As has often been observed, there’s something irresistable about schadenfreude. That’s one reason for the obsessive finger-pointing by the digerati every time a new brand experiences a social media crisis .

Another may be our unholy desire for traffic. After all, I’m writing this blog post in response to today’s Nestlé-Greenpeace-Facebook storm (if you’re coming to this story late, Sam Ismail’s post offers background). More to the point, at least four bloggers cleverly promoted their coverage of the events in the Facebook comment stream.

Several social media mavens got so involved that they joined the side of the protesters against Nestlé: twittering animatedly, changing their avatars, publishing lists of brands owned by Nestlé (and which were therefore eligible for boycott), or by referring the community manager to the Cluetrain Manifesto or Gary Vaynerchuck videos.

Examples of similar foul-ups pepper our presentations, mine included: I’m presenting on crisis management on Tuesday. All my case studies come down to two things:

• people inside your business fucking you over through ill-will or ignorance; and/or
• people outside your business fucking you over through ill-will or ignorance

Put that aside. As an industry I’d argue, it can seem that we’re obsessed with failure. And we’re nasty with it. Other than politics or the pro-wrestling circuit, I can’t think of another industry so ready to criticise one another in public. At each new crisis, the web buzzes with our speculation, exaggeration, misinformation, chinese whispers, and rumourmongering of which the events of today were just an example.

Social Media Pogroms

Why are social media gurus so ready to criticise each other in public? I suspect that our readiness to criticise the brands and agencies for whom (under different circumstances) we might work is in fact an artefact of social media. This is a an example of social behaviour. Compare it to mob behaviour. Playground behaviour where netiquette is ignored. We want to join in the fun; even when the fun turns out to be kicking someone when they’re down.

Karma

Kerry Gaffney and I once came up with a rule-of-thumb: “don’t be too quick to jump in because there but for the grace of God go you.” It sounds sententious, but we reckoned that it would pay off in time; people would, we felt, be less likely to jump on us when we inevitably #failed.

Here’s what I think: until we can grow up and leave the playground, we won’t be able to help our clients gain the confidence they need to make the right decisions in this area.

Individuals should try to come to terms with the fact that they work in marketing; and stop trying to moonlight as anti-globalization anti-corporation cowboys. Learn to love what you do, for fuck’s sake.

And I think we should go a step further. We should stand up for each other. Only a very few (and highly honourable) people stood up for We Are Social when they took an unnecessary pasting over Eurostar. I’m ashamed to say that I wasn’t one of those; while like many others I left messages of support on Robin’s post, I didn’t help to fight fires on TechCrunch or elsewhere.

And that brings me to the last idea: where we can, we should probably try to help clients in distress — even if they aren’t our clients. That might help our industry look professional and responsible. It’s a bit of a big ask: “why,” you might ask, “should I spend valuable business cycles helping someone else’s client?” But wouldn’t it be more constructive than spending those same few meagre cycles adding fuel to yet another social media fire?

Post Script

Incidentally, in the unlikely event that you’re interested in my take on the Nestlé situation: a bunch of social media gurus and pre-existing anti-Nestlé activists probably won’t do too much damage to the brand. Anything to do with Facebook has a whiff of slacktivism to me. Within a week or so there’ll be another stinking piece of Social Media carrion around which we can snarl and posture. Also, a campaign to knight Eddie Izzard seems to have more traction in the non-guru social media world.

Here’s an interesting ethical question: is it OK to ask employees to share company and client news through their personal social networks?

Here’s a hypothetical example. An agency has just launched a new ad campaign and posted the TV spot on YouTube. Is it OK to send an all-hands email asking people to share the link on Twitter and Facebook?

Let’s take it a little further. Is it OK to ask them to sign into YouTube using their personal accounts, and rate the video? It seems harmless enough, doesn’t it? You’re not telling them how they should rate it, after all.

But what if you asked them to leave comments? Any normal agency or client side social media policy will tell them that they have to disclose their relationship with the makers of the video. And you wouldn’t really want a whole bunch of comments that start “Hi, I work for the agency that made this ad and I think it’s really great,” would you? What makes the two things different?

Digging for victory

OK. Another hypothetical example. The social news site Digg is a huge source of traffic for most news websites. The Telegraph, for example, gets around 75K visits a day from the service. That’s an awful lot of traffic.

The thing is, with Digg, you really want to make the front page if you want the big traffic. Around 10K stories are submitted by users to Digg every day, and only 150 or so make it to the front page. So we’d need to be smart.

Digg is less open to being gamed than it used to be, but let’s say that a smart agency could still deconstruct Digg’s algorithm sufficiently that it can use its network of staff to improve the chances of a story (or review) making it to the front page that shows their client in a positive light.

All they’d need to do (say) is send an all-hands email that mobilised your staff to digg a particular story at the right time of day. Would this be legitimate? Digg clearly thinks not, but are they the best judge?

Ballot stuffing

Let’s say a client gets nominated for a Webby or one of the other user-voted awards out there. It’s common and acceptable practice for web services to use any means at their disposal to beg for votes.

So is it OK to send an all-hands email asking your staff to register and vote? Is it OK to ask them to use their Facebook and Twitter accounts to ask their friends and followers to vote?

Here’s what I think

I think that this is an ethical minefield, but I’ve got a couple of clear points of view that are up for discussion. First off, and from a purely business perspective:

If it’s valuable then clients should pay us to do it. If it’s not valuable we shouldn’t do it.

Ignore the ethics. When was the last time you sent an email that said, “Please share this with your friends and use billing code xxx.xx when you record it on your time sheet”? Of course, it only takes a few seconds to relay a message (fewer if you simply copy and paste the message from the all-hands email to your social media presences). What the hell – it’s all just part of the team spirit, isn’t it?

But if this service is of any value at all to the client, then we’ll see the demands on our time beginning to increase. Soon we’ll find ourselves doing several a day. Larger agencies with more staff will offer a more valuable service to clients than boutique agencies (“We have a thousand trained staff with Twitter and Facebook accounts primed to promote your campaign!”)

We could even work out some kind of ratcheted scale that said that people with more Twitter followers could bill at a higher rate; or we might start looking at unduplicated reach.

This might seem fanciful, but stories like the uSocial’s offer to game Digg’s front page for around $200 tell us that the thriving black hat market for this sort of thing is getting a little greyer.

If clients value this, then they should pay us. If we give it away as a “value added” service, then are we sure that we’ve communicated this properly so that the client understands the value we added?

How can we be certain we aren’t just undermining our digital value proposition?

Now, here’s the tricky bit where I bring ethics back into it. If we’re paying our staff to relay messages to their networks on behalf of our clients, what makes this different from spam?

Employees personal networks are their personal property

I’m one of those people who believes that the boundaries are blurring between our personal, public and professional lives. My colleague Chris Nee has posted about the presentation of self in social media, expressing a lot of how I feel rather better than I could myself, although that hasn’t stopped me from covering this elsewhere — notably in a discussion about our social media policy where I said:

I think that a good PR person is someone who manages their relationships well; who can tread the fine line between doing good work for their clients without abusing or exploiting their relationships. Who recognizes the value of their personal network, and their personal brand.

Do we have a right to ask our employees to use their personal networks on behalf of our business? I think the answer is – of course we do. We pay experienced staff more partly because of the social capital that they’ve managed to accrue in their address books. When you leave your job to go to a new agency, you’ll take your contacts with you along with all the shared experience, the favours you’ve done, and the favours you owe.

So if part of the reason we’re paying them more is because of that network, then we clearly value their network.

So why on earth would we encourage our staff to spam their personal networks?

I trust my peers. I don’t trust spam monkeys

Part of the reason for the success of social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter is that I can choose who I follow and who I don’t. I can restrict conversations to a bunch of people I trust and respect. Sure, I’ve got lots of Twitter followers with names like “Sophie1982″ and “EdelmanHR” but that just means that they hear my inconsequential blatherings, not that I have to hear theirs!

And I follow a lot of my colleagues’ Twitter streams. I’m pleased to say that these are — on the whole — full of meaty chunky content and devoid of spam.

But if we increase the spam content, what will happen? Here’s what (in the absence of evidence) I believe: their follow rates, retweet rates and mention rates will all begin to drop off. From your experience, what do you think?

Where does this leave us?

I’ve put a somewhat one-sided argument here. I’m sure I’m open to all sorts of rebuttals like, “surely, if the content is interesting/useful/entertaining then our staff will only be adding value to their networks?” and “but surely it’s up to them whether they want to pass it on to their friends?” I’ll wait for these to roll in before I start trying to address them.

But here’s what I think. I think that we’re trying to teach our colleagues to learn from managing their personal communities in order better to manage our clients’ communities. Anything that teaches them to prostitute their networks is a retrograde move.

Am I wrong?

These are the slides from a presentation I did this morning on the topic of the Integration Triangle. I’ve talked about this here before in the article “5 Straightforward Ways To Integrate Your Communication Activities” — this includes some quick case studies.

I created these slides to support the presentation I was giving: they aren’t the presentation itself. This means that while you’ll be able to have a good guess at what I was saying most of the time, there will be moments when my meaning is opaque.

There are 70 slides in the presentation, including the front and back cover. Nevertheless, I gave the presentation in under 25 minutes. To save you doing the maths, that averages out at around 3 slides every minute (actually, there was a 4 minute delay in the middle of the presentation — so it’s more like 3-and-a-half slides per minute.)

In fact, my slides fall into two categories — those on which I spend fewer than 5 seconds, and those on which I spend more than a minute. This is more an artistic decision than anything else — I think that lots of slides going past very quickly give an appearance of pace and energy (which I dearly need first thing in the morning), but can rapidly become exhausting to watch and hard to follow without the occasional pause for breath.

Even with 70 slides, there’s so much more that I can say about the “Integration Triangle” as a planning tool — but I was trying to keep this to a single simple message. I’m hoping that (whatever they thought about my presentation, and no matter whether they liked it or believed what I was saying) the audience will remember what it was that I was saying, and be able to tell a version of the story themselves.

There’s just so much that we can talk about when it comes to the whole Digital PR thing that it all becomes rather overwhelming. I’ve just got off the phone to a colleague in Vienna (where I’m speaking next week) who wants me to talk to his audience about “Facebook and Twitter and Blogs” (oh my!) And I’ve got 45 minutes to do this. Of course I can do it. But what on earth is the “one thing” I want them to remember?

I believe that — like Caesar’s wife — those who work in the public relations industry must be above suspicion when it comes to all online engagement (whether personal or professional.) Later on in this post, you’ll see how I’m hoping to use our social media policy to moderate our behaviour as a company, while freeing up our colleagues to experiment with social media. But I’m not expressing it well. What should I do?

Last summer I shared a draft of the Porter Novelli Social Media Policy that I’d been working on.

It’s one of those documents that some like and some don’t. A few people, for example, think that it’s too restrictive.

The sticking point for most people seems to be the bit that says (under 2.3.3):

Your profile must include an explicit statement that you work for Porter Novelli. Include the following minimum information: “I work for Porter Novelli, a global public relations company.”

For a couple of reasons, this item has popped up again. A few weeks ago, I tweeted that Porter Novelli people should disclose their full name and company affiliation in their Twitter bios, and referred to a post-and-comments on this blog that went some of the way to explaining why this should be. This tweet was picked up by a few people, some of whom commented. Willem (@hippowill, Ice cream for everyone!!) was probably the most eloquent, saying (among other things):

I’m not looking for work, but if I do I’m not interested in applying for Porter Novelli or any other agency that would feel the need to require my agreement to online guidelines, telling me how to talk, write and represent myself – and not the agency I work for – online.

So I’ve been meaning to get back to him, if nothing else. I feel that either I haven’t explained our policy properly, or he doesn’t get it — which amounts to the same thing. I don’t mind being wrong, but I do mind being misinterpreted. This stuff is important!

Yesterday, I had a brief conversation with some of our graduate prospects — young bright people who are looking to work for us. And it turned out that one of them, Anna Svensson (@svanna) had already written a post about it, asking Does your future employer have the right to control your online interaction?

In her response, Anna points out that (while she still feels that we’re “trying to control [our] employees a bit too much”) what we’re actually attempting to do is more “a form of issues management” (exactly!) It’s a good post, but it’s one of those that’s worth reading for the comment stream. I’d recommend you take a read.

But here, I think, is the big question:

Should a PR agency’s social media policy be different?

Different, I mean, from other companies’ policies? You see, I’d argue “Yes, they should.” I’m basing this on a lot of previous material. Wikipedia’s Conflict of Interest guidelines, for example, explicitly state that public relations is a “special case”:

Editing in the interests of public relations is particularly frowned upon. This includes, but is not limited to, edits made by public relations departments of corporations or governmental entities; or of other public or private for-profit or not-for-profit organizations; or by professional editors paid to edit a Wikipedia article with the sole intent of improving that organization’s image.

The italics are my own. Public relations (and social media relations) people are – I think – likely to be more distrusted than usual. Our errors will be held up to ridicule by our customers, and by our peers, and will live forever in the popular schadenfreude, achieving the mythical status of the fake blogging fiascos of 2007, or poor bloody Kryptonite/Bic Biro events of 2004 that still turn up in presentations and training workshops.

We’re also under more pressure to make mistakes. Between us, PR professionals around the world represent hundreds of thousands of clients, and several million campaigns every year. As the pressure increases in every region to take these campaigns online, mistakes will be made.

While I was writing this policy, I came across lots of policies from other organizations. Most of these were old-school “blogging policies” (Forrester’s Charlene Li posted a list ofBlogging Policy Examples back in 2004) and there’s a list at the NewPR Wiki.

We wanted to do something a bit different. As I state in the policy preamble, we wanted it to cover “Anything you do online where you share information that might affect your colleagues or clients.”

I’d done a bit of quick-and-dirty internal research when I joined Porter Novelli. At the time (and even today) the great majority of our colleagues weren’t bloggers. As a result, any “blogging policy” would be irrelevant to them. And yet, at the same time, a majority of our colleagues were on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Bebo, with some (mostly dormant) accounts on other social networking sites like Orkut, ASmallWorld, Hyves and the like depending on where they were coming from. A smaller number — while having no blog of their own — had commented on a blog or online news story, or posted in forums at least once in the past three months. Some of them were sharing photographs over services like Flickr, and (thankfully) a very few had — according to WikiScanner — anonymously edited Wikipedia (and, with one exception, always for non-client-related interests). Almost all had voted on something — even if it were only a poll — in the past quarter.

Some of these engagements were on behalf of clients, but the great majority were “personal business” — or as Willem might put it, representing themselves – and not the agency or clients for whom they worked.

The guiding principles for the policy

We were trying to keep things as simple as possible.

I rather like Comcast’s policy as quoted by Rohit Bhargava in his post Comcast’s Actual Social Media Policy No One Knew About:

Their official point of view is that their employees are allowed to participate authentically, as long as they disclose their affiliations, don’t divulge secret or proprietary information and don’t act as though they are an official spokesperson or allowed to speak on behalf of the brand.

That’s a lot better, I think than the often misquoted Microsoft “Be Smart” (taken out of context from a post from Robert Scoble” and a couple of often-quoted soundbites along the lines of “Our corporate policy is, be smart. We don’t talk about things we don’t know about.”)

Only the most arrogant would believe that “be smart” is suitable advice to include in a policy — instead it was a glimpse at the philosophy that underpinned the blogging policy that Microsoft were working on at the time. Scoble explicitly agreed with what Yahoo!’s Jeremy Zawodny says:

The only advice I have … is this: please make sure it’s abundantly clear what the rules are. You’re getting to be a big company. Don’t rely on unwritten rules or company tradition/culture to do the job.

So I was trying to keep it simple and flexible. Hence the guiding principles:

1. The web is not anonymous. Assume that everything you write can be traced back to the company, if not you personally.
2. There is no longer a clear boundary between your personal life and your work life.
3. Do not lie or withhold the truth.
4. The web contains a permanent record of our mistakes. But do not try to change things retrospectively.

Furthermore, I borrowed a philosophy from someone much wiser and smarter than I (and who was more fitted to our corporate culture than — say — Microsoft’s), Cluetrain Manifesto co-author David Weinberger who says:

All I can promise is that I will be honest with you and never write something I don’t believe in because someone is paying me as part of a relationship you don’t know about. Put differently: All I’ll hide are the irrelevancies.

So what’s the thinking behind Paragraph 2.3.3 then?

Well — there are several.

1. We’re proud of the people we hire, and we hope they’re proud to work for us

One of the most satisfying ways we recruit is through WOM recommendation from our colleagues, who have let their friends how much they enjoy working with us.

Because we think that our people are the best advertisement for who we are and what we do, we’d like to see them promoting their personal brands as much as possible. We actively encourage people to begin blogging, set up networks on LinkedIn, get on Flickr, Twitter, and the like. We don’t actively monitor these accounts, but do

2. It prevents us from forgetting that there’s no “private” anymore

I think that a good PR person is someone who manages their relationships well; who can tread the fine line between doing good work for their clients without abusing or exploiting their relationships. Who recognizes the value of their personal network, and their personal brand.

When I’m doing background research on someone I’m meeting, I’ll check Google, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Who are they? Where have they worked? Who do we know in common?

Have you heard the story about photos of Bono and “bikini-clad babes” turning up on Facebook? Have you every searched for Carpphone Warehouse on Flickr?

PR people (who work with them on a daily basis) are already aware that these tools are also a great tool for journalists. So only someone very naive should think that there’s a divide that people will respect (“Oh — I won’t look at their Twitter or Facebook accounts because that’s personal, and I’m only interested them in a business context”)

By encouraging our colleagues to label their accounts with their place of work, we are also encouraging them to be aware that (even in their private lives) they may be seen to represent us.

3. It prevents us from accidentally forgetting to disclose

OK — everyone should disclose where appropriate. We know that. But in the heat of the moment, it’s easy to forget. It’s particularly easy to forget when you have only 140 characters to express yourself “I work for Porter Novelli, a public relations company that represents brand x” will take up more than 50% of your available space.

4. It prevents us from “accidentally” “forgetting” to disclose

Imagine that sentence being read out with heavy-handed sarcastic finger quotes.

There are all sorts of schoolboy errors that we won’t be tempted to make if everyone who works for us is clearly labelled “Porter Novelli.”

Working in the nineties at media planning and buying agencies and creative agencies leaves me with an abiding memory of being asked to “click on any of our banners that you see while you’re surfing.” These days, thank God, technology and good auditing has put paid to this kind of abuse.

This kind of astroturfing (the term we use for faking grass-roots support) is the kind of behaviour we have to prevent. Leaving comments on forums and blogs, voting on polls, ’seeding’ UGC campaigns with content or sending apparently spontaneous branded ‘consumer’ messages via Twitter or Facebook is exactly the kind of thing that junior staffers will be asked to do by people who don’t get it. The fact that all our staffers are marked with the equivalent of a digital watermark prevents people from us as a company asking them to misuse their personal accounts.

I talked above about “personal networks” and “personal brands” — it’s essential that we as a company don’t ask people to exploit those; we want to hire people who have good networks. We want to help our colleagues develop those networks and brands. But while they work with us, we want them to use them on behalf of our clients. You can see how easy it would be unthinkingly to ask them to abuse them. By asking our colleagues to put the name of our employer on their accounts, I think we take a step towards preventing that.

This is a complicated idea — but one I hope that I’ve now explained better.

5. It prevents us from accidentally astroturfing again

Remember, Porter Novelli is a global organization. Different territories are at different stages of their digital market development. This is both an advantage (we can better forecast and plan for what future developments will look like in those markets) and a disadvantage (we may be condemned to repeat mistakes we — or our competitors — have made in more developed markets.)

Does this make it clearer?

To those, like Willem, who think that we’re being too strict I’d ask — does this make more sense? Do you still believe that there is “public and private?” Do you think that we’re simply doing this to advertise ourselves and control our employees, or do you think that we are doing it (as I suggested) to moderate our behaviour as a company, and freeing up our colleagues to experiment with social media?

What can I do to improve this? Now you know what we’re trying to do, all suggestions will really be welcomed.

Using digital channels in tight association with others helps get the highest value from campaigns. All too often though integration is at best an afterthought and at worst ignored.

This is the triangle I draw when I’m trying to explain how to integrate digital comms into a client’s other activities. It provides one way of thinking about the challenges and opportunities that face us, and can stimulate better ideas.

In the interests of keeping it short, this post is going to be pretty theoretical. In future posts I’ll cover some practical case studies and refer back to this post. Think of this as laying the groundwork.

Here — in brief review — is some of what we know about the three corners.

Digital media

The single most important thing to think about in terms of integration? Except in very rare circumstances a website isn’t a story. Websites aren’t mediagenic. It’s principally because they make such bad television stories that Second Life captured such media attention a few years ago. Here at last was an internet story that looked good on TV.

Traditional media

What do we know about the traditional media channels? That, as they fragment, mass audiences are getting harder to track down. That audiences are paying less attention, or ad-avoiding. That newspaper readerships are down across the board.

And yet we also know that coverage in a traditional media news brand still generates huge traffic for digital channels. That our influence mapping projects still show sites like the New York Times, the BBC and the Guardian at the centre of most conversations. That stories that break on blogs still need to reach the mainstream media to become really big time.

The real world

Taking an action online (whether finding information, doing shopping, or finding a date) takes little or no effort. This convenience is its strength but also a weakness: that people tend to undervalue things that cost them little in commitment or investment is hardly surprising.

On the other hand, taking even a small symbolic action in the phsyical world can create such strong commitment that many marketing approaches (including sampling, try-before-you-buy, and face-to-face selling techniques) rely on such small actions for their effectiveness.

The problem? Doing stuff in the physical world is a logistical nightmare by comparison with doing stuff online. To reach those few people you’re going to reach requires a serious investment in planning and time.

5 ways to integrate your comms activities

If any idea exists in only one corner, then it should always be extended or challenged. Here are five simple ways to do this.

Use traditional media to drive traffic online

In the nineties, it was a hard job to persuade clients to add a URL to their advertising campaigns. Now that’s the most some of them will do.

There’s nothing wrong with just publishing a URL. But just as the days of putting a URL on a sticker, flyposting it in the washroom of hip night spots, and relying on nothing more than curiosity to drive traffic are now over, so perhaps it’s no longer enough simply to print your corporate URL on your press ad. It’s better than nothing, I suppose. If you’ve already got a lot of brand recognition, it may even work.

Anything we can do to make the call to action more relevant — give them a reason to visit the site. If that’s not the whole point of the ad, or the story — if the URL is pinned on as an afterthought — then the audience will read it that way, and act accordingly.

The same is true of earned press coverage, although here it’s an even simpler equation. However often you put your URL on the press release, it won’t be printed by even the most time-poor journalist unless the site has some intrinsic relevance.

Use the real world and digital to create content for traditional media

Numbers on the web are strangely inflated and meaningless, so getting a thousand people to your campaign site won’t make anyone happy. On the other hand, getting a few dozen people into a room can be a photo opportunity. Neither press nor TV journalists will publish images of a website, but anything with real people in it could be a story.

If you do it right, though, you can collect enough of a story online to make it a story for the traditional media to pick up. It’s sort of sad-but-true that you can sometimes get a story in as because it mentions Twitter or Facebook (some particularly poor examples: “Man killed wife in Facebook row”, and Second Life affair leads to real-life divorce for David Pollard, aka Dave Barmy.) Try to do more than that. Get hundreds of people to make a huge smiley in time for the Google Earth satellite to take a snapshot, for example. That should make the news.

Use digital media to archive your campaigns

A conference speech reaches only those people in a room until you record it and put it online. An ad is only shown to the people you pay for until you put it online. Yesterday’s newspaper story is old news everywhere except the web. Digital channels help you reach wider audiences; everyone from that person who really wants to show a friend the great ad you made to the person who’s Google search turns up your story. Put your photos on Flickr, your slide presentations on SlideShare, your documents on Scribd, your videos on YouTube (and Vimeo.) Turn your press office into a social media newsroom. Create podcasts and vodcasts.

Storage is cheap and bandwidth costs little these days, but don’t take that to mean that you have to become your own broadcaster. Instead, consider placing your stuff where people look for such stuff, and make sure it’s titled and labeled and tagged and (where appropriate) transcribed so that people who are looking for stuff find your stuff. You know the way that Apple computers turn up in any ad that needs a photo of a computer but that isn’t actually a computer ad? It’s the default designer’s image. My dream is that our clients’ products become the default image in everything from boardroom presentations to blog posts.

Use the real world to create the perception of value for digital channels

Everything in the digital world is free. It’s a world of abundance — I give you something (a photo, a song, some software or information) and yet I still have it. Anyone working in marketing knows the truth: that people value stuff that’s free as though it were valueless. Online marketeers occasionally create false scarcity to give a free service the perception of value; you may recall for instance the buzz when hard-to-get Gmail beta invites sold on eBay, or when Pownce invites did the same three years later.

The best way, though, to create value is to do something in the real world. In the physical world, scarcity comes into play. I give you something and I no longer have it. This makes me more careful about what I give to whom in return for what. These transactions mean that we start valuing things differently. If there’s only room for a hundred people at the Prince after show party and person A gets to go but person B doesn’t then they’ve got something to talk about.

People also value traditional media more highly than digital media. The millennials’ desire to be famous is still expressed in terms of traditional media. Get them onto a blog? Not so interesting. Get them on a reality show or into a TV ad? Now you’re talking.

Use digital channels to simplify the administration for real world events

If there’s one thing that digital channels have done that has revolutionized our lives, it’s been to turn us into a world of self-service customers. I haven’t been to a travel agent in years. With the aid of the web, I select and pay for my insurance policies, my entertainment, my software and business tools. Using online tools reduces time and cost overheads.

If you’re organizing a real world event, use the tools that people already feel comfortable with. Use a full-featured service like Eventbrite which will handle everything from eCRM to inventory control and ticketing, or cobble something together from widely (and freely available) modules. Depending on the audience and the event, consider using things like Meetup, Yahoo! Upcoming, Facebook Groups, Pages and Events, Google Groups and Google Maps. Allow people to register for SMS reminders.

If you’re running a conference or seminar, look at ways you can use digital channels to link delegates together before and after the event.

Case Studies

As I say, I’ll be following up on this post with a few examples. But in the meantime, here’s a short list I’ve drawn up (see if you can work out how these use cover off the corners of the triangle):

Microsoft/CNN’s The Moment

Cadbury’s For the Love of Wispa

The WWF’s Get On Board campaign

T-Mobile’s Life’s for Sharing campaign (note the clever use of 5-second music clips to avoid copyright issues.)

Sony Bravia’s Bouncing Balls campaign

Partly due to a comment I left on Amelia Torode’s blog, I’m re-reading Neal Stephenson’s 1999 monograph In the Beginning…Was the Command Line. I get a lot of perspective from reading old books. I tend to be too caught up in the zeitgeist to read new cultural commentary with anything like the distance that’s required to draw sensible conclusions.

This particular book concerns itself with the history and nature of operating systems, how they are shaped by and reflect our wider culture, and how (in turn) they shape our society. It makes fascinating reading, but it’s been almost ten years since I last read it and much has changed.

For one thing, the future didn’t work out the way Stephenson (or anyone at the time) expected. Stephenson forecast doom for Apple, for example:

They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly.

But in 1999 when he wrote this, Apple stock was in fact just beginning to recover from its disastrous performance in the mid nineties.

The reason for this recovery? Steve Jobs had recently rejoined Apple as CEO following his years in exile. (It’s particularly poignant to recall this in a month where Jobs has been forced to take taken 6 months medical leave from Apple.)

Stephenson noted:

Only last week… the technology sections of all the newspapers were filed with adulatory press coverage of how Apple released the iMac in several happenin’ new colors like Blueberry and Tangerine

At the time, Stephenson ridiculed this as another example of Apple’s close-minded reliance on pretty-but-closed hardware. Now Apple watchers know now that the underpowered, floppy-driveless iMac helped lift Apple out of a world of beige computers and into the market-making consumer electronics company it has become today. And no-one seems to care that you can’t change the battery on an iPod, iPhone, or even the new MacBookPro.

So some things haven’t worked out as one would have expected. Indeed Stephenson himself is back in the Mac fold (I too deserted Apple in the mid-to-late nineties. It wasn’t a hard decision.)

But despite history proving Stephenson a little premature in his announcement of Apple’s demise there is much that is good in this book. Stephenson fans will know that his writing is both erudite and accessible; discussing operating systems he ranges over a wide territory that includes:

• The origins of anti-intellectualism in Europe
• The need for and application of metaphor in popular cultural life
• The “two cultures” split in modern society

But this is the passage that caught my eye and made me want to write this post:

It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords — multiculturalism and diversity — are false fronts that are being used … to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or “honoring diversity” or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other — to stop asserting (and eventually to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false…

The lesson most people are taking home from the twentieth century is that, in order for a large number of different cultures to coexist peacefully on the globe … it is necessary for people to suspend judgement in this way. Hence (I would argue) our suspicion of, and hostility toward, all authority figures …

The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgements as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there’s no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame. The ability to make judgements, to believe things, is the entire point of having a culture. I think this is why guys with machine guns sometimes pop up in places like Luxor and begin pumping bullets into Westerners… When their sons come home wearing Chicago Bulls caps with the bills turned sideways, the dads go out of their minds.

Agree or disagree, this is exactly why people read Stephenson. If you’re the type of person who treads the line between social-observer and tech-fan, you’ll love In the Beginning…Was the Command Line

Public service message: please don't push strangers in front of oncoming trains (by freshelectrons on Flickr)

When we’re using push channels like display ads, direct marketing or pull channels like websites or search marketing — numbers are what count, and numbers are enough. But when we are talking about social media channels, we shouldn’t target strangers. Instead, we should look at our existing relationships and learn how to make the most of these to our mutual benefit.

I don’t know whether you’ve had the experience of meeting someone famous in an ordinary context (in the street, say, or in a supermarket queue). I have.

It is a profoundly disturbing experience. For a split second your brain tells you that this is someone familiar but not why. Since you’re not expecting to meet David Bowie in your video store, your brain leaps to the most probable conclusion — this is clearly an old acquaintance or a friend-of-a-friend. By the time you realize who it is, you’ve already been staring at them too long, possibly waving and beginning to say hello.

What’s unnerving about this experience of course, is the asymmetry of the relationship; you know who they are (and possibly even some intimate details of their private lives) but they have no idea who you are. For all that you think you know them, you are in fact complete bloody strangers.

The circle of complete bloody strangers

At Porter Novelli, we’ve been trying out a new way of helping people think about the targets for our social media activities. Targeting in social media is one of the many places where conventional marketing experience fails to help; and indeed, generally hinders. For want of a better name, I’m calling it the “circle of complete bloody strangers.”

This may not be the most elegant name, but it does help simplify the problem. Here’s the synopsis: in traditional on and off-line marketing disciplines, planners like me tend to play a numbers game. We’re looking to reach the greatest number of people who will be receptive to our message, and (whether behavioural or demographic) we define our targets accordingly. And so, we spend nearly all our time crafting our messages and campaigns for complete bloody strangers.

Targeting strangers

Agencies do everything we can to get to know our target audience. At Porter Novelli, for example, we follow a process that has us (among other things) conducting desk research, running focus groups and interviews with representatives from the audience, and doing mystery shopping. At one of the wackier ad agencies where I used to work, there were workshops where hypnosis was used to break down barriers and aid rôle-playing exercises.

But however well we get under the skin of our target (say “C2DE mothers with young families”), they remain complete bloody strangers.

You might recognize them in the street, say, or in a supermarket queue – but like the celebrities whose lives you follow in the news – they have no idea who you are.

Social media marketing and social currency

There is (to my knowledge) no single precise definition of social media marketing. Many, I think would agree that it involves something like “using blogs and podcasts and social networks and media sharing sites and stuff to promote a product or service,” but that’s hardly precise.

Some would argue that simply buying advertising on a blog/podcast/social network meets the requirements, others would say that it doesn’t.

As a broad digital comms planner, I tend not to fall one way or the other, but suspect that if buying media or sponsorship was all that it took, we should all have stopped worrying and gone home by now.

I suspect that when we talk about social media marketing, we mean something like “generating word-of-mouth buzz and recommendations – whether for a product or a campaign promoting that product.”

I believe that we’re trying to use existing social relationships between colleagues, friends, tribes, and niche interest groups as the pathways along which we disseminate information. This isn’t as sinister as it sounds; we know that people use brands and branded content as what Douglas Rushkoff calls “social currency.” Content, he says

…only matters in an interactive space or even the real world … because it gives us an excuse to interact with one another. When I was a kid, we’d buy records not solely because we wanted to hear whoever was on them; we wanted an excuse for someone else to come over! “What are you doing after school? I got the new Stones’ album…”

In this sense, our content choices are just means to an end – social currency through which we can make connections with others.

So — in Rushkoff’s terms — what we’re doing when we do “social media marketing” is stamping new coins that can be released into the general circulation.

At Porter Novelli, my mantra is that “people want to promote themselves, and may be prepared to let you help.” This helps me remember that, however important my client’s campaign appears to me, my audience’s motivation is markedly different.

Why we shouldn’t talk to strangers

Take a look at the target diagram again. Normally I scrawl this on a flip chart and tell the story as I’m going along. The circles aren’t precise, and I often draw them differently depending on context, but these things are consistent: you are always at the centre of the target, and the outer circle is always defined as “complete strangers”.

Now ask yourself – who’s most interested in what you have to say, and who is most likely to repeat it in subsequent conversations? I’d say that the progression goes something like:

1. You (naturally.)
2. People you’re close to (friends, family, and colleagues for example.) If you can’t get these people interested in what you have to say, what hope do you have?
3. Your “ecosystem”; people who depend on you economically – whether suppliers or employees or retailers who carry your product or developers who develop for your platform. Trade and specialist bloggers and journalists fit in somewhere around here.
4. People who have a strong relationship with your product, tailing off from advocates to simple repertoire purchasers (people who regularly — but not exclusively — buy your product.)
5. Complete bloody strangers.

Let’s take an example.

1. The people who will be most interested in the launch of your new FMCG ad campaign will be people who work with you and at the agency who created it.
2. People at other agencies will also be interested in the campaign, so it’s a good thing that there are lots of inter-agency relationships. And so will your friends and family — they like seeing what you’ve been up to and will tell their friends.
3. The retailers who stock your product will naturally be excited to hear that there’s a campaign coming. And Campaign and Ad Age are always hungry for content.
4. If you’re smart, you’ll have run test campaigns among your customer database of people who have asked to receive information. Asking their opinion makes them feel involved, and means that they’ll feel a little pride-of-ownership when the campaign does launch. “I helped with that,” they’ll say to themselves, and maybe to their friends.
5. If your media plan and creative are any good, you’ll create a stir among the complete strangers.

Do you see what I mean? As you move further and further out, the more tenuous the connection, and the less certain the response.

Another thing to bear in mind; the further away you are from the middle of the target, the more noise you encounter. By the time you’re out in the complete strangers circle, you’re just another voice making demands on their time.

So why do so many of the campaign ideas I come across require the active involvement of complete bloody strangers for them to be successful?

Let’s host a competition on YouTube where people send in films about our product! Wheeee!

Let’s create a community! Wheeee!

Let’s send out a short film and hope that people will send the link to each other! Wheeee!

Let’s make a Facebook app! Wheeee!

None of these ideas is inherently wrong from the traditional marketing point of view. As an industry, we are (rightly perhaps) judged by total exposure to our campaigns. For most channels, numbers are what count, and numbers are enough.

But how on earth can we hope to influence the social networks of complete bloody strangers when we aren’t even making proper use of our own?

This is a description of Billy Graham crusades from an academic study I’ve been reading. I’m interested in how real evangelists work (after all, I use the term often enough when talking to colleagues and clients):

Counselors begin their work after the singing, testimonials, collection and Billy Graham’s sermon, which culminates in the altar call. At the moment of Graham’s invitation to “come forward to Christ.” counselors and choir members begin moving forward to an area usually in front of the speaker’s platform or rostrum. To a naive member of the audience or a television viewer, this movement creates an illusion of a spontaneous and mass response to the invitation. Having been assigned seating in strategic areas of the auditorium or arena and given instructions on the staggered time-sequencing for coming forward, the counselors move forward in such a fashion so as to create the illusion of individuals “flowing” into the center of the arena from all quarters, in a steady outpouring of individual decision. Unless an outsider or observer of these events has been instructed to look for the name tags and ribbons worn by those moving forward it is all too easy to infer from these appearances the “charismatic” impact of Graham and his invitation. These strategies promote the respectability of making a public commitment and represent methods calculated to manipulate the consent of the passive, the uncertain, the wary, and the indecisive.

(from: David L. Altheide and John M. Johnson, Counting Souls: A Study of Counseling at Evangelical Crusades, The Pacific Sociological Review, Vol. 20, No. 3, (Jul., 1977), pp. 323-348)

Momentum

A recent (and criticised) study by Tubemogul on the short shelf life of online video reminded me of some research into views on YouTube videos I did back in 2006. I only looked at about 130 random YouTube videos for the first 20 days of their life cycle, while TubeMogul’s methodology was somewhat more sound (they tracked more than 10K videos for around three months, among other things.)

Here’s the chart from my analysis:

And here’s the chart from theirs:

You can see that it was pretty easy for me to accept their findings.

What does this have to do with evangelicals?

It’s a point I haven’t quite got my head around (that’s what this blog’s for, I’m afraid – to share what I’m thinking about, not to share what I’ve already thought out.)

I’m interested in the idea of momentum (something that my colleague Marian Salzman first brought to my attention.)

By creating the appearance of acceleration (using pre-briefed volunteers and “staggered time-sequencing”) the evangelicals put on a better show. They pull people with them.

Does the gradual build ultimately deliver more volume than the fanfare? What are the timelines?

Apologies: some very poorly put-together thoughts here. More – perhaps – later.

Later

You know the way, when a new social networking tool appears, first one email, then a few, then a dozen of emails from your friends arrive asking you to join them? Or videos always used to be on YouTube, but these days you’re seeing more Vimeo in your mix? Or (for the geekier among you) open source projects were always on SourceForge, but now you’re seeing more on Google Code.

It’s that sense of movement, of a growing surge that we notice, I think, and that can foreground a new entrant in a market heavily dominated by another player.