Pluralism

Edit> While I’ve been planning this post Facebook have made this announcement. The Anthology announcement both reinforces (IMHO) what I say below but also contradicts it depending on your POV.

I guess the key takeaway is that things move pretty fast around here so don’t spend too long drafting your post or it’ll become redundant.

So, on with the post...

It seems to me that Facebook may have made a mistake - making it’s platform a ‘buy in’ and not an ‘earn in’ market means all content quality can be sub par and it doesn't really matter. This is especially concerning with the rise and rise of video content.

Sure good paid content works better than rubbish but that doesn't stop brands and agencies from making rubbish - when you can buy your reach and engagement why make bespoke content for social. Since media agencies and Facebook now pitch auto plays as an engagement (I buy in to this on some levels but it's early days and auto play has sent view numbers sky high) you can report decent enough performance on any piece of shite. Effectively the days of making good content, relevant, shareable content and naturally effective content are gone. This is not news but it strikes me that this is counter-productive for everybody, because there will be a diminishing return. I’d add that acceptance of this also lays bare the sad state of performance management of Social at a lot of brands and agencies.

When you stack up the relative expense of video production with the time, skill and craft required to execute it well, for many, doing it at all becomes troublesome.  Doing it well becomes just prohibitive. Hence we get an onslaught of TVC cut-downs, ‘ making of’s’ (yawn) and other unoriginal uninspired derivative tripe. Why go to the expense of creating quality content when your money is better served purchasing your reach.

Not everyone is doing this, Vox, Vice and a few others (notably publishers edit> and incidentally founding member's of Facebook's Anthology group) are making great content that is designed for the channel that it’s being deployed on. They are doing this, regardless of paid support or otherwise. I’m not sure it’s fair to compare 'brands’ and 'publishers’ through this lens but the reason publishers have flourished on Facebook (in terms of video consumption and referral traffic) is that they offer something interesting at the both ends of the click.

In fairness, if everyone has to pay to play this should level the playing field - the cream should float to the top regardless - but paid social creates so much noise that, as with banners, people switch off to the content. Again, hardly news, yet we still see it, we see marketers putting digital and TV content on social, and hammering it through with paid support.

I think I used this quote in a previous post, but this is a case of ‘Hate the game, not the player’.

Paid media works, by the numbers but within social against rubbish content or poorly conceived ad units and campaigns I think it’s just, well, blunt.

I defy you to monitor your behaviour and count for a month how many FB ads or Twitter promoted tweets or mobile ads you actually click on. I’m not suggesting it’s ineffective (and as marketers it’s hard for us to regard these in the same way as the general population), I love paid media and what can be done with it. It can be a precision implement of great power, like a light sabre (to capture the Zeitgeist)  - not as clumsy or random as a blaster; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age - but it could be a lot more effective . I see a lot of content being blasted into the market and it is clumsy and random.

Through the inexorable shift to paid media social is being treated by many as just another interruption marketing technique, when it used to be about hitting the right note with the right crowd - now it’s 'just advertising’. It’s display, and just because consumption behavior has changed doesn’t mean brands and agencies will produce better stuff. Sure there will be a few quixotic digital managers pushing the boat out but for the most part is hard to justify the additional production cost. But doing the right thing is always hard...

We should be making a different video for every targeting cluster or set of keywords. Content should be sequenced, that’s the power of platform but productions budgets are for the most part still being poured into ATL - TV and Cinema - there are few agencies and brands that are agile and willing enough to make a different video for a website visitor or a registered customer or a different acquisition prospect and then serve them another narratively related piece once they've engaged with the first.

So in many ways we as an industry are nowhere. Making cheap video 'cause it’s social it doesn't have to be polished’ and hanging convenient numbers off it’s performance. We should be actually doing what the platforms are designed to do and making content a la minute (not reactive - appropriate, sequential content).

If we’re going to be made to pay to place content then the platforms ought to make that easy - 1 ad buy - 9 versions of a video based on targeting clusters, then layer on sequential messaging (or serve the 9 in the right order) cookies, Atlas etc. should be employed from a narrative perspective, "oh you've seen this, let’s show this now". It’s not about frequency it’s about narrative and not some platitude about story telling but about contextual journeys and useful content.

Social Influence, On-line Influence or commoditised influence is a funny thing. Like all things social, influence and influencer outreach is a nebulous thing.

This sounds like a classic Social Media cliché, but influence, like all things ‘social’ needs to be genuine, otherwise it is utterly valueless (no matter what price someone is putting on it).

For brand marketers and agencies, this is a tough area - we are addicted to numbers and especially for the less involved (read management or naive clients) influence is often measured in numbers - bigger the better.  Reach, Subscribers, Page Views etc.  But in the area of influence I don’t believe quantity is nearly as important as quality.

This brings me to Klout.  I was an early advocate of reputation engines/apps and so on.  I had high hopes for the reputation economy. I remember this article from wired in 2012 by @rachelbotsman (If you don’t love #longreads there is a video of Rachel speaking at a ted event on the subject here) that summed up my hopes for the whole influence measurement thing. Sorry about all the links!

However, Klout got gamed, and pretty easily too, Kred went quiet, PeerIndex pivoted and the whole thing kind of came to nothing.  Last year Lithium acquired Klout, ostensibly for added scoring of existing forum and community members for their existing clients  - which makes some sense, and everyone else kind of forgot about Klout and their Klout score.

Now, there is a caveat here.  Klout still gets some play in The US - some hotels use it for assessing upgrade potential and a lot of brands (I am told) use it for assessing and prioritising the importance of customer service requests (isn’t this counter-intuitive - isn’t the point of good customer service to serve everyone well? That may be a little quixotic but it should be our aim).

Anyway, I digress. Klout and Klout scores are purportedly a measure of on-line influence and Klout themselves have a reasonable offering in this area for brands.  However even Klouts’ offering is designed to measure, leverage and reward meaningful influence for particular individuals in particular areas.  By areas we are talking, passions, interests, verticals and so on.

Klout and Klout scores are not designed to measure the influence of influence. Just having a big Klout score, when your sphere of influence is Klout itself and you have nothing of value to say about anything anyone cares about, is of so little value as to be detrimental to the whole reputation economy model.  Measuring and even scoring influence is fine and makes sense. However until contextual, semantic and qualitative machine learning is really precise then it will always be a quantitative game, and with bots, auto-replies and a barrage of platitudes being shouted into a vacuum of equally facile ‘influencers’ then it is, as I said, simple to game and devalues the whole idea of influence. 

It is my humble opinion that anyone influential in social media is too busy actually working on their account or on comms for their brand to be spending time worrying about their Klout score.  After all - at the end of the day, it’s not about you, it’s about your customer - be it the client, the consumer, your brand or your followers - ideally it’s all. 

The bottom line is influence comes from passion - that’s why a lot of ‘YouTube Stars’ are so big and can charge such a premium (though that’s a whole other post for another day). That’s why proper bloggers and influencers get brands’ attention - because they have the attention of a group of people with a shared interest and shared passion for something: cars, chocolate, Uzbekistani Tractor engineering -there really is a thought leader for everything but I just can’t believe that the feedback loop of being influential about influence is valuable.

I just read the above quote this morning - it’s a Tim Cook quote, or at least I've lifted it from a longer Tim Cook quote that I read on a post from parislemon​. (edit: it is originally from this fastcompany article, here)

This is an incredibly bold approach to business and probably goes a long way to explaining why Apple are on the verge of having a market capitalisation of one trillion US Dollars (that's a one with twelve zeros after it).

Having said that, it is not an easy position to adopt, whether in wider business strategy or in your communications approach. Not in a world where everything is weighed and measured.

In digital there is an addiction, or at least a desire - no a lust - to measure.  We can track behaviour, we can re-target. The platforms and media sellers give us in depth metrics around CTR’s or impressions, engagements, visits, bounce rates, open rates and on and on it goes.

Now, to be sure, there is valuable insight within these numbers. I myself spend more time than I ever imagined looking at excel documents jammed with numbers.  (Side note: I was never particularly enamoured with numbers at school and my results showed this,  It didn't help that I did double majors in English and Drama - this didn't leave a lot of time for maths. It was the eighties and no-one really knew the volumes of data that were about to be unleashed).

Anyway - here we are trying to capture the imaginations of consumers, to inspire them to action, to build affinity or preference or to be that one ad, of anywhere between a few hundred to a few thousand ads the average person is exposed to everyday, that leaps out and actually moves someone.

It is here, this delta between measurement (of everything) and creative, design and inspiration that there is friction.  All the metrics are great measures of behaviour.This is all good and all valuable and if you’re lucky you have a team or an agency of data analysts who pour through all this to deliver some insight.

But sometimes - and this is where we get back to the @tim_cook quote - sometimes you need to trust your creative instinct.  Yes be informed by data, but if your gut says try the opposite then try it, at least test it. (Always check first  that you’re not an egocentric megalomaniac who thinks everyone in the world should behave like you).  It’s sometimes better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission.

You read a lot these days about brand personality and brand values and the virtual anthropomorphising of brands.  Nowhere is this embodied more, or shall we say, attempted more than in social.  The ‘Human’ tone of voice, the authentic response and on and on.

That’s all fine and for the most part I agree, but then we you get into the nitty gritty of it, you have all these different channels, just within social - Facebook, Twitter, G+, Tumblr, YouTube, Instagram (I love that my auto correct tries to change Instagram to Pentagram - what does that tell us?) and on and on.  So if each of these platforms needs a nuanced tone of voice, or a nuanced approach how do you manage your brand values across this varied landscape?

When it comes to the practice of Branding, a wise and vastly more experienced man than I (Nathan Williams nathanawilliams​) once told me about The Thumb Test.  Many readers will know about this already but certainly for visual content the simplicity is beautiful: 

 -  If you put your thumb (proverbial or otherwise) over the logo on any image from your brand would you know it was your brand?

Many brands nail this but in social many brands drop this entirely or have a totally separate aesthetic  - because they are striving to be so damn funny or human or whatever - or no consistent approach at all and just dump scatter-shot imagery and typefaces all over the place. To me this makes no sense.

To be clear, I am not advocating digital on social - I am not saying that your banner content should match your social content or that you header image needs to be the same across every platform or the same as it is on your website home page or anything like that.

All I am saying is that if you have a clear sense of brand values, and a brand aesthetic it should be able to be ‘tuned’ to social.  If you don’t have one but you manage your social presence then be the genesis of this - I think more than a human voice and more than witty repartee, a brand needs a clear visual identity and tone, especially in a world where content is snacked on so fleetingly.

As a side note, another concept I was introduced to recently was ‘responsive branding’. Again, I may be slow the party here, but it speaks to what I am driving at above.  It’s not simply the resizing of a logo but a consistent desogn language - once again I am co-opting this (with permission) from a conversation among brighter guys than I, including, again,  nathanawilliams​ and @James_Mayes.  It was borne out of a discussion about this article by @benjiemoss on Web Design Depot  . An article that can cover the subject with vastly more authority than me.

I remember when I first began in this racket, that brands wanted to build communities, to “drive engagement” - to be honest, no one was really clear on what success looked like, what the metrics or KPI’s were, often we just measured what the tools could give us. In a lot of cases there wasn't even an objective or logical reason to be doing social - it was just, well, trendy.

That said, we were clear on how to behave, we were about being social, there were so many guidelines, rules even, about being human, being light hearted and so on. There were Facebook Apps (remember when you wouldn’t drive traffic off Facebook for love or money - less you be punished by ‘Edgerank’ - you’d always drive to a tab or app). Jesus, remember how much we paid for some of those Apps! Anyway, it was all pretty much organic, and brands were acting like people, friends even, it was all about getting people’s attention and participation - comments, @mentions, replies, likes, shares were all worth something (and still are, but stick with me) - I remember even trying at one stage to weight the value of each against the other.

In hindsight I am amazed we didn’t see this coming sooner - call it Facebook Zero, call it the end of organic, call it whatever but in truth if we stop and think, it makes perfect sense. These platforms weren’t designed for brands, not originally anyway. Brands are interlopers, facile profiles that are trying to fake friendship or engender conversation between themselves and the audience - yes, people “Liked” our pages back in the day, but nine times out of ten that was because we bought that acquisition, or it was from a Like Gate or a Like to Win model. Very few brands back then offered anything remotely valuable enough for a consumer, no a person, to actively want that brands content in their newsfeed regularly, not to mention long term. So the platforms changed and now we buy our way in - this doesn’t make brands or their content any more welcome - it’s good for publishers and magazines but box moving companies, telcos, big pharma - what could they offer that is of any interests or value?

Well actually there is something - because if you’re anything like me - a lot of the friends and family content that I get on my feed is equally facile and boring so I think if a brand can offer me something of genuine interest or pique my curiosity then sure why not - this isn’t going to be easy but it may not be as unwelcome as we think.

People are naturally curious and if the right content gets to the right person at the right time in the right place, then you may just succeed in deepening that persons preference for your brand, or their understanding about why you do what you do or how you do it, or any number of things that add to the value perception the person on the street has of the brand that shares a place in their mental bandwidth.

So yes, things have changed, a lot, people don’t want brands to engage them in transactional gimmicky games and so on (unless your brand is King Games or similar, of course) and they don’t want brands pretending to be their friends and seizing moments or trying so damn hard to be likeable that they are just pathetic. People want interesting, relevant and valuable content - the commodity isn’t engagement, it isn’t even interest or attention, these are by products. The commodity we are competing for is time - time is precious, it’s valuable and people want something from the time they invest. This could be updates from real friends and family, or laughter or escape or even a bit of education, wisdom or learning - ultimately value. Never before has the saying “well that’s two minutes of my life I’ll never get back” been truer than it is today in the post click reaction to news feed content of every connected mind on the planet.

It's actually kind of simple, speak about what you know about, be authentic (this isn't actually that hard if you actually try to be authentic rather than try to dress something else up in fake authenticity) and be interesting. Read / watch / consume your own content - if you're bored imagine how bored Joe Public will be.