible (turning us all in to zombies with minimal attention spans who can’t be bothered to remember anything, or speak to anyone, because, you know, we don’t have to, what with Google, GPS, the cloud, bookmarking and everything else we can do now wherever and whenever we want) while others dispute the internet’s responsibility for any of this (and even if it is then that’s nothing different to other pieces of technology that had everyone up in arms in olden times / days of yore – like the TV, the printing press, the wheel).

The scariest thing in all this is the sheer certainty with which some people see the world. I admit to the weakness of not really knowing what I think, yet. I’d like to remain agnostic for the time being.

But during my period of blog inactivity there was a far better example of how philosophical difference can be brought to bear on shared evidence. The UK riots and their attendant hand-wringing brought all sorts of attention to social media.

I loved the post Pats McDonald wrote on this for The Social Practice, flying the flag for the benevolence of social media.

I’ve always wondered whether we should see social media itself as either good nor bad. It merely is – and people’s interpretation of it says more about their own philosophical standpoint than it does anything intrinsic to social media itself.

But the LSE’s research reminds us of  the double meaning in ‘the medium is the message’. The medium isn’t merely whatever you choose to put into it, but the medium is our message to ourselves – we cannot helped but be changed by it.

Over time our behaviour, expectations, and socical interaction will all be affected in some way by the use of these tools. They are, after all, the archetypal ‘persuasive technologies’.

So, this research is to be appreciated, as it aims to do nothing more than objectively capture what it thinks is going on right now.

How people will interpret the conclusions is, of course, up to them….

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by jimcaig on September 12, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Behaviour, Community, Perspective, Technology, Work
Tagged , , , , , , ,

Posted by jimcaig on September 12, 2011

http://seewhathappensblog.com/2011/09/12/grey-areas-and-colourful-arguments/

‘Real-time’ isn’t the same thing as ‘now’

The care my son receives on his days at nursery is second to none. I cannot think of anywhere else I’d rather he spent his days. As with all great things, though, there’s a minor quibble. When it comes to paperwork, the place isn’t quite so great.

On Thursday last week I was handed a form to fill in, asking for the changes we wanted to make to the days of the week he attends. These changes would take effect from September. Only problem was the deadline – Wednesday. The day before I’d been given the form.

Now, it doesn’t seem like a big thing. But a decision about which, and how many, days of childcare you need is actually quite an involved one. Think about it properly and you end up trying to predict the shape of two adults’ working weeks for as far as 18 months away. That in turn prompts thoughts over what job you might be in, or want to be in. Where’s your career going? Might you want to have another child? What about moving house?

Answers by yesterday please.

In reality, of course, these questions are just the stuff of life. But I found it fascinating how quickly I was contemplating disproportionately major issues as a result of an apparently innocuous question, though one that I was nevertheless obliged to answer, and to answer quickly.

Having some sort of consensus at home about our medium term plans helped. Happily having just had another baby those are pretty fixed for the time being, but it’s clear how important it is to have constant discussion and efforts to agree on what the priorities are for ourselves and our family. We know where we stand, but if we didn’t then that deceptively simple question might send us into a tailspin.

Dealing with questions thrown at us in the present is easier if we know how they fit it to a wider, longer-term framework. This is as true for businesses as it is for people. Knowing the direction of travel means we’re more likely to keep to the route and take the right turns.

This, essentially, is strategy. But it’s been somewhat buried, I think, in our rush to have conversations with clients about ‘real-time’ planning. We all urge our clients to ‘do’ it, high on a sugar rush of social media conversations and buzz monitoring data. But how is it done? How do we afford it? How do we get clients up to speed?

And most importantly, why?

Because, of course, we’ve inevitably started to conflate this with the most immediate, identifiable and measurable ‘real-time’ activity we see people/consumers doing. Real-time planning has become synonymous with social media, and most of the discussion is reduced to a pretty superficial version of what it could be. Because we can now see stuff happening, we become desperate to do something about it.

Instead of being interested in business performance, though, we get distracted by brand-related buzz. Might this be because it’s this kind of stuff that gives agencies more license to make more advertising? Or, if we must, ‘content’?

I suspect so. Like many buzzy concepts its currency among agencies has outstripped understanding of its nature, and its application to clients’ business. Which means we’re all talking about it, haranguing clients about it, while missing the  substance of what we observe.

Once again, it seems, technology has rung the bell, and agencies have proved themselves as Pavlovian as ever. I hope we don’t have our gaze stolen from the real potential benefits. Or indeed from the kind work involved in bringing them about.

Real-time planning will be incredibly valuable to some organisations. But it needs to do two things. First, it should resonate more deeply within businesses, so decision-makers can see the impact of becoming more agile. Second, it requires the capacity to react and respond to momentary incidents, as they arise, and the ability to evaluate what they mean. Do they represent an opportunity or a challenge to the strategy. You might want to react when trends in your business start to emerge – but only if you know whether those trends are good or bad for long-term strategy. You might want to capitalise on something cultural, or a new insight about the way your customers are behaving – but first you need to be clear on what that new development really means for the brand or the business.

So the key is having more, and new, stakeholders on board.

We can’t react to ‘now’ if we don’t know where we want to be in the future. And we can’t do it if those of a different view of the future aren’t included.

Which is why, just to be sure, I double-checked about the nursery with my wife

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by jimcaig on April 11, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Behaviour, Planning, Work
Tagged , , , ,

Posted by jimcaig on April 11, 2011

http://seewhathappensblog.com/2011/04/11/real-time-isnt-the-same-thing-as-now/

Red hot, red herring… or just read nothing else?

I’ve written a lot about behavioural economics here – for which I apologise. I do find it fascinating, as a means to understand the emotional context for people’s decision-making. After all, in marketing, isn’t that we’re supposed to be obsessed by?

Thought that’s not always the case. I remain frequently amazed how incurious some organisations are about their own customers at times. Perhaps that comes back to the points I made here about the need to systemically provide stimulus and direction to teams and individuals. Anyways, I wanted to make it clear that on no account do I believe behavioural economics is the be-all and end-all. For a start, so much of its value as a discipline lies in how effectively its validated some of what we’ve already been doing: insight, the why behind the what, contextual relevance, compelling messages, providing solutions to problems.

So, it can help us with universal insights, attributable to the uniform nature of our behaviour. But what about the differences between us. In the executive mind resides the stuff that makes each of us unique. The mores, the values, the social norms that guide us. There’s no way we could argue these impulses are uniform or universal. BE can help us establish mechanisms to optimise people’s behaviour, but it’s limited in helping us to address the underlying commitment to that behaviour.

Of course, this is the critique of the behavioural economics put by Mark Earls under the Herd model. Since we’re fundamentally social animals, reducing the analysis of our behaviour to a individual model of behaviour is a mis-step. That’s not to say books like Nudge couldn’t accommodate a social model of behaviour, but it does little to explicitly address it. For a full discussion of the role of networks in public policy (economic or otherwise), go here.

By way of a very quick example that highlights the distinction, at MEC we’ve looked at the area of job-seeking. We found that Choice Architecture thinking was great stimulus to find ways to help make people’s job-seeking behaviour more effective. But it felt little more than tinkering at the edges when attempting to affect people’s evaluation of work as something neither inherently valuable or potentially beneficial.  Is it worth the aggravation to find yourself a job when there’s nothing worth working for?

Real behaviour change required something deeper, overhauling sometimes generations worth of assumptions, a complex mesh of social, cultural and personal norms that no amount of nudging can compete with. Unless, that is, you want to resort to coercion.

So, BE isn’t social, it’s individual.

But beyond that, there’s a sense that the answers it provides might sometimes feel too easy, too uniform, too universal to be right all the time. The distinction between automatic/executive modes of thinking feel bang on. And while BE is great at the automatic, it’s less so on the executive.

And, in this space, there’s another field of study that’s quietly unearthing a wealth of evidence to challenge the idea that we’re ruled exclusively by the need for shortcuts, or that we default always to what’s easiest.

It seems that engaging the executive mind can not only be done, but is frequently achieved by appealing to the best of our psyche, not the most base, or laziest.

For anyone looking for more edifying conclusions as to what unites and delights us, then read on….

In Fun Inc, Tom Chatfield makes a compelling case for Games as a crucible of human insight: it has huge potential to effect change, engage communities, provide psychological insights, diffuse technological advances, influence the way we work, and signpost the way we might all live soon.

And incredibly it does this, not through escapism, fantasy or as the preserve of geeky young men in bedrooms, but by presenting a uniquely calibrated mix of challenge and reward, and making it accessible to an unprecendted number and variety of people.

Video games need to be intuitive – no-one’s being paid to play them. They need to be stretching – anything too easy is boring. Increasingly, they’re community-based, and focus on extraordinarily complex and time-consuming task completion. In short, they make difficult things fun.

And the more difficult things are, the more fun they seem.

That this sort of appeal to our better selves doesn’t only exist in games is strong evidence against the reductive assumptions that nudging makes of us all. Look at YouTube for example. It’s familiar and undeniably mainstream, and is no sense a game, yet it highlights how applicable some of gaming’s most important mechanisms are to us in other realms.

  1. Collecting: as a YouTube user, the capacity to gather a list of ‘favourites’, to be displayed as part of your personal identity, and seen online by anyone else who wants to participate
  2. Points: the secret to all games, and the true addiction. Anyone who’s posted a video can assess their ‘performace’ through the number of views, clicks, stars, and links that make up the public index of your profile
  3. Feedback: evidence of a dynamic community, and an essential element of any site deemed successful, despite it leaving the user open to rebuke as much as reward
  4. Exchanges: a core transactional component of games that underlies the new virtual economies developed within the gaming world – visibile in YouTube in the form of video responses to video posts, with all the tributes, mash-ups, re-edits, etc that we know and love
  5. Customisation: with any profile allowing opportunities to reconfigure their users’ experience, the remake/remodel credo is as strong here as with any avatar

The point to all this, of course, is that none of this is especially easy, but it does represent a course of action taken by a huge amount of people. The YouTube example is illustrative, but the principles could probably be applied to most kinds of social network activity, and are therefore representative of the kind of complexity people are prepared to take on in other, equally public, spheres.

So, behavioural economics makes sense of a lot of things. What is misses out, however, might be the most important element of ourselves. People’s natural leaning can be to be creative, to interact,  to build, to make. And, of course, to work incredibly hard to create social value for themselves and for others.

It means we shouldn’t let ourselves think we’ve found definitive answers.

Which should be easy, as long as we continue to make curiosity a virtue.

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by jimcaig on February 1, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Behaviour, Community, Creativity, Technology
Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by jimcaig on February 1, 2011

http://seewhathappensblog.com/2011/02/01/red-hot-red-herring-or-just-read-nothing-else/

Who’s in charge here, anyway?

Had some more thoughts on the back of the idea of Aristocracy vs Democracy. Obviously, as the (very kind) person who commented on that post suggests, any purely ‘black and white’ approach to these sorts  of questions is probably unwise. It’s dead easy to be provocative, less straightforward to deal with the endless shades of grey that really make up considerations of all things structural.

But I’m betting organisational conundrums are top of most agency bosses’ to-do lists right now. Along with harnessing creativity, I would imagine the biq question is how precisely to deal with the huge changes wrought by technology, currently rampaging across all businesses, and asking massive questions of how agencies should effectively provide the diversifying services that will help them remain relevant to clients at all stages of readiness.

How should different departments work together? How should people in those departments be hired. How do agencies cope with the polarising need for people who specialise in ever-more-micro areas of expertise, and for generalists who can pull all this stuff together and make in tangible to clients?

The Pixar CEO mentioned something powerful in this area. He said that successful companies should be inherently unstable. The organisation that tries to scenario plan, or to second guess every little thing that’s going to come its way, can only get it wrong.

Businesses cannot prevent problems. They can only solve them.

It’s astonishing how few organisations get this, or at least seem to. Even (or rather especially) agencies remain transfixed by old ways of doing things, even as they lecture clients on the need to adapt, and pride themselves on a bespoke approach to each client.

Alright, many now have social media departments or teams, there to advise progressive clients, and liberate slow ones. Some media agencies may be getting into creative and/or production – since what good is the insight that real-time data can tell us, if it’s not put to some tangible application that a client can appreciate? Otherwise, we’re just making them feel bad about how slow they are.

But these innovations can sometimes feel like bolt-ons. We need specialists at first to grow adjacent opportunities, but an agency needs to properly assimilate these practices if it’s going to be the very model of a modern business.

And it’s not just the ‘new’ off-shoots, either. Some media agencies, for example, have ‘strategists’ as well as planners. I’m not sure I understand this. Are they better planners? In which case, why wouldn’t we just make the rest as good? I have a suspicion that agencies are only really as good as their worst practitioner, as the best cannot be spread around, and all clients (and partner agencies) have the power to enhance or degrade an agency’s reputation.

Which brings me back to Aristocracy vs Democracy. The rule of the few vs the rule of the people.

Here’s the thing. I believe that in this age, neither ‘Social’ nor ‘Strategy’ should exist as departments. They are skillsets. They become effective when they are diffused throughout the company, so that they become ways of thinking as much as they are specialisms. They should be democratised, rather than segregated and protected.

I cannot think of one client who doesn’t need strategic and social insight to inform their communications. By sidelining people with these skills, we prevent them having everyday contact with clients. This means we not only fail to encourage new ways of thinking across the business, we also miss a huge opportunity to normalise these essential skills as our bread and butter services.

I understand the grey areas – not least remuneration. But soon enough the issue will become black and white whether we like it or not.

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by jimcaig on November 30, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Planning, Work
Tagged , , , ,

Posted by jimcaig on November 30, 2010

http://seewhathappensblog.com/2010/11/30/170/

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