When money talks, the writing is on the wall

"Ad dollars always follow eyeballs, and then muck everything up!".

Prophetic words from a colleague of mine on Friday.

Wherever there are lots of eyeballs, advertising money inevitably follows in quick pursuit.

Over time, those same eyeballs get tired of all the noise, and switch to ad free platforms.

TV is a good example.

Free content subsidised by annoying ad breaks, or pay a subscription and watch uninterrupted. Netflix now the norm. Catch up TV the only way to watch ITV or Ch4.

The big debate in digital marketing on ad blocking is a living example of what happens when marketers abuse a channel full of eyeballs.

Flashing banners, click bait, data hungry autoplay videos, too much junk, and not enough funk. All too forgetful of the reason why the audience had gathered there in the first place, and it wasn't to see them.

Move over websites, move in social media platforms.

One billion active users on Facebook alone. The ability to target 'custom audiences'. Match data. Force feed content. Cheaper than display. Better click through rates. No ad blocking here. Native advertising. Yum yum yum.

Or yuk, yuk, yuk.

The very worldly Stuart Bruce prompted my thinking on LinkedIn this morning.

On Wednesday he's speaking at the Global Alliance supported World Conference on Public Relations in Emerging Economies.

His topic is the future of PR including digital and social.

He asked his network from the global PR community for some quotes that he can share with the delegates.

Mine was thus:

"Social media is in danger of simply becoming another dull marketing channel as advertising money flows on mass into every popular platform, and dialogue becomes one way broadcast. Inevitably ad dollars always follow eyeballs, but if PR practitioners don't reclaim social as theirs, the engaged communities they spent years harnessing will gradually depart and seek sanctuary on ad free, subscription based platforms."

In my view social media risks becoming the overly abused banner ad we see today.

Treat it with care marketeers, or risking losing those audiences you crave so much.

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Want to grow your audience, it's a fairly simple formula

Bearing in mind the job I do, I really shouldn't be surprised how quickly your audience can grow if you blog every day and invite engagement.

But I am a little surprised that in a week my blog has gone from just under 100 views a day to just under 300.

There are other factors at play of course. I posted earlier in the day yesterday, I included a hashtag for an event that starts next week, and someone in my network who has a large following RT'd a link to my blog. I also tweeted a link four times at regular intervals throughout the day, recognising that my 3000 followers are unlikely to be glued to the platform all day long.

Even so, the basics of growing your audience more or less from scratch hasn't really changed since the start of social media.

You'll have heard me say before that I follow a very simple formula.

• Listen.

• Engage.

• Influence.

All too often people (and brands) start the wrong way round. Desperate to sell us their ideas (or wares), they simply push information at us. Rather than seeking to enter into a dialogue.

The easiest analogy is a conversation in a pub.

Imagine you're sat at a bar waiting for a friend.

Two people next to you are having a chat. You politely listen, and realise they are discussing your favourite topic, ice cream. At the right moment you catch their eye and reveal you make ice cream and are on the hunt for new flavours. You hit it off, and invite them to follow you up the road to your ice cream parlour/pub to try some free samples.

Or, you barge into a pub shouting who wants to buy an ice cream.

The music suddenly stops. Everyone stares at you. Then gets back to talking about what they were talking about before you interrupted them.

In a couple of weeks time I'm doing a talk in Salford to a group of University folk whose job it is to link up with local businesses in order to place graduates in those firms.

I've been asked to demystify social media, and help the audience consider how it can turbo charge their network.

I'm going to start with five simple thoughts:

1. The old rules don’t apply anymore. Whether you like it or not the world is digital. Get over it, join in.

2. Be a connector not a collector. Simply chasing likes, or fans, or hits to your blog at any cost is futile. Micro casting is fine if you connect to the right people.

3. Social media is turbo charged word of mouth. It's not more complicated, so don't make it so.

4. Authenticity is the key, be true to who you are. Be honest, humble, and real. Everyone can sniff out a bullshitter.

5. Be relevant, ask yourself why. Why are you on social media. What is the purpose. What are you trying to achieve.

Simple as that.

I'll share my presentation when it's done so you can let me know what you think.

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Working out loud in a large organisation, and why it helps

A lot of people I know through work probably think I'm a little too open.

I am currently blogging every day. In fact, it was always my intention when I started Thought Of The Day four years ago to post something each morning, but like many things in my world, it ran out of steam.

My old boss used to say, 'Dominic the road to hell is paved with good intentions'. Bit harsh perhaps, but fair.

Anyway, back to working out loud.

In the last week I've had two work related conversations that have been informed and influenced by a colleague reading my blog.

Rather than undermining my credibility, or giving away too much of my inner feelings both conversations have helped open up the dialogue in a way that may not have happened naturally.

We're all extremely busy these days.

A colleague who recently rejoined Asda from another retailer having been away for seven years said although it felt like he'd never been away, he does remember actually having time to do things at the other place.

Busy fools we may be, but the pace and workload is unlikely to change significantly any time soon.

Hence making sharing what we are doing, describing what we are thinking and frankly articulating what is annoying us is no bad thing.

Ideally this would be done via an enterprise (internal) social network. But in lieu of that encouraging more people to share what they are up to and what they are doing should be encouraged.

Next week is International Working Out Loud Week, yes, there is such a thing.

I read how some advocates of this open way of working, have a webpage that they update each day which simply shares a version of their to do list.

My version is this thought of the day. I make no claim that it'll change the world, but if it keeps leading to interesting conversations then it is more than worth the effort.

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Want to know where the future of social is heading? Look to China

I read a fascinating piece this morning about WeChat* by a product engineer at Medium called Katie Zhu.

Last week she had been on a panel discussion about WeChat's Product Philosophy and Innovation.

The panel included key and founding members of the WeChat product and engineering teams who shared their product insights and data outside of China for the first time.

In a comprehensive write up of the event Katie describes the impact WeChat has had since its inception four years ago.

From a standing start it now has 600m active monthly users and has grown from a chat and messaging app into China’s most impactful and engaged platform for communication, services and payments.

Katie describes how Stephen Wang, a senior PM at WeChat discussed the philosophy of “WeChat Lifestyle” and how they’ve built features to address everyday problems for users. She quotes him as saying:

"We measure growth not by number of users or chat messages, but by how deeply our product is engaged in every aspect of a user’s lifestyle.”

To illustrate this “lifestyle” concept, Wang walked through a typical Chinese user’s day with WeChat and the multiple touchpoints in their daily lives.

Adding: “At every time throughout the day, there is a touchpoint between WeChat and your normal life.”

One element that stood out for me was the concept of lucky money.

Key seasonal events like Chinese New Year typically attract lots of people gifting one another little red envelopes.

[According to Wikipedia, in Chinese and other Asian societies, a red envelope, red packet or hongbao is a monetary gift which is given during holidays or special occasions such as weddings, the birth of a baby or graduation.]

The red colour of the envelope symbolises good luck and is supposed to ward off evil spirits. 

Anyway, according to Katie, WeChat digitised this tradition and brought it into their app to 'create a fun, delightful experience of person to person payments'.

She then explained how it works:

'You as a sender select an amount you want to send, total. Then you choose a group of recipients. To make this “fun” and “lucky,” it works like this: they randomly divide up this sum among the people you want to send it to, so one person will get a larger sum than the others. (You can see who “won” each Lucky Money round.)'

Wang is quoted saying:

“We want to make sending money as easy as chat. How do you turn payments into a form of expression?”

The point being here that as we (or should I say I) pontificate on our blogs here in the West about the imminent departure of millennials from Facebook, or the potential for Twitter to monetise (or not) its user base, or whether Snapchat should enable more branded content, there is a whole world out there that is leading the way.

Techcrunch made the point yesterday, whilst reporting Tencent's latest financial results (WeChat's owner).

It noted one of the standout figures wasn’t a financial stat, it was that its messaging services, which obviously include WeChat,  now has 200 million users’ credit cards bound to it, and is one of the services that is inspiring Facebook’s plans for its Messenger business.

Imagine a future world where your interactions with Facebook, Twitter, ebay, Amazon, Apple Pay/PayPal, Messenger, What's App, your favourite games, your fitness app, Skype, text, and emoji stickers are all in the same seamless environment from the minute you wake to the minute you drop off.

Well, as my old boss Nick used to say, it looks like someone got to the future faster than you did.

N.B. If you've enjoyed this blog post be sure to share it with your network, or like the post on LinkedIn or Twitter, or leave a comment below. If you haven't enjoyed it, feel free to say why.

*According to Wikipedia WeChat provides text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, broadcast (one-to-many) messaging, video conferencing, video games, sharing of photographs and videos, and location sharing.

How do you define social media? And why it matters

I have a bee in my bonnet. Everyone talks about social media as if it is the same thing.

But what does it mean to you?

Is it managing the distribution of content on various channels, or is it community management, navigating an ongoing dialogue with your brand's customers, good, bad and ugly?

It seems to me everyone in a comms facing role now 'does' a bit of social media.

Not in a personal sense, that's a given. Even my mum sends me What's App messages in preference to texts. Skype is her preferred way of staying in touch with her grandkids.

But here's the thing. How often do people in the same organisation or company sit down and agree what the hell it is they are all doing on social media, and why?

I read two things recently that helped in my mind at least make the distinction between deploying content via social channels broadcast fashion, and building a community of engaged customers with whom you have an ongoing conversation.

The latter in my opinion requires a grounding in Public Relations. Or at least a grasp of communication that gives you the ability to flex your style, spot the nuances in conversational language, sniff out sarcasm, plus have the nimbleness to react to opportunities in the moment, and the common sense to shut up and not get drawn into every debate.

Marketers by contrast in my experience often naively follow the buzz of the day, or resort to creating content that mimics the kind of things they see working on any particular social channel. Cat memes on Instagram or quirky videos on YouTube. But to what end? Reach? Engagement? To win an award?

It annoys me when the two very different disciplines are muddled.

Christina Miller a senior channel manager at VML, a global marketing agency, recently wrote:

'Content is king, but content can’t talk back. When someone complains in the comments about a piece of content, community management is there with the antidote. When someone wants more information about a product, community management is there to answer. When someone professes his or her love for your brand, community management is there to thank them and amplify the sentiment.

'Not only is pushing out content without a solid community management strategy like sending an infantry into the fray without air support, it’s also a missed opportunity to “seal the deal.” '

I wrote about her piece previously. And couldn't agree more with her sentiment.

The second piece I read the other day highlighted seven key trends for 2016 (via AnalogFolk).

The first of which is 'renewed social discovery'.

'We’ve gone full circle. When brands first arrived on Facebook and organic reach was high, we spent a huge amount of time and effort on community engagement and interaction. However, as paid media options have grown, and organic reach has shrunk, we’re at risk of only viewing social as a way to pump out content as content.

'With more and more services being delivered through digital, rather than face to face, brands need to work even harder to maintain their humanity. From training customer service teams to being more proactive and helpful, to investing in chat bots that allow customers to easily get their questions answered. 2016 will see brands not just use social, but behave more socially.'

If I'm honest I'm not sure 2016 will see many more brands behave more socially, but those that do are on the road to success.

Those who continue to misuse social channels simply for broadcast purposes risk having a car crash.

And unfortunately most won't even know what hit them.

If you've enjoyed this blog post be sure to share it with your network, or like the post on LinkedIn or Twitter, or leave a comment below. If you haven't enjoyed it, feel free to say why.

Playing around with Jelly

Trying to predict the next big thing is about as easy as pinning jelly to a wall. But the latest addition to the social media landscape Jelly (jelly.co aka @askjelly on twitter) is probably worth a look.

Less than a week old it is already eating up hours of my attention each day.

It is far too early to draw any meaningful conclusions at this stage.

But as someone that spends a lot of time engaging with Asda customers on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram - using lots of fun images, and often posing questions that are quick and easy to engage with, Jelly is simply an extension of that approach.

So far we've tried five different posts. Most of which have also appeared elsewhere in our social news streams, so it's not a lot of effort for us to be trialling similar content on this new platform.

We've asked the big questions on the nation's mind, such as which is best for a mid-morning tea break - chocolate or plain digestives. We've asked people to choose between three different shampoos, one of which we will stock. And posted a fun spot the snowman competition which enabled Jelly users to annotate the answers on the image itself.

We will obviously continue to experiment with different types of questions and formats.

If and when Jelly becomes more mainstream (the reality at present is that it is mainly full of early adopter social media types, not core Asda shoppers) then it could be a fun, engaging way to interact with customers.

It is really easy to get going. All you need to do is download the app, login via Twitter or Facebook. Upload or take a pic and pose a question.

According @Azeem at Peer Index the posts have a 24 hour shelf life (he posed the question on Jelly, got 124 answers including one from the co-founder of Jelly @Biz himself), and at present you can't delete them or search for Jelly questions.

No doubt the subsequent releases of Jelly will have a very different user experience than the one we're 'wasting' hours of our life on at the moment.

Either way, I will do my best not to be too distracted by it. Fifty per cent of Asda customers (9m people) are on Facebook each day, around ten per cent are on Twitter and YouTube, so that's where most of our effort will continue to go for now.

Btw, did you see Mark Zuckerberg on there yesterday! http://t.co/Uyjkw1vq53

He's got issues with an unidentified spider in his shower don't you know.

In the meantime spare a thought for a chap who is actually called Jelly and has had the twitter name @jelly since 2008. He's getting a lot of misdirected tweets poor chap. Reminds me of @theashes and @johnlewis. I've told him to embrace it. Either that or sell his profile name to @biz. What would you do? 

Perhaps I should ask that on Jelly. Right must dash. Questions to ask. People to see.