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.

“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?

According to a recent study called State of Social Technology and Talent Management, commissioned by SilkRoad, 75 percent of leaders in human resources and talent management believe their companies are behind the curve regarding both internal and external social networking technology.

Have a read at this thought provoking Forbes.com post by Jeanne Meister on future of workforce in 2013 that discusses the death of the resume, rise of personal branding, HR’s ability to tap into the community networks for recruitment and employee engagement.

“We will see more forward-looking companies catching onto this type of mutually beneficial training, and use this as a point of differentiation in recruiting top Millennial talent”

“We’re moving from a “knowledge economy” to a “social economy,” and as we do so, as a recent Fast Company article noted, “the line is quickly blurring between the value of what we know and who we know.”

Click here: 2013: The Year of Social HR

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.

If all that we had done was take the original iPad and just reduce it, all that you would be aware of was everything that was missing, that there is inherent loss in just reducing a product in size. What we did was, we went back to the very beginning and we took the time to design a product that was a concentration of, not a reduction of, the original.

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.

Next week, Facebook will be offering brands an ability to ad retarget based on users’ email addresses, phone numbers and FB app user identities. This will enable marketers to reach Facebook users who are their current customers using their own customer data. The way I see it, it is like using your own customer emailing list and targeting the same customers for relevant offers, messages and more in the social networks. In my opinion, the most appropriate use will be around loyalty programs, bundled offers, and retention.

On a good note, businesses won’t have access to additional Facebook user data, according to Facebook. 

B2B Magazine reports, with Twitter, advertisers are now able to target their Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts programs to users based on what they follow and retweet. As a user, it will allow me to have promoted tweets that suit my interests appear above generic ones.

There are 350 interest categories advertisers can choose from, including education, science, law and personal finance, which can be further broken down into additional topics. What is really interesting is that Twitter also is reducing the minimum price advertisers can bid for an ad campaign to one cent per Promoted Tweet, down from 50 cents.

There are few possible reasons for this new approach.

1.  the current program isn’t working at all and needed a refresh
2. ROI and engagement numbers were below advertiser’s expectation and budgets
3. volume play to match their significant mass reach in the small business space (the core group that originally made them successful)

The coming year will be a interesting one from Social Advertising point of view. Keep seated and stay tuned!

“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong…I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.” – Steve Jobs

After a surprisingly short time, the jury in the Apple vs. Samsung case has sent word that it has reached a verdict. The jury ruled overwhelmingly in favor of Apple, and awarded the company more than a billion dollars in damages. If you are like me, it is hard to see an upside for Samsung in all of this — until you come to realize that this could have been just a very smart and a strong strategic play.

News outlets and uber popular tech blogs covered the trial live on their respective blogs. The overall majority was shocked to see jury come to a conclusion in such a short time frame. My personal interest in this trial has been not only from patent infringement, media and social science perspectives but also from an user interaction design perspective.

For years, I have worked on and closely observed projects where we focused on making it painless for an user to interact with the system. System in this case is defined by any interface that interacts with the user. The end goal has always been to make the interaction as natural as possible. Afterall, a beautiful user experience dictates a product or service’s success in this day and age. The good enough standard of the past has been raised very high in almost every industry.

The factory era defined the basic user experience while the socially enabled, user centric information era defines and challenges the widely accepted user experience. These days, we are seeing interaction improvements all across the various industries. From commodity services to automotive to new computing interfaces. (Facebook is just plain old social from the early 90′s packaged into a sleek addictive user experience).

Survival of the fittest.

A successful business is one that is nimble and agile enough to understand where the market is moving today and where it will move tomorrow to not only survive but to succeed. Samsung realized this very early in the game that Apple’s design language and interaction had won the race in the mobile market space.  Apple challenged the notion of fixed keys and proved everyone wrong. (Mind you: They weren’t the only ones but they were the first ones to not only improve the touch experience but also bring the experience to the masses in a more unified sense. (Ecosystem, Retail Experience, Packaging, Control, iTunes, etc.))

Instead of waiting around to replicate this natural design interaction, Samsung decided to strategically mimic it. Given the number of handsets they have produced on Google’s Android platform, they have not only capitalized on Apple’s design language but also evolved their own interpretation of it for later handsets that were not even considered in the trial — like the highly successful Samsung Note and Samsung Galaxy S3.

Samsung would’ve been no where if they hadn’t realized this early on. They would be facing the same fate as RIM. Not only did they become the #1 manufacturer’s of smart phones worldwide, they also replaced HTC and took RIM out. In fact, the pricing and positioning of their Android handsets have allowed them to become the alternative to RIM handsets for the masses.

If we recall, Microsoft paid $8 Billion to acquire Skype and they have yet to do something with it. Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.5 ecosystem failed to penetrate the market while in the mean time, Samsung became the sought after manufacture of mobile devices worldwide. For a mere $1 Billion fine, Samsung is now #1 in the market with worldwide penetration and 2012 handsets command a lead position of their own.

Not too bad at all, unless the judge rules Samsung can’t sell its phones. During the process, the world has learned more about the secretive Apple design processes in greater depth and that wasn’t an easy task for Apple — given their internal culture. This has also opened up gates for Google and Motorola to sue to mitigate against Apple’s 2nd move towards the Android ecosystem. (We all know that Job hated Android and wanted to spend every penny against it).

With that being said, RIM and Nokia along with other Android manufacturers probably wish that they had gambled and copied iPhone like this.

Ants Eye View has been involved in community strategy for many years and their founder has his roots in the origin of  Microsoft’s highly successful MVP program. When I was at IBM, we had paid extra attention to that Ant Eye’s work to come up with our IBM Champion iteration. Big shout out to Kat Mandelstein, my ex-IBM colleague, who had recently joined Ants Eye Farm as their Director of Social Strategy.

I’ll quote my friend, Michael Brito, SVP @ Edelman (One of the stronger PR firms who got social right from the beginning), as he has summarized it pretty well.

(2 updates this week) First, one the “Big Four” consultancy firms, PricewaterhouseCoopers just announced the acquisition of social media strategy firm, Ants Eye View. This makes complete sense as other management consulting firms are trying to carve out their piece of the social business market i.e. Deloitte making strategic hires and McKinsey publishing reports and white papers. PwC is instantly a player in this space  with the addition of some really smart social strategists with defined capabilities, IP, experience and case studies. According to this article, the goal is to combine Ant’s Eye View’s social media strategy and digital marketing skills with PwC’s Advisory business that will build upon the firm’s growing Management Consulting customer impact and customer engagement capabilities.  Here is more from Jake McKee on the acquisition.

Secondly, Eastwick, a Silicon Valley based Public Relations firm earlier this week announced the launch of the new independent consulting firm called SocialXDesign. According to the press release, the firm will combine expertise in strategic marketing and public engagement with behavior research.

Congrats to both firms as 2013/2014 will definitely be the year when Social gets done right. More than just PR and more than just marketing messaging.

As I’ve been saying for years, Social media is all about utilization of the earned network to drive business forward. Not just impressions and fluffy activity data. This increased demand for strategic business strategy around social is in the right direction.

On July 10th, 2012, five companies spilled their guts: Steve Ballmer explained how Microsoft isn’t stabbing OEMs in the back with its homegrown Surface tablet and how it will keep Apple at bay, and Ouya explained how it planned to raise $1 million on Kickstarter for an Android-based game console (and managed it in the very same day). DirecTV and Viacom each explained how greedy the other is being in a nasty contract dispute, and Thorsten Heins attempted and failed to explain how RIM will recapture market share. All that and Nilay Patel, on today’s edition of 90 Seconds on The Verge.

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.

Special thanks to Joe Ottorino for sending this along. Great find for a long weekend laugh.

A report out of Sweden is suggesting that someone at Fiat has pulled a grand scale prank on their competition by planting a Fiat 500 in the front doorway of Volkswagen Sweden’s headquarters just as the Google Street View camera car came along.

It is very difficult to get any information out of Google, so one has to wonder if it would even be possible for Fiat to know ahead of time when the cameras would roll by the Swedish Beetle emporium.

Fiat’s PR team have said, “No comment,” so the whole story is up for speculation.

Whether it is some advanced guerilla marketing campaign, or a coincidence, I’ll bet the folks at Fiat are having a giggle while the VW team are likely verklempt.

Click on the Google maps link to find out more : http://s.bilal.ca/M1ONqE

What makes me wonder about is the Post-IPO phase of Facebook. What happens when some of them (with options) are rich enough to retire? What will happen to the human intellectual property when  the mega-millionaires don’t have to work any more?

People work for Money

Majority of the folks putting in the hours are doing it to get paid. They move from one job to another for better pay, better opportunities and the challenges. Some move specially to a start-up to seek a better than average payout.

If you love what you do, you put in even more hours and it doesn’t feel like work. That remains true anywhere. And it is true that not everyone cares for the maximum payout as there are other motivational non-monetary factors as well. There’s a reason why some dread the retirement phase in their lives.

But those that love their work usually are more successful than the ones who consider it just as a job. But even they like to get paid (above average) for their talent.

Instant Millions, Baby

Some of the top talent that made Facebook what it is and kept it innovative all along when sites like Flickr, Myspace, and Orkut struggled will be instant millionaires on Friday. The aspect of launching a company and successfully taking it public is highly attractive challenge. highly respected and much needed in the industry. Hence, I assume with that accomplishment on their resumes, many will be moving on.

Sure, you can hire more top talent and even throw options but none of them will be capitalizing on them as much as the ones who did during the pre-IPO phase. The original Paypal crew is still the one investing in the hottest start-ups of our time. It takes a million to make few millions.

I have been closely involved with a start-ups (that got acquired or we worked closely with) during my days at IBM and I have seen many who gained from the acquisition move out as soon as their contractual obligations were completed. They went on to new projects and launching services that they really wanted to start. One even decided to retire at the age of 37.

The Facebook that we know is what it is because of these very people. That knowledge can’t be replaced or bought. The post-IPO facebook will be more focused on revenue models and that might turn the idealists away as well. The work will need to be more accountable and the fun factor of the original start-up will be depreciated.

What will be the brain drain at the post-IPO Facebook? I am sure they are loyals who will stay. The executives will stay, because they are already rich and like the power. Others? You tell me.

Trust is built on reputation and reputation is generally NOT built on advertising. It is earned. Not bought. It is built on what others say about you. Become a thought leader in your field and it won’t matter as much how big you are. Companies will look to you for insight and vision. Journalists will quote you, analysts will call you, websites will link to you.

‎Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful…that matters. ” Steve Jobs

Here’s the Stanford Speech for your review. www.bilal.ca/the-best-14-minutes-of-your-life/

Writer Nicholas Thurkettle said that “People who speak of Steve Jobs’s legacy in tech terms are missing the story. Tech was the medium. Jobs was a philosopher.” If you would like to check out the other blog posts that have been inspired by Steve Jobs over the years on this blog, please click here.

I literally teared when my wife informed me about Steve Job’s death. As Om Malik said, “Steve taught me to care about the little things, because in the end, little things matter.”

Rest in Peace Steve. Sincere condolences to the Jobs family who have lost a father and husband to cancer at 56. We lost much. They lost more.