Tag: transparency

  • The path to transparency

    Google Me is already showing great results, even before its launch. Maybe its the fear of whatever-it-is-going-to-be that has made Facebook release a couple of tools a few days back. 😉

    Facebook Live (via), a live video streaming facility, with features like a live feed, and ‘ask a question’. More interesting is the app that will allow regular Fan Page administrators to add this to their page and the embedding on other platforms – Twitter, Google Buzz etc. But what I’d really like is for Facebook to get into proper video distribution- create an app that will replicate what the Justin.tv and Ustream apps for Facebook achieve. So brands/organisations can stream everything from say, earning calls to new store openings to special brand ambassador promos and so on. Think of the engagement possibilities.

    Notes. I have never found Notes very interesting at all – maybe because I blog a lot. So, except for the occasional note, or using it to get the blog feed into Facebook, my usage has been limited. For long, I’ve been asking why Facebook doesn’t allow me to tag Pages that I need not necessarily have ‘Like’d (in the Facebook way) , but would want to still tag in a status. So I couldn’t do say, “visited the @Wrangler store” as a status unless I ‘Like’ the Wrangler Page. I still can’t, but now I can do this in Notes, and I can add photos too. As ‘Location’ looms, it’ll be interesting to see how brands deal with this.

    Even as the opportunities for brands to engage increase, I can’t help but feel that its also moving them to some inevitable levels of transparency. The good part about all this for brands, though Facebook may not be the ideal way to do it, is a certain accountability that it creates for people who create content and comment on the brand, thanks to identity.

    A few weeks back, Surekha, Mahendra and I had a good commenting session over ‘The Age of Transparency‘ on Reader, an article that talks about the implications of transparency on individuals, society, government, companies. While we’re still far away from a stage when transparency is a default and ubiquitous feature for people, brands and organisations, it might well be a reality in a few years. Like Surekha mentioned in her comment, it wouldn’t do any good for a brand to engage only because it can’t afford not to, but then the question is, will brands/organisations see the trends in the evolution of these tools and more importantly society in general, and be objective enough to start rewiring themselves? Or maybe the ‘forced’ presence and the opportunities that new tools provide will act as a good catalyst for the required change.

    until next time, anonymous comments are fine too 🙂

    Bonus Read: Kapil Ohri’s well researched article on Indian brands on Facebook, (and my earlier post on social media and the scale of organisations) 🙂

  • Social Inside

    There’s quite a funny video that has got almost 50,000 views by now on YouTube. It is titled ‘The Social Media Guru’, and in case you haven’t seen it by now, you should take a look, though you might want to keep the audio levels down thanks to the language

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKCdexz5RQ8

    While the video does generalise and could cause some heartburn among some who work on social media and do good work, the reason I found it funny was because I see around me, a lot of what is shown in there – a preoccupation with the tools/platforms in vogue, and the lack of something as basic as an objective. As always, the tools are less important than the philosophy of sharing, collaborating, and 2 way communication that’s happening not just on social media sites, but across the web, though the former, because of their inherent nature, have taken it to a different level altogether. The combination of a client who has decided his brand needs to be on twitter, thanks to some article he read somewhere (or an even more vague reason) and the social media guru whose answer to any client is a templated Facebook page + twitter account + you tube, is quite lethal – to two sets of people – the agencies/individuals who are doing/interested in some genuinely useful work on the social media platforms and the brands who decide not to take the plunge basis the results of the poorly thought through/executed programs of other brands. It doesn’t help that the medium is still in its nascent stages and everyone is still learning.

    While social media practices and practitioners might be fewer in India, as compared to the US, the challenges faced show very little such skew. I read two posts recently on the subject. Karthik wrote about ‘selling social media engagement in India‘, where, with the experience of working in a PR firm and pitching social media, he looks at the changes he’s seen in the acceptance of social media among clients over the last couple of years, and the key attributes for making the sale. He mentions how an existing communications partner has a ‘door opener’ advantage as compared to say, an exclusive social media agency, which helps them get the right  people from the client side involved in the pitch, and the need for proper articulation and simple guides which could be used by the client team to sell to their bosses.

    In another extremely interesting post, Sanjay writes about “Advertising Agencies and Social Media: The Challenges“. He notes fundamental differences in the way an advertising agency looks at communication, and how communication actually happens in social media. The observations on ‘campaign’ focus, the obsession with perfection (copy), the mechanics of how communication is rolled out, are all spot on, and something that I too have experienced several times while dealing with creative agencies. He ends by mentioning that in the current scenario, agencies keep treating these platforms as broadcast media. That last thought is something I keep deploring regularly here, so I completely agree.

    Now the thing is, while these are all perfectly valid points, I was looking at it from a different perspective. I wonder if, in the entire spiel, social media’s proximity to marketing/communication/brand as a function completely overshadows the cultural transition required by the client organisation. Does it get discussed at all? Even in my post rant some time back, I had only emphasised the usage of social media in the PR, research, advertising disciplines and the different stages of the product life cycle – including sales, customer care etc, and barely mentioned the culture change.

    The subject of a shift in culture is something I have written about in several contexts – from basic thoughts on transparency in organisations and controlling employee communication internally and with the outside world, to the need for organisations to understand themselves and the value they provide before going overboard with listening and acting on consumer feedback, to whether the size and scale of the organisation dictates its culture and its internal and external communication processes,  and the necessity to tackle business problems and look at it as something that needs to be addressed at an enterprise level too and not just at a brand level. The Dachis Group presentation – ‘Social Business by Design‘ illustrates this extremely well.

    I examined it further in the framework of the Awesomeness manifesto, which i regard as an excellent set of fundamentals for organisations, if they want to operate profitably in the evolving business scenario, and in all four of its pillars, I could see the need for a more holistic approach to social media. Its obviously easier said than done. It involves a vision, the zeal and guts to translate that into internal and external business practices- from environment to employee friendliness, training of personnel, readjustment of business goals, hiring people who understand this new design – like say, P&G’s technopologist, who can operate across functions to evangelise it and help apply it in different contexts. And that’s just a few things. Look at an application of this across your organisation, and you’ll see how massive an endeavor it is. Maybe only a few organisations are thinking about it now, but I think it might become an imperative very soon, decided by external forces beyond the organisation’s control. Whether this is spearheaded by the organisations themselves or an external agency would be a decision based on several subjective parameters. Maybe then, organisations will be able to figure out the ‘gurus’ better. 🙂

    So while, it is good to see great social media efforts from brands, I wonder whether more needs to be done to integrate it more fundamentally within the organisation.

    until next time, social nirvana 🙂

    Bonus Reads:

    Customer Twervice by Social Media Explorer (10 examples of companies using social media for customer service)

    Social Media Policy Database (Via Six Pixels of Separation)

    Why its time to do away with the Brand Manager 🙂

  • Big brands, small ideas

    I ended last week’s post with a note that social media services provide brands a way of having their lifestream online, and weaving themselves into the consumers’ context. Last week, I read an interesting article on Six Pixels of Separation titled “Your Company is a Media Company“. It talks about how the different social media tools allow companies to publish their own content without the aid of the earlier generation’s tools and processes – newspapers, PR companies etc, and how these companies are finding new ways to tell stories. It also discusses how consumers now expect companies to be connected, listening and reacting – in a human voice. I remember touching upon this subject in a few old posts of mine – “The new media owners“, and “The Evolution of Content Marketing” a few months back.

    One of the biggest gripes that come up when big brands arrive on social media services is how they use it as just another broadcast channel for their TVCs/microsite/contest etc without adding any value to the reader/consumer. I have seen many a brand on Twitter completely disappear when their promotion ends, perhaps it came up only because ‘Twitter account, Facebook page’ were the current flavours in the marketing communication checklist. These are obviously generalisations, and the three examples that I’d discussed in the last post are obvious exceptions.

    While wondering why it has to be this way, I remembered an old post of mine, which though discussed the future role of a brand manager, had started out on a different premise. It had been triggered by a superb post by Russell Davies titled “the tyranny of the big idea“, and a couple of wonderful notes at Misentropy, which took the idea further. (All the three posts I have linked to are 1-3 years old, and I still find them great reads. What I’m trying to say is that you MUST read them)

    In the last few days, I have seen a few posts that have explored this theme, from different perspectives. Six Pixels of Separation has a post that discusses how the combination of 3 factors – a conversation based social media, real time and fragmented media would mean that marketing strategy would have to move away from the big idea and be more involved with smaller ideas basis the type of people the brand talks to, the platform of discussion, and the context. Closer to home, I read a good post  on afaqs – a question posed – whether television is hogging the resources (financial and talent) because in India it is the most preferred medium (not basis revenue) for marketers as well as the advertising fraternity. L Bhat has a very pertinent post on regional branding, and how Indian brands approach it with a one-size-fits-all approach, relying on translations which don’t do justice to the original idea, or showing contexts which have no relevance to the local audience. He notes (illustrated with examples) that brands which have developed communication specifically for the region have touched a chord with the audience. Another indicator that media fragmentation is not just about the web, let alone social media.

    With the advent of the internet, and specially social media, brands have the opportunity now to use this means of distribution to explore the long tail of audiences and marketing communication. The economies that dictate the usage of television, print etc – in terms of both production and distribution, do not really apply on the web. The NYT has an article on the rise of sentiment analysis – the social web as a ‘canary in the coalmine’, as a way to identify opinion leaders, as a forecasting tool, and so on. Its still early days yet, and we will obviously see much improvement in the current systems. In BlogAdda’s interview with Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Analytics evangelist, I had asked about the effect of the ’emotional responses’ in social media on the field of analytics. As he explains, there cannot be a single tool that can capture all data, and those who monitor this, will have to get used to the idea of multiplicity. From just deciding where communication will be distributed (and to a certain extent, consumed) to  having to track where conversations are happening in an ‘everything reviewed‘ (Transparency, Trendwatching’s September trend)  world, and then deciding the what-why – that is quite a drastic change. These are obviously not mutually exclusive, but it still is a challenge.

    The earlier models of communication (and even some elements of strategy) have perhaps been conceptualised and practised without factoring in instant two way communication, conversation among consumers, and multiple touch points. It was relatively easy for everyone concerned to have one big idea and push it into all the channels. That is perhaps what is happening as ‘social’ is seen as just another ‘media’, but it works differently. It involves a whole new set of rules, some yet to be even thought of. While there will be quite a few advantages, there will also be several challenges for the brand- to be different within the core brand idea, to add value to the different kinds of audiences in context, to decide levels of transparency and be comfortable with it, to be a ‘media company’, to be also comfortable with the rigours of listening and possibly having to react real time. There will be challenges for the brand manager, like I mentioned in the post earlier. There will be challenges for the creative agencies – when they develop ideas, they have to be medium and context specific, and also know how to respond in real time. They will also have to be churning out fresh ideas on a regular basis. There will be challenges for media agencies – to find out the maximum possible touch points relevant for the brand. And this is not just to do with the web and social media alone, but the better usage of other media too. Brands can actually be different things to different people, and be relevant. In short, a drastic overhaul of the system which currently operates, before they an get to being a media company. Being a ‘media company’ and ‘always on’ means that the ‘content’ cannot solely be made of big ideas. Possible, but impractical, I’d say, unless its an idea with several rendition and execution possibilities. From one big idea every quarter/year to a stream of small ideas. Not necessarily, perhaps, but probably so. I wonder, how many big brands and agencies will be game for playing with small ideas.. and failing sometimes?

    until next time, a tyrannosaurus hex 🙂

  • Bridge over troubled water

    In ‘Tin Fish‘, there is a wonderful speech given by the school captain, which goes (edited a bit)

    …..I am not what I’d have liked to be. The school is aiming to prepare me for others. I want to be for myself. But it is growing increasingly difficult for me to prepare myself for myself as my expectations grow greater. A reformed, open-hearted school can help me. Till then, I shall stand on the beaches, look towards the sea and wait for a solution to be washed ashore.

    The novel is set in a boarding school in Rajasthan, deals with peer and parental pressure, and has the chaotic politics of the 70s as the backdrop. As a late 70s born, I could identify with the book because though the cultural icons had changed (rock bands/actresses etc) societal changes seemed to have moved at a much slower pace. The value and belief systems as well as the prejudices – caste, religion, income are a part of the 80s too.

    I could also identify with the above excerpt on two counts. ‘Preparing me for others’ ..the pressure to conform – on the kind of education one should have, the kind of career one chose, the kind of person one could get married to, one’s conduct with family, boss, and one’s behaviour in society in general, all had their own sets of conformity. ‘Prepare myself for myself’..when I wrote this post sometime back, I had mentioned the conformity that the blog imposes on the blogger, it is something that happens in real life too – we create an image of ourselves, consciously or more likely, sub consciously, and try to stick to it. In either case, more often than not, objectivity will be lost.

    Sometime back, I also came across this wonderful piece in the New York magazine, titled ‘Say Everything’. It talks about how as the young population gets increasingly used to the net, there are many among them, for whom, sharing their ‘stuff’ online is the natural way to be, and for whom, privacy has an entirely different definition. In fact they consider the extreme caution of the earlier net generation to be narcissistic and are prepared for the implications that the shared stuff might have on their lives decades later. The author sees this as the biggest generation gap in a long time, perhaps since the hippie generation. She even wonders whether in this era of surveillance cameras and tracked card transactions, their belief that privacy is an illusion might be the sane approach. The article outlines a series of changes that are happening with this generation –  “they think of themselves as having an audience, they have archived their adolescence, their skin is thicker than ours”

    Now, one could say that they are conforming to an online audience (like my blog example), but as the author points out, over a period of time, will this generation, which has been growing up with the net, move towards such degrees of comfort that they are totally un-self conscious? And perhaps, to quote the extreme example used by the author, a Paris Hilton level where what could have been the worst humiliation possible, was used as a stepping stone for fame? A generation so transparent that any ‘forced’ conformity would be easily detected and would be undesired. And moving on, to use the words I had seen in a totally different context (link), would transparency be (or subsume) objectivity?

    At this stage, we are of course, smack in the middle of these changes, but unlike the above generation, technology (more specifically, the web) entered our lives relatively much later. We perhaps have the baggage of not just peers/parents/society but also the ones we have created for ourselves earlier on in our lives. We might struggle to adjust, but yet we are perhaps the bridge generation, across the cultural changes wrought by the www or even liberalisation (in India). Did every generation have to play similar roles? 🙂

    until next time, stage fright

  • Brands – Maturity, Transparency, Objectivity

    On the day that gay sex was made legal in India, I had wondered aloud on Twitter, whether condom brands like KS, Moods or even a deo brand like Axe – whose communication is all about attracting people (the female gender so far, since its a deo for men) – would use the occasion to provide a bit of a twist in their standard advertisements. As expected, none of them did. Which led me to wonder on the maturity of audiences and those of brands. (‘maturity’ for the lack of a better word, a more elaborate description follows)

    From an experience in an earlier place of work, when we had played on the visuals of Sai Baba and Jimi Hendrix and talked about music and religion, I have seen the fear that marketers have about how the consumer will react to a communication that could be taken as offbeat. In the case above, one could argue about hurting sentiments of followers (Sai Baba’s, according to the client, Hendrix’, worried the copywriter 😀 ), but there really wasn’t anything derogatory. Now that may be a subjective reaction, so let’s go back to the initial example. I’m reasonably sure that even if KS/Moods/Axe had thought of this, they might have decided not to pursue it.

    Is that because of a simple positioning mismatch that they perceive, or is it a fear to push the boundaries, of what they perceive as acceptable to their audience? Something that goes against the image they have created. But, as we keep discussing here, consumers are moving on. They talk to each other, and share their experiences about the brand, which may or may not work in advantage of the brand.

    Meanwhile, I recently read an article in the New York magazine, which got me thinking quite a bit on this subject. The article was titled ‘Say Everything‘, and talked about what the author perceived to be the largest generation gap since the hippie generation. While the extreme scenarios outlined in the article- of the kind of photos and complete transparency, of thinking of themselves as having an audience, of archiving their adolescence, of having a thicker skin than earlier generations- may not be what the average youth indulges in in his community, it does point to a generation which is growing increasingly uninhibited with sharing more and more of themselves with others on the net. The author points out that with surveillance cameras, transaction tracking etc becoming the norm, this complete transparency approach might be a saner route.

    In fact aren’t FB/Twitter status updates, and even online journals that many in my generation indulge in, also cases of living for an audience? The details of what they share might vary when compared to a younger user set, but this seems to be a trend that may not be scaled back, and in all possibilities, would increase. With the social tools that keep improving the ways to communicate, and share, can brands afford to cling to the kind of communication that they are used to delivering to the audience?

    In another article I read, YouTube blogger Kristina Horner, who was criticised for working with Ford Fiesta, makes a wonderfully simple, yet passionate argument that for “both bloggers and brands to be successful they need to accept that traditional advertising is not-effective (and even rejected) and that publishers like Kristina can find a win-win situation where a brand supports their work without compromise.”

    Would being completely transparent (yes, that is a bit of a redundancy, i guess) ensure that brands get a fair deal from the people they communicate to? Like I read in another context, would transparency fulfill the function that objectivity is supposed to?  But as always, transparency is not something that can operate only in communication, it moves to product, and many other functions within the organisation. So, as more and more consumers realise what Kristina has articulated so well, shouldn’t brands also take some initiative in changing themselves, and collaborating with their consumers?  That would take some maturity, i guess. 🙂

    until next time, audible audiences

    PS. For those missing the Tool Aid that is the blog’s staple diet, here are a few interesting reads

    The Sysomos in depth Twitter study that places India in the top 10 countries in which Twitter has been growing.

    The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing report.

    The Wetpaint/ Altimeter list of the world’s most engaging brands, and how there might be a link between engagement and financial performance