Teblog

Online Marketing 101

If you need a crash course in online marketing, you could do worse than browse my recent collection of articles and blog posts by experts on the matter.

I had started off, a month ago, intending to investigate what's out there on the subject of 'web-based business to business collaboration' but, as I collected the links on Scoop.it, I found that 'marketing' was the theme that bound most of my discoveries together. Hence the title of this blog post.

When I was a journalist, I didn't really like having to interview marketing folk because they were too sanitised, too in control of their messages and hard to get real stories out of. (Good stories to a journalist are those which carry at least a hint of disclosure.)

However my Scoop.it investigations gave me a new respect for marketing, it really does seem to belong at the centre of B2B collaboration activities. 

Here's a snap of part of my Scoop.it collection (click on the image to see it full size):

It was 'curated' by looking at hundreds of suggestions from Scoop.it, reducing them to fifty or so, then throwing out the four or five that didn't live up to the promise of the extract.

The result is a neat little package of pieces, admittedly of variable quality, but all of which helped to round out my existing perceptions of how to approach online B2B collaboration.

Since so much work went into the curation, I thought it would be silly to keep it to myself.

See what you think. It's at http://www.scoop.it/t/b2bcollaboration

 

An evening with PR/Marketing Guru, Larry Weber

Back in May, I trotted off to meet with marketing/PR guru, Larry Weber and a bunch of other interesting people, including Jack Schofield (IT man at the Guardian for donkey's years and erstwhile competitor - we both edited PC magazines in the early eighties) and Bill Nichols an academic and marcomms/reputation consultant who, when Jack and I were competing, was Clive Sinclair's PR man. They were both on the speaker panel with Larry. The other notable people were in the lively audience.

The occasion was the UK launch of Larry's (then) most recent book: Everywhere. It's about social networking being at the heart of the future of business. He calls this 'anytime, anywhere' access the the fourth wave of computing. (I ought to know what the three earlier waves were, but I've forgotten. Maybe it was brains, internal networking and internet, or something.)

No surprises so far then. But I don't think Larry set out to surprise us particularly. More that he wants to share his familiarity with the subject matter in a non-frightening manner. After all, the people who really need his insights are those who are probably the most fearful of openness, transparency and genuine dialogue. You might think of them as the 'command and contol' brigade. While this has its place, it's probably not where the rubber of the corporation hits the road of the marketplace.

Sorry, I should be talking about Larry's evening. (And, if you're wondering why it's taken me so long, it's because I was suddenly pitchforked into a new company and I've been more than a tad busy. My conscience was pricked by a Facebook post about his recent presentation to the Public Relations Student Society of America. The headline of the post was "Social media’s impact bigger than television’s.")

At his book launch, he predicted that, by 2015, "you'll be hard pressed to find any newspapers or nightly news on TV." He says, "TV ads have got to die sometime." He may not always provide answers but he knows how to provoke fresh thinking. Let's hope the revenue replacement doesn't put the TV companies even deeper in hock to corporate sponsors.

With regard to the Fourth Generation thing, he told the story of how he sent off for brochures from all the prospective colleges for his daughter. She didn't look at one  of them. She'd already done her research online. Except she didn't refer to it as online. When Larry once said to her, "I'm going online", she replied "Oh Dad, we don't go online any more. We just are." Online, that is. And a lot of people reading this will know what she means. If you're not one of them, then it's likely that his book will interest you.

Another thing he talked about was Innocentive. Companies give it problems and money and it gets its community of 'solvers' to apply their brains. Larry gave examples of $100,000 here and $25,000 there. It's all online (of course). And the winning contributor exchanges their IP for the cash. That's a great commercial application of crowdsourcing. Related to this were his comments on how social networking allows for the intense, focused, sharing of knowledge. I think his book goes further and talks of micro-segmentation of the internet so that you can find a community and go deep into just about any subject that interests you.

He is very clear that successful companies (especially consumer-facing) will have to become radically transparent, be willing to share and also to stand for something that will resonate with customers and prospects. Core values that permeate the company's business. Larry doesn't claim it will be easy, but he sprinkles his conversation with stories old and new of how companies have turned on the proverbial dime. Dell, of course. BP to a certain extent. And so on.

I was quite taken with the idea that, "big sites will die under their own weight." He said this because he believes that all the power is now in the network. Not sure that a behemoth like IBM would totally agree with this sentiment, despite its strong advocacy of social networking values. With statements like this, the evangelist in Larry seems to pop out of the closet. (My views of evangelists are here.)

Let's turn to one of the other speakers, Bill Nichols. He scored a hole in one for me with his observation that "People respond to emotion and fairness."

I have the sense that the former has been faked and the latter missing for a long time.

If Larry and Bill are right, we would seem to be heading towards a better and much more harmonious world.

Let's hope so.

Sir Jimmy Savile

Jimmy Savile died today. I hope you don't mind me reprinting an interview I did with him some years ago for Mensa Magazine. RIP Sir James. It was good meeting you.

 

GOOD KNIGHT

Sir James Savile, to accord him his correct title, is more than just flash jewellery, bonhomie and platinum blonde hair. These are merely the superficial manifestations of a very practical and thoughtful man. My aim for Mensa MAGAZINE was to meet the man behind the mask.

Few knights would conduct press interviews in zip-up carpet slippers, white socks, a red sports shirt, a yellow dressing gown and what looked suspiciously like blue pyjama trousers. The characteristic huge cigar was clamped in his teeth. I asked him if smoking had any effect on his running. "None whatsoever." Does he inhale? "No, no, no, no. You'd die in four seconds if you did. It's just for the aroma. And also they kill all known bugs dead."

I suggested he identify five pivotal moments in his life. The first one, "being born", was dealt with swiftly. The second came 15 years later when he realised that, "although still being totally in love with my parents, I'd have to de-learn a lot of the stuff of life they'd handed down to me. For example, my dad was a bookmaker's clerk so he had an inbuilt distrust of policemen which I grew up with. I had to de-learn that policemen were a problem in life, but that didn't affect my respect for my folks."

His third pivotal moment involved "the taking over of the gentlest form of control. My parents brought me up for the first half of my life and I brought them up for the second half of theirs. I realised that I had a clearer outlook on life than they did. Also it was obvious that I was earning ten times more than they ever dreamed about so, for their benefit, I then re-educated them that life wasn't like they thought it was from the Victorian days."

This looks, I know, a bit smug in print, but when Savile talks you can sense a warmth and affection for his parents who, apparently, were just as enthusiastic for the reversed roles as he was.

I suggested that they must have been very special parents to listen. "It's not so much that they listened, so much as they accepted. We never discussed it in anything like detail, because I realised that there's no point in discussing it. Later, after my father had died, I took my mother - I called her the Duchess - from the family terraced house to live in a sea front flat in Scarborough, with me. She had a beautiful place looking out at the sea. Whereas the way that she and my father were doing things, God bless him, we were looking out in somebody's back yard."

Did she regret anything in terms of old friendships and social connections? "Not at all, because of the thing called the telephone. The telephone is a lifebelt to old people. They should all have free telephones. Not free calls, though, because other people will come in and use it."

The fourth moment came when he realised, "the enormous sums of money that I was earning weren't going to ruin me, change me or kill me. When you get in the big bucks those are three things that can happen. The present day is studded with stories of people who have acquired lots of money which, in several cases, has led to their early death. They were more successful than I but not necessarily as clever because they're dead and I'm alive."

I asked him what traps they fell into. "Corruption. All round corruption. Corruption of the body, the spirit and the mind. That's what happened to them. As simple as that." Savile's fifth pivotal moment was, "the eventual realisation of your life long goal and, with some trepidation, you look at it to see if the goal was worth fighting for in the first place. My goal was simple: to be loaded, with nothing to do. To me that was eminently sensible. Because to be loaded with nothing to do delivers you ultimate freedom."

He based the amount of money he'd need on the assumption he might live to 110. "I'd gone up, as it were, the rapids of life, and had gone into the calm waters of the lagoon at the top and the lagoon was everything that I hoped it was going to be on the way up. So there was no disappointment. No saying, 'Cripes, I've wasted my entire life becoming loaded with nothing to do and it's not nice.'" So the final realisation was, "Yes, I'm loaded, I've got nothing to do and it's bleeding marvellous. It's bleeding fantastic. It means that I don't have to bother to earn money, which means that I do things because I choose to."

"Other people opt for different things. You can imagine me as the trunk of a tree with no branches and my juices shot straight up the trunk to the blossom at the top. Whereas every other human being that I know developed branches - wife, family, dog, cat, son, daughter, and their juice gets diverted and doesn't usually get right to the top because it's drained off. I will never have the emotion of a wife and two kids where they're all safely tucked up in bed and I go and lock the house up and go to bed. That must be a very satisfying thing. I don't have that. Likewise, they don't have this single-minded pleasure of setting out for something, achieving it, and saying, 'Hey ho, how about that then?'."

I wondered whether he thought about doing good when he was on the way up. "In the early days, my folks were always on the fund raising kick because it was a way of life. It provided a social life - whist drives, dances, all those things. It was not only a fund raising thing, it was a pleasant evening and it had a purpose of profit to give to somebody else at the end of it. At the end of the day, you'd hear them talking 'We've made one pound four shillings. That's very good. We'll give that to the Little Sisters. They'll like that.' And I used to think, 'Cripes there's about nine people grafted their balls off for about five days. They've got one pound and four shillings. Equated out that makes it about tuppence ha'penny each. There's got to be an easier way.' It was undeniably pleasant, you understand, but then I realised that they did it as much for the way of life as they did it for the gain. But all this went into my computer up 'ere." He taps his head.

"Then I realised that if I made myself independent, eventually, I might be of more use to people. So I didn't do very much for anybody for the first ten years. And then, as it got obvious that that I might just stay, I started to do that bit more. Then there came a period where what you did for people overtook, time-wise, what you were doing for yourself. And now the ratio is I work, we'll say, one day a week for me and six days for everybody else, for free. I don't see that that's giving at all. I see that's sensible because, exactly like my folks, it also gives me a lifestyle which I quite enjoy."

I asked him what major problems he thought the world faces. "The common denominator of world problems must be, again, corruption. It is patently obvious that individual corruption has ruined many an emergent African state. It's patently obvious that corruption has ruined the country of, shall we say, Iraq. Somebody like Saddam Hussein who professes to work with God on his side but at the same time builds himself a fifty million pound palace and gasses the Kurds. Which he did. Then obviously, the guy is a con man. If he is not a con man, he is totally deluded in what he is thinking."

"Corruption spreads. If the boss is corrupt then the deputy boss is corrupt. And so is the deputy's deputy and so on and so forth, right down to as far down as it can possibly reach. If one poses the question, 'Will you ever eradicate corruption?', the answer is, 'No'. Because the resolution of the vast majority of things in the world is attempted by debate. But very few bring into the frame the thing called human nature. Corruption, in all its forms, is the bedevilment of the world."

"The alternative is within your circle, to do what you can starting with yourself, to resist corruption. At the end of the day, you have to be prepared to jettison those people who won't knock corruption on the head and get on with your own little thing. Conversely, you can have ceaseless, endless, pointless and stupid debates about so-called global problems when it's comfortable not to acknowledge the real problem, which is corruption."

Another answer, he suggests, is "sensible and honest education. Education is different things to different people. If you have a nationalist group that instructs its children to sing nationalist songs and actively hate those not of its nation, that is not education, that is corruption. So corruption can be passed on by education."

I couldn't leave without asking him about his three major honours. The first, his OBE in 1971, came while his mother was still alive. He shared her disbelief that a child from such humble origins could be so honoured. In 1980 he became a Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory, an honour bestowed by the Pope. "That," says Savile, "was a tremendous honour because, as a Catholic boy, to get a papal knighthood was totally unthinkable and was the source of much inner comfort and humility as well."

This experience was repeated in 1990 when he received a knighthood from the Queen. According to Savile, "I found all these awards of high fun content, high dignity content, and some small acceptance that whatever I was doing I must have been doing it right in the eyes of man, if not necessarily in the eyes of God. But I've got to pay that bill as and when it comes. The second bill."

I'll tell you now, I wasn't looking forward to meeting Sir James Savile OBE. Although I loved programmes like Jim'll Fix It and Savile's Travels, I was convinced he'd bury me in banter. I am delighted to say that I was wrong. He was extremely pleasant and courteous and gave very thoughtful answers to my questions. The man is undeniably kind. He is relentlessly logical. But the thing that impressed me most was the quality and strength of his convictions.

 

Homo Imitans. People do what we do, not what we say

The human body has two circulatory systems, the veinous and the lymphatic. They are connected, but largely independent.

Leandro Herrero's latest book, Homo Imitans, reminded me that the body corporate also contains two circulatory systems, the hierarchy and the networks. And, while each plays an important role, the networks - rather like the lymphatic system of the body - have incredible power which is underestimated, if not ignored, in most organisations.

This is a mistake, says Dr Herrero, describing the two systems as 'World I' and 'World II'. His book is mostly about World II, with the occasional nod to the enabling and encouraging role of World I in enlightened organisations.

His fundamental thesis (building on his earlier Viral Change book, which I reviewed here) is that people are more inclined to change their behaviour by copying peers that they respect than commands from on high. And, since behaviour is the only thing that counts when it comes to real change inside organisations, this is where (change) management should be focusing its energies. Dr Herrero gives due credit to authors of social networking books which cover a lot of similar ground, but his talent is in directing his thoughts and guidance slap bang into the heart of organisations that want to change but don't know how. It is also, very occasionally, a 'sell' for his Viral Change^TM practice, should you not want to go it alone.

Influence travels through networks completely independently of the company hierarchy and, in many cases, without the hierarchy even being aware of what's going on. In an organisational example, we saw it when Greg Dyke left the BBC after the stink around the 'sexing up' of the Iraq dossier - the crowds of staff, some in tears, seemed to appear out of nowhere but they were actually galvanised by the internal network.

In a non-corporate example, the recent rioting and looting in England came about largely through social networking and many people caught up in it were simply copying others who appeared to be 'getting away with it'. (The book contains a very useful 40-page annex which describes in detail many examples of social contagion with references to Dr Herrero's source material. It's called The Human Condition: a guide for the perplexed.)

All of which brings us back to the title of the book (Homo Imitans, if you've forgotten). We see what others do and we copy them. If others who respect or like us, see us doing something in a new way that makes sense to them, they copy us. If just three people copy what 'someone like them' is doing, then it's clear that such a social infection will quickly reach epidemic proportions.

The trick espoused by Dr Herrero is to find those key people in organsiations, wherever they are, and persuade them that a new way of behaving is good for them. (Obviously, it has to be good for the organisation, otherwise there's no point in doing it.) Much has been written about finding such 'champions' but less has been written about focusing on their behaviour.

Words alone are not enough. Dr Herrero likes to collect "Don't do that" posters which usually have little effect but can actually encourage whatever it is they're trying to stop. ("ABUSE OF STAFF WILL NOT BE TOLERATED", etc.) People will respond much more readily to what others do than to what they say.

The book is rich in structure and entertaining in style. It hammers home its messages and suggests new practices from a variety of perspectives. Each chapter reinforces what went before but, maybe because I've spent the the last 35 years as an enthusiast of behavioural psychology and the last seven deep in social networking, I felt I'd well and truly got the message before the end. Nevertheless, I notice I've still made margin notes right up to the last page.

I particularly like his encouraging penultimate paragraph:

"Viral Change^TM ... doesn't depend on behavioural sciences, network theory, social sciences, storytelling and leadership studies. Or even us as consultants!"

Leandro Herrero provides a wealth of persuasive examples and evidence which will help you make the case for socially-driven behavioural change in your own organisation.

Recommended.

I'm tired of the sterile AV debate

Today, we all have the opportunity to vote, although some will be more inclined than others to turn out because they have regional or local voting too. Londoners do not have this pleasure which means they have to turn out just to have their say on the AV versus FPTP voting system.

In all the acreage of debate about the new voting system (mainly in articles in newspapers, online articles and their comments), I haven't yet seen anyone commenting on what AV would require politicians to do - and that is act like adults and genuinely put their heads together for the good of the country.

The idealist in me says it's the only way forward. The realist in me says it's not going to happen.

In business, leaders have to make decisions rapidly and they (mostly) do it after due consultation with knowledgeable people. In the end, they make their decisions and stand or fall by them.

It's how government ought to work. But could it?

What do you think?

 

Eggs and baskets

Being away from here has given me a chance to focus intensely on launching a new magazine without too many distractions. We now have five issues under our belt and I have reaquainted myself with the rhythms of conventional publishing. I know where the peaks and troughs of effort lie and I can get back to a more normal and less distorted life in the troughs.

Creating, editing and writing for Blue & Green Tomorrow has been a lot of fun and a lot of hard work. And it couldn't have happened without Simon, Lori and Dominic (publisher, sub-editor and designer respectively) and, of course, our marvellous contributors. Other people take care of 'webifying' the magazine at blueandgreentomorrow.com. You can register (free) which gives you an account tab and access to digital copies of the magazine. Otherwise much of the content is publicly available under the various themed tabs.

Even through the mayhem of the launch, I've continued to do the occasional course on how to handle the media, often with my long-time partner in crime, Martin Banks. We used to call ourselves 'Press Here' but, when we both deviated out into analysis work, we sold the domain and renamed ourselves greybeards. One look at our photos will tell you why. I also run the odd writing skills workshop for business people.

And, now, here I am blogging again. Given the nature of the magazine, I suspect that I'll be blogging more about sustainability (could a word possibly sound more boring?) than about IT. But it's hard to keep me away from software. Talking of which, I now have an HTC Desire smartphone running Android, and jolly pleased I am too. That could be another running theme.

We'll see. But, as you can see from the title, I think that a deliberate spread of activities, providing I can do all of them well, will makes for a more balanced and fulfilling life than having all my eggs in one basket.

So, the last post turned out not to be The Last Post after all, just a pause while I gathered my wits.

See you again soon.

David

 

Blue & Green Tomorrow

Funny how things work out. No sooner had I reorganised my life (see this blog post) than I got an irresistible offer to help create and edit a new magazine. Since July, we've been working on the creation of Blue & Green Tomorrow which hit thousands of carefully-selected doormats two days ago.

We've called it Blue & Green Tomorrow because we want our planet to be as blue and green tomorrow as it was yesterday. And we believe that the way to do this is for our readers to start making more informed choices about their domestic, business and financial lives.

We're not interested in stale debate or slanging matches between vested interests which lead to the deferment of decisions, we believe that all of our readers can take positive actions right now, if only they could easily lay their hands on the right information.

That's where the magazine comes in with its news from around the world and features on subjects such as shopping, travel, energy and investment. It is relentlessly focused on positive, practical and pragmatic choices that readers can make to leave the world better than they found it.

We expect their influence to spread and affect others, whether it's by setting an example or by helping to finance the right kinds of business.

We aim to give them an informative and enjoyable read. We want the magazine and its website to become a lively forum for the readers and the publication team. The buzz has already started as we get feedback on the first issue of the magazine. The website is live, but you can expect much more very soon. A twice-monthly email newsletter will follow for those who choose to opt in.

That's probably as much as I can tell you at the moment. One or two people have questioned our use of paper for the magazine but it comes from sustainable forests, is bleach-free and can be easily recycled. You could add other benefits such as it being possible to read it anywhere and it keeping postal workers in business.

When I helped relaunch Personal Computer World in 1979, I just knew we were at the start of a fantastic era in which computer power was going to be put into everyone's hands. Right now, I have similar feelings about the opportunities that face us with clean energy, ethical purchasing, wise investment and sensible travel. And that's just for starters.

As someone whose environmental awareness was awakened in 1974, when I read E F Schumacher's Small is Beautiful, I'm just thrilled to be associated with such a forward-looking and optimistic publication. While I've been involved in many sustainability initiatives over the past seven years, none has felt as 'right' as this one.

I'll keep you posted on progress.

 

Managing Brand and Reputation in a Social Media World

Last week I co-presented a BrightTALK webinar on the impact of social media on branding and reputation for an audience of media and marketing professionals.

The lead presenter was Cathy Pittham, MD of the European arm of global PR company, the Racepoint Group. (Its chairman, Larry Weber, is something of a new media marketing guru and has been writing books on the subject since before most of us knew it was a subject.)

I went to Cathy because I felt she'd have far more practical advice to offer than I possibly could. After all, I was a bit of an outsider to marketing and PR - mainly an observer or a victim, depending on your point of view. So it ended up becoming 'her show' with me asking questions on behalf of the audience.

As we went through the preparation, it became clear to me that operating effectively in the social media world requires many of the hard-won skills from the traditional media world. It also needs a cultural shift by all participants towards openness, giving genuine value and two-way engagement.

Nothing new there, I hear you say. Which is true. Which is why the presentation focuses primarily on what good stuff and processes can be nicked or adapted from tradtional PR and Marketing activities.

As we discussed the powerful combination of traditional and social media techniques, I desperately wracked my brain for a suitable parallel. All I could think of was a nuclear chain reaction, which is triggered by combining two volumes of fissile material to make a single 'critical mass'.

Which is what led to me slipping this final image into the slide deck.

The webinar (BrightTALK calls it a webcast)  lasts a tad under 45 minutes, unless you skip from slide to slide to make it quicker (and jerkier).

The social media world changes all the time but we hope that this presentation will offer you a durable 'framework' for your own planning.

Track what's important with paper.li

To my (slight) shame, I periodically purge the list of people I follow on Twitter. I simply don't have the time to read the minutiae of some of their lives, despite the fact they occasionally come up with worthwhile gems.

Now, I've discovered a way of getting the best of both worlds: I can keep up with the more interesting/useful Tweets from whoever I like while keeping down the number of people I follow in Twitter itself.

So, three cheers for paper.li - a free service that builds online daily newspapers: from a Twitter user and the people they follow; from a twitter list; or from a hashtag. It looks for Tweets that contain links and publishes an extract from the destination, crediting the Tweeter at the foot of the piece. You can click the headline to go to the original article/site

Paper.li earns its money from small display ads dropped into your newspaper.

'envirolist' is my Twitter list of people who specialise in environmental and ethical stuff.

You probably can't see the detail in the above picture, but it has a 'trending topics' cloud and a live Tweet stream from the people in the list over on the right.

I currently have two papers running and I can create a further eight. My two are paper.li/tebbo and the one above, paper.li/tebbo/envirolist.

As a quick way to catch up on what's going on, paper.li is a corker. It requires minimal effort to set up a paper and it will even announce each new edition to your Twitter followers if you want, complete with the inclusion of some contributors' names.

[Update Sept 7: I switched the notification off two days ago. While no-one had complained to me, paper.li updates were beginning to annoy some Twitter users. This could only get worse as the service became more popular. Today, the company has changed the notification to top story only and it has dropped name plugs. It helps, but if anyone wants to follow my papers, the links are in my Twitter bio. I'm not switching notification back on.]

With paper.li's simplicity comes a lack of flexibility but, once you start complicating things, you have to start learning stuff. This turns (some) people off.

As it stands, paper.li reminds me of my first encounter with Google - it was a shock to just see a text box and a search button. And look what that led to...

Interactive Infographic: How To Handle The Media

Since 1988, Martin Banks and I have been running media skills training courses. Early on, we introduced an 'architecture' for the process. We drew it on flipcharts for a few years then, in 2004, we formalised it and started giving it out as part of our wallet-sized plastic business card. The model acts as an 'aide memoire' for all who've attended our training.

A few weeks ago, I was rummaging (as you do) some infographics - pictures that speak well over a thousand words - and took a shine to the interactive variety, where the graphic responds to the user's actions.

I'd just been doing some training work with the Racepoint Group and, coincidentally, one of its US staff Kyle Austin wrote a blog post: Are Infographics the New Slide Shows?  Good point, I thought, having just taken someone through our 'architecture'.

So I set to work to convert our flat image into something a little more lively. It's aim is to refresh the memories of those who've attended our training and to give others an appreciation of how they might set about handling the media.

The first attempt was an animated .gif file with text boxes to expand on each element of the image. Horrible. Boring. Sequential. No user interaction. Didn't lend itself to the web. Etc.

I wanted an interactive infographic that would work in more or less any browser and not depend on the presence of JavaScript, Flash or any other kind of plug-in. Just HTML and CSS. (I'd done some simple stuff before, here and here, so I was optimistic that it could be done.)

The second attempt was a graphic that the user could mouse over, highlighting image elements and showing the relevant text in a nearby box. The size was determined by my computer screen, which was a bit stupid because many of the people I'd like to share it with might have a smaller screen - an iPad for example.

So I reworked it with the iPad in mind. The hover can be achieved with a finger, even on the smallest graphical element. And while I was resizing everything, I added drop shadows and rounded corners to the text boxes.

If you're interested, the end result is at How To Handle The Media

I hope you enjoy it.

PS If anyone wants the gory technical details of how to do this sort of thing, I'll pen another post. Just ask.