C is fer…
I’m finding this alphabet approach a tad slow and clumsy, but hey ho – I can complain or get stuck in, so here’s a little go from me, please chip in with better suggestions :)
Cluetrain
Do without me. This blog. Our agency. Buy the Cluetrain Manifesto. Read it. Become enlightened. Do good things in the world. Understand that markets are conversations. Move on to ‘C’ number two.
Character
Character? You can’t buy that shizzle. It real. It real how we speak, how we look, how we whiff and wheeze. Brand is about character and personality but I think there’s in something what that young Hopkins fella said on Twitter. “No longer the ‘brand personality’ – real personality”.
When I work with groups of marketers and PR folk we do a lil exercise with tone of voice. Just short, simple. They have to write a public comment in response to a scathingly negative customer service experience that has been left online. The tension for them or anyone doing this is balancing the brand, their personal tone of voice, the appropriate level of formality, public admission of liability when they haven’t investigated the problem and other stuff. Finding that character is tough.
And here at NixonMcInnes Labs where we live out our lives in a Nathan Barley mode, micro-scooting about, touting skinny lattes and buzzwording to the max, we witness the gradual deprogramming and relaxing of new team members – gradually their true online self reveals its ugly heeed. We’re taught to not be ourselves at work. So it feels wrong for lots of people to express their character – actually, maybe not so much *wrong* as risky and uncomfortable. This isn’t critical, mind, but I do think it’s very real.
So expressing character, through tone of voice, honesty, personality, visually (e.g. through real peoples faces vs a brand/logo), this isn’t normal for big organisations.
See Bob Lutz, Vice Chairman of Global Product Development at (desperately teetering) General Motors for some good ol’ finger wagging senior curmudgeonlyness. I love it! He’s REAL. Character abounds.
Or the brimming character of James Whatley, Ben Smith and Dan Lane, aka the Mobile Industry Review crew (Ewan is the power behind the camera):
MIR Show – Week 45 – MoMo London Live from Mobile Industry Review on Vimeo.
Good examples of Character expressed through social media:
- Bob Lutz, General Motors – see above video
- James Whatley, SpinVox – Twitter and Mobile Industry Review
- Gary Vaynerchuck, on behalf of family biz Wine Library – video blog
- Stephen Fry, as himself! – Twitter & TwitPic
Costs
Nothing is for free. Social media is apparently new, or not, depending on how grizzled and webby the person you talk to is. For the client community, it’s a relatively new thing. With new, comes fear of the unknown. With fear comes caution, and with caution comes under-investment!
Clearly, I would write this. But seriously, too many projects are under-funded, which as I have opined previously, actually excarcebates the risk. The percieved risks are AMPLIFIED and actualized (hat tip to antikewl – it’s his word of 2008) through the under-funding of the work in social spaces.
Success in social media is usually built through momentum. (Usually). So to succeed in social media you need to spend time, and unless you invest the time yourself as a client organisation, then you need to pay for people to do it. C’est tout.
Conversations
This is what it’s about, n’est pa? So sayeth the Cluetrain. But really. Really this is what social media is about. About conversations between normal people about things they care enough to speak about. And in this ‘attention economy’ the marketers job is to earn attention – usually by being helpful, less often, by being remarkable.
Social media isn’t about advertising: ‘interruption’. It’s about engagement, joining in, helping, being part of the conversation. So much more to write, but will more words change this. You either get it. Or you don’t.
Co-creation & Crowdsourcing
Two different things, but essentially closely related: cousins if you will. Some purist will slate me (see Childish Behaviour, below) for grouping them but it’s dark outside and I havnae the power.
Co-creation is generally seen as more collaborative with the world and the organisation working together on a level, sleeves rolled up, in an engaged, even embedded way. Like focus groups, but ongoing, less structured, more authentic and open.
Crowdsourcing implies a slightly different power structure in my humble opinion, with the org creating platforms to harness the wisdom of the crowds. The flow is less swirly-roundy-all-togethery and more ‘tell us your good ideas on this shiny website and we’ll make the world a better place, honest’. That’s what I reckon anyway.
Some examples of this kind of thinking applied:
- Threadless t-shirts – a multi-million $$$ ecommerce
- LEGO – customers as lead designers
- Dell – Ideastorm sourcing ideas from anybody
- Random House – cover designs for ‘Crowdsourcing’ book via Flickr competition
- Netflix – competition with prize to source innovation
- Innocentive – very successful B2B innovation marketplace
Childish behaviour
Absolutely. Social spaces online are often governed by the kind of social structures, hierarchies and norms that were last experienced in the playground.
It’s generally agreed that it’s easier to be rude via email than it is over the phone, and easier to be rude over the phone than it is face-to-face. So online it’s easier to be foul than IRL (In Real Life).
And also many of us with a craving for public attention are drawn to social media.
The vast scale of t’internet and its populous freshly scrubbed masses seems to trigger this ‘look at me, follow me, be my fan’ behaviour. And unfortunately it’s easier to stand out by being obnoxious, constantly highly critical, snarky, bitchy, very noisy, than it is to be polite, to be reasoned and thoughtful, to be gentle and nurturing. (In fact, Neville Hobson and J.P.Rangaswami are two rare examples of the latter approach – god bless ‘em).
So often, I say with reluctance, that there can be a certain childishness to behaviour in social spaces at the moment. I wrote somewhere before about The Age of Snark, which is adjunct to this. In short, I think and hope that this leaning will change as our norms and experiences evolve and catch up with the technology and social shifts of being online.
Continuous Partial Attention
Deeply fascinating. Deeply relevant. And aided, abetted, fed by social activity online, like the crack pellet dispenser in the lab rat’s cage: the generation of tweets, emails, comments, IM windows.
From Continuous Partial Attention wiki by Linda Stone:
Continuous partial attention describes how many of us use our attention today. It is different from multi-tasking. The two are differentiated by the impulse that motivates them. When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. We’re often doing things that are automatic, that require very little cognitive processing. We give the same priority to much of what we do when we multi-task — we file and copy papers, talk on the phone, eat lunch — we get as many things done at one time as we possibly can in order to make more time for ourselves and in order to be more efficient and more productive.
To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention — CONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.
We pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANYTHING. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always in high alert when we pay continuous partial attention. This artificial sense of constant crisis is more typical of continuous partial attention than it is of multi-tasking.
How true is this for you? Is this increasingly true for you and your colleagues and loved ones? Can you see it?
If you do this, recognise that you do. And think about whether it makes you happy or not!
Cognition
Finally, as I veer further and further from the foothills of technologies into the steep icy chasms of brain science, COGNITION. Thinking, its very self!!!
From Jeneen Interlandi via Stowe Boyd, a great thinker on Internetty things:
“The findings [of research by UCLA neuroscientist Gary Small], to be published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, suggest that Internet use enhances the brain’s capacity to be stimulated, and that Internet reading activates more brain regions than printed words. The research adds to previous studies that have shown that the tech-savvy among us possess greater working memory (meaning they can store and retrieve more bits of information in the short term), are more adept at perceptual learning (that is, adjusting their perception of the world in response to changing information), and have better motor skills.”
Read the whole piece, but as Stowe concludes:
“…the source of information on the web is not a disembodied Big Brother or mass media outlet, but is generally social: a blog post by a specific thinker, email from a friend, Facebook messages from a classmate, or Twittering with an extended network of acquiantances. Perhaps we gain by using the lens of our social involvement to illuminate the world, and bring it into a closer focus?”
So that’s some Cs to get us started. Whaddayareckon? Thoughts, additions, comments, puh-leaze. I will join you in the comments below if you can bring yourself to join in…
Will McInnes wrote this on 22.12.08 – 4 comments
It's filed in the A2Z of Social Media, Development, NixonMcInnes box
On December 29th, 2008 at 2:01 pm, FutureGov » Useful links » links for 2008-12-29 responded:
[...] C is fer… @ NixonMcInnes: Social media goodness. Translated. Created. Delivered. The social media alphabet moves onto C this week (tags: social media howto agency nixonmcinnes) [...]
On December 30th, 2008 at 12:36 am, dan mcquillan responded:
A great and meaty post (er, in a vegetarian sense).
Coincidentally, I’ve just re-read the Cluetrain and I’m gobsmacked at it’s prediction of much-that-is-socialweb (http://twitter.com/danmcquillan/statuses/1024360318).
As far as costs / lack of investment goes, ‘fraid it’ll take more cases of incumbents getting drubbed by one-click orgs before they start to seriously turn their supertankers.
Btw, i wouldn’t let mainstream media & politics off the hook when it comes to childish behaviour; treat us like infants and lo, we are infantilised.
Continuous Partial Attention as artificial crisis is a good point. I think the Dalai Lama has muttered something similar w.r.t. tech generally.
The counterpoint is the stuff about cognition. I’ll take your rec re: stowe boyd (don’t know his stuff) but the idea that our minds ’store and retrieve bits of information’ or can be ‘rewired’ is imho hogwash. Me love tech, because it cracks the status quo, but i don’t want more mechanistic metaphors for mentation.
Closing thought: are markets _really_ conversations? Or at heart are they about _committments_?
On December 31st, 2008 at 12:47 am, Barry responded:
Censorship vs. Freedom of Speech.
On January 2nd, 2009 at 11:50 am, Trevor May responded:
How the Dickens (Merry Christmas and a happy new year to you, sir) did you miss out Creative Commons? :)
Community… CMS… Commenting… Ooh, Control… or its absence?