Privacy

Privacy is an issue getting lots of media attention right now.  Privacy is in the headlines virtually every day lately.  While privacy and the protection of it HAS become a political issue, it also is an issue of great social significance.  It is also shaping up to be an issue of generational divide.  Young people today seem to have a different view about privacy than their parents.

According to a recent Pew Internet study, about teen social media use and privacy:

• Students are sharing much more personal information about themselves of social media

• 91% of teens posted a photo of themselves in 2012, up from 79% in 2006
• 71% posted their school name, up from 49%
• 71% posted the city or town where they live, up from 61%
• 53% posted their email address, up from 29% in 2006
• 20% posted their cell phone number, where virtually no one (2%) did just 6 years earlier
• At the same time, 60% of teen Facebook users report high levels of confidence in their ability to manager their settings.
• Just 9% of teens indicated that they were "very" concerned about third party access to their data on social media sites.

On the other hand, there are a lot of adults over the age of 40 that won't even dip their toe into the Facebook pool because of concerns of privacy.

I cannot tell if these differences are generational or experiential in nature.  Are teenagers less worried about someone mining their personal data from Facebook because they are young and naive or because they are used to the quirks and tendencies of a Facebook-driven life?

This is not to say that young people are not concerned about privacy issues.  They undoubtedly are. According to the Pew study, more than half of them limit access to their information using privacy settings.

Despite all of this, there is a growing school of thought among all generations of users that the greatest danger to internet privacy over social media is advertisers, not individuals with malcontent.  People are genuinely afraid of the time in the near future when advertisers have gleaned all there is to know about an individual and use that hyper personal information to make highly personalized offers.

The challenge for marketers is to be culturally and demographically sensitive to the issue of privacy.  Most people sincerely enjoy the recommendations on Amazon or Netflix that are based on past purchases.  Fewer people enjoy those same recommendations when they are based on non-purchase past behavior on the site.  There are even fewer (dare I say almost no one) who would enjoy recommendations based on their internet activity on other sites other than the recommendor's site.

The opportunity for marketers is to recognize that privacy is an important issue in the marketplace, albeit one that is viewed differently by different generations.  A smart marketer can use respect for customers' privacy as a marketing advantage.  A smart marketer can identify the generational similarities in views about different types of privacy and/or can take advantage of the differences.

A smart marketer will recognize that privacy is not just a political issue or a generational issue but also an image issue.  Companies that are seen as respecting our individual views on marketing will, I predict, have an advantage over those who are seen as indifferent to those issues.

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A Strong, Simple Message

One of the most effective strategies for cutting through the message clutter is to have consistency of message.  Convincing non-marketing leaders of the need for consistency of message can be one of the hardest things to do as a marketer.

To be effective your message must be clear, concise and repeated frequently. In a mass media strategy, that means replaying the same ad on the same media over and over and over again. In a new media strategy, while message repetition has a place, message consistency becomes more important. Your message will be displayed differently and probably less frequently on different media. Done well, it could be MANY different media.  So if someone sees your message on a banner ad, a magazine ad, a retweet, in a radio story and on your blog, there had better be the same message elements running through each of those, or you have lost out on a golden opportunity to drive home your key message.

One of the scariest things about social media for most marketers is loss of control of the message.  The conversation of social media is much more difficult to manage than the monologues of mass media.  One of the exciting things about social media for most marketers is that you can interact and engage customers and potential customers directly.

There are some things you can do to help make sure your message is heard:

• Select a strong, simple message and use it consistently and constantly in everything you do.  
• Make sure your message is heard and understood and used by all internal audiences because internal audiences carry your message out into social media.  Make sure they are carrying the message you want them to!
• Make sure your strong, simple message is translated effectively into tweets and posts and blogs, so that wherever and however a prospect or customer is interacting with you, she is getting that same strong, simple message.  This can mean changes in length of message, language of message and format of message.  It should not mean a change of the core theme of the message.
• Use that strong, simple message over and over and over again.  About the time you are getting so sick and tired of that strong, simple message that you can't stand seeing it anymore is about the time that your audiences are starting to notice it.  Continue to use it.  Fight with your boss and your bosses boss when they insist on a new message.  They will be glad that you did in the long run!
• Resist the urge to complicate things with additional messages, sub messages, tangential messages or anything like that.  Companies that have been most successful in marketing and messaging in both traditional AND social media have presented a strong, simple message and stuck with it.
• Make sure your message means something to the audiences that matter to you.  If your strong, simple message is in jargon or uses terminology that is unknown or unfamiliar to your audiences, it is NOT a strong, simple message to that audience.
• I do want to be clear.  A strong, simple message is not necessarily a simplistic message.  "Acme Industries is good" does not qualify as a strong message.  Your message should identify your organization.  It should emphasize or highlight some reason prospective customers should consider becoming customers. This means it should emphasize or highlight a solution to a problem commonly shared by prospects.

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6 Ways Social Media is Scary to Marketers

To most marketers, social media is still new.  We are still trying to make sense of this new way of communicating with stakeholders.  Today I would explore a few ways in which social media is different than traditional mass media.  Today I explore ways that social media is scary to marketers.

1. Two-way communications
Social media is a conversation.  Mass media is a monologue.

The simple fact that the audience can talk back in many social media venues is both thrilling and frightening to many marketers.  We all hope that the result will be a productive conversation but fear it will be the media equivalent of a heckler at a comedy club.

2. Volume
The really attractive thing about traditional media is that you can reach a lot of people with a single ad.  When you can get your message to millions of people with a single media purchase, that makes things much simpler and much easier.  This works really well if you are Proctor & Gamble or Ford Motor Company.  It works less well if you are Billy's Bait and Tackle Shop.

For Billy's Bait and Tackle Shop to take advantage of the more democratic virtues of social media, they need to have someone who has some tech savvy and the time to keep their message in the social media.  For P&G and Ford, they have the people, but they have to develop the ability to talk to people at an appropriate volume.  Marketers who grew up talking at mass media volume sometimes have trouble switching to their inside voices.

3. Social Media is Free...sorta
Facebook and Twitter don't charge companies to set up accounts.  Companies can set up all the Pinterest boards they want without forking over a fee.  However, to participate in these "free" social media opportunities effectively requires ongoing input and updating.  For most organizations, this inputting and updating is not done for free.

Furthermore, more and more organizations are recognizing the value of having professional input into the set-up and execution of these marketing tools (not that the son of the guy in payroll wasn't doing a good job...when he wasn't in school.). As someone pointed out to me recently, if we understood social media and what we have to do, we could figure out what it costs.  Since we don't understand it, it has the potential to be a big money pit.

4. Measurement is easier with social media
One of the "truisms" that I grew up believing about advertising is the John Wanamaker quote about knowing that half of your advertising dollars are wasted.  The trouble was there was no way of knowing which half.  Social media provides a lot more data about who is seeing your message, where they are coming from and what they do after they receive your message.

The thing about data is that it is only numbers until you do something with it.  To marketers who have spent their careers channeling Wanamaker, suddenly having detailed data available about our marketing decisions feels a little like being called to the Principal's office.  It could be that you are going to be praised for doing the right things, but the odds are against it.

5. Social Media Allows You to Target Your Audience
The common analogy used is that mass media is a shotgun shot and social media is a rifle shot.  Social media allows you to target your audience more precisely.  That means that marketers need to know who they are trying to reach and what message each audience segment should get.  That is hard.  That requires a marketer to know details about his target audience and detailed message that he didn't really need to know before.

If you are marketing in Chicago, you could buy ads in the Chicago Tribune and on WGN and pretty much figure you are reaching your target market.  Sure, you are also reaching 80 to 90% of the audience who AREN'T your target audience, but when mass marketing was your primary option, what could you do?  When you can slice and dice the audience a million different ways, your opportunities are endless, but so are your opportunities to miss your audience.

6. Social Media Keeps Changing
If you were buying advertising nationally 25 years ago, you were most likely buying advertising in the same media as the guy (and it probably was a guy) who was buying advertising 50 or 60 years ago.  That is not true for social media.  10 years ago, most social media marketing options didn't even exist.  Facebook isn't 10 years old yet.  My Space, a marketing "has-been" by most accounts, will celebrate it's 10th birthday in August.

New social media channels and options are opening up all of the time.  Reading the business and marketing literature can be intimidating, as they are frequently citing the next big thing in social media.  Add to that the challenge of identifying which options best meet the needs of your organization and your target audiences and determining which options best support your marketing strategy.

Keeping up with the Zuckerbergs can be exhausting!



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Digital Snake Oil Salesmen

I have noticed lately that just about any problem you have can be solved by way of some sort of electronic communications.  You can get rich via webinar, loose weight from a blog, and repair your love life with an online conference with a the company's registered Lothario.  You can do even better if you also purchase the e-book.

Or so they say.

It has been the history of each new media that the earliest adapters are the purveyors of porn and magical remedies for all that ails you.  The snake oil salesmen.  The internet and social media are no different.

What is different is the democratic nature of the internet.  An ad for Rolls Royce gets largely the same treatment as the con man selling magic pills.  In print media, there are expensive, high status publications in which the cost of entry is enough to keep out at least the most questionable of advertisers.  The same thing for television and radio.  Not so much with the internet.

The same open qualities of the internet that allow a young musician to post her new songs on You Tube and find an audience and an entrepreneur to find a disperse but loyal customer base, make it ripe territory for other, less desirable uses.  I don't think we can, or should, try to prevent these uses.  I do think that we need to learn to be smart consumers.

Also, I think it is important for reputable businesses to embrace the possibilities of internet media options.   As has happened time and time again, when reputable companies step up and establish a strong presence in a media, the snake oil salesmen tend to get pushed to the side.  Which is a better place for them!

The Challenges of DeFriending

I have too many friends.  I am too linked in.  I need to simplify.

At least that was my intention when I wrote a post on quality vs. quantity when it comes to social media contacts several years ago.  Read that blog here.

All was fine and good until I started realizing that I was missing messages from contacts that I really cared about.  A colleague told me about an opportunity, but I missed it among the sea of posts I get daily.  I have to search to find pictures of my 1 year-old niece on Facebook because I get lots of other messages that aren't nearly as important, nor as cute.

So when I wrote, two years ago, about my intention to go for quality over quantity on my social media contacts, my intentions were good.  But liking someone is a lot easier than "unliking" them.  I have not made much progress on winnowing down my contacts list.  One of my many issues with Facebook is that they have all sorts of groups and games and features that encourage you to connect with lots of people, but they make it difficult (at least to this Luddite) to sort and organize your contacts.  I have "friends" that I connected with several years ago over a common interest in an issue or an event.  The problem is I don't remember what that issue or event is any longer.

Also, you friend someone by pushing one little button.  Once they accept the invitation, you are Facebook friends.  To defriend someone, once you know that want to, involves several steps.

Ultimately though, the problem for me is in the difference between the two actions.  Friending is a generally positive and inclusive action.  It opens up possibilities of connections made and opportunities revealed.  Removing friends, or links, or contacts is the opposite.  It shrinks your online world.

Or does it.  As I wrote two years ago, sometimes it is about numbers, but sometimes its about making sure you see those cute toddler pictures!

Thumbs Up for Critics...Sort Of

"No one has ever built a statue to a critic, it's true. On the other hand, it's only the people with statues that get pooped on by birds flying by."           Seth Godin

Few of us set out to be critics.   Rarely does a critic make it on anyone's list of most admired people or historical figures we'd like to have dinner with.  Critics are seen as living off of the efforts of others.

Yet we pay attention to them.  We talk about how many stars a movie got or whether new software was highly rated or panned.  We read the books they recommend and buy tickets to the plays they admire.

I think that there is an important role in society for quality critiquing of our arts and entertainment.  First, it helps us sort through the endless stream of options to identify the handful of things we can reasonably expect to enjoy.  Second, quality criticism can help us develop our critical viewing and reading skills.  Reading solid, thoughtful critiques helps us to learn to look for the subtext and symbolism, the context and the character arcs of more subtly crafted films or books.  Third, critiques provide us with the context and language to talk about the arts and entertainment we enjoy. I seriously doubt that many of us would be talking about sweep shots and casting coups if they weren't first discussed by a critic.

The challenge for critics is that the rug has been pulled out from under them.

Siskel and Ebert probably would have had a harder time getting started professionally today, because the role of critic has been democratized.  It is easy these days for any user or viewer to weigh in on what they think of a movie, or an app, or a product.  There are whole businesses that are built around consumer reviews; businesses such as Angie's List, which shares customer reviews of service companies.

As critiquing has gained prominence in our society, the role of critic seems to have diminished.  Does the professional critic serve a purpose in a world when you can get the average rating of thousands of Amazon participants.  Does a critic, despite facing competition from her very audience, contribute anything to the general conversation?

I feel that professional critics do serve an important purpose.  That purpose is not in the ratings they give, but in the explanations that support those ratings.  Critics give a context to their ratings which makes them far more valuable.  To learn that a movie only got two stars is one thing.  To learn that it got two stars because it has a clown in it and the reviewer hates clowns gives you a whole other perspective; especially if you also have strong feelings about clowns!

However, critical context can be found many places as well.  Searching "movie blogs" on Bing generates almost 3 billion results.  I am pretty sure a few of them are done by amateurs.

In the end, I think the role of the professional critic is going through the same transition as the role of the professional journalist.  The rules are changing and the successful critics will change with them.  Just this week, the Chicago Sun Times fired all of their staff photographers.  They cited the need to increase the use of video as the reason.  I suspect the need to control fixed costs also played a role in the decision.  If major market newspapers are counting on freelance photographers to meet their needs, how far behind will wire service or crowd sourced critics be?

Perhaps the best roadmap was laid out by the recently deceased Roget Ebert. Not satisfied with being just a print journalist, he joined forces with the film critic from a rival newspaper and became a broadcast star.  When cancer took his voice, he made sure he still had one by moving into social media.  As you can see from the article below, even death hasn't stopped Mr. Ebert.  His site lives on, providing film criticism and reviews.

Today's critic needs to leverage what ever credibility and audience she has into whatever media and format is looking for content.  As so often happens, quality work will rise to the top and find its audience.



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A $136 Billion Dip in the Road

On April 23rd, a fake AP tweet caused $136 billion in stock value to disappear.

For those of you who aren't familiar with this story, I will summarize.  A fake AP tweet indicated that President Obama had been injured in a White House explosion.  Despite the fact that AP quickly flagged the tweet as fake, the S&P 500 dropped 0.9 percent, briefly erasing $136 billion in stock market wealth.

Even though the market recovered quickly upon the realization that the tweet was a hoax, a lot of money changed hands over a very short time frame.  There were undoubtedly winners and losers.

The response to this incident was as fast as it was varied.  On either end of the spectrum, there were calls to end the computerized trading that caused thousands and maybe millions of shares to be sold in milliseconds. On the other hand, some are looking to the equally swift correction the system enacted and feel that it is an example of things working like they should.

I think that this is another example of how our technological abilities are advancing ahead of our social abilities to deal with the consequences.  I put significantly underutilized smartphones, the Cloud, and Facebook into this category.  All with differing degrees of consequences.

I do not mean to paint some sort of Terminator scenario where the technology is going to take over our lives and rule the world.  Technology can change must faster than society can change.  That just means that for a while after a period of rapid technology change, society has to struggle to catch up.  I think we are in that type of period now.

It manifests itself in things like some social and emotional upheaval.  When automobiles first were commercially available, automobile drivers were seen as rude, impudent upstarts by those who chose to still travel by horse and buggy.  Today, we have people making blanket indictments about technology.  It is, according to them, a travesty to invest so much into technology.

This disconnect between our technological abilities and our social ability to assimilate to it can also be clearly seen in business.  For example, businesses sense that social media is important and will continue to be important.  Yet most companies have struggled to figure out how to make social media work for them.  The few companies that seem to be having success tend to be newer companies that don't have to assimilate traditional media thinking into a new media world.

I think that the lesson of the fake tweet is neither that the world is coming to an end nor that there is nothing wrong here so don't bother looking into it.  I think we need to try to understand how technology changes the traditional paradigms we are working in.  In the case of this incident, it isn't only that the stock market can react incredibly fast to changing market situations, but also that we must learn when we can trust our media sources and how easily things like fake tweets can be generated.

I agree with some of the commentators I have read that this incident was not a crash of the system but rather a minor dip.  But like a dip in the road, if you aren't prepared and don't know how to drive through it, that little dip can knock your trailer off it's hitch and cause a lot of problems.

It's best that we mind the dips in the road, at least until we can catch up to our technology.

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Learning How to Read

There has been a lot of talk about how the advent of social media and things like blogging has changed media, transformed writing and allowed for the rise of citizen journalists.  There has been some discussion about the responsibilities of writers in social media (including in this blog.)  There has been less discussion about the growing need to be a responsible reader.

When our primary news and information sources came from mainstream media (newspapers, television, books, radio) it got to us after having passed through several filters of journalists and editors.  These filters had many effects on the news we consumed, including the fact that a news story had to pass muster with numerous people to make it on the air or on the page.

With the explosion of "news" sources those filters are greatly reduced or removed altogether.  While this allows for more and more diverse voices and a more immediate access to information, it also allows for more deception, inaccuracies and lies to be paraded around as news and facts.  In the absence of editors, and probably despite them, we must learn to be more judicious and critical readers.

There has always been a difference in the reliability of news sources.  Walter Cronkite in the 60s and 70s was above reproach.  He signed off every newscast with "That's the way it was..." and it WAS the way it was!  Mostly because Walter Cronkite had said so!  I have no idea if Mr. Cronkite was any better of a journalist than the newscasters today.  I do know that he had the trust of the public.

To be a responsible consumer of media these days, you need to do more that to turn to wherever Walter Cronkite is broadcasting.  You need to assess the sources of the messages you are consuming.  Are they coming from a reputable journalist or a lonely writer (your truly included) who is expressing opinions without access to resources for fact checking and data inputs.

I do not mean to suggest that lonely writers are always less credible or that established journalists are more credible.  I am only urging that as a responsible reader, you should assess the "quality" of the source of the information you are consuming.  In a way it is no different than how you would judge a restaurant.  You can still get food poisoning from a restaurant with white tablecloths and four forks and you can eat the best burger you will ever find with a hole in the wall place with cracked linoleum floors and a creaky fan in the corner.  But those would be exceptions to the rule.

As readers in the internet age, we are no longer constrained about reading from our local sources of information.  While that means we can more easily learn about events in Bangladesh and popular music trends in Omsk, it also means we are reading from unfamiliar sources.

Ultimately, as with so many things, it comes down to trust.  As a responsible reader, you need to pay attention to your sources.  You need to figure out if you can trust the ramblings of a favorite blogger (ahem) or the anonymous sources of the established reporter.

You have the choice.  Choose wisely.

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The Coronation of Content

"They" say that now, in the brave new world of social media, content is king queen royalty all that matters.

My initial response to that saying is when hasn't content been all that matters?

If content is now everything, that must mean there was a time when content meant less...when what was in your messages wasn't as important as it is now.

With some notable exceptions, I must have missed the Vapid Age of Communications.
  

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"Social" media

One of the reasons some companies fear social media...



For more cartoons like this, visit the marketoonist, Tom Fishburne at tomfishburne.com.

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Talking together

Lately, we seem more concerned with having our devices talk to each other than we do with having our colleagues talk to each other.  With the explosion of wireless computing and the Swiss army knife of the 21st century, the smart phone, featuring more and more capabilities and tools, we have more and more ways to connect with colleagues and customers and fewer and fewer reasons to talk to people.

While I believe in the efficiency of webinars, conferences and conference calls, I also have multi-tasked my way through all of them enough times to know that they are not usually the best way to have an engaged conversation.  As with so many things related to communications, the closer you can get to face-to-face, one-on-one conversation, the more impact and persuasion you can have.  The closer we can get to one-on-one conversation the more likely we are to make a connection with the other party in the conversation.  

A friend of mine sends out emails about her business on a pretty regular basis.  She was telling me that she had recently started personalizing some of the emails to key customers.  The response from those customers was remarkable, she told me with a bit of amazement.  While not everyone made a purchase, many people felt the need to respond to her; to reconnect with her.  They saw these emails not as advertisements, which they essentially were, but as one-on-one communications.  As a personal message.  They felt compelled to respond.  They felt compelled to strengthen the relationship.

There are ways that technology can help us approximate the one-on-one conversation.  For a while, one of the biggest concepts in marketing was the idea of mass customization.  The theory was that technology would allow us to use the convenience of mass marketing but with the impact of a personalized, customized message.  While I suspect there aren't many people anymore who feel that a mail merged letter is the same as a hand-written note, it does make a letter seem a bit less like a form letter and a bit more like the sender wants to really communicate.  Technology allows us to customize what information a customer or prospect receives, essentially allowing us to customize our interaction on a one-on-one level.

We need to be mindful of what we are doing and not let the technology seduce us too much.  For example, think about how too many people use what is now a pretty dusty technology, PowerPoint.  Too many speakers continue to pour all of their energy into creating detailed, bullet-riddled PowerPoint presentations.  They end up giving their speech facing the slides because they don't want to miss any of the precious facts they have loaded onto each slide.  As Seth Godin says in his blog post titled "Really Bad PowerPoint," "countless innovations fail because their champions use PowerPoint the way Microsoft wants them to, instead of the right way."  Wordy, bullet-laden presentations rarely communicate as much as the creator hopes they will.  When a speaker is speaking to the screen, he cannot be talking with the audience.  Also, people can't see all the brilliance on the slide if their eyes are closed.

Similarly, some organizations confuse the use of social media as a strategy as opposed to a media option.  This results in companies focusing unwarranted attention on generating likes, or followers, or repins instead of focusing on the true mission of the organization or the brand, generating sales.  Getting someone to push a "Like" button is not a conversation or a connection.  It may be an invitation to start a conversation, depending what scheme you used to get that person to push that "Like" button.  We really need to be focusing on connections, real connections, with customers and prospects and other key audiences.  We need to be finding ways to talk together.

A colleague of mine told me recently that if an email exchange goes past three emails without the issue getting resolved, she picks up the phone and calls the person.  The issue rarely goes past one phone call.  There is nothing more powerful than talking directly with a person.

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The Formula for Quality Communications: 6C=Q

I have written about the need to be more concise and more precise in the messages we use.  In an earlier blog post (see link below), I referred to this as creating carefully crafted, concise messages that clearly communicate one or two key messages.  Six C's that result in a quality message.  6C=Q.

It has been suggested that platitudes are fine but specifics are what are really helpful.  I agree.  In this blog I am going to start with several ideas about how to be clear and concise in your messages.  I challenge everyone who reads this to leave a comment with a tip or two that YOU use to make sure your messages are quality messages, especially in today's world of interactive and social media.  I will share all ideas I get in a future blog.

Tips for Creating Carefully Crafted, Concise Messages that Clearly Communicate

• Clear Concise Communications are rarely created by accident.  This takes work.  The more you work at it, the easier it will seem, but rarely is clear concise communication created by accident.  As Abraham Lincoln famously said prior to a speech, "This speech would have been shorter but I ran out of time."
• Clear Concise Communications requires that you have a key message and a key audience in mind.  You have to be clear about what message you want to get out and who you want to get it to.  Your decision on both these areas will dictate everything about your message.
• Be aware of the language that you use.  Many of us who work in a single industry have to be aware that many people we are trying to communicate with, including many people within that same industry, don't understand the jargon, acronyms and language shortcuts that are a part of every industry.  There ARE times when it is appropriate to use those things, but do it purposefully.
• Write to communicate.  What I mean by this is pay more attention to getting your message across in a clear and engaging way than to the formal rules of grammar (unless of course you are communicating to a group of English teachers!).  This is closely related to the next tip.
• Write how your intended audience talks.  You want to communicate with your intended audience, so you need to communicate how they communicate.  This means using the language they use.  It also means communicating using the media they use.
• If you can't say it in 30 seconds or 300 words, you haven't figured out your key message.
• Be concious of the rhythms of your writing.  The best writing has a rhythm or cadence to it.
• Edit by reading aloud.  Your ear is a great editor!
• When possible illustrate your ideas with pictures. While a picture may be worth a thousand words it is worth way more than that when it comes to its ability to generate attention and interest.
• If you are illustraing with pictures, consider moving pictures.  Video is easier, cheaper and more popular than ever before.  It should be part of your communications toolbox.
• Great video starts with a great script.  A great script delivers the message in less than a few minutes (see above).
• Great communications starts and ends with great listening.  If you are listening (to your audience, to your peers, to yourself) you will have a much better idea of how to communicate.  If you are listening you will also have a better idea of how your message is being recieved.  You have two ears and one mouth which is a good reminder of the ratio of listening to talking (or writing) that you should be doing.

There is more, but I want to hear from readers.  Add a bullet point or two to this list in a comment and I will publish them in a future blog!  Thanks!

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Blurring the Lines

Reposted:  This blog first ran on 12/18/12
I read an article in my local newspaper last week that breathlessly reported about a recent study indicating that a huge percentage of employees (60%) check personal social media sites more than once a day while at work.  The article goes on to calculate the lost productivity and the unfairness of this to employers.

I think the reporter is looking at this issue too narrowly.  The issue, as I see it, is more about the blurring of the lines between home and work.  I acknowledge that many people access personal social media sites at work.  I acknowledge that when you are updating your Facebook account you can't be balancing the ledgers or helping customers.  But what the reporter didn't explore was how often employers do the same thing to employees traditionally non-work hours. 

With the prevelence of smartphones, tablets and laptop computers, employees can access their work email accounts, if not the entirity of their computer files, from the comfort of the kitchen table.  Furthermore, as this access has become more prevalent, access beyond the work day is not considered going above and beyond the call of duty, it is expected.  How many of you have had someone ask you on Monday morning why you hadn't yet responded to the email that they sent you on Saturday?

Working at home has always happened.  My Dad's had his briefcase and "paperwork" that needed to be worked on.  I have replaced his briefcase with a laptop and a cellphone.  What is different now is that with cellphones, tablets and laptops many of us are expected to be on call 24/7.  Even vacations aren't sacrosanct.

Understand, I am not complaining about this.  I have chosen to work in the field of marketing communications.  As a media spokesperson, I have usually have had to be on call.  Before cellphones, I often wore a pager.  Likewise, I have also almost always brought work home.  Some of that is because I sometimes find it easier to write away from the office. 

But if we are going to have a conversation about how mobile technology has allowed more people to access personal social media during work hours, I think it is important to also acknowledge that the same media has also made it possible to access work from home.  More and more, defining "work hours" has become difficult.

Quality vs. Control

In today's marketplace, a communicator needs to focus on clarity of message and connecting with key audiences more than controlling the message.

Occassionally a communicator may have the illusion that she can control the message.  It is only an illusion.

Today's marketplace provides us with an opportunity to have a dialog WITH our key audiences (new media) versus a lecture AT our key audiences (old media).  Everyone knows that in a dialog, you can only realistically control no more than one half of the conversation.

So what are we professional communicators to do if we can no longer realistically claim the super-secret ability to control the message?

The answer is something we should have been focusing on all along.  We need to refocus on the clarity and the quality of our messages.  We need to sharpen our pencils (most likely metaphorically) and pay attention to creating carefully crafted, concise messages that clearly communicate one or two key messages.  (For the mathematically inclined reader, or those of you who are aspiring marketing consultants, you would state this as 6C=Q.)

When you can only control your half of the dialog, you need to make sure that is a high quality half!

We need to focus on making sure we are delivering messages that communicate our key message as clearly and engagingly as possible.  THEN, we need to listen for feedback that will tell us if our messages are as clear and engaging as we anticipated.  If they aren't, you adjust and start over again.

If your quality is good, I guess you don't need to worry about control.

11 year old boys

Everyone in marketing and public relations knows that they should be involved with social media and the internet.  Every company that markets (which means every company) knows that they need to have a presence on the internet because 1) It makes them look modern and "with it," 2) that is where they think their customers might be, 3) everyone is talking about social media so that must be where things are happening, 4) it doesn't cost anything to send an email so why not? or 5) all of the above.

The trouble is knowing you should and knowing how are two different things.  As I read recently in Fast Company magazine, "[companies and] brands on the internet are like 11 year old boys.  They know that they want girls to talk to them, but when they do, they don't know what to say."

It seems to me, many companies are putting the cart before the horse.  Instead of deciding you want to jump into social media and then figuring out what you should say, instead you should be deciding what your story is BEFORE thinking about the best venue or venues to tell it.  Often the nature of the story will dictate the appropriate media to tell it in.  While many stories work well on the internet, some are best told on radio, or by postcard, or an in-store display.

Like that 11 year old boy, you should figure out what you want to say before you start passing notes in class!


Some of my other posts you might enjoy:

• Tell Stories http://allismarketing.blogspot.com/2011/10/tell-stories.html

• The Marketing Value of Social Media http://allismarketing.blogspot.com/2012/03/marketing-value-of-social-media.html

The Marketing Value of Social Media?

I have to admit that while I see social media as a valuable communications tool, I have had a hard time figuring out how to make some social media make sense from a marketing perspective.  The Ad Contrarian blog has an interesting take on this in the blog Farcebook.  Your thoughts?

Some of my thoughts on social media: Social Media: Quality vs. quantity

Babies and Bathwater

There is an old saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater."

My interpretation of this saying is that as you are getting rid of things you don't want, or no longer need (in this case the bathwater), be careful that you don't also get rid of something valuable (i.e. the baby).

In our current media and communication milieu, many companies are throwing out the bathwater of their traditional PR plans.  With tools like Twitter and Facebook, the thinking often goes, who needs newspapers (or radio or TV)?  With websites and e-newsletters and video conferencing, who would ever again pay to place a print ad or struggle to get their message into 30 seconds with music?

But here's the thing:  very similar things were said about newspapers and magazines more than 100 years ago when commercial radio became popular and the same thing about radio (and newspapers and magazines) when television joined the media fracas.  And newspapers and magazines and radio are still around and by most accounts, doing OK.

More importantly, those "traditional media" are still delivering visibility and audiences for those advertisers who use them wisely.

You see, I think new media tends to be additive, not replacing, in nature.  Each new media adds something new to the customer experience, but most don't really replace the old.  And even if it does replace those experiences for some, there are still many many many people who cling to their newspapers or radio programs with strength and conviction.

Traditional media also evolves.  Radio stations we have today are remarkably different than the first radio networks, but no less vibrant or vital of a media.  

So, when you are thinking of throwing "traditional media" out the window with that bathwater, you really need to calculate if you really can do without all of those customers who don't have access to new media, who don't care to have access, or that want access, but can't figure out how to use it, so they don't.

Social Media: Quality vs. quantity

The other day I read an email from a friend and colleague who had written to me on LinkedIn asking for a favor.   The problem is that she had written me several weeks before I had read the email, and now the favor was a moot point.  The problem wasn't that I had just ignored her request, the problem was I didn't see it until it was weeks old.  I didn't see it because of the volume of message I get from LinkedIn has caused me to turn the volume way down on those messages.

Don't get me wrong.  I am not suggesting that I am so popular or so important on LI that massive amounts of people send me messages to get my perspective or advice.  Rather, I have adopted the strategy of being what is called an Open Networker.  The philosophy of an Open Networker, as I understand it, is that no contact is a bad contact.  That the advantages of social media multiply if you accrue a larger network of contacts.  While I never got caught up in the arms race that some LI open networkers get in, trying to have the most connections, I also have not hesitated to accept link requests from people with little or no obvious connection to me.

I have had the belief that a larger network would serve me best by giving me a larger pool of references and a greater resource of opinions when I have posted a query.  While this proved true and useful when I was first using LI, as more of my "real" contacts have started using LI as a means of connection and communication, it appears to have become counterproductive.

So the question I pose to the blogosphere is this:  which is better, quantity or quality when it comes to connections in social media.  I realize that there are some differences between LI, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media.  I am interested in whether people have strong opinions, relevant experience, or a pithy comment or two regarding contacts in social media.  What are the advantages to open networking?  What are the disadvantages?  I will be posting a link to this blog on all my social media sites (LI, Twitter & Facebook)  I am hoping to be educated and enlightened by my open network!

Frequency vs. consistency

A hundred years ago when I was in school taking marketing and advertising classes, Reach and Frequency was the mantra of the day.  In an era when mass media allowed you to reach everyone relatively cheaply, the way to get your message seen/heard/viewed and remembered was to make sure the message reached a broad audience and that the audience saw YOUR message frequently enough so that it would be remembered and, hopefully, acted upon.

With today's electronic media, and with some of recent and upcoming changes to the golden oldies of print, radio and TV, we can send customized messages to micro-targeted audiences inexpensively and efficiently.  Reach is still important, even though it now is a bit more nuanced.  I would argue, however, that frequency in less important these days.  Instead, the extreme targeting power of social and electronic media shifts the focus from frequency of message to consistency of message.

Old marketing messages no longer go into the recycling bin with the morning's newspaper.  They last forever on the internet.  What is almost more disconcerting is they can be found and read by your prospects with almost as much ease as they can find and read your current, intended message.  Because of this, I would argue that long-term consistency of message is as important, or more important, as frequency once was.

Reach and Consistency is the name of the new game!