Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

Can The Big Egos Please Leave The Building

Most marketing agencies have a few big egos knocking around, often in the creative department.  Frequently the belief is that such individuals are required to come up with the Big Ideas that clients love so much - the brand propositions that everyone in a company can convene around and CEOs can sink the big bucks into.  Sometimes these individuals are able to get away with *ahem* unusual behaviour because it is excused as the flip side of their Big Thinking.  However, this breed may well be coming to the end of its life-cycle.  Why?  As marketing communications become more about pull than push, community over control, peer power not promotion, the personalities involved will reflect that.  Skillful community managers tend to be thoughtful folk - and good listeners to boot.  They are blessed with a natural curiosity about people and an ability to promote the views of others.  Or in other words, a mental make-up that is diametrically opposed to that of your typical Creative Director.  Take Craig Newmark for example, founder of craigslist and one of the world's most successful online community managers.  He has built a 'community service' that covers 570 cities in 50 countries and serves twenty billion page impressions a month.  However, despite being one of the web world's real superheroes, Newmark is best known for his modest profile, including a job title that remains, 'Customer Service Representative'.  Indeed, the idea of a Big Idea seems to be entirely irrelevant to Newmark who says his online empire was built with, 'no vision whatsoever', and that it's, 'all about listening and then listening some more'.  His focus was purely to build a, 'culture of trust'.  Which, of course, all makes a lot of sense.  It's perfectly evident that people would want to join a community based on Newmark's guiding principles of, 'giving people a break' and, 'treating others as you want to be treated'.  Compare this to communities driven by the brand-as-hero school:  my favourite example of which remains Wal-Mart's short-lived community site, The Hub.  The network launched with a range of fun tools for customers to play with, including an invite to create a list of the things they would like to buy at, er, Walmart.  It was the online equivalent of an ego-maniacal CD - 'Enough about me - how do you like my hair?'.  So next time you are with a Big Thinker who is being 'difficult', just relax and let them talk.  Take heart in the fact that the world has heard everything they have to say.  And is just about to switch them off.

Scary Signals

'P2P is a demand signal from the market,' says Cory Doctorow.  If that's the case, what are we to make of The Pirate Bay conviction last week?  For those who don't know, Pirate Bay is one of the world's largest Bittorrent search engines.  It allows people to search through the gazillions of TV shows, films and other entertainment that sit on the web.  This content is broken up into tiny parts and stored across distributed networks of computers, until someone makes a viewing request at which point Bittorrent or another P2P technology will draw the pieces together and put them back in the right order, ready to watch as a film or TV show.  The problem, of course, is that this distribution method is not sanctioned by the people who make and own the content, most of which appears without any advertising.  That's the advertising that pays the wages of the people who make the films and TV shows in the first place.  In the Pirate Bay case these good folk were represented by the IFPI (aka Hollywood).  So why does the world's entertainment industry persist with legal recourse, instead of listening to the 'demand signals' being sent to them through P2P?  The main reason is that P2P file-sharers have been seen as people who steal valuable IP. They must, therefore, be treated as thieves.  But that's misreading the signals.  The real driving force behind the growth of P2P is that it's convenient and gives people what they want, when they want it.  What if you don't want to wait a week to see the next episode of 24?  Or maybe a friend abroad has told you about a great new movie and you want to see it now so you can discuss it?  And, vitally, P2P is also a way for regular folk to distribute their own content and pursue the rock star dream.  Furthermore, with one third of all broadband users worldwide admitting they use P2P there's a massive network effect in place.  One that the entertainment industry will probably never be able to reverse.  However, the truth is that all of these signals are just too terrifying for people in the industry to listen to.  As Mark notes about the latest Digital Britian bashola, many executives in the entertainment industry and beyond, 'are paid to keep the current model going and just don't want to see the digital technology as anything but a means to turbo-charge the current model. It's just too scary to contemplate anything else.'  And this is why Pirate Bay is just one part of the massive bout of creative destruction occuring in our time.  After all, there are plenty of others perfectly happy to listen to the market signals if the uncumbents are too scared.  And despite this court case, Pirate Bay and others like it just keep on rolling, allowing people to create personal media platforms and services of their own design.  As Doc Searls says, 'in networked economies the demand side supplies itself'.

Marketing Buffoons

If you are marketing into the social space you should read this.  A London-based blogger and mum tells marketing folk how it is: "This mass marketing strategy baffles and worries me in equal measure. When it's all a bit random, when it's clearly a case of "grab these email addresses, fire off some emails, tell 'em what a savvy blogger they are, and bingo, let's sell some washing powder"...I just think: there are a lot of unemployed people about, yet clearly the culling process has not yet extended to the buffoons in marketing."  The 'American companies' in question clearly need an outbound spam filter...

I Am An Outbound Spam Filter

A few weeks ago a client generously told me that they valued my contribution because I was trying to, ‘do good stuff’.  'In fact', his colleague added lightheartedly, 'you are our outbound spam filter'.  The remark was clearly intended as a compliment but initially I was confused.  The client's company was not to my knowledge a great user of low-down spamming techniques.  However, I soon realised that the comment didn't refer to unwanted email but more generally to traditional ‘push’ marketing.  I really liked this fun description and it also set me thinking.  Traditional marketing isn't really like spam - is it?  Clearly spam, the underground practice of harvesting emails from the web and launching bulk campaigns pushing largely illegal goods, is a long way from the activities of the mainstream marketing industry.  However, it's fair to say that both involve dispatching commercial messages to large audiences in the hope that one or two individuals will be interested.  That aside, traditional marketing, in its defence, exists around a positive exchange where people accept some promotion in exchange for free or subsidised media and entertainment.  But there's no doubt that this exchange has been abused to the point that people now use filtering technology beyond their email box.  Sky+ and Freeview allows viewers to ‘avoid’ television advertising.  Adblockers let people remove banners and pop-ups from their surfing.  Direct mail can be stopped through the Mailing Preference Service.  So, increasingly, traditional marketing and spam, while different entities, do share some characteristics.  Which, considering that spammers are thought of as semi-criminal pondlife, can hardly be positive.  But what's the alternative?  If you can’t buy attention for your messages through paid media, what can you do?  A while back I suggested that that as media becomes increasingly networked and socially driven, brands will need to ‘earn the right’ to operate through positive participation.  Only this mindset will allow them to build the goodwill that is the lifeblood of the modern social web.  The web that the majority of their customers probably now use in some shape or form.  I noticed this week that Fred Wilson has picked up on a similar notion that he describes as Paid Media vs Earned Media and suggests it's just good business.  The practicalities of this earn-it approach are creating something of value that people genuinely want, seek out and recommend.  And committing to that over the long-term.  Or as my client put it - ‘do good stuff’.  So there it is.  After years of trying to describe my job to my family, friends and professional associates, it turns out that I am an, ‘outbound spam filter’.  Not the most graceful job title in the world.  But at least there’s a future in it.

Picking Up Your Customers' Breadcrumbs

As the UK Parliament prepares to publish to the world 1.2 million receipts, invoices and bills from MPs' expenses claims, the media awaits to rummage through the detritus.  After all, it’s the tiny details about each others lives that fascinate us, right?  I sniggered along with everyone else about the viewing habits of Mr Jacqui Smith.  But it was the Home Secretary’s eighty-eight pence claim for a bath plug that caught my attention.  And I'm not alone it seems.  It’s this natural interest in sharing and comparing the details of our lives (intended or not) that makes the social web tick over.  For a long time, such titbits were left online only by geeks and the technorati.  However, now that forty-three per cent of the UK’s online population are members of Facebook, these trails of digital breadcrumbs are becoming more common.  It's easy to see these digital trails as banal.  Individual instances about breakfast habits, for instance, can appear quite pointless. However, when viewed as ongoing narratives, they become rich representations of peoples' lives. Narratives to which we can all relate.  For the marketing industry these breadcrumb trails should be viewed with delight, particularly during economically difficult times.  With a few simple tools, and a curious individual or two, it quickly becomes possible for a brand to...