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.

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Struggling for ideas, by M. T. Mind

Me and a few mates have this thing we do from time to time.

Basically you think of a fictitious title of a book by a made up author with a name to match.

It is puerile, childish humour, but it tickles me nonetheless.

For example, on show this morning:

The Perfect Pizza, by Pepe Roni

The Long Walk, by Anita Sitdown

Don't Give Up, by Percy Veer

The Sea Spy, by Perry Scope

And finally,

The Hidden Word, by Anna Gram.

Have a lovely day people. Be sure to smile and if possible laugh out loud.

It's good for the soul (by Mehdi Tation).

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.

Why do today what you can put off until overmorrow

Are you a procrastinator?

Do you have a long list of things you plan to do today but never quite get round to.

I stumbled across a great new word this morning on Twitter.

Perendinate:

To defer until the day after tomorrow; to postpone for a day

I might set up a company called that one day. Not today obviously, that would be mad.

Anyway, if you knew your time was up what would you really want to do?

I read a powerful piece in The Telegraph today about the legend that is Mohammed Ali. The Greatest fighter to ever live.

He is quoted saying: "I believe that when you die and go to heaven God won't ask you what you've done but what you could've done."

Put aside religion, I quite like the sentiment.

What's stopping you doing something you really want to do?

Really stopping you.

Step through the fear my friends. Just feckin do it.

We have a phrase at work, born out of some business theory or other, that you should worry most about the bits you can control.

Worrying about stuff you can only influence a bit, or have no control over is futile. But we all do it.

My brother who works in A&E as a doctor has another more humbling phrase. 'No-one died today did they.'

Work has been tough recently. Really tough. Things haven't all gone to plan. In fact it feels like I've let people down.

I can post rationalise why we are where we are. It mainly involves blaming other people or circumstances out of my control.

But nobody has died.

So today I make this commitment to you, I'm going to do something today that normally I'd put off until overmorrow.

You'll have to come back tomorrow to find out what it was.

Brilliant idea? Or shower of sh*te

What is it about showers and ideas?

Apparently warm water increases the flow of dopamine. So that helps I guess.

It's also relaxing.

And according to Lifehacker when we have a relaxed state of mind, we're more likely to turn attention inwards, and therefore more able to make insightful connections.

So there you go.

You may have guessed I had a shower moment this morning. And I'm desperate to share it with you.

Btw, did I ever tell you I'm the proud owner of Mediocre Ideas dot com?

It is a graveyard of things I've come up with over the years and not done anything with. Or at least it was meant to be.

I have this tendency to want to share my 'best' ideas before they are fully formed.

When I have them they feel like they're earth shatteringly good. Literally going to change the world.

My adrenaline then kicks in.

I can barely get out of the shower quick enough to type the text message, email, or What's App to whomever I think will be most interested in hearing it first.

Of course time after time what happens next is inevitable.

The idea starts to deteriorate.

Like an unstable atom my amazing idea has an extremely short half life*

Halving in impact by the day until eventually being worthy of appearing on aforementioned website.

Which ironically is a mediocre idea itself.

At the time of purchasing the domain for five years, yes five years, I thought I was onto a real winner.

It'll go viral. I'll make a killing.

But then it ran out of steam, or I did, and I simply moved on.

Now you could argue eventually one of my brilliant/mediocre ideas will coincide with a serendipitous moment in time and get a lucky break.

Either that or I'll meet someone who is really good at the next bit. Taking my rough diamond, and creating a gem.

Anyway, today's idea involves disrupting not one, but two industries. Plus a new range of toy products and...

Even as I write it I can feel my confidence waining a little.

Time will tell if today's shower was a moment of brilliance or another washout.

*via Wikipedia: Half-life (t_1⁄2) is the amount of time required for the amount of something to fall to half its initial value. The term is very commonly used in nuclear physics to describe how quickly unstable atoms undergo radioactive decay, but it is also used more generally for discussing any type of exponential decay.

Peering into the future

This week's Future Foundation conference in London has unveiled the top trends coming to a world near you. 

It's always fascinating peering into the future, and impossible to argue with the predictions as to some extent those who make them can always claim they weren't wrong, they're simply early.

Anyway, Rebecca Coleman in Marketing Magazine reports today that the top five future trends range from multi-faceted paths to purchase, to hedonistic offsetting and solo living.

The one that caught my eye however was number 3, emojinal intelligence.

According to Future Foundation’s managing director Meabh Quoirin brands have an opportunity to harness the power of real emotion.

She adds: 'No-one can deny that emotional marketing works, but the ways in which brands are getting there is becoming increasingly varied.'

And 'amplifying emotional messages is one way brands can meet the ‘adblockalypse’ head on, on the basis that people are much more willing to share ads and content that makes them feel good.'

It caught my eye partly because today also saw an ad blocker take out a punchy ad in the Financial Times to denounce the internet advertising industry.

Lara O'Reilly, Business Insider's global advertising editor reports that Shine, the Israeli ad blocking company, has placed a provocative print ad in the Financial Times to denounce the US advertising trade body the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

The ad features the famous image of Muhammad Ali knocking out Sonny Liston, with the strapline:

"The @iab knew we could block. Now they know we can punch, too."

Both stories highlight the conundrum facing brands in the modern digital environment.

How to reach and engage an audience that leads to meaningful interactions and ultimately a deeper relationship with their brand.

The recent rise in ad blocking is a consequence of advertisers having taken advantage of that relationship in recent years.

It's time to make amends, and quick. Connecting through real emotion may be the answer, but doing that consistently and at scale is no mean feat.