Don’t know if you feel or experience the same and I’d be surprised if people haven’t wrote about it something already but it seems like the industry is in a massive state of contraction (as the the opposite of expansion) at the moment. There is a sense that there are no specialists any more and everyone is trying to get a piece of the same cake.

Up until few years ago ‘digital’ was still a new territory done by digital specialists, DM was the blacksheep of the industry, POS was the territory of BTL peeps, media agencies simply planned and bought, well, media and the idea of a PR stunt was something that mainly PR people talked about.

Etc.

But recently, more often than not I see a response to a client brief coming from different agencies and they all seem to play in the same playground. I’m sitting in an all agency initial respond meeting and apart from few ‘crafts’ that remain within their natural territories it seems like the idea of a specialist (ATL, BTL, Digital) is a thing of the past. Media agencies develop and execute ideas, PR agencies doing ‘digital’, the best ad agency in the world is doing social media powered customer service and everyone’s doing the social media thing (little drops of puke in my mouth as I type, excuse me).

And unsurprisingly, the hottest shop in town is a cross channel, media neutral ideas factory kind of agency – just a bunch of very clever peeps solving business problems.

Some clever peeps talk about the death of siloed channels:

We wondered what would happen if we banned people from talking about “digital”, “social”, “viral”, “mobile”, “ATL”, “BTL” and “TTL”. As an exercise, it’s revealing. What do you sell to clients? What do they buy? What do you “make”? What do planners talk about all day? We believe it’s the end of the road for talking about “digital” and all talk of channel-based silos. Thinking and making in silos prevents us from joining the dots between a business’ activities and the audiences it seeks. Both client side and agency side, silos are the enemy. But what’s the alternative?

So what’s gonna be? Everyone’s going to turn into an idea shop and the best ideas will win the business? Is that a good thing? And more importantly, can clients handle that?

I don’t know, you tell me.

Simple and nicely done (although the ‘results’ of the experiment could have been even more interesting)

Blu Dot Real Good Experiment from Real Good Chair on Vimeo.

One of the most sacred truism of social media is that it is no place for direct marketing and salesy messages. Yet recent developments and observations seems to suggest that this might become just another cliche’ as companies are experimenting with social platforms as sales and promotions and even a new breed of direct marketing, one where contact (lead) is being made by the indirect requests of people.

The initial change came from brands using Twitter for sales promotions like the successful story of DellOutlet, Jetblue and many other brands. This is a no brainer. if you have a good deal to offer people will follow.

But it’s worth paying attention to emerging practices of direct marketing. I’ve been thinking about it for couple of weeks now and don’t know what to make of it yet. Sometimes I think it’s plain wrong yet occasionally it seems to make too good of a sense sense and I’m tempted to convince one of my clients to experiment with. At the moment Twitter is where these experimentation can take place so a bit limited in scope but this indeed can be just the beginning of something big.

Let me start on a true story…

Few weeks back I #lazytweeted a question about a place to stay in Barcelona. Few nice people (not just from my network) have replied with recommendations. One @reply came from an apartment hotel offering their place.

Is this the holy grail or the greatest ever spam machine in the making?

Set up search words through twitter search of your category and you might find the goose on steroids or you might find a stinky corpse. I don’t know.

Here are some fictional tweets to bring this more to life:

Someone: anyone knows a good ethical wedding company?

I can think of hundred more examples, some obviously more promising than others.

There are, of course so many issue here, I don’t know where to start.

Do people want to be directly contacted by companies or is it intruding spam that will put people off Twitter and kill it? My instincts say sod off but seriously why not? If the right offer can come in the right time by the right people – how is that a bad thing?

I’m shouting out to my network, not to sales persons you say. Well, the emergence of the #lazytweet says otherwise. When people in need they want to throw their net as far and as wide as possible right?

That’s a spam full stop, you say. It will taint my experience and kill the network. But if these replies appear not on your main stream but on your @reply stream which you can access or ignore as much as you like that makes it less problematic right? And you can always block intrusive users. Besides, you bloody hypocrite, why is it OK for brands to ‘listen’ to your customer service rants and response very quickly but NOT with anything else?

Tricky thing, virtual social spaces. You can argue that in the physical world, a sales person won’t approach you in the pub saying, sorry mate, I just overheard you asking your friend about X. I’m Asi, I’m an X retailer, come buy from me. But we slowly change our perceptions of public/private in mediating social technologies and getting used to what Danah described as their persistence, searchability, and the presence of invisible audiences. So comparing it directly to physical spaces is a bit futile although I’d still suggest taking that test.

And there are of course loads of other issues from a business perspective – mainly resource and scalability. Please let’s not fall into the twitter trap. It’s still and probably will be just a noisy minority of the early adopters so take it with a pinch etc. I guess that just like with everything social interwebs, context is king and we will soon see another demo of Sturgeon Law – some companies/brands will get it and do it right and make some good business of it, most will fail.

Please tell me what you think of this one – your opinion (as usual) is hugely appreciated.

UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, smarter and quicker people have thought about it. It’s getting hot in here…

Complex? yes. A problem? well, for the people conversing probably not but for brands and agencies wishing to ‘monitor the conversation’ the unthreaded nature of the conversation poses some problems. Just when brands finally realise they have to listen, the tools that available today are simply flawed. That doesn’t mean to say they shouldn’t use them – they still provide extremely valuable data.

I’ve been looking at some of the big and small names in the social media monitoring sphere and while some of them are fairly sophisticated, I believe they give us a partial picture. For a start, we know big share of the conversation take place on social networks like facebook which, as we all know are inaccessible to these tools. Luckily for the measurement chaps, clients that just started to catch up are still pretty ignorant so they can still easily sell them the illusion of control but not for long. The conversation goes wider than existing tools can measure.

The other, interrelated challenge is the idea of tracking and sourcing influentials. Friends, contacts, followers, networks, context and content – how can you get a real understanding of the elusive nature of influence? As much as I share Herdmeister’s point of view regarding the dynamics of influence, I still think it’s perfectly valid (and still valuable) to identify relevant people who have prominent presence in social environments. What you do with them is a different story.

So the conversation is scattered, the tools are a bit flawed (Technorati is so irrelevant It’s a miracle it’s still alive, socialmeter is a joke) and influence is increasingly elusive. I think it’s mainly a challenge for the geeks and until better conversation trackers will develop the only solution is to connect the dots manually. And let’s not forget that studies show time and again that the biggest share of the conversations regarding brands and products take place offline so your best hope is still to give people really good reasons to talk about you...

So….Hyper.

Hyper is a young, (predominantly) digital comms planning and creative shop from the Naked family. They called me on board to help them shape and grow HyperSocial, a special unit dedicated to word of mouth marketing.

Now, just by reading these last few words I can start telling you a ill bit about my challenges and opportunities:

The world of WoM (and social media) marketing is crammed with cynical opportunism, myths, empty buzz words and wearisome social media ‘experts’ that so far their expertise was mainly to patronise and confuse clients with hollow formulas on how brands (sorry, Meister) should ‘operate’ in social media. I’m hoping to change that, if only by little…and i’m well excited about this opportunity to head-up something like that.

One of the most important lessons I learned at Poke and hoping to take with me wherever I go is everyone’s need to be just a little bit less serious, stop stressing about the future and to have more fun

I’m hoping to help my clients to demystify and better understand these emerging environments. Seriously people, there are no secrets and magic formulas to ‘do’ the internets: Just be interesting, honest, super nice and make people happy – with your product or service or comms.

One of the biggest illusions is that positive conversations can be manufactured. I already wrote about that and don’t want to repeat myself. But there is a lot of myth-busting-jargon-shooting to do as soon as I have the time. So in the next few months I’m hoping to theorise less (well, perhaps just a bit less, I’m still a bore academic i love theorising…;-)) and do more and write here in this space some interesting case studies on the projects I will be involved with.

Stay tuned. or not

Perhaps it’s because ‘digital’ or social media marketing still needs to prove itself, or maybe it’s because we ‘live’ the conversation and it feels natural for us to tell the stories or our creative work?

But there are too many cases (myself included) where we go out of our ways to promote the work we do for clients which occasionally turns us to online PR whores and/or free media agents and that’s not what we are being paid for.

There is nothing wrong with being proud in your creative work and self-promoting it, but in many cases I’ve seen recently you start loosing the sense of who is the real owner of the work. You read about the work in blogs and blog comments and emails and while it does good job at helping the story get out there, it also detaches the work from the client/brand.

That brings me to another related point. When traditional PR people use their contacts to promote their clients it is usually exchange between mediators or media owners (I’ll get you into the papers etc); it’s all done behind the scenes and you understand the value transaction – there is nothing personal.

In online PR this can easily go wrong. If brands are keen to engage in real conversations with real people they should go and do that themselves or at least give the impression that they are doing so. When social media consultants become the carriers of the conversation, they risk loosing authenticity and context for their clients.

I’m interested to hear more views on this one – what do you think?

Sounds perfect, you say, why are you spoiling the party?

Well, let me take you couple of years back to Iain’s unpleasant experience with Virgin Media. He described in details his ordeal and, surprise surprise, someone from virgin contacted him and solved his problems. That was just one story of that increasing trend of companies staying tuned to the blogosphere and replying to people rants – and we all blogged about these cases and how wonderful and advance these companies are and how the ‘get it’.

And now the story repeats itself on the twitter platform. Excuse my cynicism but I’d be a bit more critical and less hasty in heaping praises all over the place. Since Iain’s case I’ve only heard more horror stories on Virgin Media CS, most recently Dave’s ordeal. And I say, don’t hurry to make an invaluable PR service for companies with bad CS reputation.

They are smart and cynical. They learned that satisfying a couple of angry Tweets is the easiest and cheapest PR trick as the public rant turns into a public praise and gives the false impression that this company has a great customer services.

Do you honestly believe that Comcast really changes their ways?

Mind you, for every one satisfying tweet there are probably hundreds of angry customers that don’t blog or tweet. They do it the old fashion way by talking to their friends down at the pub – and their problems don’t get solved that way. Their problem meet layers of poorly designed pre-recorded menus and canned responses that don’t actually help them.

Only time will tell if the sea change we crave for will come and businesses will (truly and deeply) change their ways and invest in their most valuable brand building scheme – customer service – or will they simply employ 2-3 people to make sure that they satisfy social media rants and that would be the end of it.

Rejoice with cautious.

It is really engaging and fun to play with.

On the microsite, they have a segment called Sprintcuts which is a collection of videos explaining a new faster way of doing something, like a pouring ketchup quicker which is supposed to save 2 weeks over a lifetime, parking, speed tying your shoes (that will save you 4 days!) and other mundane activities.

And they also have an interactive time calculator that calculates how much time you spend on a particular activity in a lifetime:

via Three Minds

google >> comparing 2-4 sites >>> find best deal & book >>>> get confirmation via email.

simple & straightforward – not looking for anything but decent deal. and i never bookmark the site I’m booking with as I can do the same thing next time i’ll need a car.

when I got the car last friday in sweden I asked myself – wouldn’t it be nice that with the confirmation email (or somewhere before) the car hire company will remind me that there is actually a nice sound-system with CD in the car – something like:

“hey don’t forget to bring some groovy CD’s with you unless you’re really into swedish euro-pop”

nothing more, really.

something like that would have made me happy (and appreciative) and it would have really increase the chances i’ll bookmark the site and come back again next time I need a car.

I gave them the expected stuff about the ways in which social-technological developments alter the balance of power and force marketing communications to re-invent itself. My overall argument was that we’re heading towards better relations between markets and consumers where bad products/brands won’t be able to be disguised behind clever marketing, witty taglines or flashy advertising and we can see a growing trend towards authenticity (truth and beauty) in communications.

You had to see the resistance! Put aside the fact that the audience were for a large extant left- leaning, Neomi Klein sort of a fans, there is still some things to learn from their perception of marketing – not as academics but as ordinary people/consumers.

Some of the arguments I’ve heard:  "marketing is essentialy evil", "advertising is loud and intrusive" "marketing is corrupt and manipulative", "Brands and corporations took over our public spheres" etc. Not that I didn’t know or feel it myself but still, the level of loathing and distrust between consumers and marketing communications is immense. People are just fed up with the sleaze and bullshit that governed marketing communications in the past 20 years (yes, we are making a generalization here but the fact that some brands are ‘good’ doesn’t change the overall perception of marketing as evil)

But there was some interesting argument that I took with me and was thinking about in the last few days. Martin argued (I hope that I re-state his argument accurately) that the appearing of a ‘jargon of authenticity’  in marketing and public relations, which are essentially opportunistic exercises, is very problematic and deserve scrutiny. Opportunism and existential authenticity  are moral concepts in tension. Authenticity, he argued, manifests itself persistently in the face of adversity; where the opportunist only sees an opportunity to change tack.

I think that if you leave for a second your critical views on consumerism society and the effective economy, you cannot dismiss the fact that markets and marketing where here from the dawn of humanity and as Uri once said, "Marketing communications, specifically, remain one of the most prolific, complex and powerful aspects of human sign activity."

Therefore, you cannot, to my view, regard marketing – a primal human activity / interaction – as essentially moraly flawed. From the early days of civilisation people were involved in production and trade of products and goods so that cannot be inherently immoral. But it might be true that in the 20th century, especially the last 40 years or from the beginning of mass commuications, marketing, to a large extant has become manipulative, corrupt and therefore unethical.

We now know that there is a growing trend towards authenticity and back to the good old days where if you have a good product, people will tell each other about it and you can expect good business… I want to believe that marketing communications is undergoing a real change towards openness, transparency, dialogue and enrichment and that authenticity, whether forced upon or genuinely pursued, will help consumers to regain trust and better relations with brands – after all they are here to stay so at least we should have some fun together…

UPDATE: In the same vein, read this thoughtful rant on brands in today’s Guardia

(pic via)