Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

Obama - The Revolution Will Be Televised

When it comes to online marketing and fundraising Barack Obama learnt everything he knows from Howard Dean, the Democratic nominee in 2004, and his adviser Joe Trippi who documented the campaign in all its failed glory in the must-read book, ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’.  It’s a great title but turns out to be totally wrong.  The Obama revolution is being televised on a scale that dwarfs all other campaigns.  So how is it that the world’s first presidential candidate to really 'get online' is such a big fan of TV?  The answer lies in the fact that Obama and his team learnt a lot about what works from the Dean campaign, but also a lot about what doesn’t.  In short, Dean’s online campaign ‘Blog For America’ did a great job of bringing supporters together into a movement, but that movement wasn’t very successful as an advocacy vehicle.  Obama has addressed that – and in some style.  He has encouraged his online movement to become an incredibly powerful advocacy tool and get beyond existing believers, in three key ways.  Firstly, he asks people to draw on the energy and inspiration of the massive Obama community by becoming involved and interpreting it for themselves.  Secondly, he gives people the tools to direct their efforts to recruiting new volunteers, not just reinforcing one another’s view of the world.  And finally, using the mind-boggling funds he has generated with these first two techniques he has ensured that the message comes blasting out of the community to the wider world - on TV.  Thereby avoiding the echo-chamber effect experienced by Dean and many other communities.  Obama's campaign illustrates a point I have been making of late.  Frequently in my conversations about networked and social media there is a sense that people feel they have to make a choice.  That they can either stick to traditional techniques or go all out and embrace the new world of community-building, blogs, networked or social media and other peer-to-peer techniques.  My point is that the choice is not one or the other.  The best thing to do is both.  To take the best of the old and the best of the new and blend them together to create a superior modern approach.  No one (in their right mind) believes that television is about to disappear, although it already looks very different from the past, and is losing its utter dominance of the media world.  However, it still reaches the parts that other media cannot reach.  It’s not just the world that Obama may change next Tuesday.  He could be rewriting the marketing books along the way.

Compared With What?

I always like it when someone poses the ROI question in discussions about the social web - 'What's the return?'.  Recently, I have found myself responding by asking, 'Compared with what?'.  This may sound like a clever-clever response but it isn't meant to be.  There has long been a sense of what different aspects of the marketing mix are good for.  PR is good at explaining complicated messages but its value is really difficult to quantify.  TV is the big blunderbuss that gets across the banner headline but the metrics look increasingly creaky when justifying its price.  DM is a good way to build data and customer profiles that can drive action but it has a junk problem, especially in the recycling age.  Sponsorship builds good long-term recognition but can be a very expensive tactic.  Print can be targeted and deliver wonderful visuals but isn't terribly interactive.  Search is great value but doesn't build brands.  Radio is relatively cheap but (obviously) isn't visual.  But social media hasn't found its place in that intuitive ranking system because it's new and in flux.  And my question is intended to define the role of blogs, video sharing, communities and social networks in that broader context.  One obvious but very big difference is that most marketing tools have an established metrics system based on media effectiveness.  However, social or networked media doesn't have such a system because it's not about measuring media.  It's about measuring the interaction between people.  The irony here is that measuring social media is very easy to do in practice, but very difficult to do in theory.  On the modern web you can see if people are interacting with you through analytical tools that interpret what is happening in real-time, or just by counting how many people are talking to you and seeing what they are saying.  For instance, it's really easy to see if a blog or online community is popular or not - and with who - by looking at the comments or seeing who is linking to it.  However, this approach doesn't really fit in a theoretical conversation such as, 'If we invest in this media plan we will reach x percentage of the demographic over this period of time which means a unit cost of y'.  Which is what most mainstream media does.  We all know blogs, communities, forums, social nets and other networked media are very real in practice. But they're invisible in theory.  Which makes people's heads hurt.  I'm sure the area will develop its own place in the intuitive marketing armoury over time.  But only if people continue to ask that ROI question.

Apple - Now A Phone Company?

I know there are plenty of people out there who think Apple get too much fanboy credit but the iPhone story really bears scrutiny.  The latest financials allow Steve Jobs to claim that his company, 'is the third-biggest maker of cellphones in the world by revenue, after Nokia and Samsung.'  And the cash story is just as impressive : 'In the quarter ended in September, Apple said iPhone sales represented 39 percent of the company’s $11.6 billion in revenue. That means Apple sold $4.5 billion worth of iPhones in the quarter.'  Which also means it's selling more phones than computers, although the distinction hardly seems worth making.  For marketeers it's a great story, not so much as a campaign, but because the iPhone has created a new consumer marketplace populated by groovy, young folk.  The bigger trend still is that that companies are now building devices that are successful not because of the software they have on board, but because of the way they access software and data on other devices, or the web.  Also see Howard Stringer, Sony's Grand Fromage, on the subject here at about 16.40.  Again, its seems, (degrees of) openness wins.

'You Want Culture? Then Rent It.'

Lawrence Lessig is the inventor of the Creative Commons license, a 'copy-left' system, that seeks to rebalance the world of copyright and in doing so allow people greater freedom of self-expression. Lessig is a Stanford Legal Professor and super-smart individual.  However, his arguments sometimes get lost in the complex technicalities of the subject - in spite of the rather splendid, 'Lessig Method'.  So I was pleased to see this video where he explains his point of view in plain language: "To my generation what they (young folk!) are doing doesn't seem important because we've never done it.  You want culture then rent it, watch it, sit on your couch and enjoy it.  But younger generations say, 'Why is what I'm doing illegal?  I'm creating, I'm re-expressing, I'm criticising, I'm spreading ideas.'  But the reality is that under our law - that's illegal."  To my mind, this goes right to the heart of the changes that networked media has introduced.  Today, you don't rent culture, you participate and create it for yourself.  For modern marketing that creates plenty of challenges but, equally, many opportunities.

P2P Search - The Secret Economy

A new service has been launched that allows advertisers to access the underground world of P2P Search, writes Jon Healey.  Whether brands feel ready to enter such unchartered territory remains to be seen but they may think twice as figures about its scale begin to emerge.  "Just compare Web searches to the activity on file-sharing networks. According to comScore, Web search engines answer queries about 400 million times per day. Those searches generate more than $20 billion a year in advertising. But by data security firm Tiversa's count, file-sharers search for content on p2p networks about 1.5 billion times daily. That's almost four times the volume of Web searches."  This is a tricky play, fraught with legal greyness.  One the one hand it could be a way to finally legitimise the vast world of P2P services such as LimeWire.  However, can Hollywood bring itself to provides revenues to organisations they have been trying to close down for more than a decade?  Maybe the pirates will get their gold after all! 

(Btw, P2P Words sounds like a great cockroach).

Blog School - Getting Down To Business

John Gapper, the FT's Chief Business commentator no less, says that business blogging has reached a tipping point (via his own blog of course).  Gapper points to a stable of heavyweights including Joe Nocera of the New York Times, Justin Fox of Time/Fortune, Daniel Gross of Newsweek and, natch, Robert Peston of the BBC.  It seems that the blogopshere's transformation from, "sad, joyless people in their underwear who sit in front of their computers all day," to influential market-makers is complete.  A good deal of my professional work is blog training in one form or another.  My aim, as ever, is to bring the subject alive and create blogging plans that people find engaging and sustainable.  I also spend time exploring how writing for the web is different from writing for other media.  Earlier this year a journalist client of mine christened the sessions Blog School - a name which has stuck.  If you fancy joining the new breed of business bloggers but aren't too sure where to start, you can find out more here.

Where Are The Marketing Cockroaches?

In this essay Paul Graham explores how innovation and good ideas can still flourish in a recession. "Fortunately the way to make a startup recession-proof is to do exactly what you should do anyway: run it as cheaply as possible.  For years I've been telling founders that the surest route to success is to be the cockroaches of the corporate world.  The immediate cause of death in a startup is always running out of money. The cheaper your company is to operate, the harder it is to kill.  Fortunately it has gotten very cheap to run a startup, and a recession will if anything make it cheaper still.  If nuclear winter really is here, it may be safer to be a cockroach even than to keep your job.  Customers may drop off individually if they can no longer afford you, but you're not going to lose them all at once; markets don't reduce headcount."  Graham, as an uber-hacker and innovative VC is talking about the Silicon Valley tech bubble.  However, as the media and marketing world goes through its own hard times there will, no doubt, be many cockroaches emerging from the rubble to satisfy modern consumers' needs.  Which areas do you think they will be in?

Round One Goes To Hulu

Wired has a great account of the birth and growth of Hulu, the front running Web TV platform from Fox and NBC.  The article's interest comes from its focus on business issues and how seemingly resolute, dyed-in-the-wool thinking was quickly overcome.  "Kilar (aka Mr Hulu) won their (studio execs) support by explaining the obvious: In a world of limitless choice, 10-year-olds are no longer going to race home to catch a TV show. Admitting that fact means surrendering the scheduling power the networks have always enjoyed and putting a lot of their profits at risk. But Kilar focuses on the opportunity. If you were a network exec, he says, playing with his cheese-and-veggie scramble, "and I told you here was a tool that enabled your content to be shared, to be forwarded, to make your audience your most powerful marketing vehicle—it would be music to your ears, right? This is a tectonic shift, and what it does is allow network heads to find the audience they always should have had but couldn't reach."  Compare this to the story of Joost, which for a long time looked like it was going to be the Web TV service to beat, but suffered from the decision to use a client application rather than go straight-to-browser and not having direct access to the studios and their legal know-how.  It also, ironically, may have suffered from feeling it had no, or very little, competition.  Whereas Hulu seems to have been a response to a very significant threat in the shape of YouTube.  This has left Joost playing catch-up and needing to push increasingly ambitious schemes such as Live TV.  But for now, Hulu has had the last word, due to its radical outlook rather than radical technology, as illustrated by this quote:  "Hulu is weeks away from unveiling a tool that lets users embed the Hulu service itself into their Web site. Soon you'd be able to stick all of online television into your blog. Finally, after decades of dictating what we can watch and when, the networks would be reduced to a Web widget, functioning at the user's whim. Just as it should be."

Who Needs A Label?

The music industry remains fascinating from a marketing perspective as the distribution networks driven by its fans become increasingly influential and start to supercede the structures of the Big Labels.  This interview at TorrentFreak with a young musician gives a great flavour of what radical change looks like from the Y-Gen perspective.  “'Labels will complain and sue their very core audience just to make a dollar. I can’t blame them, it’s the way they’ve built their company. Change scares them, especially when they don’t control it. I honestly believe that I wouldn’t be a musician today if Napster hadn’t appeared. I think Napster fostered the incredible current musical culture and nobody gives them credit for it. I find it very hard for an upcoming artist to get any exposure without being willing to promote their music on p2p networks.'  The clash between artist and labels, and the ever increasing piracy statistics are forcing the big labels to rethink their business models. Nowadays, BitTorrent has the power to promote artists based on their music, not on the advertising budget. It is hard to deny that the music labels are in a crisis, however, music itself is more alive than ever before."  As Doc Searls says, 'in networked economies the demand side supplies itself'.

What Is The Blogosphere?

In an interview this week the Grand Madame of Madison Avenue and uber-boss of Ogilvy, Shelly Lazarus, spoke about current client queries noting that, among other things, brands wanted to, "know how to deal with the blogosphere."  Remembering that the type of clients that Lazarus talks to are super-senior grand fromages of their own, this comment bears scrutiny.  First of all, what is meant by 'the blogosphere' these days?  People who use blogs you fool, I hear you cry.  Well, while that may be technically correct, it is in increasingly misleading.  The term blog lost any precise definition sometime ago as people used it variously to describe websites, forums, social networks, Twitter, Flickr, del.icio.us, YouTube and mostly just people doing stuff online.  On occasion this was overlaid with a mysterious sect of folk called 'bloggers' who were viewed as troublemaking, angry, mischevious loners trapped in a strange echo chamber of their own making.  Then, further confusion was added to the blogosphere when professional journalists started using Wordpress et al in anger, bringing huge media brands into what had previously been a lively coffee morning for the world's geeks.  In a time when most Facebook profiles probably see more action than your average blog site, and the idea of sharing your life online, for some demographics at least, isn't weird but just what you do when you get up in the morning, it's unwise for clients to talk about 'the blogosphere'.  Instead, they should be relieved that they can drop the techie references and strange language and revisit the blogosphere as something they know all about.  Yes, it may be a new style of networked organisation and an ever-evolving environment.  But the blogosphere is driven by something they are completely familiar with.  People.