HEAD BLOG

Two days of consecutive sunshine has us all in weather mode. Whether it is to long for cooler days or to talk about how marvellous the heat wave is (followed by a glum prediction of it ending soon), the weather leaps into conversations at every opportunity.

Marketing is similarly hasty in its willingness to take advantage of each change in weather, be it an oncoming storm of football fever or the potential break in the clouds offered by a long awaited election.

Here is something which unites us all, it seems to say, something we can all talk about. And look how switched on to the national mood we are. You might think all we do is sell crisps but really we are your friend and as such we can take liberties with your time by striking up a conversation.

Much akin to a stranger sat on the bench next to you who decides to try his luck with a line about how long term weather predictions have us suffering through a rainy summer before offering us advice of a handy umbrella shop (owned, incidentally, by his brother), the eager Marketeer will stop at nothing to catch your interest.

So it is we have had every form of product sold to us on the strength of a weak “vote now” campaign and so it will be that the World Cup will be drained of any effectiveness as products rely upon our dumb willingness to buy anything from anyone provided they have a fine line in football related conversation pieces. This lawn mower is a like a game of two halves you say? Adorned with a flag even? By the cup, I’ll buy one and visit your store again.

It may be that certain topics hold a common interest for many people. But it also true that they make for short term conversations and fair weather friends.

Collaboration, not crowd sourcing, is the future of advertising.

Crowd sourcing is directed from a brand manager or agency creative.

And that’s an important word: directed. The Doritos campaign was directed and the ‘public’ did as they were told, expressing themselves beautifully, wittily but doing so in a controlled, managed, directed way.

When a client approaches a number of agencies to request ideas in the form of a pitch it is, in essence, crowd sourcing ideas from a limited pool of creativity. The advantage an agency can have over others (and the public) is experience.

Each agency can draw upon its experience to respond by building a compelling argument as to why their ideas are better, regardless of whether their ideas are, in fact, actually better. It becomes a game of personalities in which ideas are judged on what is likely to win with the client rather than succeed with the consumer.

Collaboration, on the other hand, is freer, more open and more targetted at the end result. The process is fluid enough to change according to that end result. What might be perceived as key selling points are open to change under the process of collaboration.

Personalities are focussed on producing something that works for the consumer rather than satisfying a predefined brief.

Collaborators, removed from the competitive process, are focussed upon pooling resources and figuring out how to get the best results (and even agree how those results ought to be measured).

It’s all part of forging a great relationship with the client and, whilst I accept that crowd sourcing has a certain energetic pleasure, it’s in the relationships that effective work will be produced. The energy offered by crowd sourcing is akin to the enjoyment of a pub wit. It’s fun at the time but makes very little impact in the long term and social marketing has to be about the long term. It has to be about the relationships over the casual acquaintence otherwise there is no depth, no substance and no loyalty.

Society functions effectively in true, deep rooted communities.

Not crowds.

Volkswagen have created a wonderful piece of what they call “social marketing” but which anybody familiar with gaming for the past thirty years would just call “gaming”.

At Head First we pursue work where we can make a difference; where we know that our ideas would be appropriate. Sometimes this takes us outside the games industry and the usual response is “where’s your relevance?”. I never struggle to find an answer.

I say something like games brings everybody together. To which I am told that the client isn’t a gamer.

I don’t believe them.

Everybody is a gamer.

They might not consider buying Modern Warfare 2 or Bioshock 2; they might not even own a “games machine”; but they are gamers.

The rise in what is commonly called social media has gaming built in as standard. Look at your friend’s Facebook updates and a game won’t be far away, clearly VW understand this.

Games unite people. Games teach people and games blaze the trail in terms of user experiences and technical accomplishments.

And if everybody is a gamer then it follows that there are certain elements they have in common; certain elements that can be used to reach them.

VW’s boast centres around the fact that their promotion had been downloaded over four million times. The “revelation” of their claim is supposed to be that all this was achieved without spending a penny on media. However, when you understand the power of gaming the revelation, however brilliant, isn’t surprising.

It’s that time of year again: Superbowl time. Traditionally I enjoy skipping the actual event and turning instead to the ads. Companies spend such a huge amount of time, creativity and money on them that it seems rude not to politely sit through to the end, bitter or otherwise.

This year they are getting talked about more than usual. Normally I read about which movie trailers played but this year Google ran an ad which made it into the mainstream press; dragging everything else behind it.

Google’s ad was pretty nice; whimsical and confident and with a simple message – namely search is a fact of life. As brands become increasingly switched on to the social side of commerce this positioning resonates.

What stood out for me, however, was the number of ads that were content to essentially waste time and money. Go Daddy drew lots of ire but, subjective views aside, at least it threw in the facts of the product.

Other brands weren’t so ambitious, relying instead on the media spend to impress the viewers. Why spend money on creative if all you are doing (from a semiotics perspective) is showing the company logo? Indeed, if no message and no values are conveyed then thirty seconds of a logo would not only be cheaper, it would arguably be more memorable also.

Advertising, of course, is the opportunity to be more than memorable. It offers the chance to inform as well.
And in these times, when buzzwords such as “social” and “conversation” are in such free-flow, what better form of dialogue is there than a contructive one?

Microsoft’s first foray into ‘social networking’ on the Xbox 360 came with the integration of Live Messenger back in May 2007 as part of the then ‘spring update’. Fast forward to 2009 and, whilst Messenger is still popular, people are more likely to be found messaging through Twitter and Facebook so it hardly comes as a surprise that Microsoft have chose to add these to the Xbox. Forming part of a new “Community Channel” not available until later in the year I managed to get myself on to the ‘Xbox Live Update Preview’ to see what all the fuss is about. Read more…

There is a debate raging across the Twitternet. At stake is the future concept of the Follow list. Entire conversations hang in the balance.

After the first article, Dave Trott replied:

@headfirst_dom I didn’t quite understand why I should follow lots of people v selective perception, maybe you could flesh it out.

Damn. Trott and his insistence upon persuasive strategy.

Well OK, let’s take a shot at that.

I had argued that Twitter was Social Networking, not Social Friendship. My approach was to attack Dunbar’s number as applied to Twitter Follows. I was right to do so. Dave’s comment regarding selective perception is something else entirely.

It concerns the very start of the debate and the comment about Dave’s small number of followers.

Having lots of followers has clear advantages, foremost of which (for me) is that you get your message out to more people.

Working in advertising that’s important.

So what about the other way around?

There are two questions here: the first one of why should Dave follow more than 30 people and the second of why he should follow lots of people v selective perception.

The second question is easy.

He shouldn’t.

Selective perception is absolutely the way to go.

I don’t follow Stephen Fry. Nor do I follow Philip Scofield, Ashton Kutcher, John Cleese, Derren Brown… the list goes on.

To varying degrees I enjoy the work they do. It’s just on Twitter I have found that they don’t enrich my life. I don’t really care who is on GMTV and I don’t really care whether Stephen Fry is stuck in a lift. As for Demi Moore’s bottom… well, what’s the point?

I chose to switch them off. Selective perception wins out.

There are millions of Twitter users. Surely it is possible to be both selective and follow lots of people. Given the numbers and the demographics involved it is likely that of these many millions, an individual will find more than 30 people who could enrich their lives and provide stimulating insight and accounts of their daily lunch habits.

This isn’t Sodom and Gomorrah here. Finding more than 30 people to follow shouldn’t be hard.

Of course that means making a judgement call on why we follow people.

I know why I do.

I follow people who are active in my field in my community.

Because their views are often exciting and stimulate my own.

I follow writers who offer insights into the way they work.

Because their insights can help me in my work.

I follow damn funny people.

Because I’m learning to smile.

I follow followers of followers.

Because I’ve come to trust some followers and believe in recomendations on #followfriday

I follow competitors.

Because SOMEONE has to keep an eye on those pesky kids.

I follow Demi Moore.

No, I don’t.

I follow because I can find a few statements amongst the daily chatter that interest me or excite me or provoke me. I follow because I look for debate. I follow in the same way I read more than one newspaper each day, flick through more than one website a day and talk to more than one person a day.

Because ideas can be found in the most unusual, most unexpected of places.

And these unexpected places are everywhere on Twitter. So that must make them expected… OK, let’s move on.

Twitter gives us a chance to connect. To connect to people. To exciting, stimulating, surprising, inspiring, sweary people.

And it’s an ad-man’s dream to be able to connect, in some way, however briefly, however superficially, to these people.

Here’s an example courtesy of the man who started this:

Twitter is free, completely live, market research. Doing an ad for running shoes? Follow some runners. Put them into a group called “Runners” and watch what they talk about. Maybe dip in and reply, ask a question or two, prod and poke them (gently) for responses.

Of course you don’t have to Follow to get this sort of research. You could run searches and pick out the comments. But that’s not selective. And you have no hand in guiding the debate. You are passive, not active.

So, 30 people? Are they likely to provide (given that most people don’t Tweet on a regular basis) all the stimulation, all the insight, all the debate, all the surprise you could need?

Why should you follow more than 30?

Why not?

A friend of mine sent a tweet to Dave Trott on the number of people he follows via Twitter.

He said he couldn’t believe Trott followed 30 people.

Dave Trott replied with a joke. A good one.

He said that he agreed. And that he’d cut that number down to 20.

Boom-tish.

Advertising copy live as it happens.

What my friend actually meant was that the number was far too low and that Dave Trott should think about following more. My friend suggested that he would get more from the experience of Twitter that way.

Dave Trott responded with a link to Seth Godin’s blog piece about Dunbar’s Number.

Dunbar’s number is 150. Dunbar estimates that any person can only have 150 friends.

It’s down to tribes and the way mankind interacts.

It sounds true.

But it doesn’t matter.

Because when it comes to social networking, Dunbar’s number doesn’t apply.

Because the dirty secret truth about social networking is that we aren’t friends. Not really. Not in the tribal sense.

And why would an ad-man like Dave Trott want that?

When he promotes himself using Twitter he doesn’t want a tribal relationship with his followers.

He doesn’t limit their numbers to 150.

And I’m willing to bet he doesn’t want his ideas, his tweets, to be read by just 150 people.

He doesn’t want a tribal relationship with those people.

He may like the idea of his tweets being picked up and retweeted.

He may like the idea of sending his people out to carry the torch.

But advertising doesn’t work like that.

You don’t broadcast an ad to 150 people and believe that their word, their tribal strength is stronger that way.

Word of mouth is great.

But why limit it?

There is no guarantee that if only 150 people hear your ad, that their takeup and evangelism will be any stronger

Facebook might call us friends. Twitter might call us followers.

But they are just being polite.

When we read a tweet we are just dipping into the thoughts of a number of people. Any number of people.

Some of those thoughts will stick. Some won’t.

We’ll pay more attention to the former and less to the latter.

But we aren’t trying to be their friends. Not in the real, social sense. It’s nice when it happens but it’s not the primary concern. On Twitter I want to be exposed to lots of ideas. I select a list of people to follow based on the hope that their ideas will be good. And I’d want to be in a similar camp for other people. Building trust on as wide a scale as possible.

I’ll do my best to make my tweets stand out in the way I would if I were writing an ad.

But I’m under no illusions as to why others follow me.

It’s social networking. Not social friendships.