According to The Observer, “Got a problem? Air it on Twitter and it could be solved instantly.” This headline will have come as no surprise to the social media fraternity. Many have known for years that tweeting or posting comments about poor customer service allows them to ‘jump the queue’ when it comes to making complaints, but this knowledge is now beginning the penetrate the mainstream. Why wait for days or sometimes weeks for a problem to be resolved when a bit of digital ranting can achieve an almost instanteous response?
The good news is that social media-enabled customer systems, when properly resourced, are far more effective than the alternatives. According to Everything Everywhere’s Ben Kay, “Social agents are four times more efficient than telephone agents and result in better NPS ratings.” The bad news for organisations that rely on a large customer service function is that the maturing of social media as a customer service channel will dramatically raise our expectations: the more we see problems being resolved in real time the more we will come to see this as the norm. In the words of Gareth Turpin, General Manager of Customer Services at O2: “Customer service expectations are not set by what your competitors are doing but by anyone.”
My most recent book Loose was partly inspired by a Tom Peters quote: “in an age when all value flows from creativity and initiative, we must imagine and embrace a model of leadership that is loose, open and perpetually imaginative.” It is difficult to conceive of a looser leadership style than that embodied by Boris Johnson, the newly reappointed Mayor of London. His arch rival, Ken Livingstone has described him as “a lazy old fogie”, without the self discipline to be an effective politician: “He remains incredibly funny, but he’s not interested in detail. Unless you like lots of mind-numbing work, getting on top of budgets, crafting government policy and drafting strategies, you’re not doing it.”
Boris exhibits many of the characteristics and behaviours of those institutions that appear to thrive amidst the chaos of modern live. We should never underestimate the level of calculation that goes into Boris’ bumbling persona, but to the public at large he comes across as unpolished and authentic, which is why he has been able to appeal beyond the narrow confines of Conservative party. He is a flawed character, but that simply makes him even more appealing to a public that has always had a soft spot for loveable rogues: the public will invariably choose the interesting, flawed character over the ‘too good to be true’ product of the party machine. He clearly has an inflated ego but he also appears to be collaborative: willing to delegate power and decision-making to trusted deputies. Livingstone would no doubt argue that this is simply a product of Johnson’s laziness and disinterest in the minutiae of bureaucracy, but it does allow Johnson to be able to focus on the big picture, rather than get too bogged down in the detail.
Abrahamson and Freedman in their book “A perfect mess” described how: “Though it flies in the face of almost universally accepted wisdom, moderately disorganised people, institutions and systems frequently turn out to be more efficient, more creative and in general more effective than highly organised ones.” A perfect mess: possibly the best description you can find of Boris’ electoral juggernaut.
By Martin
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April 20, 2012
In the era of Balotelli and Barton it takes a brave (some might argue foolhardy) football manager to allow his players to come and go as they please and to trust them to manage their own time. But this loose approach to man-management has been one of the secrets of success of Brian McDermott, who’s Reading team was this week promoted to the Premiership. McDermott was apparently inspired to implement a more relaxed and informal approach by a visit to the Google Mountain View offices in the US where personal freedom has become something of a religion. Football managers are expected to study a business as part of their UEFA qualifications. Most tend to stay within the world of sport but McDermott wanted to try something different, hence his decision to study the weird and wonderful world of Google, in which employees determine their own working schedules and are given time to pursue their individual projects.
McDermott has tried to apply a similar approach to the way he managers his players’ time. In an interview in The Times he described how: “I don’t tell the players what time to come in. We start training at 11, but that’s it. I don’t mind what time they leave, whether it’s two or 10. They’ve really bought into it – we have to kick them off the training pitch, or they don’t get their rest … it’s a good environment.”
Of course, the real test of McDermott’s enlightened approach will come when one of the players (inevitably) steps out of line and takes advantage of the freedom he has been given. Others, who have tried a similar approach, recommend the use of a “high trust/high penalty” policy. You trust your employees as much as possible – based on the belief that people will respond to this freedom in a positive way – but respond decisively if anyone abuses this trust. This was the mistake made by Martin Johnson during England’s disastrous Rugby World Cup campaign. On the eve of the tournament he publicly declared his trust in his players and his intention to treat them like adults. Unfortunately, amid tales of dwarf-tossing and drunken dalliances, he failed to crack down decisively when his trust was abused.
By Martin
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March 9, 2012
We are all Netizens. It is a clunky word, but an important concept. We are citizens of the internet and as such we have rights that need protecting from often over-zealous legislators – the right to freedom of expression, the right to privacy, the right to access information that should be in the public domain. But we also have the responsibility to protect these rights. This was one of the themes in a great talk by Rebecca MacKinnon at the RSA yesterday.
In her new book, The Consent of the Networked, MacKinnon – a former CNN journalist in China and co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices - describes how our freedoms as internet users are under attack: not simply from repressive dictatorships in China, Russia and the Middle East, but also from our own governments. The intentions of our political masters may be honourable – protecting us from the internet’s more salacious content, identifying web-based threats to our national security, protecting the owners of intellectual property – but MacKinnon believes that this instinct to regulate and police the internet risks undermining the rights and liberties of all the world’s internet users. She is also concerned that much of this policing function has been effectively outsourced to unaccountable commercial organisations such as Google and Facebook.
The biggest threat of all is arguably our own apathy. Are we sufficiently interested and engaged in the issue of internet freedom to be willing to defend our interests? Do we care enough to pressurise our legislators and demand that the commercial guardians of the internet are held to account? A previous speaker at the RSA, Evgeny Morozov warned that the vast majority of web users, especially in developing markets such as China, are more interested in cyber hedonism than cyber activism. I asked MacKinnon during the question and answer session whether the mainstream internet population was having too much of a good time online to worry about issues such as freedom of expression and privacy. Her view was that the current level of public interest in these types of issue reminds her of the early days of environmentalism: eventually eco issues became a mainstream concern rather than simply the preserve of activists. I hope, for all of our sakes, that she is proven correct.
By Martin
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March 5, 2012
Banksy, the iconic graffiti artist and film director, has recently shared his musings on advertising. Not surprisingly, for an artist who has built a career out of manipulating popular iconography, his perspective is highly subversive: “Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.”
These aren’t simply the rantings of a professional polemicist and genius self publicist. We live in a Banksy world in which creative ideas are manipulated, customised, remixed and often subverted … and not simply by high profile graffiti artists. People’s apparently insatiable desire to personalize and manipulate all forms of creative content has coincided with a virtually unlimited technological capability that allows even the most ham-fisted amateur, given the right amount of commitment, to produce high quality work. You only need to see the number of spoof ads appearing on YouTube, usually within hours of the appearance of the original creative work, to see how creativity has been democratized.
The smart advertisers are the ones who realise that the world has changed and that even their beautiful, highly crafted creative executions are not immune from the creative impulses of wannabe-Banksy’s. The even smarter ones invite manipulation, creating malleable ideas for people to play with and providing tools to facilitate customisation. They think of advertising as existing in what the software developers describe as ‘a perpetual state of beta’ – never finished, always open to refinement and development.
By Martin
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March 1, 2012
The growth of social media as a money-making monster has been based largely on people’s willingness to trade privacy for utility. We forgive Facebook and Google’s use of our private data – to provide wonderfully compelling advertising opportunities - because they are so damned useful. The social media platform owners constantly reassure us that we shouldn’t worry about privacy – Google UK’s communications head was on the Today programme this morning defending Google’s new privacy policies - but despite the slickly packaged PR I remain convinced that (for four simple reasons) the privacy issue will come back to bite them.
- The immutable law of frequency – the ad guys have always talked about the importance of message frequency … you need to hear a message so many times before it becomes ingrained in your unconscious. It therefore stands to reason that the more the public is told about privacy issues associated with social media – even if they are told not to worry about privacy - the more it will come to be seen as an important issue rather than an irrelevance.
- Advertising overload – a perfect storm of Facebook’s IPO and Google’s need to sustain its revenue numbers is about to unleash a tsunami of advertising. Media owners have historically been pretty poor at self-regulating the amount of advertising they feature – try watching TV in the US to see what I mean. The temptation to squeeze ad messages into ever more formats will be difficult to resist. Nobody registered with Facebook just so they could receive advertising – however well targeted – despite what the sales teams would like advertisers to believe.
- A generation cries “what they hell was I thinking of?” The first Facebook generation – the group that have lived their every waking, post-adolescent moment on the Facebook wall – is starting to settle down. They are building careers and attempting to form steady relationships … all of which are in danger of being compromised by all-too public reminders of their hedonistic past. Of course they can control their privacy settings and edit the content, but like organising your photos, this will always be tomorrow’s job.
- Human nature – we are private people, so much so that our right to privacy is seen as a fundamental human principle. It is the first thing that dictatorships compromise in their efforts to control the population. Zuckerberg may claim that the age of privacy is over … but he has a vested interest in trying to turn this into a self-fulfilling prophesy. In most other areas of the media the right to privacy and protection against excessive intrusion is being defended if not extended, why should social media be any different?
By Martin
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February 28, 2012
… I could move the world
The row over the UK government’s work experience initiative – in which the country’s leading retailers were supposed to provide work experience opportunities to young benefits claimants – rumbles on. Despite the efforts of Chris Grayling – who for someone with a background in PR seems pretty hopeless at managing the news agenda – the scheme is on the verge of collapse, thanks to the determined efforts of a small group of activists with a smart understanding of how to leverage the power of social media to send some of the UK’s largest corporations into headlong retreat.
This is an all too typical demonstration of the hyper-sensitivity of most corporate communications departments when they come face-to-face with any form of well orchestrated protest. Procter & Gamble’s global marketing officer Marc Pritchard described the effect of social media as “amplifying the volume of moaning” but it is also removing any remnant of a corporate backbone. The instinctive response of those in the corporate communications department is to back-down in the face of any criticism, especially when – as is the case with the work experience programme – it is not their own initiative. Why risk a load of negative headlines and hostile tweets simply to defend the policies of an increasingly discredited government?
Those of you old enough to remember Naomi Klein’s ‘No Logo’ – the original bible of the anti-capitalist movement – will probably find it amusing to see how far we have travelled in the past decade. Klein depicted a world in which consumers were under the thrall of all powerful global brand owners; freedoms were under attack and corporations could ride roughshod over the public interest. Fast forward to 2012 and a few angry people and a hashtag can force even the most powerful corporations to change their policies and abandon what appeared to be deeply-held principles.
By Martin
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February 15, 2012
The vast majority of specialist social media agencies, founded during the heady days of the early social boom, will not survive the next couple of years. Their business model remains reliant on selling basic, low margin monitoring and community management services that most clients can now handle in-house. A few years ago it was relatively easy to win small retainers for monitoring, delivering internal training and providing simple market intelligence. That easy money has now largely disappeared, but few agencies have been able to replace it with new, higher margin revenue streams.
The few agencies that survive will be the ones capable of delivering two critically important, added value services for clients:
- Sophisticated data analysis - fusing social, behavioural and commercial data – to help clients establish the commercial impact of their social media investments. At the moment far too many social media specialists are adept at generating screen-grabs (of pretty charts and largely incomprehensible data) rather than commercially-relevant insights.
- Business consulting expertise to help clients address the significant cultural and organisational challenges of putting social media at the heart of their organisations. Getting the technology right is relatively easy for most companies. Changing an organisation’s culture and aligning the behaviour of people from different parts of the business is much more difficult and is the reason why so many of them struggle. This doesn’t mean that social media agencies suddenly have to embrace the language and methods of a McKinsey, but it does require them to be able to understand organisational culture and talk the language of the boardroom rather than the digital department.
I think I already have a good sense of which social media agencies will be capable of meeting these challenges and adding these twin capabilities to their existing creative and technological strengths. Are you one of them?
By Martin
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February 10, 2012
He was a brand manager’s dream. He’d turned up at a Guinness-sponsored rugby match wearing a Guinness hat and a Guinness t-shirt. He couldn’t be more engaged with the brand. The only problem … he was drinking a pint of Foster’s.
That’s the problem with engagement. It doesn’t actually mean a great deal from a hard-nosed commercial perspective. I might love your ad campaign, play the game you have created on Facebook, share that wonderfully funny video clip with my Twitter followers but still not spend a single pound on your product or service. Unless you can deliver meaningful engagement – behaviour that unequivocally delivers a commercial or tangible benefit – it is a pretty irrelevant metric.
So by all means stick with your engagement tracking and your Facebook engagement scores, but if you want senior management to take you seriously and give you the budgets you think you deserve, then you had better be able to demonstrate what all of this wonderful engagement actually contributes to your business. Does it drive traffic, build loyalty, increase sales or any other metric that dominates boardroom discussions? If you think it improves people’s propensity to purchase you had better be able to substantiate your hypothesis. Above all remember that engagement is not an outcome, it is simply a means to an outcome.
By Martin
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February 3, 2012
1. The immutable, Darwinian law of new technology. Remember when Sony dominated consumer electronics, IBM dominated PCs and Nokia enjoyed a 70% market share? History has shown that technology-based businesses with dominant market shares and apparently bullet-proof business models will eventually be replaced by younger, more innovative versions of themselves.
2. Yogi Berra’s law of popularity. The much quoted former US baseball star once explained why a restaurant had started to decline: “no one goes there anymore, its got too popular.” Now that just about everyone is on Facebook, it has no social cachet, it is merely a dull utility.
3. The first law of cool - no one is less cool than your parents. Facebook started as a craze among college kids looking for a hot date. It was cool, underground and alternative - the fact that the university authorities tried to ban it merely added to its mystique. Now that your mum and dad are on Facebook, it’s time to hangout somewhere else.
4. Just because your paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. The wise people at Facebook keep saying that privacy isn’t an issue (the privacy word was mentioned a gazillion times in this week’s IPO) and that we are worrying unnecessarily. No we aren’t. Up until now, people have been willing to trade privacy for utility: ‘Facebook is so dam useful’. The introduction of Timeline will shift this delicate balance. Suddenly being reminded about all the stupid things they’ve said and done during the past eight years will remind people that privacy is important and is worth protecting.
5. Making money is not a social purpose. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when reading in Zuckerberg’s letter announcing the IPO that Facebook has a social purpose: “to make the world more open and connected.” Compared to the guerrilla evangelists of transparency at Wikileaks, Facebook’s declared commitment to openness sounds pretty hollow. Openness is not knowing how drunk my boss got last night. Equally, just about every business in the telecoms sector can claim to encourage connections and connectivity. Facebook’s original purpose was to find good looking people on campus. Its current purpose is to generate tons of cash by convincing corporations that it can offer advertising nirvana: I sat through one of their sales pitches last week – it is very compelling.
Of course, failure is a relative term. Facebook won’t collapse over-night. But in ten year’s time, will we look back at this week’s events as another AOL?