Is 'social media' the problem?

I wanted to write up the IPA Social event last week, but unfortunately I've had my arm in a sling for most of the time since, so here we go a week later! I've written a few things on here about how the IPA Social stuff kicked off, which was basically about a few people talking about what we thought other people might want to also talk about. The first event last week got a lot more folk joining in, and there seem to be a few themes that keep coming up - there's obviously a big piece around measurement, which I'll leave to people who know more about it, but I'm really interested in the role of brands, and their agencies, in "social media". Over on Advergirl, Leigh House makes the point that

When we talk about consumers paying for content, we skip over how brands get into the conversation. Can we really rely on WOM networks to do the work of mass advertising? Do we all want to turn into blathering mouthpieces for our favorite brands?

(as part of a much longer and very smart series of posts on the changing economics of mass media).

And a lot of the themes are around how things are changing for every type of communications business: brands don't believe for a minute that there is a whole population waiting to promote their products if they could only design that Facebook page right, but they are getting differing advice from their different specialists on what has changed.

Is the term 'social media' the problem for marketers?
It seems that the term social media itself is counter productive - a fundamental change in how people are able to communicate with each other will naturally have knock-on effects to all businesses that deal with communications. But it will affect each differently. So 'social media' means something different to an ad agency than to a PR agency because it impacts what they have traditionally done in different ways. So the advice that clients get from their roster is that 'social media' means a range of different things. Meanwhile the customer services and IT departments are finding that it means a set of other different things outside of the marketing department but intrinsic to the brand.

When you have a range of different disciplines, advertising, digital, PR, media, etc, in a room talking about something that crosses over (and changes) each of their specialisms, you naturally get different views of what is important and how to go about achieving it. Will's written a great piece on why a brand might not want to be social, asking why you would care more about what sharing opinions with your bank than how good it is at managing your money. Which makes sense from the perspective of what has changed for advertising. There's obviously some brands that aren't inherently social. In a lot of cases, it might be counter-productive for brand built around functionality and cost to try and make itself social. But only in its advertising, in what it says about itself. These type of brands also have over-stretched customer service departments in which NOT being 'social' ie not trying to initiate open conversations with customers, is far more counter-productive to the way the brand communicates. But these are outside of the role of most of the agencies employed by a brand marketing department because they don't sit within brand marketing. One of the key challenges to brands and their agencies that people have been talking about over the last few years is moving from campaigning to committing - as in John Willshire's great analogy about bonfires and fireworks. Someone (not sure who, sorry) at the IPA Social event challenged to this, saying that surely it is about committing and campaigning. Which makes sense; there's nothing wrong with 'social media campaigns', as long as they are part of a wider change in brand behaviour; but there's no point in talking about how you are 'listening to consumers' on TV and then ignoring them in call centres, as you'll get found out quickly and publicly. Campaigning has been the domain of ad agencies, while committing fits more into what we traditionally called PR. As media relations has evolved to include geniune 'public' relations (eg liaising with non professional journalists) among other things, PR agencies have been on the coalface of brands' moves towards 'committing'. This doesn't mean that 'campaigning' doesn't still have relevance, just that it will look different from what ad agencies have traditionally done (as Robin Grant rightly points out in his write-up of the IPA event). However, lumping all these changes to various comms disciplines together and calling them 'social media' makes it harder for marketers to understand the underlying changes, or the need to act on them.

To me the terminology is wrong because it confuses cause (structural change in communications that is far bigger than just our industry) with effect (that clients' objectives are best served by having a group of specialists relevant to their business needs). In that in a lot of cases clients find it difficult to put the correct roster in place because they are equally confused by the conflicting advice from specialists who concentrate on changes happening to their own specialist areas.... which is all labelled social media.

#IPASocial Principle 9: Change will never be this slow again

(Photo courtesy)

So I've written a few things about the #IPASocial project over the last few months, about how it got started, and how I've had the chance to chat through loads of ideas about the future of advertising and communications with some awesome folks. And now comes the important bit - the time to chat about it with everyone else who is interested. We're going to have a go at doing that in person next week on October 6th when the IPA are running an event to have a chat around what social really means for our industry. We’ve worked up ten principles to start this off, and this introduction (written by Amelia) gives the proper context:

Social Media is a conversation. That seems to be one thing that we can all agree on.

But given that Social Media is a rather noisy and opinionated conversation, what value do we think we will have by adding our voices to it?

We are not Social Media gurus. In fact we are rather sceptical of people who claim they are. We are simply 10 people from across a wide range of communications disciplines in the UK and the US who would like to share some thoughts. Thoughts that have either been bugging us or inspiring us, thoughts that we believe could form some of the building blocks for succesful Social campaigns. We came together to respond to and add our voices to some work that the IPA had done earlier in the year.

We have each defined a Principle which we feel is important in this Social world. You will find each principle up here but they are also on our individual blogs where we will be curating the conversation which we hope they will generate. Please do get involved, maybe you think these principles don't apply, are there better ones? Are there changes that you would like to make? Are there examples that you could add to help illustrate them? The only thing that we ask is that as part of the advertising and communications community that you become part of the conversation. After all the more opinions that are being shared and built on, the more interesting and stronger the outcome. At least that's what we are hoping.

Thank you in advance.

The IPA have created a hub for all ten principles, along with an overall summary of twhy this is important, written by Mark Earls. This can be found here. Everyone who has joined in so far is also hosting a principle on their blogs, so please join in the discussion there too.

1. People not consumers – Mark Earls

2. Social agenda not business agenda – Le’Nise Brothers

3. Continuous conversation not campaigning – John V Willshire

4. Long term impacts not quick fixes – Faris Yakob

5. Marketing with people not to people – Katy Lindemann

6. Being authentic not persuasive – Neil Perkin

7. Perpetual beta – Jamie Coomber

8. Technology changes, people don’t – Amelia Torode

9. Change will never be this slow again – Graeme Wood

10. Measurement – Asi Sharabi

So my thoughts are all around the underlying changes in how people communicate, and particuarly what this means for agencies

IPA Social: Principle 9 - Change will never be this slow again

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

Change has never happened this fast before, and it will never be this slow again. This shouldn't come as a surprise; Intel founder Gordon Moore observed in 1965 that since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 that processing power had doubled every 18 months, and predicted that this trend would continue unchecked. So far he has been proved right, and the future of advertising is too closely linked to that of technology to escape the effects of Moore’s Law.

That isn't to say that people are changing. Without paraphrasing too much from Clay Shirky and Mark Earls, all the things we are evolutionarily disposed to do and have a cultural requirement for are simply quicker, easier and further reaching than previously possible. Most of those things are to do with other people, not technology. To get hung up on technology risks missing the point: as Henry Jenkins says,

“Our focus should not be on emerging technologies but on emerging cultural practices"

As an industry we have faced change before; early radio ads were print ads read out. Early TV ads were radio ads in which you could see the face of the person reading. In each case the rise of a new medium provoked a step change in the advertising industry, but one that didn't happen immediately. But each of those media worked in the same way, and the one-to-many assumptions of the 20thcentury about how brands communicate are fast becoming a casualty of the power laws of 21st century networks. While it is fun to speculate on how technology will change behaviour, most examples follow Bill Gates' suggestion that

“We overestimate the change that will happen in the next two years, and underestimate the change that will happen in the next ten”

Interruptive advertising won’t disappear overnight, but each change towards a more networked world will make it less relevant. We can’t predict the impact of new technologies on cultural practice, only prepare our businesses to embrace and foster change rather than reacting to it. Things are happening quicker, including irrelevance. In the words of AG Lafley, former CEO of P&G,

"..our company's success rate runs between 50 and 60 percent. About half of our new products succeed. That's as high as we want the success rate to be. If we try to make it any higher, we'll be tempted to err on the side of caution”

So the real step change for agencies is about not keeping control or making things perfect, it is about embracing business models that constantly evolve and communications that are designed to exist in beta, making the move from what Gerd Leonhard calls “protecting brands to projecting brands’. Charles Darwin said

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

We know that species of animal can remain unchanged for millennia, and then suddenly evolve in a few generations as their environment changes. The increasing speed of communications is eroding the 19th and 20th century assumptions that our businesses are built upon. Leading change rather than being lead by it demands that we don't err on the side of caution.

#IPASocial

So I went to an event back in January about Social Media and the Future of Agencies. Sounded like interesting stuff, but it turned out to be an opportunity for the IPA to try to sell us some research which looked like a bit of a snapshot of stuff that was happening while missing a lot of the important stuff, the reasons why it is happening. Well it looked like that from the presentation, but it was hard to tell because none of it was shared and there were no opportunities for dialogue about it. Except of course there are always opportunities for dialogue in the interwebs, and lots of people including me were fairly critical about the whole idea. It could have just finished there, as another missed opportunity, but then Nigel Gwilliam from the IPA got in touch with everyone who had commented on the event to how the IPA could make the things they are doing more relevant, more like a conversation.

And over the course of a few months this developed into a few of us putting our heads together to work out what we think are the most important principles for brands and agencies to understand when navigating the new ways in which people relate to each other online. We've also added initial thoughts about what each of the principles means, kind of conversation starters so that hopefully lots of other people can add their thoughts. And then there's going to be an event, which might hopefully be some of the things that the last one wasn't. So there's some speakers to get the conversation going, and then there's some conversation.

And these are the subjects that we think people might want to talk about. Everyone who has written the thought starter piece will be blogging it over the next week, and we're suggesting tagging it all #IPASocial. Keep a look out and please join in.

There's apparently a plumber of Yahoo Pipes somewhere in the IPA who might even be able to aggregate this tag on their site soon too, so we can really live out the perpetual beta principle.....

1. People not consumers – Mark Earls

2. Social agenda not business agenda – Le’Nise Brothers

3. Continuous conversation not campaigning – John V Willshire

4. Long term impacts not quick fixes – Faris Yakob

5. Marketing with people not to people – Katy Lindemann

6. Being authentic not persuasive – Neil Perkin

7. Perpetual beta – Jamie Coomber

8. Technology changes, people don’t – Amelia Torode

9. Change will never be this slow again – Graeme Wood

10. Measurement – Asi Sharabi

Things are happening quicker....

(NB. This is part of some work that the IPA are doing on the impact of social media on the ad industry. When I say 'part', it's more like a big pile of ideas that would need sorting into some sort of order before they became part....)
The changes going on in the advertising industry are doing so faster than ever before. It is probably fair to say that they will also never be this slow again. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone; Intel founder Gordon Moore observed in 1965 that since the invention of the integrated circuit 8 years previously the number of transistors that could be placed on a circuit board had doubled every 18 months, and predicted that this trend would continue unchecked. So far he has been proved right, and the increases in computing power that Moore's Law describes are the reason that we are coming to talk about technology and advertising interchangeably.

That isn't to say that people are changing. Without paraphrasing Clay Shirky or Mark Earls too far here, all the things we are evolutionarily disposed to do, and that we have cultural requirements for, are simply quicker, easier and further reaching than previously. This is not a different challenge to those faced by our 20th century predecessors:
Early radio ads were print ads read out. Early TV ads were radio ads in which you could see the face of the person reading. In each case the rise of a new medium provoked a step change in the advertising industry, but one that didn't happen immediately. So if we have survived and adapted in the past, is the challenge really as great as it appears?

Well, not unless you believe that the set of assumptions that underpins how we help brands communicate might also be a casualty of the power of Moore's Law. It is fun to speculate on how technology will improve, but most examples follow Bill Gates' suggestion that

“We overestimate the change that will happen in the next two years, and underestimate the change that will happen in the next ten”

Our ability as individuals to control access to our attention is likely to be amongst these. Since the internet was invented, it has slowly grown to a point where it has roughly the same number of computers connected as there are cells in the human brain, and about the same number of links as there are connections. The number of synapses, or connections, in our brains is taken as a proxy for intelligence – it is basically processing power. So in the 18 years since the public birth of the worldwide web in 1991, the internet has developed the intelligence of one person. Moore’s Law means that all the processors, and all the storage, and all the other capacity will each be doubling in power every 18 months. According to Kevin Kelly’s calculations, by 2040 the internet will have the brainpower of 4 billion people. According to Kelly, in the medium term future we will move from computers connected BY the internet, to one single computer that IS the internet. Our devices will simply be views into it, our networks always on.

Advertising tends to be seen as a necessary evil, as a transaction in return for content, which means that the challenge that has historically faced those who work in advertising has been to disrupt, interrupt, gain attention. Increased demands on peoples’ attention has made this job more difficult in recent years, but it has still been fundamentally the same challenge. What will alter it dramatically is the shift from gaining our attention to gaining the attention of our digital gatekeepers, the devices that will increasingly filter our access to entertainment and information. If I trust my applications’ recommendations, why should I look myself? They know more about what I like than I could ever have time to. Technology simply amplifies and speeds up underlying human behaviour and interaction. Brands that are asking themselves why people would want to be friends with them should think about what the alternatives may become.

And going back to the earlier question, is the challenge really as small as it appears? If I knew the answer, I'd start the agency that solved the problem. What we do know is that it is time to test. We have been wedded to the big idea of the Big Idea for generations, but big ideas that are rigorously researched and pretested will struggle in a world of ever increasing change. Things are happening quicker, including irrelevance. The idea of lots of little ideas seems more suited to this quicker world. In the words of AG Lafley, the former CEO of P&G,

"..our company's success rate runs between 50 and 60 percent. About half of our new products succeed. That's as high as we want the success rate to be. If we try to make it any higher, we'll be tempted to err on the side of caution”

Lots of little ideas acknowledge that all we as an industry can do is to make things as mimetic as possible. It is down to the other 99.9% of the population as to whether they happen. In Sketching User Experience, Bill Buxton talks about an art college ceramics professor who comes in on the first day of class and divides the students into two sections. He tells one half of the class that their final grade will be based exclusively on the volume of their production; the more they make, the better their grade. The professor tells the other half of the class that they will be graded more traditionally, based solely on the quality of their best piece. At the end of the semester, the professor discovered that the students who were focused on making as many pots as possible also ended up creating the best pots, much better than the pots made by the students who spent all semester trying to create that one perfect pot.

So the real step change for agencies is about not trying to build that perfect pot – it’s about not worrying about the bad ones. Charles Darwin said “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” We know that species of animal can remain unchanged for millennia, and then suddenly evolve in a few generations as their environment changes. As the increasing speed of communications erodes the 19th and 20th century assumptions that our businesses are built upon, our role is to avoid erring on the side of caution.

IPA Future of Advertising and Agencies - the presentation and the blog

A week later....

IPA Social Media Report

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: findings delphi)

This is the presentation from last Monday's IPA 44 Club, which caused a bit of a fuss. There were a few more people including me being relatively critical on Twitter. And the IPA might very well have ignored it, and carried on trying to sell the research to people who needed it (and lets face it, there are plenty in our industry and those that we work directly with). But they didn't. Respect to Nigel Gwilliam, Head of Digital at the IPA, who joined in with the comments
and has now started a blog that aims to take the report as a starting point from which to share knowledge for the industry - an open communal IPA resource.

Although the IPA were criticised for the way this project was launched, I think that this response shows a real understanding of how brands are going to have to change their communication models. (full details of my views on that here) - it is also the way that brands like Dell and Comcast 'came across' dialogue as a marketing tool as a response to negative publicity.

So please visit Nigel's blog, whether or not you are an IPA member, and add your views on how we can help our industry develop.