Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

How Twitter Saved My Sanity

This summer, while preparing to decorate my house, I found a particularly unpleasant outbreak of wood rot in my daughters' playroom.  After much prodding around and spreading of noxious chemicals I was unable to find the water source that creates such a problem.  Knowing the financial implications and hassle involved I was, to put it mildly, hacked off.  A couple of days later I received a letter from Thames Water to say they had found a leak in the street outside my home.  Hardly great news but I was relieved to have found the cause of the rot.  However, then came that sinking feeling at the thought of what was coming next.  I’m sure you know the situation.  A large organisation or company has done wrong by you.  You know it.  They know it.  You know they know it.  They know you know it.  However, you also know that you are going to have to jump through many painful hoops to reach any sort of conclusion and your heart sinks.  And so Thames Water's hoop-jumping began.  I won’t bore you with the details but suffice to say it was everything I expected and dreaded.  Endless emails and phone calls, constant repetition of my problems, surreal responses from people with odd job titles eg ‘leak co-ordinator’ (co-ordinator of leaks?).  Questions about whether the leak (that Thames Water had pointed out to me) had ever actually occurred, random promotional offers thrown in for good measure, and the most mind-numbing, process-driven responses that go on for so long you can’t quite remember why you began and can’t imagine ever finishing.  We’ve all been there right?  What's more, as if to rub salt in the wounds, about half way through this miserable experience I received some promotional materials from Thames Water explaining how I could save water by, for instance, not running the tap whilst cleaning my teeth.  Now being aware that Thames Water had caused a small river to run under my house, I took exception to this and expanded my circle of outrage to Twitter adding : ‘I'm less inclined to follow Thames Water's water-saving advice since finding their leak under our house flowing at 250k litres per year.’  However, following that tweet, much to my surprise I received a response from @thameswater asking how they could help.  I replied that I was already ‘speaking’ to the customer relations department and left it at that.  Secretly I thought that, however much I enjoy Twitter, it was unlikely that the person running the company’s Twitterfeed would be in a position to actually help.  Anyhow, further miscommunication, confusion and frustration ensued with Thames Water until a couple of weeks ago when I once again turned to Twitter to vent my frustrations about the lack of progress.  ‘3 months on, it turns out that @thameswater haven't heard a single word....*sighs*’, I tweeted.   Once again I received a response from @thameswater asking to help.  This time, with the lawyers briefed and the feeling I had literally nothing to lose, I reached out and asked the mysterious @thameswater if they could help me find another way beyond the Kafkaesque world that is the company's customer relations department.  And guess what?  They did.  The very next day the Director of Customer Services, no less, at Thames Water emailed me asking me what the problem was.  He then apologised for the company's lack of responsiveness and by the end of that same day had organised the visit from the loss adjusters that is required to bring about any resolution.  As I write the matter is still a long way from being resolved and many niggling issues remain.  However, I have escaped the miserable merry-go-round that is Thames Water’s ‘customer relations’ department.  A ride I was beginning to feel would eventually suck any remaining sanity I might have retained about the matter.  And that was all thanks to twitter.com/thameswater.  Three months of being passed around from pillar-to-post through a bureaucratic, mind-melting minefield resolved in twenty-four hours by an exchange on Twitter.  Who would believe it? 

Google TV - Marketing's Missing Link?

Computers aren’t made for watching TV on, are they?  This low-level epiphany came to me the other day whilst viewing a thirty-minute show from BBC’s iPlayer on a laptop balanced on my knee. As the programme began my MacBook was a comfortable few degrees above room temperature. Twenty minutes in, however, the whirring machine felt more like a scalding cup of tea gently griddling the skin on my thighs.   Luckily, that’s all about to change as TV is sucked onto the global networked media platform, currently dominated by Search and Social.  Sony’s decision to roll the dice with everyone’s best frenemy Google, now looks like the shot from the starting pistol, with Apple and several well-funded start-ups like Roku and Boxee as the early race entrants.  For the marketing industry it's a change that offers the chance to seriously reinvent its business.  A business that’s still reeling from Silicon Valley’s realisation that global media budgets were up for grabs, rather than the Mad Men’s birthright.  The big change will be based on a very straightforward tweak in consumers' behaviour.  People will be able to merge web services and mainstream TV content on a single large screen in their living room, rather than juggling a red-hot laptop in addition to their three remotes.  Which means that when people see any type of advertising within their personalised, socially-driven schedules they will be able to drop into the brand’s virtual showroom, without leaving their armchair, let alone their living room, whilst their favourite show rolls on without interruption.  They can just click-on the in-show link and a second screen or AppStore will appear where they can read a few customer reviews, pop the brand goodies in their Amazon basket and pay with those Facebook Credits they were sent last Christmas.  Yeah, yeah, so what.  You can do all this now, right?  Interactive television has been around forever and most people combine a smartphone with the TV, rather than put up with laptop-induced skin grafts.  Well, yes.  However, as the ever-prescient Mick James once commented on this blog : ‘There is no limit to human laziness. I find this more and more when I'm online. Drag the mouse all the way up there and click it to get that free content? You must be joking. Thing weighs a ton.’  Whilst additional kit is a boon for geeks and the gadget-crazed, it’s an unwelcome pain for...

Why Earn When You Can Pay?

It’s been five years since I wrote a manifesto called, 'What Is Open Source Marketing?' where I tried to hint at a different view of media based on the trends emerging at the time.  My main suggestion was that the, ‘love affair between big brands and mainstream media is over,’ and that the Open Source Movement gave an idea about where we might all be heading.  Namely, into a people-powered, super-collaborative world where only the only way to garner meaningful attention was to offer channels through which people could participate with your brand.  Unsurprisingly, some of these observations proved to be correct while others were overblown.  Vast open networks where people can collaborate in whichever way they wish have miraculously appeared.  However, TV networks remain just as powerful, albeit without some of the kudos, and have largely resisted any change - to date.  Meanwhile, the marketing industry has roadtested a gazillion 'open' campaigns, with varying degrees of success.  On the positive side there is the most overly-used, yet still rather dreamy, example of marketing openness, Nike+, a largely open platform where people upload detailed personal information about their running lives to a massive American corporation in exchange for community.  The benefits of ‘openness’ to the sports giant have been considerable as explained by Nike-dude Roberto Tagliabue shortly after its launch: 'As of February, 2008, Nike+ members have run over 50,000,000 miles, logged over 14,000,000 runs and issued over 450,000 challenges. We created the world’s largest running club at nikeplus.com. 40% of community members who didn’t own Nike+ ended up buying. That is pretty tangible.'  And on the less splendid side, there is Walmart’s social network - The Hub.  Only ten weeks after the big launch, the site was shut down after a poor reception because it seemed no one wanted to give this other massive American corporation any information about themselves at all.  (In fact I don’t think there’s any mystery here.  The Nike brand was already part of grassroots running communities everywhere, whereas Walmart were seen to be paying lip service).  Which all begs the question why do some open projects work and some do not?  Clearly there has been no shortage of debate on this subject online over the past few years.  However, I thought the blog post by Jono at Mozilla Labs offered a succinct critique - ‘Openness is a lot of work’.  He observes that overuse of the ‘open’ label has meant that, ‘people are starting to attribute near-magical powers to it.'  Furthermore, 'Openness is a policy choice, not a replacement for old-fashioned hard work. I happen to think it’s a good policy choice in many cases: An organization that is open to outside ideas and criticism will learn faster about its own mistakes. It can build more trusting relationships with its users, because it doesn’t have to keep secrets. It attracts self-motivated contributors, and it get more diversity of viewpoints. There’s that old mantra about how, ‘with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow’”.  Jono then decries the rise of some marketing crowdsourcers who assume that just the act of setting up a blog will bring Nike+ style benefits to any project, when the more likely outcome is virtual tumbleweed and awkward client briefings as an analysis of the participants reveals a list of agency friends and family.  ‘Successful open organizations aren’t just unorganized mobs,’ he notes. However, it seems that lessons are being learnt. I put up a Tweet about Jono’s blog post this week and a very lively, little meme began, powered by people who seemed all too well aware, maybe after difficult experiences in the area, of the challenges that ‘openness’ represents for a marketing industry that still prefers to pay than earn.

Linked Data For Dummies

I really liked Michael Hausenblas' imaginative explanation of Linked Data : 'Imagine you’re in a huge building with  several storeys, each with an incredible large amount of rooms. Each room has tons of things in it. It’s utterly dark in that building, all you can do is walk down a hallway till you bang into a door or a wall. All the rooms in the buildings are somehow connected but you don’t know how. Now, I tell you that in some rooms there is a treasure hidden and you’ve got one hour to find it. Here comes the good news: you’re not left to your own resources. You have a jinn, let’s call him Goog, who will help you. Goog is able to take you instantaneously to any room once you tell him a magic word. Let’s imagine the treasure you’re after is a chocolate bar, and you tell Goog: “I want Twox”. Goog tells you now that there are 3579 rooms where there is something with “Twox” in there. So you start with the first room Goog suggests to you, and as a good jinn he of course takes you there immediately; you don’t need to walk there. Now you’re in the room you put everything you can grab into your rucksack and get back outside (remember, you can’t see anything, in there). Once you are outside the building again and can finally see what you’ve gathered you find out that what is in your rucksack is not really what you wanted. So, you have to get back into the building again and try the second room. Again, and again till you eventually find the Twox you want (and you are really hungry now, right?). Now, imagine the same building but all the rooms and stairs are marked with fluorescent stripes in different colours, for example a hallway that leads you to some food is marked with a green stripe. Furthermore, the things in the rooms have also fluorescent markers in different shapes. For example, Twox chocolate bars are...

Now For The Tricky Bit

I started Collaborate Marketing five years ago when I became interested in blogs and the effects of consumers grabbing hold of chunks of the media world that had previously been run exclusively by large profitable MegaMediaCorps.  For a while it seemed that the new digital media wave was going to blow away the old guard.  Instead the media soup’s just become thicker, as everything that can be digitised has been sucked online, constantly adding exotic seasoning to an IP-flavoured broth.  For media and marketing professionals, the world has gone from being a refined a la carte menu of traditional TV and radio fare to a bewildering tapas selection that’s refreshed on a weekly basis.  Indeed, so flexible has the technology become, that some of the new dishes in the networked media world can seem quite bizarre.  The plug-and-play web means a smart hacker can fuse pot plants into his own global energy management system; people can pay real money to have their virtual dogs neutered; others can leave Hansel-and-Gretel style music trails behind them; a social network of people can share credit card purchases; the ‘cloud’ promises mind-boggling opportunities to suck up information about the world.  Now that anything seems possible technically, it’s tempting to think that the hard work has been done.  However, the really tricky part is yet to come.  The next stage is for people to learn how to use all this new wizardry, which can be difficult, particularly when it means unfamiliar types of online collaboration.  While hackers and open source tinkerers like nothing more than linking technical systems or pooling data swamps, most of the world see the walls around them as comforting and reassuring.  Not just inconvenient barriers that need to be smashed down to accelerate disruption.  A common thread of all my consulting work over the last year has been to try and help groups brought together by networked media to operate effectively.  Sometimes these groups are thrilled by the idea of new opportunities to collaborate together.  Sometimes they are appalled at the prospect.  More often they are a little bit of both.  The challenges raised when people are flung together on networked media platforms are devilish and diverse.  For consumers (aka people), sharing the same online neighbourhoods for the first time can feel wonderfully liberating at best, but chaotic at worst.  For professionals in large organisations, the requirement to take the best of the old and mix it with the best of the new can seem like mixing fine wine with Red Bull.  For corporations the opportunity to work across traditional sectors is all too easy to confuse with the appearance of new competitors that need to be crushed.  We’ve rewired the marketing and media world.  Now we need to reinvent the way we work together.

'Information Wants To Be Paid For'

In discussion about Chris Anderson's article suggesting that the web is dead, Catherine Fitzpatrick's comment caught my eye over at the NYT Bits Blog : "Oh, of course not, that's silly. Where do people *go* with their lovely aps on their i-phones and droids? They go...to the web. To Facebook, to Twitter. That is, those websites might now be aps accessing servers and not "the web" in the same way, but they are still open public spaces. As aps mature and develop and take people to more log-on closed spaces, then you might start talking about a big change to the web. And that's ok. That's where the commerce is, and that's where people can make a living. Chris Anderson is wailing because Web 2.5 and Web 3.0 aren't the free opensource sandbox that it was in 1.0's day, hating on "walled gardens" and vandalizing them with technocommunistic formulas of "information wanting to be free". But eventually, organic human society prevails, and doesn't want to live in an open-sourced open culture that is so open that value is lost, that musicians, newspapers, book authors, artists all lose their intellectual property rights and all lose their livlihoods as a result. With the phones, capitalism returns to the web and flourishes on the ashes of the old 1.0 communism. It restores software and its contents as products you can buy with code that is protected and not forced free. It introduces the concept of hooks into proprietary software as API engineers, and not opensource mindless cultism. So it's all good. All sorts of things will start to thrive. Privacy and identity also have a powerful basis in dedicated phone numbers you pay for and which telephone companies, separate from the Googlized web, maintain for you, so that you data isn't scraped and datamined at least by all the IT giants. It's all good. Ads are fine. Put more in. Information wants to be paid for."

The Gift Economy & Internet Karma

I thought Frances Grimble's comment about the way in which the Gift Economy has been adopted online but recently stretched beyond all recognition by mega-social nets is really insightful.  Here's a snippet : "But the Internet, and Internet-related businesses, have exploited this economy to the extent of breaking it down. E-groups consisting of hundreds or thousands of people are described as communities, but most of the members remain relative strangers, and membership is often anonymous or pseudonymous. So what happens is, a handful of people repeatedly supply the relatively higher quality of free information. Everyone else enjoys it with no sense that any return is ever required. There’s an assumption of a kind of Internet karma—no one feels obligated to return a favor because the person providing it will probably somehow, someday get some kind of return from someone else entirely. And, Internet companies where the users are providing the information/favors/freebies—Google et al—are doing their best to exploit any remaining feeling of obligation by taking the credit for what the users give away (or what they sell and parties like Google have appropriated) and transferring that obligation to their companies." Read it all here.

We All Love The Bazaar Now

Eric Raymond’s seminal essay The Cathedral & The Bazaar remains one of the most powerful analogies for the world of media and marketing today. In case you aren’t familiar with Raymond’s work, he explained how in the world of software design, for many years, engineers spent long periods locked away creating huge operating systems in institutional settings that were then wheeled out into the real world for people to admire and to obey.  However, the open source movement changed all that with online systems much more like global street bazaars allowing programmers to gather in informal networks and collaborate on technical projects in an organic manner, adding a little stitch here and a patch there, and always feeding their knowledge back into the main market, which remained forever in public ownership.  For many years Big Brands operated in exactly the manner of Raymond's Cathedrals, building towering spires that required Brand Architects and Guardians to maintain their sanctity.  However, in the shadows of these vast edifices grew global online Bazaars made up of people who found they could organise themselves around their passions, as oppose to the demographical pews ordained by the marketeers.  And gradually the flocks flocked out of the Mainstream Media Cathedrals into the hustle-and-bustle of these online markets.  However, this was just the beginning and people quickly realised that they could not only hang out in the Bazaars but could also bring their own soapboxes along in the shape of blogs.  And eventually, as these little soapboxes grew into giant social networking sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, the Bazaar morphed into a global conversation.  One where people trashed the Big Brand Cathedrals as they pleased, or even helped build new ones, ignoring the pained grimaces of the Brand Guardians and Architects who could only see desecration wherever they looked.  However, that’s now all changed.  Big Brands have come our from behind their lecterns and are fully signed-up...

Google TV - If The Vikings Don't Deliver, The Pirates Will

The technology and media industries have been at war for the last decade. In no small part due to Google reinventing the media marketplace, or ‘f**king with the magic’, as Ken Auletta so memorably noted. Messrs Brin and Page snaffled the lunches of content kings all over the world to create a $160bn corporation. Ever since, their algorithmic tanks have been parked on the manicured lawns of global players, such as Time Warner and Vivendi launching salvo after salvo into their infinity swimming pools. Including sucking up vast swathes of the media industry’s treasured IP and giving it away for free, whilst collecting gazillions of Adwords dollars. In short, there’s been plenty to keep the battle raging and the legal eagles billing. With such history, the recent announcement about Google TV felt like another howitzer blast in the direction of the marketing industry’s Tuscan holiday villas : Mountain View’s last surge into the media world’s ultimate stronghold to grab its most valuable real estate. One slight change to the script is that this time Google has brought along a friend. One with bonafide Hollywood credentials. The Google TV bandwagon includes Sony (owners of MGM, Columbia and Tri-Star), which will be making the kit for the Android powered web TVs. That could help the thawing of relations between Big Media and Big Tech. Maybe a first step in recognising the reality that the geeks of San Jose will never actually produce blockbuster content. While the players of Santa Monica will never actually develop global technology platforms. However, as with all these wonderful new media possibilities, the real options are not restrained by the technology, but by the backroom double-dealings and the beancounters’ carving up the juicy new revenue streams. The world’s media markets are worth something in the order of $600bn annually. And that’s the prize that the execs of Beverley Hills and Sand Hill Road have their respective high-powered sights set upon. As a result, suspicions will remain that Google TV is looking to grab media’s ultimate mega-market. Just as Google Search absorbed the revenues of its beloved print businesses. Or, worse still, that Page & Brin plan to unbundle those pricey 500-channel cable and satellite TV packages, where must-see sports comes complete with never-to-be viewed shopping channels. And that Google TV is actually a kind of giant Hulu. But one where TV execs aren’t pulling the strings. However, a pot of gold remains within sight. Whenever Hollywood Players and Bay Area Geeks sit...

The Joy Of A Gated Community

A couple of years ago, I heard Sir Tim Berners-Lee describe the muddled state of his splendid creation in  this way : ‘If your sink is blocked for a few weeks and you remove the plug to dig out the obstruction, the offending mangled mess of soap, fish bones, human hair and other horrible gunk in which bacteria has set up home, is exactly like the World Wide Web’.  Now, for many tech-heads, geeks, tinkerers, everyone in Silicon Valley and other early-adopters it didn’t get much better than this organic mush.  And the gooey paradise remained intact for a long time.  However, for the mainstream (aka Everyone Else In The World) the web remained a mysterious, slightly sad place where only-the-lonely gathered.  But the online social revolution has blown away this view.  In part, by throwing up some gated communities, such as AppStores and Social Networks, where regular folk can talk to each other without fear of their Gucci loafers getting sullied by geek-grime.  In fact, for many, it even became rather exciting to mix with the technorati and let some of their magic coding dust rub off.  But not too much.  And certainly none of the whiffy stuff.  Personally speaking, gated communities where the comfortably-off huddle from the excrutiating ravages of real life, such as potholes and unmown lawns, always sound pretty dull to me.  However, there are times when we’d all like to withdraw into sanctuaries of expert topiary and poo-free paving, away from the open clutter of the real world.  In such harbours of tranquillity there are no worries about unsightly neighbours or anti-social viruses.  The no-nonsense management are constantly poised, ready to pulverise any shady individual who dares to disturb the peace.  For some, such walled gardens become claustrophobic as they tire of the same faces and fences.  The security guards start to look like prison screws and the disorderly streets where the everyday folk dwell begin to look enticingly vibrant.  (Not that I’ve ever spent anytime in a gated community you understand.  Although I did once spend two weeks at Centre Parcs and was very relieved to escape, er, I mean depart).  However, for many these well-ordered suburban enclaves that consist of friends, family and neighbours is exactly what’s required.  All the time.  And this is what the early-adopters, geeks and webnorati struggle to understand.  The gurus who rail against the vice-like grip of Steve Jobs brighter, lighter, whiter Appstore, or Zuckerberg’s perfectly manicured Facebook empire, overlook that most people don’t want to see what’s blocking their sinks.  And they don't mind if that hardwired convenience means the management is watching over them.  They just want to get on with their happy, gunk-free lives.