04.27.09
Posted in Advertising, Digital, Marketing, Maslow, Media, Social Media at 8:37 pm by drwarwick
Of course I wanted to play with alliteration, could have squeezed a few more m’s in for good measure as well, but the four above will do the trick.
Social Media Marketing - Some insights from Abraham Maslow
‘Traditional media is dead’ or so goes the common discussion, usually centered around changing consumer behavior and the emergence of new media such as online social networks. Books such as Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin http://tinyurl.com/ysw9ea (a must read by the way) illustrate how traditional products (the meatballs) fit poorly with emerging media and marketing trends (the sundae). There is no doubt strong evidence to show that TV and related advertising has become less effective than it was and that the ‘broadcast’ model is not always the best approach. Tony Thomas debunks the death of traditional media in his blog http://tinyurl.com/bqu5pn and suggests that social media can amplify traditional ’solutions and create a platform that delivers more effective and powerful communications’.
Media dynamics
Personally, I think the death of traditional advertising is wrong, however so is the assumption that new media and traditional media can sit easily together. When television emerged, radio was far from eradicated from the media scene. TV did however change radio forever, some formats began to fail and some personalities in the radio era failed to survive or make an effective transition to television. Similarly the internet has not and will not eradicate TV, radio or print, however it has changed them forever and the change is far from finished. Social media is one the key Web 2.0 transitions for the internet, the delivery of a truly interactive and personal format for communication (marketing included). The biggest fundamental change is not destruction of format (print, radio, TV, etc) but rather an alternative that is not broadcast (one to many) - it is social (many to many) and as a result it is ‘messy’, different in its dynamic structure and suits Godin’s visual metaphor of a ‘Meatball Sundae’.
Making sense of social marketing
Marketing science (if I may be so bold) is predominantly addressed at understanding ‘broadcast messaging’. The result is a set of models and perceived ‘truths’ that do not fit well with heavily interactive and fragmented communication. The same models are also ineffective at monetizing these channels. In this blog, I am looking back to 1943 and Maslow’s Hierachy of Needs as a model that can shed some light on why traditional marketing struggles in this environment, hence the title …
Maslow’s Modern Marketing Mashup
You may have studied Maslow in High School or University. If not, or if you need a refresh, wikipedia can help you out at http://tinyurl.com/kd3ok. Basically Maslow said we have a hierachy of needs, starting with physical and safety needs (lets call them practical needs for conciseness), moving through belonging and esteem (lets call these social) and finishing with self-actualization (lets call these personal - as we are talking about self-fulfillment needs).
Like many foundation theories, Maslow was discounted by later social theories for a number of reasons, usually relating to the hierarchy itself. The weakness can be illustrated by a homeless or starving poet - or any other example where multiple needs are sought simultaneously or higher-order needs are sought when lower order needs remain unfulfilled. There is also my favorite, that “there is no possible way to classify ever-changing needs as society changes” (Lim and Khruschev, 2002), as this argument suits our ‘new media’ discussion and focus on change. However in reality I don’t think that it is about changing times, but more changing personal situation, stage of life, and personal focus, or what a marketeer might call segmentation and demographics.
What can we learn from Maslow
My premise is that ‘broadcast marketing’ and most advertising has worked to target practical needs and some social needs, basically the bottom half of Maslow’s pyramid. Food, sex, health, property, money, mobility, employment and some belonging. I would go as far as saying that as it moves up the pyramid, its effectiveness weakens and by the time we are talking about social needs such as belonging, the broadcast marketing is ‘fake’, based on aspiration rather than reality. I am arguing that marketing is ineffective in addressing the top-half of the pyramid because its very nature is divorced from individual personal fulfillment needs.
This hasn’t really been a problem for marketing and advertising until now because nothing in the media domain could get granular enough to play seriously in this space - it remained, in the main, the domain of family, friends, community, teachers and direct human interaction.
What has changed?
Emergent digital media can now facilitate direct human interaction (you all know the sites) and it can also automate, approximate and stand as a defacto for human interaction at the higher social and personal fulfillment needs and desires of the Maslow pyramid. Since this is now a reality, society has been shown that messages can be interactive, they can be targeted and they can be humanized and as a result, audiences are becoming less willing to accept poor messaging at the base of the pyramid. Broadcast marketing is becoming less effective in its heartland because the game has changed and expectations are much higher.
Authenticity
We all put up with broadcast advertising lumping us together, oversimplifying or completely faking reality to fit in a 30 second slot and considering us all stupid, largely because the engagement occurs while we are relaxing or occupied. We accepted this because it is not our core social or personal (top of pyramid) needs that were being addressed. This in not the case any longer!
Now, as with other forms of human interaction, we demand personal attention, quality of message and authenticity. This does not fit easily with marketing theory and practice, it is harder to craft, distribute, measure and monetize. Some will say that granular social marketing is the domain of individuals not organization, and yet we all need to hear from organizations at a personal and authentic level and the smarter organizations will work this out. The others, as has happened before, will become extinct and although other media will survive and flourish, the commercial organizations who cannot communicate with their end-users will loose out to ones that can.
I don’t have the answers to marketing models for this paradigm other than to suggest three guiding principles …
1) If the message is not authentic don’t say anything
2) The message needs to come from the people at the coal face with credibility
3) This is not broadcast from ‘on high’, let the community speak and generate content
Get these three right and the result will be authentic, compelling and viral.
Thanks to Maslow, Seth Godin, Tony Thomas and Brad Howarth http://www.lagrangepoint.typepad.com/ for the thought starters.
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04.21.09
Posted in Economy, Finance, GFC, Melbourne at 12:09 am by drwarwick
On Tuesday 21 April 2009, I attended a seminar at BMW Edge, Federation Square Melbourne, with the same title as this post (have to say I am beyond tired of the overuse of the GFC acronym for all the world’s ills). Nevertheless it was a good discussion that I was going to tweet some of the comments but now feel the material needs more than a few 140 character phrases.
The session was sponsored by Melbourne Conversations, City of Melbourne and Future Leaders, take a look at http://tinyurl.com/d32tsz for more details.
My take-aways, coloured by my own perceptions and opinions are as follows, hope you find a gem (thanks go to the speakers and not to me) …
Professor Sue Richardson (Flinders University, Adelaide)
Commented that the two percent fall in GDP only takes the world economy back to a standard of living that we enjoyed in 2007 and in one sense is an overstated problem. The real problem is uneven distribution, and as a result the fact that the change impacts on certain segments of society much more profoundly than others.
Other observations included a increased call on the public sector and a possible reduction in the excessive work hours of recent years to a more balance work effort. As far as concerted effort, activity focussed on disadvantaged segments should be supported.
Sharan Burrow (President of the ACTU)
Discussed the ‘Double - Crunch’ of both the financial crisis and environmental crisis upon the global society. Her premise that financial institutions should reassess their purpose and realise that they exist to support communities not to profit from them and that a new moral foundation was required for international markets.
Sharan also made the point that the majority of affected people, especially in economies on their knees, did not understand how ‘toxic debt’ and globalization had taken their jobs, hours, wages and homes and that the level of anger in some places, notably Europe, was palpable.
Professor Ian McDonald (Melbourne University)
Suggested that financial innovation had helped society and that a negative overreaction was not dissimilar to the excesses of the boom period. He illustrated how humans are prone to invent stories to ’suit the circumstances’ and provide self-serving bias. The positive reinforcement of a boom market made institutions feel invulnerable and as a consequence make increasingly poor decisions. The boom stories throughout history, for example, steam, the web, and China all allow a boom period to be seen as ‘unique and sustainable’ and these constructions help us to forget or ignore the paterns of the past.
In a sense the ‘boom stories’, reinforced by medium term successes are the group equivalent of individual bias. For example, the fact that ninety-percent of drivers believe that they are of above average skill, clearly not possible is the same as financial institution believing that asset values could continue to grow at boom rates.
Marcus Padley (Stockbroker and Columnist)
Compared the financial markets fall over the past year (55 percent) to the movie ‘Das Boat’, in the sense that the market fell below its ‘designed depth’ and began to break apart. Market losses in general have three-times the emotional impact of gains and fear as a driver is much stronger than confidence.
The result is that generally humans are cautious at the bottom of a market and risk-takers at the top and that this is not the correct ‘wiring’ to make a successful investor.
Marcus made the point that the business around the markets are ‘marketing machines’ and that ‘no one will ever tell you to sell’. In investment, the sell decision needs to be your’s alone and in a falling market cash is better than a defensive stock (which is only a stock that falls less).
Thank you to the organizers and the speakers for their insights. However as Marcus said, the conversation that is occuring now actually needed to occur sixteen months ago. At least he suggested, we have the ‘unfettered exuberance’ of his children (and their generation) who won’t remember this and will see the next boom as a permanent dynamic to sell his assets to.
This is the first and last time I will be using the acronym GFC. As far as I am concerned it is as passe as ’synergy’ and ‘best-practice’ (although I haven’t stoped using them).
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04.16.09
Posted in CMS, web applications at 8:28 pm by drwarwick
I have now been working in a space you could loosely describe as content management, or web publishing, or website development, or digital media for well over a decade. One thing I have known for sometime, but for various reasons I now evangelize, is that content management, and all the other descriptions I included above, are not disciplines (in the specific context of a ‘branch of learning’ … see http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/discipline). No S&M or high-school principal connotations here.
Let me elaborate. No one (at least a decade ago) went into a career in content management, and even today, with the exception of few attempts I have heard about, there isn’t a University course claiming the domain in a compelling way. The closest to an aggregation of professionals working in this territory is the Content Management Professionals organization (see http://www.cmpros.org/). As an aside, if you are in Australia, join others in this ‘non-discipline’ at the CM Pros Australia Community Facebook Group.
So what is Content Management?
First and foremost it is a contemporary challenge. We face content management dilemmas at a personal, organizational and global level, as part of the sheer volume of ‘content’ that the information age has delivered to us (and the ease by which we can create our own). In some sense there has always been a ‘content management challenge’, dealt with progressively with the development of language, mathematics, publishing, cataloging and specific areas of specialty - science, accounting, journalism, teaching and so on.
Today we tend to see content management as more about non-systematic content, the type of more ‘organic’ material that proliferates with the web and is now becoming even more fragmented, voluminous, rapid and organic with the online social networking boom. Things will only continue to accelerate.
The content management challenge impacts on us all in both our personal and professional lives. The way we manage content, or more importantly sort through information and leverage the important stuff, becomes part of the path to competitive success. What can be accessed and leveraged is part of determining personal socio-economic success and at an organization level, competitive advantage and the resulting market position and financial outcome.
Given the breadth of this conversation, lets get back to something more discrete – organizational utilization of the internet. The field of ‘web content management’.
Multi-Disciplinary Content Management
In the Content Management Professionals organization, we have vendors (software houses), consultants, designers, writers, marketeers, librarians and a host of other highly skilled practitioners from impacted disciplines. In many cases, they have their own ‘discipline based’ professional association, however they come together within CM Pros because of the challenge and opportunity. As well as the need, discussed below, to call on other disciplines.
Back in 2006, I ran a half-day tutorial at Open Publish on web publishing strategy. As part of the course, I tried to highlight both the ’skill set’ (disciplines) that an organization might need, as well as the process of web publishing (both a longer build/review cycle and a shorter content renewal cycle). The resulting chart (borrowing from an earlier CM Pros content life-cycle chart and other related material) can be viewed at http://twitpic.com/3fwyz, or contact me and I will send you the document itself (david@veridianmedia.com.au).
In short summary, there is a regular cycle of content creation, processing, publishing, consumption and if the organization is smart, analysis and back to more content creation. Then there is a longer-term cycle of developing business strategy, determining the role of online tools, implementing online action and then as before, reviewing performance and back to more strategy (both organizational and online). Within this process, the skills that are called on are strategic, creative, intuitive, analytic and require an understanding of the organization, the media, the audience, trends and the available tools.
I am yet to meet the person who can claim to be a ‘black-belt’ in all of these, so I claim that this is not a discipline to itself that someone can master. In fact, as an organization trying to outperform competing organizations, I would claim that this is the classic example of where a team and multi-disciplinary focus is required. It is also why you want a ‘Content Management System’ to guide the various human inputs, become a repository for best practice and automate the aspects that can be automated. In particular to keep the organization on an iterative loop of sustained improvement.
Not with me on this?
Like I mentioned, I have been doing this a long time. I can write OK, my English good, and I have a Bachelor of Arts with an English Major to say so (blame my teachers if you pick up poor language construction - otherwise it was my fingers that slipped). I think I also understand business reasonably well, and again I have a Masters of Business Administration to say so (although I have not been as successful as others with this qualification). Add to this a long-standing involvement in the development of CMS software and the deployment of hundreds of websites. In another field of endeavor, I could have claimed to have achieved some level of mastery - not with Content Management. I know design well and have managed studios, however I am not an information designer (either trained or with a natural proclivity) - my design sucks (and I can prove it). I am also not a legal expert and I only have detailed knowledge of some business fields and markets. I am also not a specialist in rich media, advertising and I am too expensive (and easily distracted) to do data entry or repeated data analysis.
So once again, and to finalize this piece, I say ‘Content Management is not a discipline’, it is a cross-discipline team effort and if you want to be great in your own field (and have your business win online) - get the right team. Content Management is not a discipline, it is however one of the most significant challenges and opportunities for contemporary organizations, don’t put this in the hands of the wrong people or you will pay a heavy price.
The negative rests!
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