Tomorrow I am on a panel at the Marketing Society annual conference that takes place in the splendid surroundings of the Royal Opera House. I intended to link to the event and programme, but the Marketing Society moved their website to Sharepoint and in doing so killed the old pages about the event. I can see the reasoning… “by the evening of 18th November those who wanted to attend will have been signed up, so there is no need to have a link to the event on our site. We’ll just redirect them to where they can read about it later.” That someone might want to link to the programme seems an idea they haven’t entertained. But I digress…

The question of the panel will be “Can social networking be harnessed by brands?” The regular readers of this blog can guess my position. I was asked a similar question for one of the Marketing Society publications and wanted to share what I wrote on the topic.

“How do marketers control and manage their brand in the age of Web 2.0?”

This must be a trick question. Talking about “how to control a brand” today is as provocative as saying three years ago that on the Web companies will lose control of their brands. The buzzword Web 2.0 does not capture what this shift is about. It would be more accurate to talk about the Two-Way Web or the Read/Write Web to make it clear that the Web is not a medium. The Web is a network where people are creating, sharing and distributing without any need for the industry’s involvement. The two-way nature of the online enables individuals develop their own ‘brands’ effectively and cheaply because a brand is more like identity than unrelenting messaging and campaigns. Brands could get a share of the Web magic, if they were willing to come out from behind the glossy fronts and engage as human beings. In short, marketers – Step. Away. From. The Brand. You cannot control it, the best you can do is to help shape your company’s identity, while respecting people and the way they engage with you and each other. None of this involves ‘leveraging’ anything from traditional marketing. There are other alternatives worth investigating.

*The title of the post is based on a) what I keep telling brand strategist and b) t-shirt that I plan to wear tomorrow.

…we too easily default to framing our understanding of advertising in its own terms. We regard advertising as an independent variable: something ya gotta have. But in fact advertising is a dependent variable. The independent variable is the individual human being. As Chris Locke put it so perfectly nine years ago, we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it.

What we need is to equip demand with better ways of engaging supply. Not just better ways for supply to create and manipulate demand.
- Doc Searls in Facebook doesn’t need to be Adbook

When The Lord God Almighty’s enters the CEO blogging game, you know time’s up, all you business types… he’s got his eye on you!

With 22 operational subsidiaries employing the services of over 11800 Million members of staff, most of whom spend a lot of time trying to kill each other, it’s easy to loose touch with the needs, fears and desires of 6.6 billion potential customers.

The purpose and mission of this personal blog is to offer both staff and customers a behind the scenes, no hold barred look at the way I, the Lord God Almighty, go about daily business; offering more transparency, more accountability and more visibility to my mysterious ways and explore some of the challenges facing a modern day deity.

Hell, it isn’t easy being God. Benchmark me.

The Times they aren’t a changing uses NYT archives against its news:

It is the conceit of newspapers that each morning there are new stories to tell. Using the New York Times’s own archives, unchangingtimes.com sets out to prove that everything news is old.

via Joho the Blog

Another remembrance day…

Why NING is better than Facebook:

The past year for Web 2.0 has been a marvelous ride. But the better news is that the next few years are going to be even better. Strip away the trivial and you’ll see that the concepts of the Social Web are fundamentally changing the way people work and play together. Pull back the face of Web 2.0 and you’ll see a new paradigm for computing: a highly distributed information architecture that distributes not just data, but also the power and authority to leverage it. It’s a highly distributed information architecture that requires substantial innovation in infrastructure, technology, security, and services to support it.

The legacy of Web 2.0 is the technologies, concepts, and ideology that defined and built the social Web. These live on as the foundation of the next great shift in computing.

But please, let’s not call it Web 3.0.
- Chris Shipley in Counting down to 2008: 8 Trends for next year

The poor abused internet!

According to a study conducted by the Guardian, since 2004, 132 workers have been sacked, 41 resigned, 868 received formal warnings and 686 received other forms of punishment (such as fines) for internet and email-related issues.

The money quote, emphasis mine:

According to research released recently by Proudfoot Consulting, companies in the UK lose a total of £80 billion a year through the inefficient use of labour.

This is not about doing your bit for the salary they pay you and anyway you signed a contract… most contracts are not detailed enough and let’s be honest, the negotiating position for most employee is not in their favour. It is about treating people who for a company as collaborators who work with you, not as more or less forced labour that needs to be ‘managed’ and coerced to some degree to do what they are told. Just like the term ‘consumer’, ‘labour’ also betrays a mindset that prevents any relationships other than adversarial, abusive and enforced by power. And that’s not a relationship anyway.

Last Friday a few of us gathered together in the name of VRM. Doc was there so the ritual could begin – geek talk about structured goop with XML crap, excited interrupting of others whilst being interrupted, nerd in-jokes and, most importantly, pizza with beer! Notes from the session can be found here. (Warning – they will give you only the gist of it, and a – not always meaningful – record of the multiple conversations throughout the evening.)

VRM is still at the stage of conversations, which, in my opinion, is right. Some basic assumptions need to be clarified and spelled out. No point in avoiding that or trying to gloss over them, as they’ll come out of woodwork a few months down the line anyway, when more time and effort has been invested. We all have our views and visions of VRM and although the concept is broad enough to accommodate them (in fact, it is a feature, not a bug that people have many and varied ideas about VRM) but there are a few that will need articulating. Here is one.

At one point he [an executive of a large retail company] talked about “owning the customer”. I asked, “What’s a word for ‘owning’ a human being?” “Oh my God”, he replied. “It’s slavery!” Then he said he was amazed, in respect to wht had just become obvious, at how much people at his company talked about customers as if literal ownership were both desirable as well as a fact.

Such legacies die hard. And it’s the customers themselves who will have to kill this one.

Doc Searls blog is always a good start and there is a growing number of people who have been pondering issues of ownership, control, data and access, privacy and much more.

I do like the way Tomas Kohl puts it:

This isn’t about the internet, Web 2.0 or 3.0. Forget it. We’re talking real world, real relationships, stuff that involves our everyday lives. The internet has helped to equalize some of the relationships we have, very much with the media, the government, and each other, and the debate should now switch from the virtual to the actual. We don’t go to bed and neither do we wake up as avatars.

A friend forwarded me a quote that I find particularly apt for my current state. Substitute “social media/Web2.0″ for music and current Web 2.0 buzzwords for the watchwords and good old Béla hits the nail on the head.

Recently I have felt so stupid, so dazed, so empty-headed that I have truly doubted whether I am able to write anything new anymore. All the tangled chaos that the music periodical vomit forth thick and fast about the music of today has come to weigh heavily on me: the watchwords, linear, horizontal, vertical, objective, impersonal polyphonic, homophonic, tonal, polytonal, atonal and the rest…

Well, not quite true… partly I am fed up with social media/Web 2.0 stuff bandied about all over the meedjaland, which is not a pretty sight. What with being ‘creative, ‘communicative’ and all front, the ad agency/comms crowd has mastered the lingo. Alas, ‘engagement’ in their mouth means ‘interactive campaign’ and we know what that means.. more evil Flash! And partly I have been hanging around some really clever geeks, which puts strain on any web evangelist.

So onwards in a distributed fashion.

So, been watching all that excitement about Google’s OpenSocial and I couldn’t hear over all that cheering how much do I get to ‘own my data’ and take it with me until I read Tim O’Reilly’s post OpenSocial: It’s the data, stupid:

My disappointment with OpenSocial was crystallized by an exchange between Patrick Chanezon, Google’s developer advocate for the program, and an audience member at the OpenSocial session at Web 2.0 Expo Berlin. The audience member asked something about building applications that can remix data from the participating social networking platforms. Patrick’s answer was along the lines of: “No, you only have access to the data of the individual platform or application.”

That is rather disappointing. I do not just want social network aggregators. As a user I want to take my information, profile, contacts and context with me wherever I want and can. If I am to invest my time into creating profiles and gathering contacts (thus making my friends to invest theirs), then spending time building context, which is actually more important than data. Data has become a commodity, it can be replicated and distributed without the physical constraints data faces offline. What is now rare is context because that still a) has to be created by humans and b) is not machine readable. So to elaborate on Tim O’Reilly’s

…two key principles of Web 2.0:

* It’s the data, stupid. (Formerly “Data is the Intel Inside”)
* Small pieces loosely joined.

…a principle of social web

* It’s the context (and control over it), stupid.

If all OpenSocial does is allow developers to port their applications more easily from one social network to another, that’s a big win for the developer, as they get to shop their application to users of every participating social network. But it provides little incremental value to the user, the real target. We don’t want to have the same application on multiple social networks. We want applications that can use data from multiple social networks.

Such applications would have to be based and designed around the user, not another platform and its growth and maintenance. Which is what every social network to date has been. And if you design for the individual, the distributed is definitely the way (see Small pieces loosely joined). At a VRM meeting in London last Friday, among other things, how to design an architecture around increasing control over our data. Alec summed it up:

…should we consider making a VRM pilot and simplify our lives by making the assumption that the database would be wholly centralised; the answer to that was an emphatic NO; the reason being that working from a perspective of “the data is centralised in a fortress” will lead to thinking that will never be able to accommodate a distributed architecture; whereas there is nothing to prevent an architecture which is capable of distribution in a wholly or partly centralised matter, as a convenience. In short: the web-browser would never have been invented had someone elected to ignore the distributed nature of the Web; instead, they would have merely yet again reinvented the file-browser. So: DESIGN IT DISTRIBUTED, TEST IT DISTRIBUTED, BUT IMPLEMENT IT HOWEVER YOU CHOOSE.

That’s the spirit. But Tim O’Reilly asks the crucial question:

Would OpenSocial let developers build a personal CRM system, a console where I could manage my social network, exporting friends lists to various social networks?

No, it doesn’t look like OpenSocial will, but VRM is predicated on that. Set the data (and their owners) free!

And I don’t mean economical headlines! Bloomberg uses a company name in a headline for an article that has nothing to do with the company. The company in question is large and with a recognisable brand – Johnson & Johnson.

We’ve questioned Bloomberg in the past about their indiscriminate use of the Johnson & Johnson name, and we’ve always been told that it is “Bloomberg style” to put company names in their headlines – and the bigger the company, the wider the readership.

So, here we have a professional news organisation being shameless about its audience-grabbing motives. And commercially ‘justified’ behaviour. How on earth is that more credible than a random blogger?!

These days I get rather impatient with people who complain that blogs are not authoritative because they are written by people. The point is that they do not pretend to be anything but opinions of individuals. Often those opinions are far more authoritative than journalists can muster and even when they are mistaken or misleading, it can be easily discovered and disputed. Bloggers’ credibility comes from the filters they provide to their readers. When I am criticising or praising something on my blog I’ll always link to the source of my opinions. You, dear reader, can make up your mind about them and over time get an idea of where I am coming from and whether I am credible. It is the same as with one’s favourite film or food critic. Reviews are based on the individuals opinions that are transparent and testable. So, here we have my equation coined a while ago, when I first realised this:

Back to matters at hand. Thanks to JNJ BTW blog, the J&J people can point out Bloomberg’s dishonesty headline economy.

It’s ultimately a case of Market Value – not News Value – that factors heavily in Bloomberg’s editorial equation. Johnson & Johnson has a market capitalization of nearly $190 billion. Abbott Laboratories’ market capitalization is about $83 billion and Boston Scientific’s is about $20 billion. You can do the math.

There we have it. Corporate comms guys who have had yeeears of experience dealing with the journos and have been journalists themselves, can talk about it on their own blog.

Anyway, next time you see Johnson & Johnson or other companies referenced in a Bloomberg headline, be mindful that there may be other “market” factors at work in the editing.

Rock on! as they say…

Disclosure: Yes, yes, I have had my fingers in the blog.