Digigen & The TinMan

I’m doing research into modern publishing models and how they can affect the way magazine brands distribute content. Although there isn’t alot of exciting stuff apart from the standard – treat digital as its own publishing channel, I did find this interesting piece from Sourcebooks. They refer to what they are trying to do as The Agile Publishing Model and it is quite new, although actually I think Guy Kawasaki tried to do this with his recent books.

The Agile Publishing Model is based on Dominique Raccah’s theory that:

“building audience participation before the writing and publication of a book was a way to help readers discover new work, as well as leading to greater sales”

This seems to make sense and of course feels true. Build partcipation before you launch is smart and means when you hit activation stage, you already have a willing band of followers. This applies to most industries really, but the publishing industry does always seem slow to keep up.

Raccah told the audience: “We’re going to develop the book and build a community [around it] and the community is going to influence how the book is developed.”

I think it is smart, modern behaviour. So we shall see how it pans out.

You can also see Futurist David Houle talking about it below (poor sound quality but you get the idea)

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I hate Top Fives and Top Tens, and infact How Tos. They are written for the sole purpose of SEO and improving the written word’s visibility or performance in a world controlled by Google. However, although it pains me to write it on my blog, I am making use of an email sent to a friend who asked me for a list of top tens about social or blogging. So here they are:

Top five for things to do:
1) Start it at the core of your business
2) Identify the people (linchpins) who have the most interesting, but also passionate stories to tell
3) Define your core purpose, what do you want people to take out of your interaction
4) Define the long-term, not just short-term
5) Plan for all eventualities, you might not think anyone has anything negative to say.. but they will eventually.

Top five things not to do:
1) Create crap products, these are exposed quicker than ever with social
2) Treat every interaction the same way.
3) Think that everyone is going to be interested in your story
4) Employ a specialist social media agency (see Chrysler for example), you need strategists and people that can implement..they can come from anywhere
5) Be completely transparent, there is a magic in not knowing everything

That it the last ever Digigen Top 5 list. I promise and apologise.

Debate has raged since Facebook launched about who owns the social conversation. Should it be PR agencies, because as Andrew Bloch puts it in a recent article in Campaign because they “are the experts in telling the story, not selling the story”. Should it be Creative Agencies, because they can react quickest with content and creativity, plus they have some of the best writers in the business. Or should it be In-house agents working for the brand, as they are closest to the brand heartbeat.

To tell you the truth, on reading all the different cases put forward by all the different areas, the question isn’t “who owns the social conversation”, but actually should it really matter? Sadly, Bloch’s article highlights the fundamental lack of understanding of social media and social conversation by talking about them “controlling” the conversation. Surely, this misses the point somewhat that social media conversation is difficult to control and the struggle that PR have is the adaptability when the conversation gets “off message”.

Anyway, I’m not criticising Bloch, my point is that there is no need for one person, one agency type to own the conversation. It doesn’t really matter. There are so many different elements of social that each agency can find its own field and adapt. There are some great modern PR exponents of this, Dan French at Clifford French, Zac Schwarz at Shine, to name a couple I have worked with and know well.

But then there are some great creatives who understand what can drive social conversation and we are lucky to have two here at The Brooklyn Brothers, Ali Alvarez and Cali Oliver.

A couple of years ago 2008, I created this very, very, very simple triangle of where I thought social media was at. I still think it applies and giving the desire to pick “who owns the social conversation” perhaps it helps somewhat. But then again who cares.

Apparently, this is how you calculate the ROI of social media. But let me expand further below the jump…

It was the moment people in the room had been waiting for. The presenter was at the start of his presentation into Social Media Effectiveness. The slide was a picture of a cup of tea. The accompanying summary “Trying to find the ROI for Social Media is like trying to find the ROI for a cup of tea”. Silence descends on the room. People leave. Social Media slowly dies.

If this is genuinely what we think about Social Media ROI, then the industry is in big trouble. I know there are exponents thinking differently about ROI, trying to approach it and create a smart way of looking at how Social Media contributes. We all talk about “effectiveness” but what we show is “affect”, not actually a ROI. How come we can’t get there any quicker?

When I first started in the industry, the year 2001, we were attaching margins to search keywords for clients like Expedia. It was simple. We knew the page people landed on and could assign a value to that page, then link back to the keyword. We can create goals in Google Analytics and link that back to unique URLs, so we should be able to link a video view to a visit to a sales page.

The problem is we focus on engagement. Engagement is simply the first stage in a consumer journey. Yes, we should be producing content that is engaging, but there are different types of engagement as highlighted below.

We need to start taking the lack of proven ROI seriously. Otherwise Social Media might just be left on the side as “something we tried”, I’m looking forward to the next IPA Social Media Effectiveness conference where we have genuine case studies about ROI, Effectiveness, and some award winning effectiveness campaigns.

This could be my Jerry Maguire moment. Putting my neck on the line and saying, I don’t agree with alot of what goes on within the social media industry. There is a lack of clarity in what we do, even though we tell clients to be open and transparent. There is a lack of rigid and reliable understanding of effectiveness, with little use of the genuine meaning of effectiveness e.g. business, campaign, advertising ROI.
It also feels like the planning side of things is covert, meetings I have been in have talked about “complicated tools”, “dark arts” and some clients I am close to refer to it as “smoke and mirrors”. They also complain of agencies putting the same outreach blogs and partners sites on their plans everytime.

In the aim of being open, I thought I would share something which I have called The Social Planning Framework v1.0. 1.0 because I want people to feedback on it, to make it collaborative. To be honest, alot of people might not view it as completely groundbreaking, but groundbreaking isn’t always best.  Some people may think it is basic, but for me it feels like the right framework to build a social plan from. Its based on a number of things which I have found interesting and relevant, others which I have simply found frustrating.

None of it is based on traditional social media theory and if you look at books like “Business Model Generation” you might find some very similar traits. It is effectively a business planning model but with a social twist. I think we need more of this sort of thing; planning frameworks and social tools which create a long-term credibility around the industry. Something which I believe we are in danger of losing if we don’t continue to prove ourselves, demonstrate our brilliant planning capabilities, and stop that “close our eyes and hope” mentality which alot of clients talk about.