CXO Talk Sessions

Luckily, there is a weekly web show that is hosted by CMO of Enterasys, Vala Afshar and CEO of consulting and research firm Asuret, Michael Krigsman every Friday at 4pm EST on Google+ Hangouts. Vala and Michael host these sessions with high profile C-suite leaders to discuss the challenges faced by all of us in IT and Marketing in 2013.

I have been attending these sessions religiously for the past few weeks and I love the fact that these are authentic, real and non-scripted. Guests have included very high profile leaders such as Dion Hinchcliff, Kim Stevenson (CIO Intel), Ekaterina Waler, Guy Kawasaki and more.

This Friday, Vala and Michael will have Ben Haines, CIO at Pabst Brewing.

Click here to add to your calendar: https://plus.google.com/u/1/101981322245962603627/posts?hl=en. Do also make sure you follow and join the discussion on Twitter with #CXOTalk during the sessions.

UNICEF is currently running a brilliant Facebook campaign that focuses on the inaction that is often observed in the social media campaigns.

It delightfully pokes at the online media phenomenon, “Slacktivism”.

Slacktivism (sometimes slactivism or slackervism) is a portmanteau of the words slacker and activism. The word is usually considered a pejorative term that describes “feel-good” measures, in support of an issue or social cause, that have little or no practical effect other than to make the person doing it feel some amount of satisfaction. The acts tend to require minimal personal effort from the slacktivist. The underlying assumption being promoted by the term is that these low cost efforts substitute for more substantive actions rather than supplementing them. (Source: Wikipedia)

Malcom Gladwell, in his Oct 2010 New Yorker article, argued that it is not right to compare social media “revolutions” with actual activism that challenges the status quo ante. He argued that today’s social media campaigns can’t compare with activism that takes place on the ground.

Unicef’s Likes Don’t Save Lives

You cannot not ‘like’ this one.

Why just compete? Why not redefine the rules.

Facebook announced “Home” today, a new way of experiencing Facebook on the Android platform. Contrary to what analysts predicted, Facebook Home is not an mobile app and it is not another mobile OS either.  It is an experience layer. A springboard that sits on top of the operating system and lets the user experience their mobile device through the lens of their social network.

Facebook Home will be available both pre-installed on the new HTC First devices and also is downloadable on other Android devices on April 12th. It is a whole set of features that Facebook-izes the mobile Android experience. It includes Cover Feed, in which you get your friend’s photos and status updates as soon as you turn on the phone. There’s also Chat heads, which are Facebook messages you can get and respond to even while using other apps. Very strategic and competitive in redefining how people experience the network on their mobile device.

Watch out Google, Whatsapp and Flipboard. Facebook is competitive, and they are serious. 

Facebook’s Director of Product Joey Flynn didn’t hold back critiquing the messaging app competition.

Highlighting some of the flaws with the messaging services, Flynn explains that messaging apps require you to close the app you’re in right now to view a message. “You should really be able to talk to your friends no matter where you’re at on your phone and no matter what app you’re in,” he says. “And your friends shouldn’t just be siloed off into these apps. With Chat heads, you can talk to whomever and wherever on your phone.”  Facebook wants us to think of Chat heads not as a competitor, but as the next evolution of messaging.

This allows Facebook couple of really strong competitive plays:

1. Gain back momentum from mobile messaging platforms like Whatsapp, Tango, Google Talk, Skype and others.
2. Re-position itself as a mobile ‘experience’ destination and continue building mobile revenue streams.
3. Experiment with content curation experience and compete with Flipboard, Pulse and others.
4. Build on Facebook Social Graph Search to competitively play in Google’s own playground.

Just imagine what a total experience allows Facebook. It gives them the power and the edge to progressively take the share away from Google services and others. And before Apple fans tout their closed ecosystem, just wait for the jailbreak. ;)

#social #learning #creativity

Interested in learning more? Have a read at this fantastic paper from MIT’s Media Lab on Creative Learning.

Disclosure: I am currently involved with the MIT’s Media Lab’s P2P Learning Program.

“The medium is the message” is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan meaning that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. One of my main points was bringing this context back to our digital brands. Research indicates that 70% of all social + web activity on the internet is among people, yet brands, communications/PR and marketing folks are too focused on just the 30% branded activity which has no real impact. Or should we be focused on utilizing our brand to support and engage our ecosystem — in a true social business manner?

The New Brand Narrative

What are you focused on? Building a strategy that leverages the social behaviors online for organic activity or the strictly one way marketing “broadcast” that we are often more comfortable with?

Many organizations have moved from the question of, “Should we incorporate social into our business practices?” to “How do we incorporate social into our business practices?” But now they are faced with another, age-old IT question: point solutions or platform? With its Social Relationship Management platform, Oracle is suggesting that the latter is the way to go.

Oracle, like Salesforce, IBM, Cisco, SAP and others, has made a number of social technology-focused acquisitions in the last year or two. In Oracle’s case, these acquisitions have been aligned with the company’s existing enterprise apps. Oracle’s social relationship management platform, or SRM, is the result.

Ultimately it allows for easier implementation and alignment across various business units and their respective functions. Frankly, from a brand strategist’s perspective, it also allows for an easier vendor procurement process as well. We might be getting to a better ‘closed’ boxed social business approach, which focuses on the business process integration vs. social for the sake social/collaboration approach in the past.

It also means that we are getting to a point where external social media activities can be better aligned with internal social enterprise activities — allowing sales, support and marketing functions to work more efficiently and ultimately prove ROI.

Glad to see this from Oracle. It’s a step in the right direction. There are only so many non connected suites one can manage to make social work.

On Super Bowl Sunday, Seth Godin has raised a very bright point in around media and its role in his post.

Our digitally connected world is now very personal and distastes anything and everything ‘mass’.  (More on this in the post on online commerce). Most of what we consume as a society today has been directed and crafted through the use of mass mediums like TV, Print and Radio. And this mass medium strategy has worked marvelously in influencing our preferences, likes, dislikes, culture and ultimately our choices — specially during the industrial era when there were no alternatives.

These days, we live in a 4 screen world where TV, PC, mobile and tablet experiences co-exist together. Ironically, 3 of those screens are very personal, interactive and custom to our preferences and socially enabled experiences. The experience of our web medium is vastly different from the experience of a broadcast medium.

Marshall McLuhan predicted the Internet as an “extension of consciousness” in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man thirty years before its commercialization. He stated, The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its content, not as its environment.

So the question is, Can we or Do we have the ability to re-create another Super Bowl like event for another 50 10 years in a different sport (or commercially backed and supported activity)?

Before you answer this, I have quoted Seth’s post for us to ponder together about the upcoming, drastically different, few years in our digital economy.

- Bilal

Why do we care about football?
For someone outside the US, the visceral connection with football seems mysterious. You can understand a lot about the future (and past) of marketing once you understand how the sport turned into a cultural touchstone.

Tribes -> TV -> Money -> Mass -> TV -> Tribes

Football as we know it started in colleges. It was an epic muddy battle, pitting one alma mater against another, a war-like, non-balletic battle that united (at a pretty elemental level) the tribes on each side. As it grew as a college sport, it became as much of a social event as a sporting one, with alumni and students finding connection around a game.

But if that’s all it was, today wouldn’t be the biggest day of the year for several industries. If that’s all it was, you wouldn’t be able to pick a fight merely by challenging the hegemony of football or the local team. We’d be spending as much time and energy on soccer or lacrosse or basketball, but we don’t.

No, it turns out that, quite accidentally, football, more than any other sport, is made for television. It’s better on TV than it is live. The combination of the play clock, the angles, the repetition and the opportunity for analysis all make it perfect to watch on TV. And perfect to run commercials on. TV and football grew up together, side by side. Instant replay and the thirty-second commercial, supporting each other.

It’s not an accident that the commercials are as much a part of the Super Bowl as the game. The commercials represent both the cash component of football as well as the cultural souvenirs that go with our consumption of the game.

Fifty years ago, a coat salesman paid $4,000 for the rights to film a game, and NFL Films was born. The decisions Ed and Steve Sobel made over the years turned the sport cinematic, amplifying the tribal origins but taking them much further. They used sound editing and shot on film, all to transform a game into a spectacle.

Then, the second great accident occurred: As football became the official sport of television, it generated billions of dollars in revenue. This revenue led advertisers to push for more football, which led to more television, which led to colleges transforming football from a small sideline into a cash cow of some focus, despite the fact that it has very little to do with the core mission of the institution.

People justify the unpaid (and dangerous) labor of college football players by pointing to all the scholarships. But the scholarships aren’t for playing football, they are for appearing on TV. That’s what pays for the system.

The media-football complex drives deep into childhood, with many kids fast-tracked from a very young age into the game (not soccer, not baseball, not physics) at some level because of TV and because of money and because of tribes. If football is part of what we stand for, then of course we’re happy to have our kid be part of that. But what does it mean for football to be part of what you stand for?

No one stands for movies, or ice cream or double-entry bookkeeping. No, a sport has become a pillar of our worldview, a tribal and economic connection to our past and our future. We don’t want to understand the history and the money and the happy accidents. We just assume that this is as it was and as it will be.

Going forward, no other sport will ever have a run like this, because the TV-cash part of the connection can’t be recreated. Mass TV built many elements of our culture, but mass TV (except for tonight) is basically over.

The new media giants of our age (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.) don’t point everyone to one bit of content, don’t trade in mass. Instead, they splinter, connecting many to many, not many to one.

The cultural touchstones we’re building today are mostly not mass, mostly not for everyone. Instead, the process is Tribes -> Connections/communities -> Diverse impact. Without the mass engine of TV, it’s difficult to imagine it happening again. So instead we build our lives around cultural pockets, not cultural mass. Our job as marketers and leaders is to create vibrant pockets, not to hunt for mass.

Image: Google Think Performance Conference, 2012

Our beautifully crafted messaging and creatives are becoming less impactful in this connected marketplace of ours.  Reports keep validating that we tend to lack trust in commercial entities and if anything has validated this human behavior, it is the social web. In the world of $4 million dollar tv ad spots, this becomes a very hard pill to swallow. Don’t get me wrong, it still needs to be part of the overall marketing strategy but needs to be adjusted to accommodate the user behaviors of today.

Weber Shandwick and KRC research recently conducted a survey involving around 2000 consumers that outlines that peer reviews and social recommendations have grown beyond just friends advising each other on the new purchases.

Some of the findings include:

• 65% of consumers have bought a product they weren’t intending to buy after reading a positive review;
• 74% of consumers search for reviews online before making a decision;
• Consumers read an average 11 reviews before making a decision;
• Peer reviews are trusted by more consumers (77%) than professional ones (23%);

As Danny Brown states, “These figures, and some of the other ones in the full report, should act as a wake-up call to brands that are still investing in the traditional method of product review – buy advertorial or pitch the mass media – and ignoring search and social graph impact“.

In addition, let’s not ignore the fact that 70% of all content online is user generated. It also ranks higher than static corporate pages by search engines and trusted more by the average consumeras well. In 2013, all go-to-market planning and comms planning should be focused on strategically leveraging the potential of this medium.

And doing it right requires experience and understanding the context of the medium. Otherwise you end up with facebook and twitter accounts without any real social presence. Don’t believe me? Have a look at this hilarious Facebook Page of Corporate Social gone wrong.

Let’s avoid doing social in a pure check list manner. Mere likes and follows don’t translate to actual business. Time for experimentation is over.

P.S. For a copy of the full Executive Report on the survey referenced above, please click here.

If you are in the space, you must be following the hundreds of discussion threads around the ever changing role of the web/digital/social strategist. I want to showcase the common misunderstanding in this space. Social web is not another silo’d channel to ‘communicate’ to. It’s not a one way broadcast medium. It’s certainly not all about tools, follows, likes either. It is definitely not about being lazy and buying social advertising either.

It’s about understanding the medium to build a leveraged social network which can be utilized for various activities. From thought leadership, feedback channels to building sustained  relationships. Not mere connections that don’t translate well.

Your strategy should be built around the way the audience uses the medium, not how it works well with your mode of operation (hint: no broadcasting, no one way messaging). The way you use LinkedIn is significantly different than how we use Facebook or Twitter or any other ‘X’ platform that comes out next. A great social strategist focuses on the translation of the social dynamic and momentum into the business objective in a manner that facilitates collaborative storytelling.

Anyone can tell you how to use Facebook, or best practices for engaging Twitter. Any community manager can build an engaged audience for a half decent product or brand, especially if they have goodies to give away.

A strong strategist doesn’t just put you on Facebook, he doesn’t just build value for your community, he or she facilitates the translation of the brand into the social context, ultimately helping to deliver the transformation of the brand promise into a social brand state.

Quoting Jon Burg,

“Typically, the aspiring strategists can use social tools and technologies to help drive a defined business objective. A great practitioner can translate and deliver business results leveraging the social dynamic overall. A fantastic strategist can transform the business overall for the socially connected world.  At the end of the day, a social strategist is a business strategist focused on leveraging the unique dynamics of the social construct to drive a business. Everything else (knowledge of the platforms, best practices, technology) is the foundation of a strong strategist, not the definition of why he or she will excel.”

Kevin KC Lee says, a great strategist understands Social Media NOT as media, but as Social. Kevin, you are right. The premise of social is about engagement. And nothing else.

Social Media is perpetually evolving and changing. Not simply because technology continues to get better and enables new capabilities, but because the way people interact and the meanings of each ritual & action continues to be interpreted and reinterpreted by different peoples, different groups, and different regions, creating new opportunities and insights about how digital technologies can add value to their lives.

Today’s social media practitioner is occupied with learning these platforms to build clicks, impressions, likes, followers, re-tweets, comments, etc.

The problem is

1. These easy-to-count, hard metrics have never fully answered the client’s deeper needs of branding and cultural relevance with the end user and
2. Even before the practitioner has successfully learned how to utilize the platforms competently, newer social media platforms, based on new social interactions change the game yet again.

Again, reliance or building your expertise around a specific ‘tool’ is not a good long term strategy.

In this fashion, the social media practitioner is constantly playing catch-up, and never fully delivering on the client’s key needs. Let’s try to understand the users first before we tackle down the ‘reason’ for engagement. Social intelligence technology has come a long way in the past few years, go out and try to learn more about the space. Culturally and Contextually.

Let’s build a mutually beneficial relationship.

May this year be the one that makes us poke the box, walk with the dreamers, the believers, the cheerful, the planners, the doers, the successful people with their heads in the clouds and their feet on the ground. Last but not the least, let us have the strength to smile, accept each other, enjoy life and work towards making this world a better place. There is no other purpose.

Regards, Bilal

Augie Ray definitely nailed it here in his post. Social media will require a closer look. In fact brands will need to re-look at their overall digital strategy — that encompasses every digital channel, including social. Mere focus on messaging and PR plays will no longer be enough to survive in the digitally connected world of ours.

A survey conducted by Duke University’s Business School. Sent out its latest CMO survey found that CMO’s are enthusiastic about digital marketing, projecting an 11.5% increase in spending for digital over the next 12 months. While traditional advertising found CMO’s decreasing ad buys for these channels. I do see an increase in spend for experimentation in Social Advertising space which will fall under digital spend.

The survey also found that CMOs were increasing there budgets on platforms that focus just on customer relationship management. CMOs currently spend on average of 7.6% of there total marketing dollars on social media. Respondents expect to increase this by 40% in the next year to 10.7% and then double to 18.8% in the next 5 years.

Many senior executives still think of social media as something you do after hours for fun, says John Hagel, co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge — they haven’t bought into the idea that social can drive the core performance of the business. He’s committed to showing them why they’re wrong.

“ONE THING that’s really undervalued in discussions of social technology and social business is the opportunity to make the invisible visible,” says John Hagel. It’s the opportunity, he says, “to see patterns of activity and interactions that you never knew were occurring.”

Read the rest of the report here.

Our world has evolved. We consume our content on variety of platforms — tablets, smartphones, TV and laptops. Smart advertisers are already running integrated digital campaigns to capture audience anywhere they go. Here’s an example from Bell around Olympics.

There are live streams on mobile devices, laptops (over our sites), obviously TV and tablets.

And of course, all of this also means that it’s much easier to fall in love now. ;)

“A social business optimizes interactions among people to create business value and gain competitive advantage. The social web experience provides an intimate and personal (my additions) first class access to people via mobile, and social networks. It also enables people powered processes with dynamic decision making, social monitoring and engagement. And last but not least, the combination of social and web experience drives systems of engagement. Engagement is what drives business outcome and ROI. This engagement comes from models of sharing like crowdsourcing and ideation. ”

Thanks Sandy Carter for the insight. Here’s my take on the key components of an exceptional web experience.

Some people know that before Brad Pitt became a megastar he grew up in a strikingly normal (non-Hollywood) family in Springfield, Missouri. Like a lot of people who come from normal families, he’s got some normal siblings, including younger brother Doug, who apparently still lives in Missouri.

Virgin Mobile Australia tapped the younger, non-famous Mr. Pitt for a pretty substantial marketing campaign, including this micro-site and a “viral” video, “Meet Doug Pitt,” which follows his daily activities, which include hanging out in his “man room,” shooting hoops in the cul-de-sac and mowing the lawn.

“Doug’s just a regular guy. He washes his own car, pays his own bills, and does his own laundry. You see, unlike his famous bro, Doug’s never been the star of anything,” says the site, urging visitors to “like” Doug enough to make him a “CeleBro.”

The campaign generated 1 million views last week alone.

We worked hard to build an audience, kept them engaged (sometimes entertained) and hoped that having a relationship would mean that our customers and the extended ecosystem would come to us for advice. Through this relationship, we would end up selling a service, product or two.

It was hard enough to change the way we market — (from broadcast push to relationship driven pull). We worked hard on Facebook and other related channels to build a channel to have an on-going dialogue with the customer.

Let’s look at the post-IPO Facebook. Shall we? Facebook’s new model charges brands a certain amount to reach X number of customers. The problem with this model is that it does not reach everyone. In situations where the customer, friend, fan wants to know what we are up to as a brand, they cannot know without the brand paying a certain $ amount.

Let me clarify, this is not to ‘gain extra followers’, or fans or to reach additional audience.  This is not to run ads on the side of your personal profile. This is purely to have brand updates in the customer’s feeds,  the ones that they chose to follow.

This also means that you brands no longer need to work hard to get your attention. We can just pay to get our ‘broadcast’ message to you. Will it work with you? Not a chance.

As a consumer, I will despise facebook sending me sponsored feeds. I will also start looking for an alternate.

I’ve written about this before, from digital strategy perspective, brands should do everything to not send traffic to facebook .

All that work to build an audience, spending time and resources to build a robust content and community program only to have it reach 2% of my audience. I smell a #fail in this new facebook model. Facebook would be more successful in charging brands to act as a non-intrusive platform that connects vs. being the social advertising delivery model.

Marketers can now use data to shape everything from how brands interact with customers to the products and services they offer to the structure and culture of the company itself.

By radically rethinking their profession, marketers today are able to understand customers as individuals, use predictive tools to get ahead of demand and design truly social businesses. Meet the challenges of the new marketing landscape. It is no longer about just the message.

Here’s a great video by IBM that makes that point.

On June 27th, I’ll be joining my fellow peers at Rogers and Sysomos to discuss Social Media Communities and ROI. The event is hosted by Information Technology Association of Canada. If you are in town, feel free to join us.

Going Social – Building Online Communities that Boost Your ROI