Category Archives: ageofconversation

Too much plumbing. Too little poetry.

We live in a world driven by data and although we probably don’t even understand half of it or don’t even bother to look into it as we should, decisions aren’t taken unless they can be fully rationalized. As Rishad Tobaccowala mentioned in a recent post:

“In marketing we worship the algorithm and its superiority to human decision making.”

He makes a good point. He continues with:

“In the world of media we are so fixated on the plumbing of finding the right person at the right place at the right time that we forget that the interaction we deliver will have to be absolutely right and brilliant not to piss of this superbly well located person at the exact right time. The better the “targeting”, the more important the tone, content and quality of the interaction. Lets think about the poetry versus just the plumbing.”

This reminded me of the conversation between Bill and Melinda Gates during this year’s TED event in Vancouver. Somewhere in this conversation – hosted by Chris Anderson – it’s clear that part of the magic between these 2 people in spending billions of dollars to charity is the mathematical approach of Bill Gates combined with the more tangible, human experience of Melinda with the people involved in the decision. Something they obviously recognize as a necessity in their decision making.

Anyway, Rashid makes a few strong points why we should rethink how we deal with data. Read the full post here.

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Does technology generate more talk, less conversation?

There’s an interesting article in The Atlantic based on an interview with the publication and Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and a professor at MIT. She recently released the book Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other in which she argues that we are losing the art of conversation:

“Conversations, as they tend to play out in person, are messy—full of pauses and interruptions and topic changes and assorted awkwardness. But the messiness is what allows for true exchange. It gives participants the time—and, just as important, the permission—to think and react and glean insights. “You can’t always tell, in a conversation, when the interesting bit is going to come,” Turkle says. “It’s like dancing: slow, slow, quick-quick, slow. You know? It seems boring, but all of a sudden there’s something, and whoa.” Occasional dullness, in other words, is to be not only expected, but celebrated. Some of the best parts of conversation are, as Turkle puts it, “the boring bits.” In software terms, they’re features rather than bugs. The logic of conversation as it plays out across the Internet, however—the into-the-ether observations and the never-ending feeds and the many, many selfies—is fundamentally different, favoring showmanship over exchange, flows over ebbs. The Internet is always on. And it’s always judging you, watching you, goading you. “That’s not conversation,” Turkle says. She wants us to reclaim the permission to be, when we want and need to be, dull.”

I like the idea of the occasional dullness. The idea that breaks or gaps in a conversation is actually help drive the conversation. Check out the whole article.

Launching a unique duo iPhone app

Yesterday we launched a new iPhone app for Nutricia.  In a new approach to support moms even more we’ve created with Nutricia this new app that helps to get dads more involved in addition of moms tracking their pregnancy.

Another pregnancy iPhone app you say? That’s what we though as well and therefore we’ve taken the new approach to involve dads because ‘Baby Connection’ works best when you use it as a couple. There’s a mum version and a dad version – and everything each parent adds is automatically synced with their partners’ phones. The app can also transform the two iPhones into one big screen. More about that in the video below:

To launch Baby Connection, we came up with an idea to make men pregnant… well kinda. You can see what we did below:

Where are the case studies that matter?

Or at least, where are the social media case studies that matter to me. The reason I’m calling for this is that most of the cases I see or hear about aren’t always that usable to me. There are learnings in every case, but most of the time those examples have one or a few things in common that make them difficult for me to use. I need other cases, other than the ones people keep sharing at the moment, so where are those cases that are:

  • NOT from an online business: Zappos is the first that comes to mind. If you’re in e-business it’s also easier to create and measure a valid social online presence. There’s an immediate link with your business to be made online, there’s an immediate link to be made with sales online, that’s not the case for everyone.
  • NOT from a tech company: Microsoft, DELL, … I’ve worked for Microsoft myself and even 4-5 years ago there were about 5.000 bloggers active within the company. The company was actually active in social media before The Company was active in social media (if you know what I mean). You got a whole bunch of tech savvy people together, I can tell you from my experience that is a very different starting point than when you try and set this up with your average FMCG brand for instance
  • NOT from the U.S.: Ford, Starbucks, … great brands moving the needle in social and proving that it makes a difference for the whole business. With someone like Scott Monty at Ford, they are able to test and build social web experiences and applications, monitor etc but don’t forget that most of the learnings from this only work for a market as big as the U.S. The team, the tools, the costs, … for a market in one main language and with something like 300 M people is quite different from any market in Europe for instance. And a Pan-European approach might have the same scale but also that still requires a pretty different approach. There is no Europe basically ;)
  • NOT from a social media company: Social Media Examiner, Hubspot, … their business is in social media, it would be kind of sad if they didn’t know how to make it work for themselves right?
  • NOT from an indivitual or a 2 person company: There are obviously plenty of examples around like this – Choqoa from a friend of mine is a great example of a case like this. But it’s different when the business is basically yours and when you’re passionate about social media and understands how things work versus getting things organized in your regular mid-sized or big companies. You just have to start, you’re convinced and there’s no-one else around, no steering committees or anything like that. And that makes a huge difference.
  • NOT initiated by a negative experience: DELL Hell, Kryptonite, … we’ve all seen and heard of these examples plenty of times. And it’s great to see the turnaround DELL did after all the negative buzz they got at the start. But when I want to show people the opportunity that is social media, not why it’s a good tool to set up your defense systems.
  • NOT just a link or a screenshot: Last but not least, it’s great to get a link of a nice example but I’m really looking for cases so I’d like to see more information, data or at least people’s opinions around why this is a good or a bad case.

So don’t get me wrong. We’ve probably all learned certain lessons from some of the examples mentioned above and we should have. But on a day to day basis I cannot use much of the learnings I ‘ve got from these examples given the nature of those cases versus the situations I think many of us are dealing with on a daily basis.

So if you know a good case that is none of the above, please let me know. And share my request with your friends if that’s not too much to ask ;)

Photo by Andy Ciordia

Some thoughts on Social CRM

Yesterday I did a presentation on Social CRM at Digital Marketing First (and no my thoughts on that event haven’t changed yet). It was our partner Selligent who had asked me to join them for this presentation and the following is what I prepared.

The original call for the presentation was around social media as a direct marketing tool but I found that too limited of scope and also I’m annoyed by the fact that many people just see social crm as a campaigning tool on Facebook and Twitter. But hey, nothing new there – online crm is also mostly translated as being sending emails to a database. While clearly crm is much more than that. And that’s kind of what I wanted to bring in this presentation to begin with.

‘The customer is at the centre of everything we do’. Customer centricity is a hot topic these days, it’s the primary scope for how we manage our business. But is that really so? I’m not too sure about that. From what I see and hear businesses seem to have quite a few other objectives that come first. Do we even know our customers? Because how can we even be real about being customer centric if you have no clue who you’re talking about?

In an age in which consumers constantly re-evaluate brands/products (cfr McKinsey) it’s even more important to put the consumer that the center (and for real) and to start building relationships. So the point in the end is to use a lot more of the tools/channels to get to know your customer a lot better so you can be more personal in the conversation. And luckily there’s an awful lot of automation that can be done to deliver on that promise.

For those that attended the presentation, hope you liked it.

Dear cell phone user

So there you are, reading a newspaper on a terrace while you’re kids are playing on the playground and the phone rings. Not yours, but that from your neighbor. It’s long, loud, … can’t even hear myself read the newspaper anymore.

shhh2

This initiative from Coudal might be old, but I sure wished I had a card on me yesterday. Printing them out right now.

Celebrating the future of advertising. Are you in?

Only just a couple of days ago I posted some questions around the category setting in award shows such as the Cannes Lions. If you read that, you will understand I’m delighted to read about the Tomorrow Awards:

“The Tomorrow Awards is the first international award show dedicated to discovering, showcasing and awarding advertising creativity that pushes new technological boundaries. Since the very best examples of such work are those that defy standard award show categories, the Tomorrow Awards is category-neutral; all entries are judged together, and only the very best ideas shine brightest.”

tomorrowawards

Will it be as exclusive as Cannes? Certainly not, but I do hope it’ll be a great awards. Looking forward to the shortlist already. For one, I have given myself up to help judging. What about you?

[Via AdLand]

What the F**k?

What the f**ck is Social Media: one year later. A presentation I suppose a lot of you have seen right now, as it was posted about 2 months ago and pretty much every blog on social media posted it by now. So why am I still posting it now then? Because only recently someone made me aware of the those 2 lovely kids on slide 5… those are mine :).

The photo was taken for the Age of Conversation ebook project.

The egg and the eggplant

Found this via Helge Tenno’s blog – quote on media vs social media from my friend Kevin Slavin (Area/Code):

“One way to think about it. It’s like the relationship between media and social media is like the relationship between egg and eggplant. They share just a couple of letters but they’re not in the same taxonomy. That it’s a fundamentally different experience. And that it used to be when you where storytelling, that what you were competing for attention against where other stories. It’s sort of a story competition. And the attention we are competing for now is the attention to each other.”

I didn’t get the chance to meet Helge in person yet, but I find both him and Kevin very inspiring so check them out.