How To Avoid Social Media Disaster

The biggest mistake a marketer can make in Social Media is failing to recognise that Social Media is fundamentally different from everything that has gone before in digital marketing. It is not ‘the same, only more so’, it is a step in a new direction. 

Maybe the best way to avoid Social Media disasters is to administer a small electric shock to anyone who uses the phrase “one-to-one” in the same sentence as Social Media.  Because it is not a “one-to-one” medium, and to apply the same tactics and metrics which apply to the direct-response model of digital marketing is to invite failure.

In fact, Social Media may mark the end of “one-to-one” marketing. An increasing number of people choose to conduct an increasing amount of their online interactions through the ‘Social Lens’. This means that there are large numbers of potential customers your brand will never get to speak to alone. You’ll always and only find them in them in a social setting, and you’ll have to be comfortable there in order to engage. 

Social Media upends the notion of how campaigns are deployed and measured. For the school of digital marketing evolved from direct-response DNA, a campaign is like a pick-up line. You try it out on a number of customers and achieve a certain rate of success. To extend the analogy to Social Media, imagine approaching someone you’d like to impress at a pleasant gathering of mutual friends and loudly asking: “wanna go back to my place?” It would go over like a… Social Media disaster.

An alternative to using electric shock therapy on your digital marketing staff is to evolve the resources, metrics and tactics that will drive Social Media strategy from your PR/Communications team. Their experience, and their understanding of how opinions are made and managed, is probably a more natural fit for the medium.

HiPPO Grooming

I’ve coined a new phrase which I’m rather chuffed with. It has been submitted it to Urban Dictionary and I’m claiming it here.

HiPPO Grooming is the delicate art of defusing a truly awful concept put forward by someone very senior and very stupid in a brainstorming or 'visioning' session.

The trick is to completely transform the suggestion into something worthwhile (or at least harmless), while at the same time convincing the clueless senior exec that it retains their intent and ownership, and full credit is due to their brilliance.

This is as difficult and dangerous as it sounds.

The HiPPO bit comes from [HiPPO] = Highest Paid Person's Opinion (previously defined on Urban Dictionary, see definition 23 under[hippo]. The saying goes that the HiPPO is the opinion that prevails in a decision making session, even when it’s not the best outcome.

Example

CEO - "Let's make our online registration form just like a video game."

HiPPO Groomer - "Brilliant idea, Sir. We could introduce some elements that provide a playful game-like experience of progress and reward as customers complete the form."

Colleagues (aside) - "dude, that was some nice HiPPO Grooming"

Not the Messiah, just a Very Nifty Toy

banksimple - (not) The Future of Banking (yet)

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone asked me what I think of banksimple.

I’d have about twenty bucks. But I digress. Here’s what I tell them:

I think banksimple solves a bunch of problems that don’t *really* exist. All the features in their demo videos look like nice-to-haves. Extremely nice nice-to-haves I’ll grant you, but nothing that would make me want to jump a fence.

See, at the heart of exemplary product design is a *real* problem solved. Dyson vacuum cleaners, iPods and Polaroid cameras all look slick and sexy. But that’s not all. Dyson got rid of the bag. Edwin Land gave you developed photos of your cherished moments in seconds - where before it would take days (and maybe allowed you to capture ‘cherished moments’ that mightn’t have gone down so well at the local photo stall – nudge, nudge). Steve Jobs made ripping, organising and playing digital music about a million times easier than any solution which existed before the iPod.

My point here is not to disparage banksimple (or ‘Simple’ as they are now simply known, having changed their name late 2011). No, my point is that banking is clearly a ‘target rich environment’ when it comes to problems that need to be solved. You don’t need to talk to customers of any bank for long to realise the wealth of opportunity in the form of real, pressing pain-in-the-neck problems.

It can only be a matter of time before someone solves some of these and seizes The Future of Banking. Will it be Simple, Paypal, Google, a dinosaur bank, a startup in a garage?

By the way, in my own humble opinion the place to start is with small business customers. They probably have the highest, most frequent involvement with their banks, and plenty that keeps them up at night.

The next frontier of devices and interaction.

One way to look at the Post-PC future is that it's really all about input modality and interface - rather than device or content.

In this view of the world, Apple’s particular achievement in the last five years is that it *nailed* multi-touch input and the corresponding touch interface – the iPhone, the iPad, the App Store all flowed on from this breakthrough. Others were trying to make their existing phone UI more usable, better looking form factors, phones that incorporated music players, and Swiss-Army-knife arrays of peripheral features. Smartphones, PDAs and tablet PCs were all coming out with styluses. Jobs and Apple changed the game with a revolutionary step up in input and interface.  (How many Post-PC computing devices do you see coming out with a stylus or hard keyboard today?)

This not just my idiosyncratic point of view, by the way. The iPhone Wikipedia entry contends “Development of the iPhone began in 2005 with Apple CEO Steve Jobs' direction that Apple engineers investigate touchscreens” providing multiple citations.

The next frontiers are gesture and voice.

Kinect and Siri are streets ahead in these respective areas. No matter what you think of their current state of either, the bucket loads of real-world data they are collecting is invaluable for improving the underlying algorithms; and hence the navigation/interaction experience. These datasets are something a would-be competitor can’t get by any other means.

Both Kinect and Siri are out there in a big way. Kinect holds the 2011 Guinness World Record as the fastest-selling consumer electronic device in history, while the quarter following the release of Siri on the iPhone 4S saw unprecedented iPhone sales of over 37 million units.

The question, then, is - What lucrative new devices, markets and business models will gesture and voice unlock for their successful pioneers?

In my opinion, if you *nail* voice (not just word recognition but the syntactic problems), you win mobile search. Siri is Apple seriously cutting Google's grass, at least as much as Android does vice versa.

 And if you want to win internet TV (and who wouldn’t want to own an App Store on the baby boomers’ favourite device), you need to *nail* gesture. Actually, it will be probably a combination of gesture AND facial recognition AND voice that proves the killer breakthrough for TVs and public screens as computing devices.

Apple rumours hint at some combination of inputs for the mooted Apple TV. And besides, 30 Rock’s Jack Donaghy has already hilariously illustrated why voice alone mightn’t quite cut it.