Archive for Intelligence
Googopoly. The Future of Search and Social.
April 4th, 2012 • Intelligence, Knowledge, Media, Reports, Search, Strategy
Tags: Facebook, google, google plus, Insights, People, Prediction, Presentation, Report, Reports, Social Influence Marketing, Social Networks, Study, trendstream, World
The problem with the artist formerly referred to as Social Media is – besides many other things – that it is in the agency business commonly understood as some crazy shit that you stage on Facebook to win a Cannes Lion in the end.
That of course is wrong. Specifically if you take a look at the rarely talked about opportunities of intertwining the worlds of search and social.
A while ago I had the pleasure to get to know Tom Smith, founder of Trendstream, the company behind the GlobalWebIndex and the great Wave studies conducted on behalf of McCann.
Tom’s following presentation, given at the International Search Summit in Munich, discusses the idea of what he describes as the ‘Googopoly’, where Google has risen to control most of what we see and do online.
Even though I doubt the relevance of google Plus I found Tom’s key takeaway extremely smart: It is not just about google+. It is about how google cements its position with a multitude of tools like Chrome, Android and many others in order to enforce search thinking into anything that’s social nowadays.
Great presentation. Thanks to We are Social for the link…
Working Wired. How I Model Real Time Brain Infusion.
Oktober 11th, 2010 • 3 comments Intelligence, Jobs
Tags: Diy, Information, Jobs, Knowledge, Strategy, Tools, Truth, World
Yes, we are all going insane. 27,053 tweets per day. 3,214 blog posts and 6 million status updates from your friends. There is absolutely no way on earth you can keep track or even make use of this universe of stuff anymore. Good news. There is a simple solution to working wired – train your knowledge ecosystem and model it to serve your needs. Real time knowledge infusion is possible. Even with a job. This is how I work wired. How about you?
Do you know these moments? Somebody you respect leaves a comment that is so odd that you start asking yourself why you hang out with this person in the first place? In my case this was 3 weeks ago when a friend from university asked if I ever work at all, since I sent out 4 tweets from 9am to noon.
Comments like that amuse me in a way. They are a metaphor on how we define work. Even though we pretend to work in a more enlightened society it still seems to be acceptable to work unwired. That means we sit in front of a computer screen and try to solve a problem when it pops up. We are not trained to set up a model of constant knowledge infusion. Wired working still does not fit into the average employee’s day job. But it should.
Why we usually don’t work wired
Theoretically it all makes sense – constant reading and learning will eventually make you gather more knowledge. And we are not talking about this one particular presentation seminar that you attend once a year. A constant stream of knowledge is what I am talking about. Knowledge about the latest trends in tech, music, advertising…whatever might be relevant for you. Just like reading a newspaper…you remember that concept, don’t you?
So where is the problem you might ask? The answer is simple – reality is the challenge for anyone trying to stay up to date with what is happening outside.
- As an employee in an agency and many media companies you are usually measured in billable hours. If you aren’t working on a billable client project your value all too often is considered zero.
- Learning real time is not part of our working culture. Social networking all too often is perceived as threat to productivity. Reading your tweets is all too often defined as something you do during a downtime. Even though statistics prove the opposite.
Why we need to work wired anyway
We work in a realtime era. Things change quickly overnight. This one particular piece of information might save your ass the next day or may guarantee a headstart in the next project. I have spent quite a while in my past to cultivate real time knowledge infusion. The objective is obvious. To know relevant stuff a bit earlier which is increasingly important personally as well as for the stuff that we are doing.
The key challenge of working wired is to minimize the efforts of generating knowledge while simultaneously maximizing the output. It is in fact not about reading twitter or blogs 24/7. Your task is to build a model to simplify real time knowledge infusion. My first recommendation is to integrate reading into every your working schedule. Generating knowledge must not be something you do if nothing isn’t left to do – it is part of your job.
The following methods are just some concepts I use. There will be many more and I am happy to learn how you simplify this process to maximize efficiency of real time knowledge generation. But they have worked well for me. And I think they highlight the importance of a calibrated information ecosystem in order to work wired.
- Step 1: Be the king of your knowledge ecosystem – In my world blogs and twitter are essential to stay up to date with what’s happening outside. When I first started using twitter I did not understand the platform at all (as most do) and could not quite figure out why people exchange bits of information about their lunch. I learned later that twitter is an extremely powerful source of professional knowledge – but you have to turn it into one. Reading blogs is similar. You can subscribe to TheChive (you should) or to Techcrunch (you should too). But whatever you subscribe for will define the type of information that you are going to read in the future. It may sound obvious – but if you are willing to integrate real time updates into your professional life you should think about what types of tweets and blogs will support your professional (or not completely unprofessional) needs best.
- Step 2: Use the right tools - Constant real time learning means you should be able to read updates wherever you are. The tools you use should offer interfaces to other tools/plugins and they should synchronize themselves automatically. My tip – use google Reader on your desktop to keep track of your favourite blogs. Intertwine it with the awesome Reeder app for iPhone/iPad. Reeder is an extremely handy application that synchronizes with google Reader and keeps you up to date with your google reader feed on the go. I personally use tweetdeck for twitter since it is extremely simple to setup lists and sources of inspiration here. Not much magic involved by now. Read more »
Adaptive Marketing. How not to go the Dodo way, Part 2.
Dezember 9th, 2009 • Business, Intelligence, Reports, Social Business, Strategy
Tags: Adaptation Marketing, Business, Forrester, Future, Ideas, Reports, Social Business Design, Social Influence Marketing, speed, Strategy, Trends, World
I did write about the concept of Adaptation Marketing two weeks ago. I admit, it’s another buzz word in the digital/social realm. But it’s a meaningful idea for what brand management might be like in the near future. A model which enables brands to deal with the social sphere without necessarily focusing too much on Facebook, Twitter & Co. A thoughtstarter for rather traditional as well as new marketers alike.
Adaptation is a term from Darwin’s evolution theory. Wikipedia knows that “when the habitat changes, three main things may happen to a resident population: habitat tracking, genetic change or extinction. In fact, all three things may occur in sequence. Of these three effects, only genetic change brings about adaptation.”
The life of the last Dodo ended in the 17th century. His habitat changed drastically when men appeared. An unwelcome surprise for Dodos as for brands who also struggle with real people who behave different than what they are used to. They talk and they walk and they don’t necessarily care for Dodos and brands. We, marketers or advertisers may like it or not – but things in our habitat change. Quickly. And two key aspects of it are feedback and real time.
How social will we have to be?
The Dodo formula is simple: Humans arrive = Problem. Brands know this problem since the social web startet going mainstream. Some of them adapt quickly. But most of them behave like rabbits in the headlight. Caught between a rock and hard place, the challenges seem to leave no other way than to use it or lose it, Facebook Fan Page or nothing at all.
I think there is a third way.
Adaptive Marketing. How not to go the Dodo way, Part 1.
November 5th, 2009 • 7 comments Intelligence, Reports, Social Business, Strategy
Tags: Adaptation Marketing, Business, Forrester, Future, Ideas, Intelligence, Reports, Social Business Design, Social Influence Marketing, speed, Strategy, Trends, World
Forrester has just published an article called “Adaptive Brand Marketing: Rethinking Your Approach to Branding in the Digital Age”. This article comes up with a couple of thoughts which aren’t completely new but leave you thinking. Agility and adaption are defined here as preconditions for brands to survive. Not new, you think? I think it is new in a certain way…simply because it left me with a couple of questions (which I try to discuss in the second part of this article, next weekend).
It’s good to have clever buddies. One of them is Johannes, my colleague who regularly sends me the articles I miss to read and starts a good discussion about it, usually. I had read a good post by BBH labs about a Forrester article which wasn’t even published at that time. But I missed the original Forrester report. Johannes made me read it (thanks again). And I recommend it as well now. Key question of the report: How do organizations respond to an even faster world in which they struggle to survive?
The challenges of speed and dynamics were always hard to put into a model for our social web driven world. All too often we focus on a different question as marketers: How do we respond to customers at all (not even really focusing on the real-time aspect of our digital world)? The question on how we hold conversations at all took our full attention away from its inlying dynamics and what it does to companies. But it’s crucial.
Think of the Dodo. A flightless bird endemic to the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. Related to pigeons and doves, it stood about a meter tall, weighing about 20 kilograms , living on fruit and nesting on the ground.
The dodo has been extinct since the mid-to-late 17th century. It is commonly used as the archetype of an extinct species because its extinction occurred during recorded human history, and was directly attributable to human activity, hence the phrase “going the way of the Dodos.” (thx to Wikipedia). The Dodo and his ancestors were intelligent enough to survive for millions of years. But as his environment (well, humans came) changed he could not adapt fast enough. And this is a perfect example to introduce the topic I actually wanted to write about: Adaptation. Because evolution is a process that rewards the organism most capable to adapt to new environments, not the biggest or most intelligent. It’s an opportunistic and fast system…for the Dodo as well as for brands.
Social Media Intelligence. We sell or else.
September 22nd, 2009 • 6 comments Intelligence
Tags: Analytics, Business, Diagram, Intelligence, Monitoring, Prediction, Strategy, Trends, World
Something’s happening out there in the outer social space. And while me, my coworkers and many, many others still try to explain Social Media Monitoring to clients, a couple of interesting questions were recently raised by a couple of intelligent people. One of them was Bud Caddell who criticized the idea of sentiment analysis. His criticism revolves around the fact that monitoring tools which are based on semantic analysis do most often offer quick overview diagrams which say something like “62% of all users in the social web like your product” (or similar).
Bud argues:
Here is what I think: sentiment analysis won’t ever be enough, and not because of sarcasm or industry specific slang, but because we are measuring the WRONG thing. It’s about the effect, not the content of the message.
I basically agree. We are making the same mistakes again. The same mistakes that were made by the marketing industry for ages by setting up big surveys which anticipate answers we have to give in case we fail. No doubt, only few human beings want to fail. But there is a difference between a survey and the right action afterwards. According to ABC News/Washington Post polls 75% of all Americans approved Bush’s handling of the situation in Iraq when the war started in 2003. According to this sentiment analysis Bush’s decision was completely justified.
Do you understand what I mean? There is a deeper problem.
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