Archive for the ‘Data’ Category

The rise of the expressive web

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

Human/Need/Desire. Bruce Nauman, 1983
 

As a living thing powered by billions of people, the web is constantly evolving and currently one thing above all others is emerging. It’s a trend we’ve been talking about with clients for a while, it’s the rise of what we’re calling the expressive web.

According to Techcrunch, Pinterest just hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history. It is one of the top 10 social media sites in the world.

Platforms like Pinterest, Instagram and Foodspotting are challenging original titans of the web like Flickr and Youtube. They’re offering an altogether more sensual and collaborative type of social platform and providing people with a greater opportunity to express themselves, in new ways, that is proving highly attractive.

Four main drivers are powering this shift.

1. The expressive web creates extra value
We’ve laid the basic groundwork of the web, so what now? Reveling in the sensuality of rich, interactive content feeds into a basic Maslow-style desire for advanced self-expression. Increasingly people are finding their voice. That voice is creative, it wants to be expressed.

Smart brands will enable this and make it part of their culture. This is happening as a shift towards co-creation, too. As the web becomes more democratic, users also want to become more compelling by seeking out and adopting content platforms that are built on co-created expression, around them and their desires.

2. Masses of data makes socially powered curation attractive
Two years ago when we were saying to brand managers that brands of the future will need to be good at curation, many of them didn’t understand what we were saying. Now, reputations can be rapidly built and brand associations can be recast by good curation skills. Curation as a sense-making skill is only going to increase in demand. Platforms like Pinterest, Scoop.it and Storify that make curation easy are becoming big winners because of this.

3. Rich content contains more information
Ever since the logo was identified as a cool shorthand, a body of scientific evidence’s been amassed about how much information is conveyed by ‘the pretties’. Analytic types may gasp, but a good image contains substantially more information than the equivalent in words or numbers (up to 20 times more information in fact) which goes some way to explaining the popularity of the infographic.

Interactive features, responsive web design, sound effects, they all create what we’d call a ‘visceral’ reaction. A moment of interactivity that fires synpases has engagement potential and is also expressive.

So while words will always be around, the web’s giving us a whole new way of communicating in cool shorthands and it has big implications for information architects and content managers.

4. Doing a job is harder these days, being expressive’s an antidote
In fact, 225m people in Europe don’t have a job at all. Those that do have full plates and can be pretty stressed out. It’s a sideways issue perhaps, but the expressive web is providing an alternative to traditional spoon-fed entertainment that enables escapism and self-discovery in ways which are just as highly accessible but where the user is in control.

The expressive web is therapy. It generates ideas and sparks the imagination. Another reason that explains people are taking to it in such numbers.

For marketers this is a very big deal. It’s a signal that, thanks to the social web, the essential nature of communication is taking a turn and it’s demonstrating how the quality of the co-created user-experiences becoming key performance indicators.

IBM’s Global CMO Study shows around 70% of chief marketing officers are unprepared for the explosion in data and the social web that the expressive web intersects. Many of them are in organizations with legacy structures finding it hard to turn around the way they do things.

As sites like Pinterest show, the expressive web has just ramped up the communication challenge a notch. It’s making it even more important that communication isn’t being seen as boring or difficult to use. It’s asking marketers to think about the way they define and serve up content in a fundamentally different way.

The expressive, artistic, web is the high touch equal-and-opposite to high tech functionality. It was never not going to happen. Are we prepared to make the most of it?

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Curation, Data, Human Relations, Neuroscience, Self development, Social business design |

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When the consumer’s the connection

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

At a fundamental level, business dynamics are up in the air around how brands can build their business models and market themselves.

It used to be that it’s the company that’s the distributor, that’s the long-held assumption. Distribution‘s been the bedrock of an entire business model.

So what happens if that changes and the customer is the connector?

To give you an example, I’m a bit partial to Rude Health’s Morning Glory porridge. It’s great with raisins and keeps for a week in the fridge. Camilla Bernard is one of the two founders of Rude Health and someone I’ve met at a meetup which helps. She’s the one that gives Rude Health its social voice. I like what she and the brand stands for, that the brand has a passion around it, that it’s healthy and full of authentic value. I especially like how Rude Health responds and joins in with social conversations.

As a result I’m prepared to be part of Rude Health’s contribution economy, and I’ll speak up for it as an advocate, not because someone pays me to do it, but because I want to.

I also like Waitrose. I shop there regularly. I especially like the way John Lewis partnership’s building on its impressive trust credentials by being open about its sales data.

Good or bad, I’m rooting for them for that, it helps me build a belief in them, I’ll maybe shop there more if I see they’re struggling.

Like any customer, for me supermarket retailing’s about ease and convenience, but I want to get as much bang for my buck as well. The trust that’s in the equation and Waitrose’s values and personality are at least as important as the ability to transact with them.

At the moment my local favourite supermarket doesn’t stock my favourite breakfast cereal. Disaster. This messes up my user experience! So I’m happy to connect the two brands together via social media.

Everyone wins in this scenario. Waitrose gets information about a Key Value Item on the shelf that virtually guarantees my weekly food spend goes to them. They also get to understand more about their local demographics at no cost. Rude Health hopefully gets a listing. I get the breakfast I like more easily.

Businesses that understand social commerce principles and the network effects of social media can do a great deal to create lucrative and compelling user-centric business models around that.

As a new kind of distribution model though, it asks brands to organize around the fact that the customer has become the connection.

When the customer is the connection, you’re really looking at the prospect of marriages made in heaven. The game’s no longer about brands pushing out product through a variety of (expensive) communications channels but about playing a proactive part in a mesh of demographic interests, powered by social media.

How well many are prepared for this change though is another matter. Are brands really making the most of this shift? Are they realigning themselves and their business processes and competencies around it, and how much are they losing by not doing so?

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business model, Business performance, Data, Human Relations, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Social business design |

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Dialogue is authenticity

Thursday, March 17th, 2011

The best ideas come out in conversation.

Have you experienced how ideas often tumble out when talking with someone, or in the shower, or even talking to the voice in your head?

It happens a lot, collectively and individually.

It’s only when we engage iteratively in that way that ideas get honed and polished, stimulated by the prism of different perspectives.

What happens is that in dialogue, we engage more than our brains. The interaction sets off our sympathetic nervous system, the power ingredient that creates a better solution.

Listening to an excellent talk by Tim Wu at the Royal Society of Arts yesterday on the Rise and Fall of Information Empires made me think about this too.

Tim highlighted an obvious but at the same time profound insight. It’s the acid test you can use to see whether an organization or person is generating new value or protecting expiring value. It’s done by watching whether a company is devoting its energy and focusing its behaviours on innovation or defence.

An innovation mindset will spread to others, as the sympathetic nervous system reacts towards it; a culture of defence will spread fear and propulsion away from that mindset. This is a basic survival instinct.

Collaborative dialogue however, one in which both parties adapt a little, will create solutions. That is why and how organisations benefit by adopting the behaviour of leaning into situations and becoming lean and agile in terms of working across silos. As with contracting pairs of muscles, in partnership with others they’ll also generate power.

I’m bearing all this in mind when it comes to reacting to the news today in the Guardian that ‘the US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media using fake online personas designed to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.’

It goes on to say, ‘the contract stipulates each persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 controllers must be able to operate false identities from their workstations “without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries’.

The article itself sparked a little conversation between Katie Smith and myself that led to this tweet -

Which led in another way, to this post – the observation that I want to share being that the grand shuffling of old protocols that disruptive technology’s creating is having quite a profound, but manageable, effect.

It’s having an effect across a number of management forms – across forms of government, upon business models, and upon marketing and communications. They all face having to accept a re-arrangement across traditional flows of power, and how to augment the duality of new power relationships into their businesses.

Even technology requires bio-feedback to work well, as the stricken Japanese are finding.

In all contexts, that feedback’s the single greatest reassurance one can have. Open data allows and enables this.

All this means that the value of win:win social contracts is ascending, whilst competitive power, based on I win:you lose management principles aren’t.

In communications and marketing terms, then, the implication is that dialogue’s never been more important to a successful operating model. We need to consider this and how to build dialogue into organizations through new processes.

It’s not enough to simply broadcast content using social media. Even if it’s done by as many people as possible within the organization who are ‘social communications’ literate, there has to be interaction and ongoing dialogue, as well as conversation which has the potential to be asynchronous.

Social media is about doing more ‘human business’ than has been done previously in the past. Increasingly, brand authenticity in this social media context is dialogue.

The kind of authenticity that breeds dialogue will be where relationships connect at a deeper level, that generate collaborative conversation, because the sympathetic nervous system will also be engaged at that point. Ultimately, this way of marketing and communicating will be more productive.

The challenge for organizations however isn’t small – all the triggers that reinforce the old ways of being have to be looked at as well as assumptions that can sit within a business model or marketing strategy.

This is one of the things we look at when going deeper into organizations to switch on dormant performance.

In real life and on-line, sock-puppets don’t do dialogue. A good volley of questions and answers and co-created conversation is where insight, ideas, value and satisfying user experiences are to be found.

Dialogue is authenticity. It’s also sustainability  – could this be something it’s now time to embed into an operating model and marketing strategy? What are your ideas on it?

 

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business, Business performance, Corporate development, Data, Identity, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Neuroscience, Self development, Social business design, Society |

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How distinctive are your social markings?

Monday, February 7th, 2011

Who are we? We’re the sum total of things that make an impressions on our lives.

Our natures don’t exist in a vacuum. Collectively and individually, we’re the things that make us – those formative experiences, the times of achievement and transcended challenges when new levels of experience were reached or we had memorable moments with others we can recall years later.

On a personal level, there’s huge value in the memories and the objects that remind us of these moments.

And on a corporate level too, it’s really no different.

For any organisation thinking about how to become more social, the key is becoming more collaborative. And for any organization thinking about their brand, an important question now is to what extent, and how, does its social identify reflect this?

Brand identities, as signifiers, are a combination of identification and communication. They’re the necessary redux needed to get a sense of something in one easy sitting.

The easy fix then would be to include people more obviously, much in the same way as brands added the word ‘Direct’ after their logos when online presences first appeared. That’s a crude and potentially short-sighted articulation of what being a social brand can be.

In the age of the factory, all one had to do was hang a sign over the door and people would come marching through it, ready to produce and consume, because there were few other choices on offer.

Things have changed, and brands have multiplied. Over time, competitive pressure has demanded that brands have embarked on a journey to develop an individual look and feel; to be more recognizable, distinctive and preferred.

Today it doesn’t matter where you’re a large corporate or a company of one, if you are actively social then it follows that you have a digital footprint, and it follows then that footprint should have some clear markings that create a trail, that leave a clue as to who you are as a distinctive species of value.

At Davos, Goldman Sachs was cited by Edelman as a company that aces social media. Goldman Sachs doesn’t have a great social reputation. It aces social media but it isn’t a social organization.

If you’re a valuable social brand, people will want to follow and participate in what you do, and you’ll let them. So if the biggest social compliment anyone can pay is they seek to include others, how is that being reflected in the unifying thought of your organization and your social identity?

As part of the possible answer to that question, thanks go to Johnnie Moore and Euan for pointing this out recently:

‘We are conditioned by what we eat, by the economic pressures, by the culture and society in which we live. We are that culture, we are that society.’

Our online social environment is often regarded as primarily a technical and digital phenomenon, but if you dig a little deeper what you’ll realize we connect with in social communities in actual fact are our authentic selves and each other’s native spirit.

Picture by Liddy Napanangka Walker ‘Wakirlpirri Jukurrpa’ (Dogwood Tree Dreaming).

It’s time to bring these to life as part of your social brand’s assets.

Data visualization and story telling are both very powerful ways to articulate social identity, and we should be looking at data visualizations that take data closer to art.

Novo Nordisk has done a great job of telling it’s story online in its integrated Annual Report, but it’s a shame that the great content isn’t brought to life with animated datasets, a visual story, interactivity and rich media that can be an essential part of communicating the social dynamic of a brand.

For food and FMCG brands, the opportunity is to tell useful data stories about food provenance and product journeys as part of being a sustainable brand.

Unfortunately the nature of datasets today is one where the ability to customize information so that it’s part of an organisation’s collective graphical, verbal and behavioural identity is missing. Tools are largely proprietary. This is something we’re seeking to address. The telling of the Microsoft journey below is a good step in the right direction, as are these about Foursquare and Old Spice.

Social brands communicate best when they have clear and recognizable cultural watermarks.

Picture by Quasimondo

They need their art to be seen as well as their output to be engaging. As data journalism comes more adopted, this is a big opportunity for future forward developers.

The challenge is on now to see who will tell the best stories for social organizations by blending data with visual art.

This opportunity to tell visceral stories is the way to develop more effective brand communication and social organization involvement, and if you have come across some powerful data visualizations about brands, please share them with us and we’ll add them to our Tumblr blog of them here.

As Steve Moore has described it, convening, curating and narrating the progress of the collectively smart social organization, and telling stories about ‘the net worth within the network’, and doing it your way, isn’t this all a part of who you are, if you are a social organization?

We’re looking for developers who can collaborate with us on developing powerful data stories for brands. We think that’s one way we can help the artistry of how social organizations develop. If you’re interested in being a part of it, we’d love to hear from you.

Tuhoe Isaac by Ashley Daws. The face of an individual and his identity, honest, unique, full of integrity.

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Corporate development, Data, Identity, Marketing, Social business design, Society |

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