The revolution of the social web is nearly completed.

From a brand and marketing comms perspective, soon enough a presence on social platforms (predominantly a facebook page, considering the fact that facebook is about to become dominant in social as much as google is the single player in search) will become hygiene in a similar way that every brand now has a website.

And then what?

Then we’ll see a magnificent display of Sturgeon’s law (oh wait we’re seeing it already!). The novelty of social, humanised brands will fade out and people will get pretty bored with the whole chattiness thing. I wholeheartedly believe that the vast majority of people don’t want any ‘extra’ layer of relationship with the vast majority of brands (“I had a bad commute after an average weekend thanks you very f**ing much”). And in as much as personal profile pages fast becoming irrelevant so do branded social spaces.

The legendary Ted of innocent wrote earlier this week that

when, and if, social media reaches tipping point there could quite easily be a divide in those that got in early and have (reach/ market share/ and lessons under their belts), and those that didn’t and have-not”. It’s a very interesting observation from someone who got there early, done some great stuff and keep learning.

My prediction is that similarly to the evolution of the (personal) blogosphere brands and social spaces will go in three possible directions:

1. The big Haves

These are the very few brands that both have what you can call “the social mojo” and who got there early and reached a scale (whatever scale means for them) and some understanding of what is the value for their audience as well as for the brand (read ROI). These are the Starbucks of the world who not only reached a scale but cleverly integrated/adapted their business and culture to the social mode.

2. The small, sophisticated Haves

Sometimes scale is not the main thing and some brands will realise / learn that getting closer to your core few is much better than talking to uninterested masses. These brands will find the value in doing great stuff to a small but valuable group of people and maintain a healthy, sustainable relationships with them. These are the brands that will find their voice, purpose and value proposition whether that means doing real-time customer service, brand’s storytelling or open-innovation.

For both types of Haves it will be (it already is) much more about the other stuff that happens outside the owned social spaces that will drive growth of audiences and interaction. It’s the great products, services and marketing that will keep people’s interest and love and get them back to the social space. Put differently, it’s only your business, brand and marketing strategies that will increase your social mojo.

3. The have-not’s

This is going to be the fate of most brands on facebook (or Twitter). Look around you and you can already see thousands of branded pages or twitter acounts that are so lame, screaming lack of purpose, so me-too without minimum understanding of the space and a strategic direction. Unsurprisingly these brands fiddling around with few hundreds or few thousands of Likes/Followers. Soon enough they will get bored and frustrated from the no return and will simply ditch their spaces (or facebook will become a massive graveyard for deserted branded pages). Unlike your website which is absolute hygiene and can be fairly static a branded social space needs constant TLC and that means time and money. The days that brands will pay someone external to sit and do that chit chat banter on their behalf without proving real value are numbered.

Discuss etc.

First, there is no such one thing as social media to relate to so any categorical question/answer/statement related to social media is very problematic. This point applies to the question “should social media be handled in-house or outsourced to agencies”. There are so many aspects to social media so there simply cannot be a black or white yes or no answer to this question.

Generally speaking still, you can narrow down ‘social media’ to three key areas for which you can ask the outsource vs. in-house question:

Community management:

This is the most relevant area for the question above. Managing your permanent presence online (your company blog, facebook page, Twitter account etc). There are 3 possible solutions here:

a) Done completely in-house – this is personally my preferred solution and there are enough examples out there from the awesome innocent people, Yorkshire Tea, Zappos and Dell, when a business takes the digital and social culture seriously and invest in internal resources it is much more cost effective but more importantly it says something about your brand. Being hands-on is always a good thing.

b) But sometimes internal processes, knowledge, structure and personnel simply wouldn’t allow for an in-house team. In this case a dedicated community manager(s) work along side the brand team but with ongoing guidance and direction from the agency that helped recruit and train this person. so it’s a 50-50 ownership and direction. I’ve done it with few clients and in many cases this is the only feasible solution and as close as you get to in-house.

c) In some cases brands are simply either too busy or too lazy to even care about social and for all they care as long as the job is done it can be a cleaning company that handle their spaces. They are happy with an intern in a social media agency to be their voice online. The results of this solution are usually (but not always) lame. Not my cuppa.

Creative development

This is the area that brand will need the help of their agencies just as they need them for any other creative direction whether it’s ATL, BTL or digital. For your social media oriented campaigns and so called ‘conversation starters’ clients with no in-house creative team definitely need a great creative agency to help them in this area.

And BTW on this point the Lean Mean Fighting / Coke case comes under this category and was just an unfortunate incident. It was a super awesome campaign that very very few brands could pull out in-house. Coke and others reaction was completely out of proportion IMHO

Monitoring, measurement and reporting

Again, no black and white answer. Some clients prefer to be hands-on, trained on the ongoing monitoring dashboard while some will want to pay for this service like they pay for any other research brief – both are completely reasonable and legitimate. Similarly campaign tracking and reporting will normally be done by the agency but can be shared by the client.

Any thoughts?

Nooooooo!

The focus on the ‘channel’ is dafter than daft. What the old spice success has proved IMHO is entirely different:

It proved, yet again, that great ideas, well, they work! I find it a great reminder of the art and science of advertising. The success of the man your man can smell like was down to that rare stroke(s) of genius: first and foremost the quality of copywriting. Comic writing is arguably the most difficult form and the W+K team nailed it with immortal phrases (“Silver fish hand catch!”) that will forever remain in our popular culture. Then of course the combination of genius writing with the perfect casting and acting. Can’t imagine anyone could have done it better than Isaiah. That was the Art.

All the rest was ‘just’ the science, from the initial media planning and buying all the way to the ultra clever extension to real-time production as a live dialouge with loads of people from Twitter, facebook and youtube. Piggybacking or simply milking the success of the original ad was not least brilliant but something which has been achieved through great outreach strategy and admirable understanding of the culture we live by.

‘naff said.

PS: The ever too clever Graeme talked about cause and effect from a slightly different angle (read it here it’s good)

2008 Tiger walks on water

EA grabs our attention with a very quick, clever and wit response to a youtube video posted by a user of a game who allegedly discovers a ‘glitch’ in the game. It took EA 2-4 weeks to produce and launch this video:

2009 Meerkat rides on twitter waves

The campaign of the year. A stroke of genius peppered with herd and luck makes a surprising talking animal a social media hero. The brand and VCCP were fantastic at responding to the popularity of the meerkat with lots of banter, fun dialouge that extended the character’s personality, most notably their hall-of-fame response to @stephenfry twit-pic of a powercut ordeal. Credit were deserves etc. The meerkat pave the way for what we saw last week.

2010 @oldspice man owns the internet

Unless you were on the moon last week you couldn’t avoid LOLing at the absolute-fuckin-awesomeness of @oldspice. One blogger quite rightly said that for 24hours @oldspice man ‘owned the internet’. I can’t think of a better complement for a marketing activity.

Niiiiice.

I’m feel really fortunate to do what I do at these super exciting times.

Now there’s been some interesting writings about our changing notions of ownership. Increasingly, some predict, people will question the need to pay for and pack their living room with piles of CDs / Vinyls or their hard drive with 300 gigs of music when you can (soon) stream every song in recorded history.

Ownership, in this scenario, will become an antiquated concept, no longer applicable to current conditions. Some people believe that the concept of ownership is going to disappear completely. For the digital natives, there wouldn’t be any difference between owning music and streaming it wherever and whenever you want. The notion of “not having that album” will be totally alien to them; they have everything, always.

I think that this scenario is missing something crucial in human psychology. If you think about ownership only through pure economic prism (there are tons of studies that show how ownership lead to increased perceptions of value) you are prone to misrepresenting the complex nature of value, or more specifically, sentimental value.

Talk to any music fan about their collection and what you are unlikely to hear is “I’ve got £17,400 worth of CDs here”. The value of the music we own and consume is far more complex than it’s economic value. It’s neither a case of pure intrinsic or final value nor is it a case of instrumental value. The relations we have with the music we own are at the center of a triangle whose points are defined by emotion, memory and the self. People invest a lot more than money in the music, (or films and books) they own.

Because sentimental value is personal rather than universal the notion that “not having that album” will be in the near future an alien concept because we have everything, always, seems pretty weak to me.

But two crucial questions remain:

1. How is the shift from physical to digital changing our relationships with objects and content?

2. How is the notion of super-abundance (i.e. the cloud) changing that triangle of emotion, memory and the self?

Will Thalia (my 2 years old) still collect music? Physical, digital, owned or not, will her generation still develop similar attachments (sentimental values) that we have with our stuff?

Until very recently, LIKE, for me, was the lukewarm, shy cousin of LOVE.

“I like you” was merely a regulator, a milestone on the path to saying “I love you”. Of course it also means to favour something (not just someone) but personally, I find that there is something quite vanilla-ish in the word Like, some reservedness or lack of passion, almost banal.

And then almost overnight LIKE took a massive turn. From linguistic mundane LIKE has evolved to be a currency, a clickable human gesture, a mass behavior (I wonder how many global LIKEs are clicked every day).

Of the many things and stuff we LIKE everyday now, naturally, one very interesting area to research this new behaviour is the relationships between people and brands. Who would have thought two years ago that LIKE will evolve to be a desired behaviour featured as comms target on clients’ briefs.

It might seems like just as a semantic turn but to me it feels as if something in the (symbolic) power relations between people and brands has slightly changed in the shift from “Become a Fan” to “Like”. ‘Like’, until recently, was a gesture kept to our friends’ status or a photo etc. Today, brands overtly want people to like them. Turns out it’s good for business

Don’t you find it a bit ingratiating and even forced? I can’t help seeing something approval-seeking in ‘Like’ in this context.

With Become a Fan it was different. Become a fan is like an invite to a membership of a club or a community. Now I just have to LIKE you. A bit of a downgrade if you see what I mean?

This is exactly the point where the whole “brands are like people” becomes a bit odd. This is why I’m a bit ambiguous with the culture of “Like-bribing” – Like as a condition, requirement we have to fulfill in order to get into your world.

No LIKE – no in!

So when everyone gone crazy about how Nike made it big in ‘digital’ (and social!) by hiding the new World Cup ad behind the Like button, like Andy, I really found it quite cheeky. We’ll let you see our new (a-may-zing BTW) ad only if you’ll like us (AND of course, not only that, you will have to tell all your friends that you LIKE us.)

Brands are like people, they say. But Nike you’d all agree is like the coolest boy (or girl) in the class. People like him anyway for who he is and what it does. Surely if he throws a party he won’t ask people to like him in order to get in? No, that’s totally uncool. He will let everyone in first and only after everyone had a good time he will quietly enjoy seeing his popularity rates go even higher.

There are very few brands that can get away with that (that’s true to all ‘forced -into-newsfeed’ interactions, e.g Massive Attack’s Tweather. If your content is good I’ll talk about it but it’s quite rude to ask people to help you with your marketing before you even showed them what you’ve got. Nike should have had more confidence in the quality of the content (hell, it’s the best ad of the year so far) for it to earn them Likes without making it a condition for viewing. My verdict: not on-brand.

On the other hand there are other equations, other Like practices which I find far more appealing. The best example is Hyper’s recent campaign for Pedigree adoption drive. The value proposition was totally different – here we asked people to Like Pedigree and for every Like, pedigree donated 50p to dogs’ rescue centres around the country. People’s Likes were a symbolic invitation to do good on people’s behalf. (Of course Zizek would argue that this is just as manipulative as the Nike behaviour but hey, I’m not a new-communist cultural theorist, and I like good, clever or awesome marketing)

So to conclude the ramblings everyone and everything around us want you to like them today. The meaning and value of ‘Like’ will keep evolving in interesting ways. I wonder if it will stick. Or perhaps it will quickly loose it’s novelty and become so ubiquitous and banal it will eventually be meaningless.

What do you think?

I thought it’s be nice to compare their performance, mainly from a social media traction point of view.

Diesel one hundred lovers – In case you’ve missed this awesome piece – inspired by Goddard’s “Bande a Part” movie, the video features 100 lucky selected people re-creating the famous dance. Based on special stop-motion technique, the lovers appearing in the video rapidly change, along with their clothes, all while appearing to continue to smoothly follow the choreography of the dance. The video is fully interactive: you can pause it, rolling over individual items to get further product information, buy them online and also find information about the people featured; allowing anyone to link into their activities and interests on their social network personal pages – making it the world’s most awesomely social interactive fashion catalog.

Utweet from Uniqlo, one of the most culturally digital brand out there, known for their simple ideas and slick execution. UTweet simply puts a funky little song and dance to your recent tweets, running them through several animations and as your stream is running so do some beautiful people wearing Uniqlo t-shirts.

There is very little to compare between these two projects, however, going back to the core of their initial objective (get people to see our new and interact with our brand products) both seem to have done well but in a slightly different way.

Note: one big unknown here is any media spend.

From what I was able to gather (using different tools and public data)

Diesel a hundred lovers:

187 blog posts

11 news items

378 related tweets

Over 1 million views of the final video

uTweet

456 blog posts

15 news items

27,947 tweets (!!!)

uTweet plays – ? (this one is key – can anyone help me find this data?)

Conclusions:

1. Be awesome - both brands created slick beautiful executions that once seen is hard not to interact with.

2. Do something with people – when you approach your brief with the question “what can we do with the people we want to reach” (insted of what can we say to people) you are bound to come up with much more interesting, engaging answers that actually bring value to both people and brand.

3. Personal instant gratification is key to spreadability – ‘conversation wise’ (i’m doing my best to avoid using viral here) it looks like uTweet had much more traction on public social platforms (blogosphere and twitterverse). It have reached millions of people by letting people have some fun with their social stream. Nothing innovative but admirable simplicity, playfulness and very slick execution made people happy and they couldn’t help but shouting about it. Simple, slippy ideas win.

4. Being culturally digital pays – as I mentioned earlier there is nothing innovative about uTweet. If you want to be even more critical abuot it you could even say they are taking the piss – making you to look at their clothing through your visually pimped twitter stream. But the fact that it’s Uniqlo and the culture of anticipation they have created over the years with their beautifully crafted digital toys made it one of the most successful campaigns of the year. Very few brands could have managed to pull out something like that and take home millions of mentions/ interactions.

Apart from the much needed break and the (leaned) ability to not be (self) distracted one thing I found really fascinating (again) is how social publishing tools rewrite our social cognition and how when Twitter is becoming integral part of your communicative life, it mediates your experience of things.

You react to and sometimes even process a whole bunch of situations, from the most mundane to the most significant, through the prism of this new self-other relationships. If i had the time i’ll be writing about it in the context of the Dialogical-Self.

On a slightly different note, as an introspective exercise, I took note anytime that I instinctively wanted to tweet. When I looked at all the tweets as notes this morning they looked (un?)surprisingly out of place/time. Some random insignificant snippets of life that when seen outside of their place/time/context they almost become somethimg else altogether – here you go, judge for yourself:

Tayaabs is not the same without @therealshemi

2K morning swim now being offset by having Thalia on my shoulders for 2 hours

Brunching with Thalia at Graceland Kensal Green (4sqr)

OMG Sarkozy sr. portrait of Carla Bruni is so tacky! He should have a stall in Camden market.

Shut your horsey face you loud f**k you’re waking up my baby!

Posh Meryl Streep look-a-like in a convertible Porsche sporting a minicab-driver-like Bluetooth Headset. #seriously?

Principles are meant to be broken? But sometimes you need Cbeebies at 10AM to babysit! #parentingdilemas

[if you want to skip the words and just join the group]

So Constantine films decided to join the hall of fame of media dinosaurs who simply don’t get contemporary culture and brutally savage the wonderful showcase of recombinant culture that are the hundreds of Downfall spoofs that have been created since the film was launched.

Under anachronistic copyright low, they have now taken down quite a lot of these hilarious videos which are merely a brilliant commentary on contemporary life and became such a brilliant internet meme that made millions of people aware of Downfall some of whom are bound to have bought it. How can these people be so stupid?

Hell, even the Oliver Hirschbiegel, the film’s director said: “Many times the lines are so funny, I laugh out loud, and I’m laughing about the scene that I staged myself! You couldn’t get a better compliment as a director“.

While I’m not really the campaigny type of person, I created, with the help of Ben a facebook group to call Downfall filmmakers, Constantin Film group to abort their campaign to take down all user generated Downfall spoofs from youtube.

Join here.

…and the reactions will come I hope… I just found this brilliant video which says it all:

Hitler, as “Downfall producer” orders a DMCA takedown from Brad Templeton on Vimeo.

So many cleverer people than myself have talked and written about remix culture but the most prominent figure is no doubt professor Laurence Lessig from Harvard Business School. If you haven’t read one of his books or watched him speak you really, really should.

The last advertising agency on earth my ass.

Sorry ya’ all but that’s just another shallow, smug, so-2006, new-media-evangelists-hyperbollocks. Aren’t we over the advertising is dead mantra already? Advertising agencies are not going anywhere. Bad business is screwed whether they are selling juice or advertising. Or not. There are quite a lot of shitty brands or less than mediocre ad agencies that still make good business.

Come on, most advertising has always been and will always be shit. Like most of all stuff is shit. As I write this post I’m watching a re-run of Friends on E4 and the ads on the break are simply generic beauty brands crap that look the same for 20 years now (new formula, laser effects, close-up on the irresistible, larger-than-life mascara that will make your wrinkles disappear etc.) And I can’t think of any mass ‘beauty’ brand that does anything worth talking about (Dove might be an exception but this can only strengthen my point as they still rely heavily on TV) and yet they still make buckets of money and even more when they run a less than OK advertising campaign.

That’s because two facts remain:

1. Most consumer brands are and will always be low involvement goods that no one gives a toss about their marketing. There are very, very few brands that their consumption cycle is led by fascination, enthusiasm and cultural meaning. I wholeheartedly believe that most people don’t want any engagement or relationship with most of the brands beyond the simple need for their products and services to work (whatever their ‘work’ is) and to give me good value for my money. These brands will always need advertising and promotions and a good comms and media plan to sell their stuff cause nothing else will make you even think about them. As Rishad Tobaccowala has said ages ago, “When I have a headache I want my headache to go away. I don’t want a relationship with Tylenol.”

2. There still isn’t a single media or creative solution that can get you any near TV advertising reach and hence awareness if you have the money to spend. Here my fellow digiratis – take whatever budget you want and make something ‘engaging’ or ‘interactive’ or ‘socially-digitaly-conversational’ for Country Life butter. You will still have to pay loads of money for media buying because guess what? No one cares. So let’s see if you can get any near the results of this piece of crap that increased Country Life sales by 90% during the duration of the campaign.

And what about that meerkat or the Gorilla as well as T-Mobile dance/sing-a-long? Were they purely youtube phenomenon? of course not. They didn’t have a chance without huge spend on traditional media. Even the most culturally digital brands still and will always need great TV and outdoor ads in their mix. Nike, Honda, Burger King to name but a few are doing fantastic marketing, some of it is just really great TV advertising so don’t give me this last ad agency on earth crap.

I said it once and I’ll say it again: old things are not being replaced with new stuff, they add to them. Of course it’s not about advertising any more (it has never been) but let’s admit it – advertising is still pretty damn effective – whether you do great advertising or shit advertising. Yes, in some cases it will prove less and less effective and relevant and brands will surely have to adopt to a new reality with more engaging marketing but as long as we will have great innovative stuff from the likes of CP+B and W+K don’t kill advertising agencies categorically just yet. It’s infantile.

Everything changes, nothing is changing*.

*The cleverest thing I’ve ever heard from a planner.