TheSocialCMO

In Praise of Slow Media

Slow media is patient. It’s not on a deadline. It isn’t measured in column inches. It can be calm instead of sensational, deep instead of superficial.

In the age of “Breaking news, Emmy nominations announced!” and 140 characters, it’s sort of surprising to realize that we are also living in the golden age of slow media.

For years, on Sunday mornings, you could find me sitting in my driveway, recently arrived home from one errand or another, listening to Krista Tippett’s extraordinary interviews on the radio. Thanks to the web, there’s no need to sit in your car any longer, and Krista’s groundbreaking approach is spreading. Spending 90 minutes in the studio with her to create this week’s show was, for me, one of the highlights of my career. (download).

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Twitter passes 200 million monthly active users; no longer a fad

I wrote my first in-depth post covering Twitter in March 2007 saying that Twitter would be the “message heard around the world.” Since then, we learned that Twitter has become a human seismograph where news no longer breaks it tweets. We learned to speak in 140 characters or less. We’ve witnessed Tweets erupt into revolutions. Hashtags are now a way of life. And, we now live in a world where if it wasn’t tweeted, it didn’t happen. Life unfolds in a digital river where experiences and common interests are the ties that bind us. Twitter is indeed part of the fabric of how our world communicates and connects and it contributes to the evolution of our #digitallifestyle.

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Learning how to see

If you want to make something new, start with understanding. Understanding what’s already present, and understanding the opportunities in what’s not. Most of all, understanding how it all fits together.

Watch the last two minutes of the classic film, 2001. Today’s technology would allow someone to make a short film like this with very little effort. But could you? The making isn’t the hard part, in fact. It’s the seeing.

Would you have the guts to go this slow? To use music this boldy? To combine iconography from three different centuries over two millenia?

Where is the explosion of the death star and where are the hackneyed tropes of a hundred or a thousand prior sci-fi movies?

Stanley Kubrick, the film’s director, saw. He saw images and stories that were available to anyone who chose to see them, but others averted their eyes, grabbed for the easy or the quick or the work that would satisfy the boss in closest proximity.

When everyone has the same Mac and the same internet, the difference between hackneyed graphic design and extraordinary graphic design is just one thing—the ability to see.

Seeing, despite the name, isn’t merely visual. I worked briefly with Arthur C. Clarke thirty years ago, and he saw, but he saw in words, and in concepts. The people who built the internet, the one you’re using right now, saw how circuits and simple computer code could be connected to build something new and bigger. Others had the same tools, but not the same vision.

And all around us, we’re surrounded by limits, by disasters (natural and otherwise) and by pessimism. Some people see in this opportunity and a chance to draw (with any sort of metaphorical pen) something. Others see in it a chance to hide, to settle and to sigh.

The same confidence and hubris that Kubrick and Clarke brought to their movie is available to anyone who decides to give more than they ‘should’ to a charity that has the audacity to change things. While others believe they can (and must) merely settle.

In our best possible future together, I hope we’ll do a better job of learning to see one another.

Some people see a struggling person and turn away. Others see a human being and work to open a door or lend a hand. There are possiblities all around us. Not just the clicks of recycling a tired cliche, but the opportunity to be brave. If we only had the guts.

Seth Godin

 

Freedom in a digital world

For a long time, there was alignment between what we wanted when it came to privacy and what was possible for the government to do. We relished our privacy and got used to the freedom to act anonymously at the same time that the government and marketers really couldn’t keep track even if they wanted to.

In the pre-internet world, there was just no way to imagine a useful database of every citizen’s fingerprints. The thought that a store would know every item you’ve ever purchased (and not just at their store) was crazy. Freedom from intrusion existed largely because the alternative was impossible.

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Why vote? The marketing dynamics of apathy


Here’s what political marketers learn from people who don’t vote:

Nothing.

If you don’t vote because you’re disappointed with your choices, disgusted by tactics like lying and spin, or merely turned off by the process, you’ve opted out of the marketplace.

The goal of political marketers isn’t to get you to vote. Their goal is to get more votes than the other guy. So they obsess about pleasing those that vote. Everyone else is invisible.

Steakhouses do nothing to please vegetarians who don’t visit them, and politicians and their handlers don’t care at all about non-voters.

The magic of voting is that by opting in to the system, you magically begin to count. A lot.

If you don’t like negative ads, for example, then vote for the candidate who ran even 1% fewer negative ads. Magically, within a cycle or two, the number of negative ads begins to go down.

One reason that people don’t vote (a real, usually unspoken reason) is that they don’t want to feel responsible for the person who wins. The other reason is that they don’t want to live with the disappointment of voting for someone who loses. Both of these reasons ignore the marketing reality: not voting doesn’t make marketing or politics go away. It merely changes the person the marketers are trying to please.

Vote today. Bring a friend. If enough smart people start voting again, things will improve, because billions of dollars in political marketing will suddenly be trying to please you.

Seth Godin

Truth and consequences

There’s a huge chasm in most markets: People who want to be isolated from the consequences of their actions, and those that are focused (sometimes too much) on those consequences.

For years, Paula Dean sold cooking shows to an audience that refused to care about what would happen if they regularly ate what she cooked.

Rep. Anthony Weiner wasn’t open to buying warnings about what would happen to his photos and tweets.

At the same time, there’s the audience of new moms that are overeager to baby-proof their home (just in case), the conscientious recycler who doesn’t want to know about the actual costs of picking up that bin out front, and the passionate teacher who sacrifices every day so his students can thrive a decade from now.

If you are selling tomorrow, be very careful not to pitch people who are only interested in buying things that are about today. It’s virtually impossible to sell financial planning or safety or the long-term impacts of the environment to a consumer or a voter who is relentlessly focused on what might be fun right now.

Before a marketer or organization can sell something that works in the future, she must sell the market on the very notion that the future matters. The cultural schism is deep, and it’s not clear that simple marketing techniques are going to do much to change it.

Seth Godin

Originally published on This is Seth’s Blog

Why Do Customers Use Social Networks for Customer Service? Because They Can…

Every day, an increasing number of connected consumers are taking to social networks to ask for help or express sentiment related to business or product related experiences; some do so to seek resolution from their peers, others broadcast questions or comments as a form of catharsis; and a smaller group of consumers actually hope to receive a response directly from the company. The reality is that social media is the new normal. A myriad of social networks, whether you use them or not, are now part of the day-to-day digital lifestyle with Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Youtube among others becoming the places where your customers connect, communicate, and engage around experiences. They take to these social networks and more because they can. The question is, what are you going to do about it?

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Why the CMO Needs to Bond with the Chief Supply Chain Officer (CSCO)

As the world of commerce continues to become more complex, volatile and socially transparent the need for a strong linkage between the CMO and the Chief Supply Chain Officer (CSCO) grows. In our ongoing exploration to better understand this need within the emerging reality I call Matrix Commerce, last week I had an opportunity to connect with John Mesberg of IBM.

The below Q & A points capture John’s insights into the growing need for C-Level bonding between CMO and CSCO. I then wrap up with a few thoughts on some of the SCM factors CMOs may want to consider as they begin to build out this relationship facilitated by technology for enhanced brand protection and longevity.

Ashcroft: Why is it important now for the Chief Supply Chain Officer and Chief Marketing Officer to partner?

Mesberg: When it comes to both marketing and supply chain and we consider consumer demand and supply, both sides are simultaneously becoming more volatile. On the demand side, you have consumers who expect more. They expect products to be delivered more quickly than we ever envisioned in the past. Consumers expect products to be available in an hour at a local store. They expect to walk into a store and if the store doesn’t have what they want, they expect the store to fulfill that order to make the sale. So the level of expectation on the consumer side is changing. On the supply side, we’re now dealing with a global supply chain with significant commodity price fluctuations. There’s political unrest, supplier volatility, and managing the risk of those suppliers. Both the consumer and demand side are undergoing more volatility than we saw even ten years ago. When it comes to marketing, I tell my clients, CMOs and marketers are the ones responsible for making brand promises. CMOs are telling their customers what to expect of the brand, whether that’s fashion, service, etc. And to a degree, marketers are now telling the customer to not just expect a certain product, but to expect a certain experience. And ultimately, marketers are dependent on supply chain officers to fulfill that brand promise and deliver on the experience. These promises however, are becoming increasingly more difficult to fulfill due to the increase in customer expectations and the challenges faced on the supply chain side in order to deliver the product and that experience.

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Advertising’s bumpy transition (and why it matters to you)

Advertising has been around so long, they measure the prices in Roman numerals.

CPM is a mark of how much it costs to run an ad that appears in front of 1000 people (M is for thousand). Until recently, a full page ad in a national magazine that reached two million people could easily cost $80,000 ($40 cpm times 2000 thousand). (Much of what I say below applies to TV ads as well).

I started my career buying ads for $50,000 a pop and then made the transition to selling expensive online promotions to big brands. The opportunity was clear: find an audience, make a significant profit selling ads.

When the web was young, marketers like Yahoo said to P&G and Ford, “buy our banner ads, they cost about the same as a magazine ad, but people can click on them as a bonus.” And so banner ads at the beginning were incredibly lucrative–easy to make, sell them for a lot.

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Looking for Growth in Lean Times? Look North to Canada!

There’s no getting around it, times are tough and we may still be in for more of these lean times for years to come. Every company is looking for that elusive source of growth to keep driving the top line, or at least to replace any shrinkage in business from the downturn.

But in difficult times growth can be a hard thing to find and merchants both online and offline need to be creative and on the lookout for any potential sources of new growth. For those in the United States still struggling to find growth in the aftermath of the real estate and banking meltdown I have one word which may be the answer and that is … CANADA!

Canada you say? What’s different about the situation north of the 49th parallel that might make it a growth opportunity for me? Well to borrow a phrase well worn south of the border the first answer is “It’s the economy stupid!” On whichever metric one compares, Unemployment, GDP, Inflation or Currency, Canada has fared better during this downturn. Relative to Unemployment, at the start of the downturn Canada and the US were both tracking an Unemployment rate of roughly 6% and since that time the spread has grown to 1.5% with roughly 9% in the US versus 7.5% in Canada. Looking at GDP, Canada and the US both went negative in 2008 and based on aggressive stimulus both returned to roughly 3% in 2011, however since that time there is about a 1% spread with Canada at 2.75% and US at 1.75%.

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