hello delight

Like lots of other people, I went to Twitter to keep tabs on what was going on in Haiti last night.  It wasn't long before I came across Carel Pedre, a local radio host reporting (tweeting) from the ground.

Carel was pumping out lots of photos and general information.  What was interesting about his approach was his dependency on web 2.0 tools.  

While similar, Haiti is different from Iran in the way social media is being used during the crisis.  It seems to be less about re-communication and more about survival.  The web 2.0 infrastructure is nearing our fixed infrastructure in terms of expectations in crisis.  Carel, and many others in Haiti, have had no phone service due to cell outages and have relied purely on Skype.

I haven't heard of any Skype problems, a la the Twitter problems during the Iranian protests, but it's interesting to see how market leaders in emerging platforms become a go-to part of the communication ecosystem in a crisis.  I can only imagine that Skype ever planned to be a worldwide global crisis communication channel, but that's exactly what their customers expect them to be.

It's an interesting twist to the dogma that is currently sweeping the innovation landscape of "good is good enough" and "fail fast" and "launch early".  In the event of market adoption success, these principles can drive human consequences.  It will be interesting to watch for positioning and product changes as entrepreneurs begin to consider their benign web services as tools of survival.

The "Jesus Tablet" as this NYT article puts it could save print media.  The author's case centers on two key points: 1) Ad engagment and 2) Apple fandom.  It hinges on one giant assumption: 1) Everything goes behind the paywall.

A little game theory might help to illustrate why this is a huge gamble with a fairly low probability of success.

Suppose we have only two players in our universe, each with only two feasilbe strategies.  They can paywall their content or they can make it free and subsidize it with advertising.  If they both paywall, they'll split profits and get 2 (units of profit) each.  If one goes free and the other paywalls, the free will take 4 units and leave scraps for the paywaller.  If they both go free, they'll split some amount of profit, call it 1 each.

The Nash equillibrium for this simple scenario is that both players will offer free content.  Doing otherwise will always make one of them worse off.  Per the author's original position, the assumption for these economics to work is that everything is paywalled. 

This is a big problem for the economics of paid content - with or without a divine tablet.

Granted, what I've illustrated is an awfully simple scenario used to evaluate a much more complex system.  But the basic fact is true:  If a player is willing to offer a susbitutable product for a much lower cost, why would a market participant choose the higher priced product?

The old answer is brand.  That's what kept journalists employed and newspapers printing.  In the commoditization era, the differentiator is curation and filtration, I believe.  That's where a more data-competent partner, such as an Oracle, could add real benefit to the Apple Tablet.  An Apple store that just sells me the NYT isn't very interesting in the prescense of near-competitors.

Last night, the story broke about the Newark airport security incident.  As someone who flys quite a bit, airport incidents are always of interest to me.  CNN was reporting very little news on the topic so I decided to go to Twiter.

The problem was the signal to noise ratio was completely out of whack.  So much so, Twitter was rendered useless.  A search for "newark" brought up pages and pages and pages of the same @cnnbrk tweet being retweeted.  Occassionaly someone would add a pithy and insightful "what a bunch of morons" comment, but on the average, pure duplication of a single message.

It's beyond me why the Twitter search can't be more intelligent than this.  I assumed this was the purpose of the offical RT function on Twitter.  By not allowing an author to extend a tweet in any way, the search results should be able to easily filter out exact duplicates.

But that is apparently not the case.

It's interesting to think of this single small experience in light of the larger world of information discovery via Twitter.  Yes, it's true lots of people were telling other people there was an incident but no one was adding value vis a vis new information.  Should someone have been able to add value, say they were actually directly involved with the incident, they would never have been heard amongst the chorus of retweets.

Solutions to this sort of filtering problem come from a few places.  First, Twitter search should step up and add some Google-esque magic to their search results to make them more intelligent.  Next, this seems like a perfect opportunity for paid journalism on Twitter.  If you really could get unique scoop, and were willing to pay for placement, why not allow that?  It's a concept not unlike iReporters I suppose.  Finally, a third party could really do something interesting to solve this problem.  There are certain messages on Twitter that have a sensationally high density such as the Newark example.  Yet, there are probably little related messages that are ancillary but impossible to find even though they provide incremental value.  It's probably a combination of human and machine logic but a compass rose to navigate these stories and tidbits would be massively awesome.

The NYT have a great article in yesterday's paper about the expanding role of data in retailing.  The majority of the article is focused on using analytics to infer trends and make merchandising decisions, or at least get a read on them.  My favorite quote, however, is rather contrary to the theme of the article and is this:

"Even computing enthusiasts acknowledge that the technology is far better at fine-tuning decisions on pricing, product assortments and shipments than the basic merchandising judgments about what goods to make and buy from suppliers."

That's precisely correct.  It's also, one of the major insights that brands overlook when they enter the retal+digital space.  So much of shopping behavior is based on what we can see that other people are doing.  Often, those people aren't your friends that you'd find on your social networks.  Instead, they're very loose acquaintences or more likely strangers.

What they are is popular in your mind, even if only for a split second.

Popularity in the digital space, via an iPhone, socnet, etc, is different than popularity in real life.  In a lot of ways, popularity in the digital space is a function of credibility over time whereas in real life, it's a funciton of instant admiration.  That's a very different thing and something many brands haven't tried to model differently.

That could be very interesting to brands because this different approach to digital+retail could abruptly shift digital investment.  The trend over the past decade has been on trying to figure out "other things you might like".  That's an impossibly difficult thing to determine in lots of categories.  What might be more simple, and ultimiately more engaging, is "people you might admire, are buying" digital tools.  It's a lot easier to get a read on one's aspirational models, in my experience, and tying those models into existing ex post data is a genuine possibility.

There is an interesting piece in the Economist today about the number of PCs per person in several different countries:

"NORTH AMERICA will have the most personal computers (PCs) per person in 2010, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s forecasts. With nearly one per person, PC ownership in America and Canada far exceeds that in the rest of the world. Globally, PC penetration will continue to rise closer to one computer for every three people. Western Europeans have nearly 70 PCs per 100 people."

Controlling for income disparities and infrastructure, that's an awful lot of PCs for us Yanks.  

The fact that the percentage of PC ownership is dominated by the US isn't all that surprising.  Our culture was built for the web, presumably the primary use of these PCs - highly individualized, acheivement oriented, low power distance, future focused.

What this study implies to me is a couple things:
1) The PC is still the most effecient way to access the web in our country.  The mobile devices are gaining, as are internet-enabled devices, but the PC is still king.  The PC trend seems to be towards in-home portablility which is fantastic for marketers.  We're nearing the stage of simultaneous media consumption and the PC will be a critical component of that.
2) Ownership culture is alive and well.  This is very interesting in light of the macro factors facing our country.  We are still willing to purchase a quickly depreciating asset when other scenarios (cafes, leases) may exist.  This is interesting because with ownership comes increased density - it's hard to get rid of PCs.  More PCs end up as hand-me-downs.  Over a short time, we'll see the age of first ownership decrease dramatically as mom and dad upgrade their planned obscelence netbooks and such.

By now, you've probably heard the news that Pepsi has decided to skip the Super Bowl and instead focus on the Pepsi Refresh project.  It's heralded as a boon to new media.

But it's probably not.

After all, there is little in the way of awarness problems in the cola industry for Pepsi.  Year after year, Pepsi and Coke maintain quite stable share points.  The 24th running of a Super Bowl TV ad isn't going to add too much new awareness for the brand.  Conversely, not being there is probably not going to displace Pepsi in too many people's minds either and cause them to switch to another brand.  Would a non-drinker start drinking Pepsi post their Super Bowl ad?  Maybe, I dunno.

The big switch here that is interesting to me is the outspoken commitment to a social responsibility project.

There are two key things I'll be watching with the Refresh project as it unfolds: 1) Logistics, 2) Backlash.

The Refresh project is not a campaign, per se, and campaigns are what agencies and brands do best.  It's a year long committment to grant-writing and acting as a juror.  These are not core competencies of agencies or Pepsi.  As with all grants, a vocal minority will be ever-present.  I'm very interested to see how Pepsi et al deal with it.

The backlash could be nasty.  Just as buying RED t-shirts at Gap doesn't fix Africa, buying carbonated soda water doesn't fix much either.  Prepare for an onslaught of critisicm from those concerned with the origins of the money, the mass-market commercial ties, and the general authenticity cries.

I've been fairly critial of cause marketing in the past because it's not strategic.  This appears to be case-in-point, from my vantage point.  Reputation benefits have PR value, and can help to build brand equity, but they're difficult to sustain when they appear to not be working.  It's not easy to back out of cause marketing and shift your message around.  With as big an investment as this, I'll also be watching for the back-pedalling to begin.

One of the key early decisions a planner has to make in constructing digital campaigns is what type of math to use:  Top down or bottom up.

Top down planning is the traditional way.  You approach a tactic with reach in mind and make estimates on total market size, receptivity rate, conversion rate, etc.  At the end, you have a rough idea of the people you'll reach.

Bottom up is different.  You target a few customers in known watering holes and incent them to become marketers for you.

Either method can be effective at building an audience (people that want to hear what you have to say) and brands are pretty proficient at both.  Where things get dicier is phase two:  Engagement.

Engagement has its own set of math too.  For starters, there is the heuristic that says there is a 10 to 1 ratio of creators to comments, and another 10 to 1 of commentors to consumers.

This is the math that's most often forgotten.

Brands tend to think of engagment as only reaching the 1% of creators.  This is evidenced by campaigns that ask you to make a video, write a sonnet, doodle.   Brands don't often get the engagement levels they want because the design was flawed.  No matter how good your idea is, there is a default gesture in society that says "creating is time consuming".  The miss for lots of brands is not engaging the 10% or the 90%.  

Adding a little girth to campaigns so that your users can comment or just consume, and even making that part of the game, should be something digital marketers strive for if engagement is really the key.
 

The Economist has an interesting opinion piece recently called "The military-consumer complex".

"THE earliest computers were used to crack codes and simulate nuclear explosions. The internet grew out of a military research project. In-car navigation systems rely on satellites that were put into orbit to guide ships, troops and missiles....but lately some kinds of technology have been moving in the other direction, too. The United States Air Force has just placed an order for 2,200 Sony PlayStation 3 video-game consoles, which will be the building-blocks of a supercomputer. Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are using Apple iPods and iPhones to run translation software and calculate bullet trajectories. Xbox video-game controllers have been modified to control reconnaissance robots and drone aircraft."

Alone, that's a very interesting trend and one that represents not only consumer/private innovation, but also public adoption and integration of those goods.

But, another interesting way to look at it is from the perspective of a challenger brand.  One of the classic challenger brand strategies is to find something that's going really well in another industry and bring it home to roost in yours.  This strategy has many benefits but chief among them are an ability to capitalize on a pre-existing set of gestures.  This is exactly what the military seems to be doing:  People use iPods already, leverage them.  Xboxes, leverage them too.

It's an interesting story of interaction design whereby seemingly unrelated technologies and industries are capitalized for new purposes.
 

GOOD published an interesting article today entitled "U. of Missouri Ponders Three-Year Degrees".  As you can imagine, it's largely a budget-oriented decision.

Curious as to how much this might save a student, I went to the website of my undergrad alma mater, (soon to be Orange Bowl Champion) Georgia Tech, to see what tuition runs these days.

Surprisingly, tuition is graduated up to a point of six credit hours.  After that, tuition is the same no matter how many hours you take.  Certainly, there are limits to what one can take due to the prerequisites, shear mental overload and such.

It seems to me that a system already exists to save 25% off tuition and do it in three years.  The role for the administration in organizing this seems unnecessary.

If anything, this is a communications issue.  I don't think we need board of trustees resolutions and the like to institute something that can easily be done without.

Ethan Bauley put up a nice post today about why he believes "social media is underhyped".  I largely agree with Ethan's assertion that social media is often placed in a media plan simply as a substitute for advertising.  Much of the time this is unfortunate for the brand because they left value on the table they could have otherwise potentially gathered.

However, I'd like to suggest that maybe this isn't always the case.  The particular constraints of a firm and its objectives may well dictate that using Twitter as a giant microphone is, while sub-optimal, better than the next best alternative.

Assume the following simple three strategy framework for a brand to use social media.

1) Broadcast - A brand using social media in this context is using it as a podium much in the traditional sense of the advertising world.
2) Dialogue - These brands are actively engaging with their customers, fielding queries, offering support, etc.
3) Mobilize - These brands aren't really adding to the conversation but are using the affinities of their users to set up communities.

The factors that contribute to which strategy is suitable for a brand are numerous.  However, I think there are three factors you should consider when analyzing the strategies:
1) Resources - The spectrum of strategies above require differing levels of consistent resources to execute.  A company with low resources would be wise to mobilize its base, assuming the other factors support that strategy.
2) Market share - The ability of a firm to mobilize a base is dependent on it having a suitably-sized base.  Assuming a large base, CPMs using a broadcast social media strategy may well trump other media even though they don't provide the additional benefit of interaction.
3) Category - The category a product is in dictates, to some degree, the number of "raving fans" it will have.  That level of affinity implies the probability a consumer will likely engage with the brand.  One of the great strengths of digital marketing is to provide non-standard features to a category's standard offerings, thus allowing a challenger brand to compete effectively.  This is certainly one benefit of a dialogue strategy.

It isn't always necessary that a firm makes an either/or decision as to the social media strategy for the entire firm.  I've just tried to illustrate a few strategies and key factors to analyze as part of your strategic planning.