Online Workflow: Backtracking in the Name of Progress

Posted on by
Reply

Secretly (and often, not so) working people loathe email. Our inboxes are stuffed with it and unless you set your computer to do otherwise (which I do) there’s a constant chirping of new inbound email distracting you from your work. To the point you’re actually less productive. Worse, email is a passive-aggressive way to offload liability. “Oh, well, I sent you an email,” is a common refrain when you inform a co-worker that you were unaware of this or that request. The dynamics of email are all wrong. Here’s why:

Say Person A, has a need or obligation. If they deal with it by sending an email, they are handing off the obligation to the person who they expect will handle it – Person B. Meanwhile Person B may or may not ever see that message because our inboxes are so overwhelmed that individual messages can disappear from sight, or memory, very easily – especially since we’re all email skimmers when the text gets to more than a few sentences.

So Person A, the one with the need, has offloaded liability for getting what they need to someone who they have not confirmed receipt of message from. It’s like two people talking on walkie-talkies with the “copy-that” call signal to confirm you actually did indeed get the message. Tick-tock, tick-tock, time passes and neither side knows that the other side doesn’t know that the communication failed. Not surprisingly by the time people figure it out, time has passed and the situation worsened.

Basecramping workflow.
When they first came out, I embraced tools like Basecamp as the future of workflow. So did companies with lots of bright minds, like Google and its Wave experiment. I think we children of the Digital Age all thought computers and the Internet could rescue us by providing immense efficiencies. No more could a ‘digital workspace’ rescue us from meetings and give us more free time than could digital media rescue us from printing. Offices burn through more paper now that they ever did before.

To be clear, I am not entirely anti-Basecamp. I think it has its utility, especially for geographically distributed work teams who need a common and simple-to-use place to store and access files. But – and this is a big but – Basecamp works very much against collaboration for the very same reason email lets us down. Posting files on Basecamp offloads responsibility from the person who has the need (to meet a deadline) to the person who doesn’t and assumes that the person who doesn’t will get the message. This assumption is a huge and important failing. The automated ‘reminders’ that hit our email boxes don’t solve this problem. They just create more inbox noise which increases the need to skim and the speed with which any one message is lost or forgotten in the avalanche.

The quality of the work suffers too.

Creativity warrants more than posting.
You cannot collaborate deeply and meaningfully over written text. The pace is too slow and the opportunity for misunderstanding too great. Email is notoriously hard to read. We’ve all sent what we thought was a nice email only to have someone come back pissed off because they read it wrong.

In a business like the one I’m in (marketing), where creativity and ideas come into play, the problem is exacerbated. Ideas take time and effort to birth. They are often fragile or at the least only partially-baked when they are introduced to other people for feedback. To put something that is a little vague around the edges and born of intuition onto a screen, without context or discussion, and offer it up for opinion is asking to have the work misunderstood.

There’s also the implied cheapening of the work. It takes the hard work of creativity and treats it like a notice being posted on a bulletin board.

Coming up in advertising, I was told by the old guys that when they presented work it was theatre. The work was mounted, put in leather cases, treated like gold. “These were our ideas” and they’d treat them like precious things. Mind you, those ideas were magic marker drawings on flimsy paper, yet they were still presented by a team in a very choreographed manner. Now the computer forces us to worry about fonts and palettes far to early in the process. It’s turned concepts into commodities that are often eclipsed by quarrels over typeface and the relative accuracy of a stock photo. Posting such work online without a meeting makes it even easier to overlook the concept and focus on the execution. Many good ideas die early because of this.

Maybe the pace of business today doesn’t allow for meetings the way it used to. Maybe too many years of meeting to plan meetings about meetings has turned us all off so much that we run away from the “M-word” reflexively. I  believe we’ve lost something important along the way in this quest to move every aspect of our work onto the Internet. No doubt shared calendars and even shared notification boards have their place in an untethered and distributed workplace. And perhaps more straightforward, procedural work – like filling out forms or crunching numbers in a spreadsheet, or even proofreading – can be done by just posting files back and forth. I am guessing though that the issues with missed messages and the offloading of responsibility pervade even with this more cut and dry work.

The argument that the likes of Basecamp save time is weak in my mind. Any time saved by posting something online instead of orchestrating a meeting is probably lost running around correcting misinterpretations, clarifying details or otherwise chasing down loose ends, missed connections and miscommunication.

So how to recapture workflow gone awry. I’ve started at the office by requesting meetings. Files are still put in Basecamp, but when I see some novel-length write up, I call across the office (I don’t email) and ask to meet. I tell my coworkers this will ensure I am closer to being on-target than if left to interpret it absent the conversation. And I think I am.

You may disagree. That’s great. Let’s talk about it.

Get ready for a Kloutsterf–k

Posted on by
Reply

Oh WIRED, you went and did it didn’t you? You published a big ol’ sexy article on Klout that’s going to make an even bigger mess of the icky topic of ‘influence’ in social media. Reading the article does just what I feared it would, it makes it sound like by investing in your Klout score you’re on your way to VIP seats at the nightclub of the week, free hotel upgrades and first class air travel, hot warm towels and all. Given the geekery of your readership (and I mean that with love) you’re adding another wall to the echo chamber of social media. You know, the place where everyone who uses it obsessively believes that everyone uses it obsessively.

Worse, and maybe you weren’t even aware of this, you basically portrayed Klout as a platform to be gamed. By tweeting more, spamming often, and adding to the noise – and by trying to do this as far and wide as possible – we can all up our K’s and live the lux life of true digerati. Sign up now!

The trouble is, people will. It’s going to be a Kloutsterf–k of a mess when they do. Now all our friends will hammer harder, injecting more and more noise into the fray. They’ll try to be retweeted and to get our attention at any cost. They’ll go back to trying to gather as many followers as possible. You know who else does that? Advertisers. And most people find advertising somewhat annoying or at the very least actively try to tune it out.

Remember when Twitter went mass a few years ago and people thought getting as many followers as possible mattered most? People signed up with these slimey services that promised to get us all thousands of followers – quality be damned – if we added our username to the mix. That was gaming Twitter and it became popular for a while there until people realized that the number of followers didn’t matter as much as the quality of the relationship between follower and followee. They also got tired of the noise. Have you ever tried, really tried, to follow 500 people?

Klout is going to do the same thing if articles like the WIRED one find their way to the New York Times, People magazine and USA Today. Then it will be like a T-shirt gun at a baseball game. Everyone flailing about trying to increase their Klout score by whatever means necessary to get free swag. In the din, ‘klout’ will become as meaningless a word as ‘friend’ and ‘fan’ and ‘follower’ are now because of over- and miss use. We will realize (yet again) that many of the social tools we unleash are not most powerful when chasing quantitative measures but because of their ability to create meaningful exchanges between people (and brands) that are both transmitted and received.

We will be reminded that being influential isn’t measured by getting people to pass that simple, low, easily-hurdled barrier of clicking ‘follow’, but rather by being listened to and acted upon.

Until that day, and during the hurricane of white noise that’s coming, at least we can monitor the quality of our online brand standing through funny tools like Klouchebag.

Cooper MINI – You’re doing it right

Posted on by
Reply

This winter I crashed my car. Totaled. For the first time ever I looked at leasing a new car (I had only bought used up to now because of the whole ‘loses 50% of the value when you drive it off the lot’ thing).

Like a good consumer I did a lot of research. I read up on cars, leasing, all of it. I had my heart set on a Cooper MINI. I’ve always like cars with unusual lines – especially since most makes and models are converging on the Honda Civic body type.

A few months ago I went to my local Cooper MINI dealer and began the courtship. The sales guy was terrific (a shout out to Antonio Silva just in case MINI picks this post up!). He’d come recommended by a friend and I understood why; low pressure, friendly, no rush, took time to explain everything. After three visits and a few test drives I settled on the base model with a few key features. When I picked up my car, I was treated well as might be expcted. My wife was even offered a small jar of candy (they were out of the M&M’s with the MINI logo so we got sweet tarts) and I drove off a happy consumer. The transaction was very pleasant stem to stern.

For most companies, that would be the end of it. Deal closed, money made. CRM from then on out would be the lease invoice and the occasional unmemorable email – maybe a call from the dealer a few weeks later (which MINI did in fact do).

This is where it gets good. Six to eight weeks later, just about the time my new car was feeling like my familiar friend (amazing how quickly novelty can wear off), a package came in the mail. It was a large parcel from MINI and I was perplexed. Did they forget something? Did I? When I opened it, MINI won my jaded marketing heart all over again. The contents of the package were brilliantly laid out and thought out. Here’s was it contained (all, of course, MINI branded):

  • A mousepad
  • An issue of MINI International magazine
  • The Fundamentals of Motoring booklet
  • A set of business-card sized ‘gift idea’ cards
  • A set of little MINI pithy quote cards to give friends
  • A hardbound motoring (travel) journal to record my adventures
  • A pen to do said recording
  • A big ol’ rubber band – utilitarian, but branded nonetheless
  • A couple other cards on business matters like MINI financial
  • There was even a paperclip holding everything together – also shaped like a MINI

…Now, none of those items is remarkably new or novel – except, maybe the paperclip which I must admit struck me as very cute. Some of them were downright old fashioned (I don’t think I’ve used a mousepad in ten years). What made the packaging compelling was really the timing. Just as the newness of my MINI was wearing off, they reminded me (again) why I loved my little red car. And it worked. It worked well, in fact. Even the package the parcel came in was smart. Plastic on the outside, it was in fact reversible, the inside (which became the outside) was a branded black canvas bag. It’s reusable eco-friendliness made sense to my MINI-good-gas-mileage sensibility. And best of all, they didn’t mention the eco- angle, I drew that conclusion myself. This is always more gratifying than having the point bluntly hammered into your head.

I realize a MINI is a high-involvement, high-ticket purchase and something of a luxury brand. So it does make sense that they would and can afford to spend more on this stuff. Still, there are smaller brands that also do a great job. I wrote a similar piece about Atayne back in 2009. An athletic apparel brand, they come in at a whole different price point and yet could still afford to be smart.

The point isn’t really what is offered, but if and how that matter. In a social-media enabled world, those little acts of random delight go a long way. People talk to their friends on Facebook about them. They tweet them. They even write blog posts like this one about them.

David Ogilvy & The Business of Marketing

Posted on by
Reply

My apologies for the long delay since the last post. Life has been very busy. I’m planning to be more consistent again now…

Few legends of advertising are quoted as often as David Ogilvy. How many of us, moving at Internet-speed do what David Ogilvy supposedly did in pursuit of big ideas? Let’s go line by line through his best practices: (Click here and open Mr. Ogilvy’s “Letter Of Note” in another tab for side-by-side reference).

1. Many of us work late. In fact most of us do. Probably more than is healthy, honestly. But despite flex time and easy telecommuting many of us clock hours in noisy offices, full of distractions with lots of additional things vying for our attention on our numerous internet feeds.

2. Background research. Man, I can’t tell you the last time I had the opportunity to really dig into competitive work in a category I was working on. How about you?

3. Research material? Not when the brief is Monday (assuming the client signs off by then) and the ‘big ideas’ are due for a conference call on Wednesday. Not when you need a couple days to comp it up on a computer to make it ‘presentation ready’. Good ideas were supposed to come through on a cocktail napkin sketch. Haven’t seen one sold that way in my entire career.

4. Client buy off on the brief. This one is sticky. Even when we get it, the age of digital development has trained us all that changes are possible wherever and whenever. They are, of course – but at a cost that no one ever seems to want acknowledge let alone bill for.

5. You might find time for a brain dump, sure, but with little to no research to map it to, choosing the best ideas from the batch becomes fairly subjective and nearly impossible to measure beyond office politics (what does the senior most person like) and entertainment factor.

6. Brainstorming. We all do this. How many of us get to go deep though? The pressure, under timelines and tight budgets, is to make a choice early. The choices are usually from a pool of thoughts that come ‘top of mind’ – you know, the same concepts everyone has in a single, one-hour brainstorm.

7. Hitting the wall. I remember being terrified the first time this happened to me. Then I read about ideation and learned its usually in the moments after purging all the top of mind thoughts – when you think you’ve run dry – that the real creativity starts. That’s usually right around the time the brainstorm ends (because the conference room is booked and we’ve successfully convinced ourselves we can’t think productively for more than an hour).

8. Heavy self editing. Again, how often do we get the time to think broad (#6), think deep (#7) and then go back and edit it all down?

9. Walking away. Forget the substance abuse and gramophone mentioned. A lot of ideation happens subconsciously. Read up on it and you’ll learn the best ideas come from brains that like crock pots, slowly cook ideas rather than trying to call them forth like an on/off faucet of brilliance.

10. More editing. Man, this guy lived in a golden age! You and I would be two weeks late and possibly have lost the account by this point.

11. Secretarial work. Today we all do it ourselves. We can type our own words, comp our own ideas. This is generally a good thing, though I wonder how much time we spend formatting text that could be spent improving ideas.

12. The idea of being a lousy writer but good editor gets to something critically important that I’ll be hitting in my next post – on reduction. Ideas are messy, sometimes they feel random and out of nowhere. Editing turns 24 hours of footage into a great half-hour film. It turns a rambling novel into an intriguing short-story. And it can take the hodge-podge of notions, blurbs, bits and pieces and craft them into a cohesive story. But it takes time.

I’ve often thought our industry has been shooting itself in the foot by accepting tighter timelines, cheapening the value of our concepts in favor of the slickness of our executions, and willfully giving up our seat at the strategic table in favor of focusing on finding cheaper (read less manpower, with less experience) ways to crank out more work is less time. Clients won’t stop us from doing this. They’ve got shareholders with quarterly earnings on their minds. (Curse you Wall St.)

But in the recesses of our minds I think we all know we’re moving so fast that we don’t have the time we’d like to learn our clients’ businesses better, to research their competitors more, to think broader, look deeper, and to throw away the first 20 ideas we have (because we know everyone has those same ideas).

Our client’s don’t have enough time to do this either I’m betting.

I wish we all did though.

Why social media is a monkey wrench in business models.

Posted on by
Reply

Like many disruptive technologies, incorporating social media into a business model has proven challenging for both agencies and corporations. Social media seems to straddle at least two traditional functional groups within a business: marketing and customer service. And of course social media can be used in R&D, HR and operations as well depending on the business a company is in.

This post will deal with what I feel are the two most common implementations of social media technologies – as tools for marketing and as tool for customer service. In truth, these are the harder to work with, the others are internal only, which makes for a smoother integration process in some ways. With marketing and customer service though, the consumer plays a part, which is exactly the sticking point.

Let’s begin with marketing and communication. That social media has forever changed marketing few will argue against. In addition to providing more opportunities to engage, social media has allowed customers to do their own product research and review through peer opinions above and beyond what the marketer wants to communicate

A conflict of pace.
A business may choose to do its social media marketing internally or to include it in an agency relationship. Either way, the pace (and expectations) of social media are far more immediate than the traditional marketing process which includes development of concepts, revisions and review, legal approval and then publication. This creates inevitable conflict. Social media requires near-continual attention and sometimes instantaneous response (as with the case of customer inquiries on Facebook or Twitter). Community managers are not afforded the luxury of time by their customers, even as the company’s lawyers insist that all posts and replies be vetted through them. Without a high degree of trust and training in the community managers, a company will always be behind expectations in social media dialogues.

The devil is in the dialog.
Of course the lawyers have a whole additional set of worries with social media – what the company’s customers will say. These comments are often published on the company’s Facebook wall or directed to its Twitter account where they are searchable by hashtags. While the lawyer’s desire to review outbound postings does not jive with the pace of social media, the concern is understandable given how quickly a situation can escalate online. Though every company by now is used to hearing a certain degree of mild discontent from some consumers, the stakes can get quite high and be very, very public. Compliance issues around healthcare, finance or insurance make the free-wheeling world of social media even harder to work within. Again, community managers who are not well trained and therefore trusted represent a certain liability from the legal perspective.

Isn’t digital supposed to be cheap?
Lastly, there is the matter of ROI. With each new technology a business’ budgetary pie is cut into thinner and thinner slices. Money must continually be reallocated so that the company can be in all the important places it needs to be. As consumers come to expect customer service through social media, companies must invest in community managers online but cannot necessarily cut back on their call centers. Similarly, in addition to the budget for traditional media, and tradition digital media (banners and SEM) now budget must be made available to manage a Facebook presence (in addition to a company’s website), possibly a Twitter account (or several) and perhaps tinkering with other platforms like FourSquare, Tumblr, YouTube and the latest shiny object, Pinterest.

Yet for all the budgetary demands, the return on investment in social media remains stubbornly hard to quantify (at least in the way shareholders like to see it). There is the table stakes nature of it – meaning companies that aren’t on Facebook can look old fashioned to modern consumers. But the value of fans, cost of engaging them and ultimate tieback to sales are anecdotal most of the time. The customer service front may be more measurable in terms of the cost of running a Twitter service account vs. the number and length of calls at a call center, but continually monitoring these costs to determine if the Twitter account saves in costs at the call center itself costs money in the form of the salary for the analyst.

What’s ‘Trust’ worth?
Since its inception, digital has had the reputation of being cheap. Compared to other media it has always been cheaper from a marketing perspective. Costs have risen, naturally, but they’ve not come close to the costs of a TV campaign. Then again, they also don’t tend to have the reach of a TV campaign. Digital is a one to one medium in many ways which means its better at informing than building awareness because online everyone is spread out over a near infinite number of websites and apps.

Digital has also been portrayed as a young person’s game. Most social media community managers are late 20-somethings or early 30-somethings. As such their salaries have been cheaper comparatively. Which has been good for corporations because that ROI issue noted above has been harder to prove and most companies, absent hard ROI, will try to keep costs down on the ‘experimental stuff’ into which social media is often categorized.

The trouble is, a 28 year old making a low to mid five figures with about 5 years business experience under his belt is really probably not experienced enough to make the right calls to earn the trust of the lawyers and stakeholders in a corporation. This is not a failing of the community manager, just a reflection of their modest experience. Anyone who’s put 15 years into their career realizes in hindsight how much they didn’t know those first few years in business. Yet, these inexperienced employees are often put on the ‘front line’ of a businesses contact with customers. They are the people handling the customer service, responding to incendiary posts by frustrated customers and trying to make sense of the volumes or data and ever-changing “best practices” (a generous terms in a 5-year-old industry) in the area of social media. It is no wonder then that senior leadership and  the legal department want to have everything reviewed before it goes out the door.

Of course the price paid for this review process can be heavy if impatient customers are expecting a reply to their queries.

Trust is the ultimate quality senior leadership must have in its community managers. Yet the legacy of the digital space, and the groundless assumption that only young people – native to social media – can work in that space, mean most community managers, while likely very good, smart people, probably can’t entirely be trusted to respond properly because they simply do not have the experience to make the right judgements at crunch time.

Good, fast, cheap – pick two.
So this is where we find ourselves. Companies have new technologies they must adopt lest they look behind the times. They have legacy processes to review communication that are not compatible with the user expectations set by social media. They hire junior people because they ‘grew up with this stuff’ to serve on the frontline of social media with customers and prospects of the company. Yet senior leadership and the legal department, with some justification, do not trust these young people to necessarily represent the company properly without stringent oversight.

For customer service this can sometimes be handled the way call centers are, where responses are pre-approved and scripted and a troublesome situation can be ‘kicked up’ to a manager with more experience. This layering process, however, comes with a cost in employees which may undermine any savings gained by moving some customer service from the phone to Twitter.

The marketing side is all the more challenging. Using an agency rightly brings up legal concerns. Even the most experienced agencies cannot expect to be as aware of the regulations in complex industries like healthcare and finance. And clients in general have a hard time letting go of the review process and trusting the agency’s community manager to run their business. After all, this person is not a member of the company and most businesses, at the end of the day, realize that if something goes very wrong, the agency will not be as liable as the company itself.

For companies doing it inside, the trick is hiring the right person and building an internal process which meets the speed requirements of social media. This is usually no easier than when working with an agency, especially since the cost-conscious company that chooses to keep such things ‘in house’ is most likely to hire the 28-year-old thereby requiring the supervisory layers that slow things down.

As always, you get what you pay for.
There’s no easy answer. It you lock social media down to scripted responses so that legal doesn’t need to review every missive, the communication become stiff, unnatural and unsatisfying from the consumer perspective. If you let go and trust your agency or community manager without legal review, you run a big risk of missteps because those community managers are young and inexperienced.

The nearest solve I can see is to hire more senior for that community manager role. A veteran of communication on the customer service side or marketing side, with good industry knowledge is more likely to make good, smart decisions in a pinch. S/he is also more likely to ‘get’ customer service and understand the stakes of what s/he is doing on the frontline. While this won’t alleviate entirely the need for legal oversight, it will keep things moving along.

However, that means taking the jump and deciding to pay more to invest in a community manager. For companies who believe they need a ‘social media native’ that may mean waiting another five to ten years to find someone with “10 years of solid community management experience.” Personally, I think that’s the wrong direction. Rather, it seems more sensible to find a progressive, technologically-oriented executive with good people skills and solid business savvy. The mechanics of Facebook, Twitter and the rest can be taught relatively easily. Experience can’t be. Yet it is experience that allows senior management (and even the lawyers, sometimes) to trust the community manager. This in turn does the best job of addressing the conflicting needs of social media to be immediate but also to mitigate the risks associated with dealing with customers in real time.

Of brainstorms and quiet breakthroughs.

Posted on by
1

I’ve always been a little suspect of brainstorms. Brainstorming, has always seemed to me to be the application of quantitative methodologies to what is inherently a qualitative process – ideation. So. I read with great interest an article in the NY Times on The New Group Think.

Personally I always felt the staged environment of brainstorms worked against breakthrough idea generation. The concept of it sounds right. Pack a room with smart people and you should come up with something brilliant. But the forced environment of brainstorming has always seemed to yield ‘extension’ ideas rather than true breakthroughs. By this I mean, ideas born in brainstorms tend to solve a problem the way it had been solved in the past. Advertising issues solved with funny TV ads usually got more funny TV ads. Promotional ideas using sweepstakes tend to get more sweepstakes. This has much to do with the business line of the people thinking about the problem. Which is exactly the problem. Brainstorms tend to assemble teams of people who solve problems in the same way. These people naturally, if subtly, influence each other in the brainstorm, skewing the whole exercise in a particular direction.

Most people in the idea business come to realize that in order to have ideas, they need time to think, and that thinking is usually best done in quiet isolation. This thinking time primes the pump of ideation. Conversely, the first half of every brainstorm I have ever sat in has been an exercise in spouting out the ideas everyone is having. It’s group priming and it seems a waste of time given the high cost of having all those people in a room together.

This segues into another problem with brainstorms – their timed nature. You get the invite on your iCal, you show up. Everyone sits down. Okay, now be brilliant. Of course it doesn’t work that way. And if advanced knowledge and briefing on the problem has been given (which is rare, and when it is, is usually only hours in advance), most people attending a staged brainstorm have not had the time to think about the problem. So when they sit down they are starting cold, on someone else’s schedule. No wonder the first volley of ideas thrown out feel like the low hanging fruit.

Then there are the divergences. Any brainstorm I’ve been in has been an open-ended conversation. And creative minds, by nature, tend to wander. This inevitably leads to joke making (I am highly guilty of this) and going on topical tangents. Brainstorms, by their nature, aren’t very focused and so are arguably inefficient from an employee time standpoint. Yet neuroscience points to focus being important to having groundbreaking ideas.

There are also the unspoken politics of brainstorms which can undermine ideation. Can you challenge a superior’s ideas? If a superior is in the room, will his/her ideas automatically bubble to the top owing to the politics of the company? Does this diminish the desire to put your own ideas forward knowing someone else’s are already more likely to win out? Are people holding back for fear of sounding stupid? Worse, are they spouting drivel for fear that if they don’t say something they’ll be viewed as either dim or uninterested? Even the best companies with the more open, flat cultures still get snared up in these matters. Compound this with any sense of risk – recent layoffs, struggling accounts, slow sales – and fear can easily stymie innovation.

I acknowledge that brainstorms always yield plenty of scrawling on dry erase boards. They do birth ideas. And sometimes they birth really good ideas. But from an efficiency perspective the value based on the number of good ideas compared to the resources burned in time and distraction is questionable. Additionally, anything I’ve read on ideation, including the aforementioned New York Times article seems to point to the fact that groundbreaking innovation, true out of the box thinking, happens when a mind can focus and really ruminate on topic – ideally without time constraints.

Brainstorms of course inherently work against focus and apply time constraints.

My first job out of college was a Leo Burnett. The agency at that time was famous for ‘gangbanging’ (an charming internal term) accounts in review. They put every mind in the agency on in brainstorms in the hopes something brilliant would come through to save the day. But the politics of the company, the forced nature of the ‘creative sessions’ and the lack of advanced knowledge needed to wrap one’s head around the problem usually yielded more of the same – simple jokes, shallow gimmicks, and funny thoughts that were sometimes questionably at all related to the problem being solved.

Conversely, before Burnett I interned at Mullen Advertising – then still in its mansion in Wenham Ma. One day Ed Boches was reviewing my portfolio (which I admit, wasn’t much to look at at the time). We were talking about having ideas. I distinctly recall him saying (and I’ll paraphrase here), “I never put multiple teams on a project. I don’t do brainstorms. I don’t ask creative people to compete for a project. I hire good people, and I assign one team to solve a problem. I figure that way they’ll go to the wall for it because they are on the line.”

Now, with about two decades of additional experience since that internship, I’ve come to see brainstorms for what they are and aren’t good for. Mr. Boches’ approach feels all the more right now than it did instinctually to me then.

Brainstorms are good for extending ideas or coming up with new slants on the same approach to finding a solution. If you have a primary concept and are looking to flesh it out, having a brainstorm might help. If you’re in a line of work where the expectation is within a narrow category (e.g. making TV commercials) brainstorms will probably yield more TV commercials and some might be good (though again, the cost of these brainstorms against the outcome is something to measure).

Brainstorms, with a multi-disciplinary team, might be good to kick around some early thoughts –  to loosen up the mind a little. Brainstorming can serve the priming function much like cerebral warm up exercises.

But when it comes time to dig in, and dig down into solving a problem, I tend to land where the Times article did. Its a few people, in the quiet, rolling a problem around again and again and again who have the truly breakthrough moments that give birth to new products, new businesses and sometimes new industries.

How about you?
What have your experiences been with brainstorming? Fruitful? Frustrating?   Incubators of innovation? Or factory floors where the same thoughts are dressed in different colors?

Scarcity, Value & Social Media

Posted on by
2

When everyone is doing it, its no longer a competitive advantage.

Most commentary on social media ignores an obvious truth—that the value of things is largely determined by their rarity. The more people tweet, the less attention people will pay to any individual tweet. The more people “friend” even passing acquaintances, the less meaning such connections have. As communication grows ever easier, the important thing is detecting whispers of useful information in a howling hurricane of noise. For speakers, the new world will be expensive. Companies will have to invest in ever more channels to capture the same number of ears. For listeners, it will be baffling. Everyone will need better filters—editors, analysts, middle managers and so on—to help them extract meaning from the blizzard of buzz.

This passage came from an editorial piece in the Economist that I think is well worth reading. Coming on the heels of my ‘I was wrong’ post I’m going to stick my neck out and wonder if 2012 won’t be the year social media loses a little bit of its rock star status. Now, I’m in no way saying social media is going away or even that it’s going to decline in quality or importance. Only that like the telephone, television and Web it is becoming a simple fact of life, not a novelty, and that the conversations around social media are changing from ‘how do we get into it?’ to ‘now that we’re here, what do we do with it and what can we realistically expect to get from it?’

Here are some reasons I think social media will find itself facing many of the challenges of other communications media in the coming years.

1. The category is maturing.
Like prior media, at some point a shift will happen when we’ll talk less about the medium itself than about the content delivered through it. That’s starting to happen already. Just as few people outside of specialized industry circles discuss the nature of telephony, television or the Web, we’ve been moving away from social media’s dominant self-referential nature. Still, there are people tweeting such obvious thoughts as “This social media stuff is here to stay” (I literally saw this a few days ago, and by a credible social media guru type no less), which means we’ve not quite squeezed out all the juice from the novelty just yet.

2. Burnout.
There’s also the matter of fatigue. Even if you’re not a Tweeting, Tumblr-toting, Foursquare-checking, Instagram-shooting geek, many of us have dedicated quite a bit of our time to tinkering on Facebook et. al. over the last few years. We’ve delighted in the joys of reacquainting with old friends, meeting the occasional new person and voyeuristically peeking into the lives of people we’re connected to.

Operationally, though, these new technologies have a price for individuals, institutions and corporations. They further divide our time, resources, budgets and attention. And of course, as noted above, the fact that they are everywhere, in great quantity, applies downward pressure on their value – both in terms of the quality of any individual piece of content distributed and in the price points companies are willing to pay for services in the sector.

3. Higher consumer expectations.
Social technology has also successfully infiltrated other aspects of life – from seeking recommendations to validating facts to answering questions to making purchases. It can’t be overstated how much social technologies have fundamentally changed these tasks. By the same token, we humans get used to things pretty quick. Once we’re used to them, they become expectations not attractors. When they’re an expectation we don’t talk about them as much – unless they’re broken. Today including social technologies in consumer-facing business practices is becoming table stakes not a competitive advantage.

4. High expectations & Modest Results
Then there are the ridiculously high expectations of social media from an enterprise growth perspective. In addition to the starry-eyed and often nonsensical expectations of venture capitalists hungry to cash in quick; everyone from marketing agencies to operations teams have come to expect social media to be a sledgehammer against barriers to success. This is happening at exactly the same time our habits are settling in and social tools are becoming an expectation of daily life. Anything that is an everyday expectation is unlikely to be a barrier breaker for long.

Certainly businesses have seen some results, and up to now some of those results have outperformed other media by some (usually inherently favorable) measurements. It’s safe to say though that for most, social media has not been the ‘holy grail of marketing’ originally hoped for. Social is becoming but one more arrow in the marketer’s quiver with its strengths and weaknesses. Every company has learned that while they need to be using it, they can’t count on social media to replace all (or any, really) of the other stuff they’re doing. So budgets are divided yet again as the marketing ‘pie’ is sliced smaller and smaller each time popular culture latches onto the next Twitter or FourSquare or Pinterest.

In fact, its recently come to light that many of the problems marketers have always faced remain the same. As it turns out, 83% of a brand Facebook fans never see that brand’s missives - the same clutter issue facing all advertising media. We’re finding that the proportion of ‘fans’ to ‘talking about’ is also pretty modest for most brands – in the same neighborhood as email open rates and coupon redemptions. And whether you get their names from a business reply card, email signup or Facebook ‘like’ – the size of your list is only as useful as your plan to do something with it. The days of racking up 1MM ‘likes’ and claiming victory are over.

The hype cycle revisited
Anyone who lived through the dotcom boom knows that we’ve been here before. New technologies bring high expectations, lofty visions and sometimes crazy business models. Inevitably though, reality sets in. The Economist piece summarized the realization of that reality. A fundamental challenge for social media is the relation between scarcity and value. Social media works against scarcity and thereby against value creation in the traditional economic model sense.

That social media is now a fact of life means that in coming years it will have to work harder to prove itself and it will have to wrestle with the same challenges other media struggle with. Until now social media has enjoyed a near monopoly on the headlines in the media industry space. Moving forward though, share will be about more than just enabling the act of distributing content between friends. For social media it will mean maintaining share – of our time, our attention and our budgets – by proving its comparative value against other media.