Friday, November 2, 2012

For no-one


For a while, in the pre-crash days, it was quite vogue to rename an organisation, often as part of a merger or acquisition, but occasionally simply to change ingrained perceptions. Let loose on these projects, branding agencies conjured up unmemorable, unpronounceable or simply odd monikers such as Consignia, Thales or More Than, which were then the subject of intense and expensive marketing campaigns. 

The recent lack of such activities is one of the more welcomed but unplanned consequences of the financial turmoil. However, it has not disappeared completely as those who used to benefit are still employing  the tactic even applying it to themselves and their activities. The latest incarnation of this effect has come to be known as content marketing. 

According to Wikipedia: "Content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action. Content marketing has benefits in terms of retaining reader attention and improving brand loyalty." 

While the concept isn't new (ok content free marketing has existed but was not the norm) and some of the channels and techniques required are recent phenomena, there is a deeper issue with the idea of content marketing which I believe will ensure adds up to little more than another passing term.

In a digitally connected world, so many traditional advertising, marketing and communications functions are fundamentally challenged. The ideas of targeting segments, using limited media outlets to disrupt attention, controlling messaging, building communities are all laid to waste in a world of infinite information sources, user commentary, online sharing and social networking. 

Communicating in this environment requires new skills and approaches. Messaging and communications are increasingly decentralised with every employee becoming a  brand advocate and conversations around products and performance happening at the personal level. 

However, the mantra behind content marketing as it is currently enacted is simply "this is more of the same". Organisations continue to try to talk to their clients, not through their people but over their heads; centralised messaging is pushed out via Twitter but with no-one reacting to any feedback and ghost written corporate blogs that eschew opinion in favour of supporting initiatives. 

The failure of content marketing is that too often it is content written by nobody specific for no-one in particular. 

Until organisations grasp the need to fundamentally rethink their model, i.e. the way they interact with their market, and understand how their clients want to interact with them then this is destined to be another online cul-de-sac

Those organisations that get digital engagement right, I doubt, will be setting up a content marketing division anytime soon. 

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Wiggins rides roughshod over Messi, Rooney et al


Anybody lucky enough to have accessed the BBC's extraordinary coverage of the London 2012 Olympics, witnessed something truly groundbreaking in the evolution of the multichannel environment.

Users were able to access pretty much every minute of every competition across TV, internet and mobile platforms throughout the duration of the games. In itself this was an impressive enough logistical feat, but there are a couple of metrics from the online coverage which are even more exceptional.

The single most viewed online moment was GB’s Bradley Wiggins winning gold in the road time trial. During that day the BBC’s servers delivered over 2.8 Petabytes of data. I had to look up what a petabyte is, and its a heck of a lot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petabyte

What really stands this apart however is the fact that this single event was more popular that than the entire BBC online coverage of the 2010 World Cup. So one bloke sitting on a bike for 50 minutes spinning as fast as he can, trumped the entire panoply of the world’s most famous and most feted footballers over the course of a month.

Its a stark and unavoidable reminder that the digital environment disrupts and changes even the most widely held truisms. While Wiggin’s heroic efforts in winning the Tour de France had established his status as a national hero in the UK, his time trial took place right in the middle of the working day in Britain. Regardless of that fact nobody who could, it seems, did miss the coverage of his latest triumph. And all this in a nation obsessed by its national sport of football, where cycling would politely be derided as a minority interest and certainly not a spectator sport.

Well not in August 2012. All of our understanding, assumptions and expectations of people’s behaviour based on previous knowledge were once again overturned. And yet still many of us continue to have to argue the case against the established certainties of audience behaviour. Essentially there are none anymore. We must start to plan for all eventualities and deliver digital experiences which will appeal beyond the perceived equation of audience targeting + previous activity = assumed behaviour (otherwise known as more of the same).

You can read more about the scale of the BBC’s challenge here. What is equally impressive and less reported however is that the UK online and mobile infrastructure coped. The ISP’s managed to deliver all of this information to users despite the unprecedented demand.

What we now know is, we don’t know what will happen next, but that we can cope if that is what we expect.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Message in a bottle


So you have a great campaign or initiative or viewpoint you want to communicate to your clients. Where do you start?

Presumably by:


  • generating relevant content, 
  • creating collateral, 
  • drawing down a target list of interested parties
  • prepare electronic mail to send to the target group
  • approaching the media to see if you can generate interest
  • maybe organise an event, 
  • put something on the website
  • by some advertising 

Then you stand back, press go and watch everything disappear into the ether.

Which is followed by the wait. Not literally of course, because you have to manage all the moving parts. But the reality is that you are now waiting for your clients and targets to read, watch, hear, search or simply trip over the relevant content. And once they have you rely on them to make the effort to come back and ask you for more.

This is the modern equivalent of communicating via a message in a bottle. Once upon a time it made sense, but it seems utterly anachronistic now. Your employees and colleagues are connected to their market in ways that simply didn't exist previously. They correspond and collaborate via LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter more than they do via phone or in person.

It makes no sense to bypass your people, and their connections and networks, if you want to communicate with your targets, because that is where the relationships already exist. Where the conversations will naturally occur and where the dialogue that could build to engagement can easily begin.

In a networked world:


  1. Lobbing material over the heads of our people into the market is inefficient.
  2. Ignoring the power of existing relationships and contacts is wasteful.
  3. Expecting our clients to make the running in an engagement is fanciful.

So, if this all does sound familiar, then its time to change the music.

Thursday, May 24, 2012

The right content distributed in the right way


The challenge for businesses is to understand their client’s choices and to communicate with them using the methods and channels they prefer.

There’s no point having good content and services, if they’re not distributed in the right way. The solution is to build networks based on ideas, themes and issues. Through these trusted networks content will find its audience, based on its value.  


Unlike targeted campaigns based on assumed interest, which are unlikey to intersect with the point at which a recipient is truly engaged with the subject. That is more to do with coincidence than coordination.

Sometimes, cohorts and communities converge to be one and the same. That’s when the interests of users match an assumed distribution model for information. These opportunities to simplify the production and distribution of information are few. They should be seen as a bonus, not as an excuse to carry on as is.


Until organisations embrace the disruptive nature of networked communications, they are going to rely on luck and convergence of interest. That is not a sound strategy at any point, least of all now.

Friday, May 18, 2012

Syndication, serialisation and atomisation

People consume content one piece at a time online, and they don’t necessarily care where the information comes from as long as they trust the source that referred it. For B2B in particular, this means they cannot rely on just brand image or size to reach their target audience.


Instead they must change the way they distribute their information; to stop aggregating content and instead split it into discrete parts so users can get more out of it, more easily.


This is best done by breaking information into its separate components and publishing it in multiple formats, via multiple channels, to the widest possible audience – a process called atomisation which breaks content into its constituent parts:

1.      So each piece can be found.
2.      So each piece can be shared.
3.      So each piece can start a dialogue.
4.      So each piece builds into a greater whole.


What needs to change?
To reach more digital consumers, businesses have to accept the way they publish information currently is flawed, outdated, inefficient and wasteful.
They need new models for commissioning, producing and distributing content, internally and externally. And they need a clear, multi-channel strategy to produce the right content and distribute it in the right way.
· Content must be created which can easily distributed among personal networks - The amount of information available means clients are not loyal. They’re guided by which sources best answer their needs, and which they trust.
· Content must be easier to find in searches - Google controls around 90% of business search traffic. It’ll be a major factor in deciding whether content reaches its target audience, and so in deciding success.
· Large pieces of content covering various topics into must be split into, individual, focused, topical pieces - Searchers look for a single answer to a single question. The type of content is less important, than getting the right answer.
· Content must be produced in the widest variety of media as possible - Video and audio products are almost as easy to create, edit and distribute as print documents.
· Content must produced in a suitable format for mobiles - More people now access the internet using mobile devices than PCs. 

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

From communities to cohorts


Social networks are profoundly changing the nature of communications, dialogue and trust between clients and organisations. However businesses are failing to adapt to the disruptive nature of these developments, due to a continuing adherence to the recently adopted embracing of online communities.

Nowadays, people are much less likely to create distinctions between their social and professional contacts. As individuals, we no longer discriminate exclusively between them, and we’ll happily call on either if they’re useful.

As such, the exchange of information between the individuals within any specific personal network (cohort) is regarded as more trustworthy or actionable. If one person is recommended to do something by another in their network (even if it’s just, read this article) it’s more likely to happen than if the request comes from the source itself.

This change doesn’t sit well with existing ways of doing business, which rely on structure and organisation to work efficiently. Traditionally, it makes sense to split the marketplace into distinct areas (communities) and target them through marketing, business development and sales activity.

But targeting these structured groups matches less and less with the ways people choose to find, consume and interact with content. It makes no sense to continue targeting content at clients based on such a narrow definition of their interests on it is almost inevitably going to fail. Secondly, as we now pull information as and when it is pertinent, the push model of “pay-attention” marketing is invariably mistimed.


As digital consumers, we now choose both our sources of information and where and when we choose to interact with them. Therefore two people connected through a cohort, even indirectly, are more likely to respond to the recommendations or referrals they get through that network at their own behest.



Businesses have to understand this shift and change how they do things because the information they distribute is vital for business decisions. They need to distribute their information through cohorts rather than to communities.


This is the first of three lead articles on the topic.