Social media is a lot. It is scary and confusing but it is rewarding.
Social media is complex and simple at the same time.
Social media is not a substitute for insight. Social media needs insight to work for your brand or organization, but social media can also generate insight for your brand or organization.
Social media is not always a quick win. Social media is not guaranteed.
Social media is and always should be fun. That’s the social part.
Russ Ackoff has died, aged 90. The FT has a great obituary/eulogy which has some fascinating quotes and insight.
On internal change:
Do not wait for others in the business to start changing things. Go and do it yourself. But more importantly: never forget that everyone in the business is interconnected, that they are all operating as part of a system, that tinkering with one part of the company is never really enough, and may even make things worse. You need to see the business as a whole, as a complete system, if you want to make lasting improvements to it.
On strategy and direction:
All of our problems arise out of doing the wrong thing righter. The more efficient you are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become. It is much better to do the right thing wronger than the wrong thing righter. If you do the right thing wrong and correct it, you get better.
On being, what we at Veritas call, an “orange sheep”:
An organisation that cannot accommodate nonconformity will not be able to retain creative people.
On failure (this applies to people and organizations: see Gretzky, Wayne):
Organisations fail more often because of what they have not done than because of what they have done.
Finally, on people management:
The less managers expect of their subordinates, the less they get.
I’ve never heard of Ackoff before and I’ll certainly be checking out more of his stuff now I’ve been introduced to him.
Anyone who lives in or around the Greater Toronto Area, even in Canada, will likely have heard about or experienced the Highway of Heroes phenomenon which occurs whenever a fallen soldier is returned from the field of battle for a medical autopsy in Toronto. Whenever this happens, there is a spontaneous lining of the 401 by Canadians who show their support for the soldier and the troops in general.
My esteemed colleague, Bob Reid (he of Touchdowns and Fumbles fame) was so moved by this that he wrote and a song about this outpouring of support. After its debut on the Bill Carroll show, Bob spent the last year recording the song and this last Tuesday it was finally released!
The song is embedded below and if you like it, please mozy on over to HMV, iTunes or CD Baby where you can buy the song – proceeds from which will go to the military charity, Wounded Warriors. If you love the song, there are a whole bunch more people who do as well and you can connect with them on the official Facebook fan page.
Congratulations to Bob for this momentous release – I hope it is the success it deserves to be!
I’d like to see the American Copywriter guys come up with better American copywriting than this:
A bouncer in Birmingham hit me in the face with a wrench five times and my wife’s boyfriend broke my jaw with a fence post. So if you don’t buy a home from me, it ain’t going to hurt my feelings.
Closely followed by:
Come on down to Cullman Liquidation and buy a home. Or don’t. I don’t care.
1. The listener thinks ahead of the talker, trying to anticipate what the oral discourse is leading to and what conclusions will be drawn from the words spoken at the moment.
Although, I hate it when people vocalise this. It is distracting when someone constantly interrupts you and tells you either what you are about to tell them or, worse, what they think you are about to tell them.
2. The listener weighs the evidence used by the talker to support the points that he makes. “Is this evidence valid?” the listener asks himself. “Is it the complete evidence?”
3. Periodically the listener reviews and mentally summarizes the points of the talk completed thus far.
4. Throughout the talk, the listener “listens between the lines” in search of meaning that is not necessarily put into spoken words. He pays attention to nonverbal communication (facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice) to see if it adds meaning to the spoken words. He asks himself, “Is the talker purposely skirting some area of the subject? Why is he doing so?”
Very interesting stuff and something we can all work on.
Here’s what Google Canada suggests when you type in each letter of the alphabet.
A – Air Canada (example below)
B – Best Buy
C – Canadian Tire
D – dictionary.com (guess the Canucks can’t spell, eh!)
E – ebay
F – Facebook
G – Gmail
H – Hotmail
I – Ikea
J – Job bank
K – Kijiji
L – Lotto 649
M – Mapquest
N – NHL (of course)
O – OSAP
P – Plenty of Fish
Q – quotes
R – Rogers
S – Scotiabank
T – TD Canada Trust (honestly, i thought this would be the ubiquitous Tim Hortons – disclosure, com.motion and Veritas work with Timothy’s Coffees of the World)
U – UFC
V – Via Rail
W – Weather Network
X – XE (the currency exchange Web site)
Y – YouTube
Z – Zellers
I find this interesting on a couple of fronts.
First there is a bunch of “cancon” in there (Canadian specific sites or queries) which gives me confidence Google is customizing my experience.
Secondly, while as a snapshot this is exercise is fun but ultimately useless, if we can start to track these over time it will be a fascinating anthropological ethnographical study to see what search queries drop in and out of the suggestions.
Finally, the search results for the letter is not the same as the suggestion. Make of that what you will.
Regular trends include worrying about the H1N1 flu and/or vaccine, Twitter being considered mainstream and going “green”.
Five megatrends to watch are:
Mass collaboration is powering the new economy
The brand that gets it: Apple (app store and developer community)
Constant connectivity in an on-demand world
The brand that gets it: Sprint (the “now network”)
Globalization: Making the world a smaller place
The brand that gets it: Aliababa.com
Pervasive distrust in big corporations
The brand that gets it: Ally Bank (“straightforward” is its tagline and some ad copy is: “That means talking straight, doing right and being obviously better for our customers”)
A global sense of urgency to fix the problems of a modern world
For discussion: is mass collaboration the answer for pervasive distrust in big corporations? It is interesting that big corporations are deliberately using social media to both seem smaller and encourage that collaboration.
We use the following formula when explaining this stuff to clients:
Nothing is more important or more of a differentiator between businesses than their corporate culture. Jason Calacanis is writing Mahalo’s own corporate culture document and posted three great examples.
I found it fascinating that according to the Forrester report (most) brand marketers:
A) aportion budget based on historical spending patterns
B) do not apply media modelling to predict how media choices and spending will impact their brand
C) find it hard to credit the correct marketing medium for a sale
On point C, I saw on Twitter that @fififofum said:
RT @spikejones: Just talked to a person in a Fortune 200 that said, “Sometimes WOM is not about ROI.” Amen, brother. Preach it.
Yes marketers have experimental budgets to experiment with on new and emerging mediums like word of mouth. But if you can’t even notionally assign any sales to your experiments, guess what? They get cut.
The purpose of a business is to make money. The purpose of the marketing department is to convince consumers they need to buy from the business.
Clearly measuring ROI is tough and, truth be told, many organizations don’t set their marketing up for success in this field. But it doesn’t mean we should stop trying to measure and apportion sales to activities like WOM.
I'm Ed Lee, still fresh faced from five years on the front lines of PR and online communications. I'm now managing director at com.motion, an online and social media marketing consultancy.
An Englishman living and working in Toronto, Canada, this is my journey of exploration into the world of social media. Join me at e_v_lee[at]hotmail.com
Posted by Ed Lee 
Posted by Ed Lee 
Posted by Ed Lee 
