‘Best Practise’ comes from the idea that there is ‘one best way’ to do things.
This works for closed Industrial systems – provide the right inputs in the right order to the right system and get the right output.
Marketing on the web however, is now not a closed, one-to-many industrial system, but an …
“Efficiency, once the sole icon on the hill, must make room for adaptability” – General Stanley McChrystal
What’s the goal of your brand on social media?
Is it to drive awareness and sales?
Is it to beat competitor x in follower count?
Is it to ‘be part of the conversation’?
Its a small world after all
Turns out, Walt Disney was right.
This is the first time in history that anyone can send a communication and have it received instantly almost anywhere on the planet and almost for free.
This is not normal…
Is the person who leads this company a Missionary or a Mercenary? The Missionary is building the product because they love the customer, the product, the service. The Mercenary is building the product or service so they can flip the company and make money -Elon Musk
Missionaries are those who are passionate, sold out and evangelical about The Mission.
The Mission is the reason …
“Thinking in first principles protects you from following a herd right off a cliff, just because there’s a…
Back in the day, once a child could write well with a pencil, they would be given a Pen License, allowing them to now write with a pen.
Proving yourself in one media, made way for promotion to a new media.
In a similar way, the web has given marketers a new ‘license’ and a new media to create with.
The wasted opportunity occurs where …
When we run workshops, we ask participants to take part in a social experiment.
we ask each attendee to take out their smartphone, open up their social app of choice then hand their phone to their neighbour (typically a stranger).
We haven’t asked participants to do anything with their neighbours’ social app.
You can imagine what happens next…
Earlier this year, we wrote about an internal term we often use in our agency – Line of Sight.
That blog post broke down the anatomy of a search and the ‘line of sight’ that Google’s algorithms both judge you on (ie. Adwords Quality Score) and use to either reward/penalise you as an advertiser (with higher/lower ad positions and more expensive/cheaper CPCs).
Line of Sight makes sense with Adwords Search since there’s a clear intention behind the search and an objective for a searcher to arrive at.
Less obvious is that Facebook Ads also have a Line of Sight that an algorithm is judging you on (Relevance Score) and likewise rewarding or penalising you on.
The difference is, people aren’t searching in Facebook.
So how does Facebook’s Ad algorithm judge your line of sight?
In 1997, this well known ad was written by a Classifieds editor as one of two ‘space fillers’ for ad slots that he couldn’t fill.
Thousands of responses and years later, this ad became an internet phenomenon and ultimately was turned into a classic indie movie.
Less known was the other ad – a standard ‘singles’ classified – that went virtually unnoticed.
What’s the difference?
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together” – African…
With 6 months left in 2015, its a good time for marketers to pause and take stock – to then setup where we will lead our brands and fans in 2016.
To appreciate where we’ve all come from, let’s take a trip back through time to the 7 posts (many of which became books) that redefined marketing for our new Connection Age.
Safety not guaranteed …
Daniel Kahneman’s role was to study new recruits in Israeli army training, analyse their interactions through a range of data models, then to provide recommendations on which officers would make it as leaders in the field.
It turned out that only nominal improvements in recommendations were found when using his data models compared to Commanders who simply used observation and instinct in their predictions.
Regardless, his team continued to run the tests, confidently believing …
We regularly chat with very talented, aspiring entrepreneurs and artists who are struggling to get started.
Their issue, they tell us: “is not that I don’t have any good ideas, but I have so many I don’t know which one to choose”.
In most cases, the subconscious question they’re really asking is …
Say the words Brand Duplicity and it automatically paints pictures of brands attempting to ‘dupe’ their consumers in some way, shape of form.
But in reality, very few brands employ this kind of duplicity – for the most part, brands want to do the right thing by the consumer.
The duplicity many brands employ is far more subtle …
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The brilliance of The Declaration of Independence isn’t that it merely documented the ills of a repressive government the united States should be free of.
Its that the founding fathers, instead of running away from a problem, defined an …
“Don’t get it right, just get it written” – Screenwriter’s maxim on starting
On my recent trip to the Phillipines, I attended the local Manila @startupgrind meetup and was fortunate to hear GM, Natasha Bautista, share the journey of Grab Taxi – a company that is disrupting the taxi industry *and* beating Uber in South East Asia.
In listening to her story, there was one part of Grab Taxi’s marketing strategy that made my ears prick up …
Last week the world watched in awe as a 26 year old with a Tumblr and Twitter account stood up to Apple and made them do an about face on their new Music streaming royalty policy.
Of course, this wasn’t your average 26 year old, this was Taylor Swift, queen of the internet and her army of Swifties.
Watching this Swift blow to Apple, I realised that one of our core Connection Economy maxims was wrong …
“We restore order with imagination” – Walt Disney, Saving Mr Banks
The problem with all online ad platforms is the auction model – over years, clicks become increasingly expensive. Higher click prices translate to higher costs to get each customer – ie. higher Cost per Acquisition, CPA.
Perhaps because of the inherently smaller bidding pool, Australia somewhat lags the US, however they passed a significant CPA milestone over 2 years ago.
Back then US marketers had to …
“Prioritise: To decide the order of importance of items or tasks” – Oxford Dictionary
Facebook is offering users the opportunity to prioritise which friends’ or brands’ posts they would like to see at the top of their news feed.
Let’s consider a standard radio button survey. Be honest …
I was recently in the Philippines on business and gave myself a challenge for the trip: “What would happen if I put my money where…
Content that marketers love is content that you author once that keeps attracting visitors over and over again, potentially for years, without you having to touch it again.
Whether it be a blog post that stays number one on google or a YouTube that keeps racking views & shares, this kind of content is called …
“The desire to not compete against themselves was actually a decision to put themselves out of business” – Peter Diamandis…
We have one client who continues to confound us (in a good way).
We’re the ones who are supposed to be offering services to them (which we do), yet time and time again, they end up serving us.
That client is …
If you’re from Europe or have friends from there, you may have been one of the lucky ones to be subjected to a recent Eurovision party 🙂
Today, the Eurovision song contest is one of the longest running and most watched events in the world, however its success is not accidental…
The idea of having an artist-in-residence is simple – that having an artist in our cafe/pub/hotel/institution benefits us and our community by creating a more human, interesting and remark-able environment (especially when compared to competitors who don’t have an artist-in-residence).
The online space is no different.
Congratulations to …
Being ‘first’ is critical in an Industrial Economy.
Al Ries & Jack Trout, name this as Marketing Rule #1 #2 & #3 in their classic marketing book.
While ‘first’ is still important in the Connection Economy, ‘relationship’ is what brings success.
One more thing…
“We all start at the same place – zero readers” – Darren Rowse, Problogger
One of the most significant disruptive forces that we’re watching with interest is the Makers Revolution brought about by the rise of 3D printing.
At its core, the true disruption of 3D printing, is that it transforms the process of manufacturing from subtractive (cutting away waste material from a block to reveal a final object) to additive (creating new material from scratch to form an object).
In a similar manner …
If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, you’ll know we write about the rise of the Connection Economy *a lot*.
In the last two weeks, the laggard of all slow moving organisations, the government, has now formerly recognised the Connection Economy as real.
As a sign of the genuine commercial disruption taking place …
A scan of a typical marketer’s feed will reveal linkbait headlines like:
Four content marketing tips to use when …
5 social media trends to …
3 growth hacking tips for …
Sure, you may need to be across some of this material, but don’t make the mistake of …
For a number of reasons, we missed two posts late last week (truly sorry!)
Sure we have good reasons and some processes to address, but this brings up an interesting question:
Did you miss us? …
“You can say the right thing about a product and nobody will listen. You’ve got to say it…
A friend of mine was researching some prosumer camera gear and said something about the process that made my ears prick up: it was impossible to search for.
The problem, it turned out, wasn’t a lack of information about this particular area.
It was the opposite – there was too much information..
Years ago, petrol stations in Australia removed personal service – now you have to fill up your own tank.
Coles & Woolworths are also well on their way to removing check out staff, replacing them with self-service stations.
Even McDonalds is on the way, installing new self service touch screens that replace the need for counter staff (conveniently coinciding with the launch of their Create Your Taste menu).
The more that we become trained to accept self-service, the more that …
Advertising is what happens on TV when people go to the bathroom – Eric Silver
If you’re starting a business in a mature market, like Melbourne’s coffee scene, a strong Backstory is a non-negotiable to starting off on the right foot.
But even once you know your backstory, how do you use this to lead your tribe to greater connection with yourself and each other?
Serotonin recently opened their doors and is a model of how to disrupt a regular mature market using Connection Economics…
Promise me that you’re building your number one digital asset – your email list?
Boring old email is *still* the new ‘black’ when it comes to online marketing.
If you’re not collecting email addresses, you are 100% leaving money on the table, not to mention wasting ad spend…
Possibly the biggest recent buzzword in the online marketing world has been programmatic advertising.
Programmatic is to advertising what derivatives are to investing – holding the promise of leveraged gains over and above regular returns, but needing to be driven by rocket scientists.
The problem isn’t that marketers now have programmatic advertising, the problem is marketing doesn’t attract rocket scientists.
For this reason, programmatic is problematic.
“Good advertising builds sales. Great advertising builds factories” – Bill Bernbach
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”
Banksy is perhaps one of the most mysterious, yet prolific artists of our day.
His street art visual language combined with clever, subversive political & social commentary are so distinct and so recognisable…
For the first time in history, a generation has grown up, with instant, global, online connection being their ‘normal’.
This is Gen C (‘C’ for Connected).
So dramatic has been the fundamental change …
As digital marketers today, we’re so focussed on our (hopefully positive) numbers eg. Subscribers, Click Through Rate, Conversion Rate etc, that we forget that for the first time in marketing history, consumers can now vote on your content and ads …
Industrialists build systems to connect people to resources – communication, infrastructure, trains, planes, gas, etc
Once upon a time, consumers paid big money for these items because such services saved us time & granted us convenience – currencies we were willing to exchange for money.
Today we live in a society where all of these things are a given. They’re no longer time savers or convenient – no longer currency, simply expected.
Now …
“Buy this product and you will get this specific benefit” – Rosser Reeves
As a business grows, its tempting to keep bolting on more products and services, as we recognise more and more market needs. Before too long, what starts out as a ‘Specialist’ business ends up being ‘Full Service’.
The problem with being Full Service isn’t the model itself – its that the environment has shifted around it.
Today, every business is becoming more and more reliant on …