Marvel Comics launches Pinterest and Tumblr accounts.
A visual content publisher promotes itself on visual aggregation and sharing sites. Utterly simply, perfect match.
I could do without the "begging for engagement" comments under every image, though:
"What do you think of this blog post about Marvel on Pinterest?"
Mark Wilson, summing up his thoughts on last week's Digital Surrey Google Maps talk:
Unfortunately, there are many who will not trust Google - and I find it interesting that Google is an advocate of consuming open data to add value to its products but I see very little being put back in terms of data sets for others to use. Google's argument is that it spent a lot of money gathering and processing that data; however it could also be argued that Google gets a lot for free and maybe there is a greater benefit to society in freely sharing that information in a non-proprietary format (rather than relying on the use of Google tools).
Google has gone from one of the most trusted companies on the internet to one of the least in less than four years. I'd suggest that it needs to spend a lot less time on parachuting with Google Glass and dubious entertainment devices, and a lot more on rebuilding that trust.
I really want them to sort this out. Google have done, and are doing, great things. But if they can't win back our trust, their room for doing more is going to get ever smaller.
Image is of a window in Farnham Castle, the venue for the event.
There was once a Golden Age of social media, when people talked about the ability to find useful, interesting, valuable people to talk with all over the world. Businesses of all sizes discovered that there was great value in listening and engaging with customers and other relevant people. What had once been one-directional monologues became two-directional dialogs and most people saw that it was good.
Then the marketers got their hands around the throat of social media strangling engagement and stuffing messages down its throat.
I agree with almost every word.
This visualisation of social media marketing tools has been doing the rounds of late:
I found it on Business Insider. It was created by BuddyMedia
The general reaction has been something along the lines of:
Oh no! Woe is me! It's all so complicated! I thought Social Media was just Twitter and Facebook!
You know what's worse? Look at this:
ALL THOSE TOOLS.
Whatever am I going to do with them all? House maintenance is too complicated!
Now, here's the thing: exactly how seriously would you take a tradesman who turned up to your house with one size of spanner and a single screwdriver, and complained when the job required more than that?
You'd kick them straight out the door, and throw their tools after them.
True craftsmen respect a diversity of tools, know that different occasions call for the use of different tools, and they have the skill and knowledge to adapt when the task requires it.
I wouldn't like to suggest that the social media "profession" is one rather over-burdened with amateur hacks who've learnt how to use two or three tools by rote. No, I'm not suggesting that.
I'm stating it.
The social media world is split between people who look at that diagram and go "oh my God, how do I cope" and those who go "Oooh, possibilities."
Can I suggest that you'd be better working with the latter? People who are excited by possibilities are so much more fun than those who are afraid of them...
Ah, Flickr. In 2004 I loved that site. But today is not a day for nostalgia. Today is a day for looking at the mistakes corporates make, and how you learn from them. And the Flickr/Yahoo relationship is a compelling example of just that:"The money goes to the cash cows, not the cash calf," explains one former Flickr team member. If Flickr couldn't make bucks, it wouldn't get bucks (or talent, or resources).Because Flickr wasn't as profitable as some of the other bigger properties, like Yahoo Mail or Yahoo Sports, it wasn't given the resources that were dedicated to other products. That meant it had to spend its resources on integration, rather than innovation. Which made it harder to attract new users, which meant it couldn't make as much money, which meant (full circle) it didn't get more resources. And so it goes.As a result of being resource-starved, Flickr quit planting the anchors it needed to climb ever higher. It missed the boat on local, on real time, on mobile, and even ultimately on social--the field it pioneered. And so, it never became the Flickr of video; YouTube snagged that ring. It never became the Flickr of people, which was of course Facebook. It remained the Flickr of photos. At least, until Instagram came along.
I feel sorry for the word "engagement". It was once a trusty ally, a word I could rely on in discussions to help delineate the difference between the old publishing model and today's conversational publishing word. But then, tragedy struck. The horrible word cancer that is buzzwordification took root deep in its linguistic heart, and by the time it was diagnosed, the patient was terminal.
"Engagement" has become a hollow, talismanic shell of its former self, a word promoted as the cure for all, but unable to stand up to the closest scrutiny. People thoughtlessly spout is as the object of the new age: engagement will make everything better, boost your income, improve your sex life and allow you to make $$$$ working from home.
Let me give you an example. Here's a comment on Jeff Jarvis's blog, from a post announcing its new design:
Now, what does "engagement" actually mean there? Does it mean "comments"? Does it mean "a better class of comments"? Does it mean a higher quality of conversation? Or a more regular group of commenters engaging more regularly? Or is it just a hollow buzzword, which equates big numbers with success? "We've got huge engagement: 150,000 Likes on Facebook". Size, as the saying goes, isn't everything.
In that context, the word is essentially meaningless. It's just social media buzzword bingo. (He could have scored double points by using "platforms" instead of "systems".)
The problem with buzzwords is that they transform a concept into a goal: engagement is the result, not the process. Once people start wielding the word in that way, they stop engaging (ho ho) with the core concept, and they don't ask themselves the key question: why?
"Why?" is the critical question to ask of any serious social media project: why are you using a specific platform? Why are you trying to engage and with whom? What are the goals? Buzzwords replace the practical questions that give you both definable terms for success and failure, but also direction to your work.
Engagement is great. But too much engagement isn't. In both our business and personal lives, we have to make decisions about how and where we engage with people, and making smart decisions makes those interactions more valuable to us, in either segment of our lives. Engagement is never a goal - it's a process in service of a better business or a better life.
That's an idea to engage with... ;-)
The problem with gamification of course, was that the people who were trying to do it didn't know their games from their elbows. While the number of good brains in the gaming arena goes up every single day, there are still very few people really get what makes games tick in the first place - and that's just among people who make games professionally. People who work in marketing generally don't even understand how marketing works, let alone games, so once they'd attached their feeding tubes to it, gamification was never really going anywhere.
I bet Mary will, too...
I have something of a background in games myself (my Wikipedia page is largely about it), and so much of the second-hand nonsense spouted by marketing folks about gamification pains me.
Back when I started training journalists in blogging (which must be close on seven years ago now...) I noted a tendency for them to try and understand blogging in terms of concepts they already knew. They looked at blogs. They realised that virtually all blogs were written in a personal voice. What kind of journalism is written in a personal voice? Opinion columns. Ergo, blogs are opinion columns.
They then went on to write 500 word opinion pieces on a blog three times a week, and wondered why no-one came to read them. Blogging, of course, wasn't just opinion columns. It's a new style of publishing which has a distinct, personal voice. The much-neglected term "personal publishing" captured that brilliantly, I think. Those journalists identified the right characteristic of blogging, but they went on to misapply it.
As I look around the corporate social media world of today, I wonder if the same thing isn't happening there, too. Companies are looking at social media, understanding that it is in some way important, but are trying to understand it through the lens of the old. "Social media is about connecting with people. Ergo, it's marketing." And I think that's a mistaken assumption and one that prevents companies from truly grasping the power of these new social tools.
Let's substitute another communications medium into that sentence from above:
"The telephone is about connecting with people. Ergo, it's marketing."
That's nonsensical to modern eyes. Everyone in a business has a telephone and is expected to use it to communicate with their colleagues, clients, suppliers and partners. But telephones were heavily regulated and controlled when they were first introduced into businesses, and only became ubiquitous over time as people realised their worth to the whole business.
So, we have at least two transitional stages:
Here's my thesis: companies that manage the transition in such a way that they avoid stage one completely and pass as swiftly as possible through stage two into more useful models, will be the ones that gain competitive advantage. And it's not like I'm the first to articulate this: the Altimeter Group have been producing research on this for a while.
So: here's my question. Why are so many companies in the UK hung up on equating social media completely with marketing? Sure, it's a great marketing tool. But that's not all it is.
[Hat-tip: Neville Hobson]
In a surprise move, Twitter have acquired blogging site Posterous.
The question of course, is: "why?" The information from the companies is pretty vague.
Guess 1: (the view held by my Twitter community) It's a pure talent acquisition, Posterous will be shuttered, and the team will help develop Twitter
Guess 2: From Splat F:
Both posts are predictably vague about what the Posterous team will be doing at Twitter, but here's a not-so-wacky guess: Building out Twitter's photo/video/link/multimedia sharing services. These are currently rudimentary, but they're important in competition with Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, and other broad "sharing" services.
Guess 3: There's actually a synergy here, as Twitter start to build on top of their microblogging service with focused blogging that help feed their Discover product.
Anyone care to place a small wager?
So, to reach the public through social media, you target influencers, right? Wrong:
Our data show that online sharing, even at viral scale, takes place through many small groups, not via the single status post or tweet of a few influencers. While influential people may be able to reach a wide audience, their impact is short-lived. Content goes viral when it spreads beyond a particular sphere of influence and spreads across the social web via ordinarily people sharing with their friends.
I think a lot of marketing and PR companies desperately want the influencer theory to be true - it makes reaching a target audience and managing the message more feasible. But I think there's a degree of willing self-delusion here, but the true reality of the new social sphere is so very unmanageable.
Anyway, good read.
Panel discussion between:
Chair: Richard Waters, west coast managing editor, Financial Times
Inevitably, the discussion kicks off with Facebook, given its forthcoming IPO. Boguslavsky thinks it will be large, but there are questions about how far it can go. Mistry thinks that we're just at the beginning of the Facebook story - there are many areas where they could monetise where they haven't yet. The first question, he suggests, is "could Facebook be more valuable than Google" - and he thinks it could. The amount of information that people are contributing hourly to Facebook means it could provide increadible search results - so we could be looking at a world where you can live without Google, but can't live without Facebook.
Is the media about to be hit by the Facebook wave? Rimer suggests that Facebook has begun to learn that it's a powerful media distribution system. Sptofy has gone through the roof in the US by embedding itself in Facebook. This is the first level of integration with media. And Facebook is moving into money and ways of making payments straighforward.
Boguslavsky: humans have three major activities: information, entertainment and goods/services. The space indside those three dimensions is the space that both Facebook and Google are trying to grab. Mistry points out that media has content, which Facebook doesn't, but they both have audiences, and they need to figure out how to share them. Yesterday, they investing in a fashion brand called Nasty Gal. The business was born on the internet, and her entire following is based on Facebook, and her customers sharing what they bought and what they like. And now platforms like Pinterest are emerging. Some sites are so broad and deep - like Etsy - that they'd need an army of merchandisers. And here people are doing it for free for you. They're social businesses.
Rimer describes the trend of businesses building themselves off the distribution platform built by others - the companies Mistry is describing are doing just that. Mistry thinks companies like Conde Naste and The Guardian are doing a good job of pushing their content out into new channels, rather than just publishing old-style content in new formats.
Insurgents are attacking many parts of the vlue chain in media. Those companies who have been able to cannibalise themselves have done the most interesting things, suggests Rimer. Some photolibraries have embraced microstock and cannibalised their own businesses before other did it.
Is unbundling of video and TV channels going to happen? Rimer thinks that customers want the content they want when they want it and where they want it - but their is an issue with network capacity. But generally, getting praise for traditional media companies from the panel was nigh-impossible for Waters.
The standardisation of mobile platforms that iOS triggered is good news for investors, says Mistry. There's Apple, Android and maybe Microsoft, still. They can now invest and they're seeing real innovation, with uses emerging to help, for example, medical staff diagnose conditions better. Maybe there will be a choke point on innovation, but they haven't see it yet. Boguslavsky is less keen - he doens't think the advertising oportunity is there on mobile devices. The important thing to do is to create new mobile advertsing products. Rimer thinks we're just moving towards an age of computers with different screen sizes. Think more about customers and products rather than the device - sell them a product they can access through any device. But the dominance of just one platform would be a problem.
If you acquire your customers through Google or Facebook, and monetise them through Apple, you have a bad business model. You need to break one of those dependencies, suggests Mistry. Zynga are trying to break their dependence on Facbook, for example.
Some discussion about the limits of bandwidth, and Mistry suggests that people are cautious of investing in businesses that require more bandwidth from their products than current bandwidth can support.
Lots of questions from the floor about privacy - and a distinct lack of answers from the panel. There was evasion and dismissal, but no real engagement with thee topic - probably one to watch...
