Digigen & The TinMan

Real-time. What is real-time? I guess that depends on who you speak to. 5 secs, 5 mins, 5 hours, 5 days? Experts would say real-time is immediate, brands would say a little longer, consumers perhaps even shorter. My view is that the brand needs to define what real-time means to them. In most cases, although this is just my opinion, I am sure the consumer would prefer a response that is correct, than simply something delivered in real-time.

Of course, in practice and after a bit of practice, brands can probably find that alot of responses that are needed in real-time are queries they have answered before. Simply a response in the same way FAQs work, might suffice alot of questions. However, realistically, brands aren’t in the position to respond to alot of queries in real-time, some things just simply take longer.

Right Answer, seems a much better way of responding than “hey, we gave you the wrong answer, but did you see how damn quick we did it? – aren’t we shit hot!”. I’d much prefer coming back 24 hours later knowing that the answer I was getting had been researched, the right people had been involved and I could walk away happy.

Photo from Flickr – Philipp Klinger

I have long talked about Obama’s Democratic and Presidential campaigns, as being a best practice example of social media. I have also often talked about this in relation to the UK elections and pondered why none of the parties have really used this in the same way. I think there is a notable difference between the US and the UK: time.

Time is the key factor, the length of time between announcing he would campaign for the Democratic nomination (Feb 10 2007) and the inauguration at the White House (January 20th 2009) was just under two years. This is plenty of time to build a groundswell, communicate your policies and in Obama’s case his personality, and the build those commmunities.

In comparison, our parties have little over 6 weeks to unite the nation, create a groundswell, communicate policies (repair your personality) and build those communities.

6 weeks is barely enough time to get started, especially during a time where there is a great antipathy towards all parties, a desire for a change, and simply a lack of interest in anything that is said.

Obama therefore had it pretty easy compared to Gordon Brown, Nick Clegg and David Cameron. There teams will really need to be at the sharpest end of the stick to make any social media activations work.

“Its a tactical social media campaign”

There are a couple of reasons I disagree with this statement, but there are also some reasons to agree with this. The main reason I disagree with the phrase “tactical social media campaign” is that viewing social media as a campaign creates large masses of digital debris floating through the blogosphere/twitterverse/facebookalaxy (delete as appropriate). It is these social media campaigns which have created a kind of sense of disbelief in the power that brand activated social media can bring.

My preference for social media, is to think about it in terms of a long-term programme not a campaign. Certainly, the above statement “a tactical social media campaign” is correct if the campaign is deployed as one of many campaigns across a uniformed social programme. If its deployed on its own, I just cannot see it working to enhance the brands reputation and place in conversation for longer than the duration of the campaign.

A programme is a combination of factors which use social media to drive towards a desired business goal. This is effectively positioning social media as a tool deliver business strategy than a tool to deliver marketing campaigns.  This is the desire of someone like P&G to create communities through campaigns in order to eventually create a $4bn+ social commerce platform. It is also the desire of Easyjet to create a more in-depth commercial offering within somewhere like Facebook to shorten the purchase process and reduce costs.

Digigen Fix:

1. In order to start thinking about programmes digital teams need to be briefed to think about the annual plan for the business, not the next monthly plan. It is only this way that we can start to get on the radar to deliver business solutions than campaign solutions.
2. We need to stop talking about the great campaigns and talk about the great social business strategies. Zappos is a company with a great social media programme, EA have great social media campaigns. Virgin America is a company with a great social media programme, BA have had a few great social media campaigns.
3. Content produced for Social is key to making this work. Its difficult to maintain conversations without having additional content to talk around. Skimming off £20k here or there for social content will enable us to test new ideas which help move the programme forward and don’t need to be specifically tied to above the line campaigns.

Thanks for the Usage

I was recently reading an article by Chip and Dan Heath within Fast Company. This is a normal occurence as an avid monthly reader of the magazine. I don’t always agree with everything they say, quite often I feel they don’t go far enough. However, a recent post from them about “Switch” got me thinking about how brands can really use communities by brandsourcing into the community. » Read the rest of this entry «

I will be open about it. I am confused by the furore around FourSquare. It would appear I’m not the only one as certainly within the UK, the usage of FourSquare seems to be low. London is much talked about, yet doesn’t seem to be taking off. Comparisons with Twitter have been made, yet Twitter took off rapidly in London and continues to do so.

» Read the rest of this entry «