Shot this last Nov just south of The Dalles and just got around to processing it in B/W.
Black horse on white
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Why some games suck, and what they can teach marketers
The latest issue of Fast Company contains an exciting piece by Adam Penenberg on how game mechanics – the scenarios, choices, rewards, and penalties that make gaming fun – are being adopted by the business world, for everything from loyalty programs to employee training. I care about this topic because I’ve staked my claim on what game theory can teach marketers, and game mechanics is sort of like game theory’s cool cousin – you know, the one with the Trans Am and the AC/DC posters? At least that used to be cool.
I’ve had occasion to think about what applied game mechanics could mean for marketers too, because I’m writing a new book on game theory that promises to be even more obscure than the last, examining how game theory’s rules of survival are at play in the films of Quentin Tarantino. As part of my, uh, “research” for that project, I decided to play the 2006 Xbox game adapted from Reservoir Dogs, to see how well Tarantino’s sophisticated rules of survival translated into actual game rules.
The answer is: not very well. Whereas the film Reservoir Dogs is a finely woven web of actions and deadly consequences, the game is a damn mess of unreliable outcomes. The player can ostensibly choose between paths of savagery or compromise, but the results are arbitrary: sometimes cops will give up and lay down their arms with little incentive, and at other times they’ll reverse course and come after you. Others become invincible for no apparent reason.
So what does the desecration of Reservoir Dogs via Xbox have to do with marketers’ use or misuse of game mechanics? I think thus far we marketers have done a lousy job of applying the notion ofconsequence, just as the game did. The Penenberg article, citing an influential speech by game designer Jesse Schell, envisions a game-based marketing world, in which consumers earn instant points for every little thing they do, from eating a certain cereal to wearing a logo as a temporary tattoo. The idea is to make consumer interactions with brands more fun by making them more rewarding.
The central problem with this slightly horrifying fantasy is that the mindless accumulation of points isnot what makes games fun. Consumers may opt in for more brand encounters if you give them points, but that won’t actually make them like the brands any better. There’s no thrill to it, because there’s little competition and no risk. The part that’s missing is the same part that’s missing from poorly designed games like Reservoir Dogs: a meaningful, reliable application of consequence.
It’s not easy to envision marketers applying consequences to marketing games. We are, despite our reputation as schemers, actually chronic pleasers who overreact to positive feedback. If consumers agree to play a game with us, we’re apt to behave like golden retrievers, inexhaustibly nudging the same slobbery ball at the consumer over and over, until they become annoyed and hide the ball on top of the fridge. I know this, because I’m a Starwood member.
So how can marketers apply consequences in a way that makes consumers want to play? I don’t know, exactly; I think we have a lot of work to do. But for starters, I think marketing games need to be competitive; they need to have winners and losers. I’d be a lot more jacked about my Starwood program if I had to be one of the first 20 members to check in to a hotel in order to grab up some bonus points, and I could follow the action live on my mobile app, with other players’ avatars racing against mine. A few of us would win, and many would lose, but we’d all have fun, and we’d all want to try again as soon as possible.
The remarkable thing about that simple scenario is that Starwood would end up giving up less and getting more back (fewer points, more loyalty), and I could end up giving up more and getting less back (more time, fewer points), but we’d both end up happier because of the game. Traditional marketing can’t perform that deft bit of alchemy; it can only give stuff away. Good games actually contain an inversion of marketing logic: the more that’s demanded of you, the more you’ll give, up to a certain point where rewards must follow.
As a jaded marketer with his bleary eyes affixed on a horizon of better and more interesting marketing experiences, I’m excited about what game mechanics can teach us. And I’m excited that technology is evolving to make this all possible. We recently recommended a mobile app platform to a client based on its ability to reward consumers for participation in charitable activities that the client sponsored; the logistics of tracking that kind of participation would have been impractical just two years ago.
Change can’t come soon enough, because the marketing world is still mostly stuck in the zero-sum rut, with marketers trying to maximize access to consumers at the lowest possible expense, and consumers trying to minimize their exposure to marketers while still getting free content. We can hobble along this way for the foreseeable future, but where’s the fun in that?
Do you have a Facebook policy? You will.
I am not a lawyer, but I do know that if you encounter an article that begins with “I am not a lawyer, but…” you should stop reading immediately. If you’re still reading, then you’ve given implied consent to me sounding off about this recent Facebook/NLRB dust-up on the basis of no legal training, but no shortage of opinions.
In short, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that an ambulance company acted illegally in firing an employee after she criticized her boss to other employees on her Facebook page. The company’s social media policy was deemed too broad, as it prohibited employees from depicting the company “in any way” on any social network site. Yeah, that does sound a tad broad.
But the widespread reaction in the blogosphere, depicting the ruling as blanket protection for employees’ right to say what they want about their employers on social media, also misses the mark. The NRLB ruling is actually very narrow; it held that a negative discussion about the company on Facebook constituted concerted protected activity because employees have a right to organize to improve their workplace, and the conversation could be interpreted as an effort to do so—even if the content was pretty snarky (“snarky” being the legal term, of course). It’s not clear that the employee’s actions would even have been protected if no one had replied to the post, or if the post had been directed at non-employees.
In truth, the ruling makes social media policy a stickier wicket than ever before. As the New York Times piece on the Facebook postpoints out, a company could still fire an employee for disparaging an employer for reasons unrelated to work, or for disloyalty, which generally means defaming the company without supporting facts. I learned that lesson the hard way, when I was forced to retract my blog post “White Horse: Fourth Horse of the Apocalypse?” pending further end-time revelations. (This seems like a good time to point out that satire is considered protected speech.)
The bottom line is this: the notion that companies need to chuck out any restrictions on employee social media conduct is simply untrue. What is manifestly true is that all companies need social media guidelines; this may seem altogether obvious, but a recent Deloitte survey on social media ethics found that as many as one-third of companies don’t have guidelines. I suspect the percentage is much higher if small to medium businesses are taken into account.
If drafting social media guidelines sounds like as much fun as a sharp stick in the eye, you could, ahem, work with your digital agency to get the job done. You could also take up LinkedIn’s Mario Sundar’s fine suggestion that policies be formed collaboratively with employees. That’s a great way to get employees on board for being more careful about their use of social media without having to be all legal and ham-fisted about it.
Say, for instance, that you’re a childcare provider, and there’s a Facebook group specifically devoted to employees who like to get their drunk on after a hard day of caring for our nation’s future. Nothing illegal about that, but employees might be persuaded that such brand-linked bacchanalia is bad for business, which is bad for them. Social media collaboration prevails, and everybody wins.
At the root of this issue is the simple truth that in social media, transparency and open expression are flip sides of the same coin. Employers have more insight into what their employees do and think in their off-hours, and employees have a bigger sounding board for their gripes about their employers. This kind of power demands a measure of discretion on both sides.
Spoiler Alert: There’s no such thing as Cyber Monday
Also, there’s no Santa Claus. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you.
First of all, “cyber”? Must we? “Cyber” was cringe-inducingly uncool by 2001 – back when there was still no shame in having an AOL email address. Coined by Shop.org in 2005, Cyber Monday was apparently meant to describe the tendency of shoppers to go online on this date rather than motoring down to the Woolworth’s five & dime in their horseless carriage.
The anachronism starts with the name, but it doesn’t end there. The premise is that shoppers that have scoured brick-and-mortar bargains over the long weekend will supplement that activity with online shopping at work on Monday, because their dial-up connections at home are too slow to be practical.
But wait: what is this “dial-up” thing you speak of? Broadband penetration in the U.S. is something on the order of 70%, and it’s higher among heavy shoppers. Connectivity hasn’t been a major factor in shopping behavior in a good long while. I hate to be the bearer of more bad news: people shop online at work because they’re bored at work.
It may seem like hair-splitting to argue about why people shop online at work, as long as they do, but I beg to differ: it matters greatly whether retailers treat Cyber Monday as a digitized Black Friday – a melee of frantic bargain-hunting – rather than recognizing the real behavioral differences in online shopping and planning accordingly. Because one truism in retail strategy hasn’t changed since the days of Woolworth’s: pay attention to how consumer behavior evolves, or start planning your going-out-of-business sale.
Cyber Monday is based on the notion that the day should be a Big Event in roughly the same way as Black Friday, but online shopping doesn’t work that way. It isn’t event-based, and it never will be. Black Friday shoppers are driven by collective participation in a time-based, competitive stalk-and-kill event, like deer season in Wisconsin. Online shopping is comparative and deliberate, and it doesn’t follow a specific sequence, because it doesn’t need to.
The real data shows that consumers are operating in multiple channels throughout the shopping season. Even while they’re cold-conking each other with coffeemakers to be the first to the electronics aisle on Black Friday, they’re studiously comparing online prices; Comcast reports a 28% YOY increase in online shopping on Thanksgiving Day. A year from now, with up to 150 million smart phone users scanning barcodes with their phones to instantly compare prices online and off, Black Friday will be a completely different ballgame, and Cyber Monday will be more out of touch than ever.
Now I will acknowledge, before someone else forces me to do so, that Cyber Monday participation doesincrease each year, in a classic case of the tail wagging the dog. If you cajole enough online retailers into believing that they must offer big Cyber Monday discounts, then before you know it, you’ve got yourself a Cyber Monday, replete with discounts. How ‘bout that.
But I doubt that either retailers or consumers are very well served by participating in this meaningless tautology. In the real world, consumers chase bargains across channels no matter what day it is, and they shop until the last shipment drops before Christmas. For high-consideration purchases, they take their time and do their research. Retailers that focus more on creating superb online experiences and multi-channel consistency – building loyalty over the long term – are far better off than Cyber Monday discounters.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to hop on the high-speed series of tubes that my office provides me. I hear there’s a run on phonograph players over at the Sears & Roebuck website, and I’m prepared to throttle any scoundrel that gets in my way.
Why Marketers Should Care About Kinect
Last week marked a watershed event in the evolution of digital marketing, albeit one that received scant attention from digital marketers. But any event that promises to have millions of consumers earnestly waving at and talking to their televisions suggests a shift in behavior that no marketer can afford to ignore. I refer, of course, to the launch of Microsoft’s new motion-sensing, voice-activated gaming platform, Xbox Kinect.
Now, I know the Xbox Kinect reviews have been mixed. The consensus seems to be that the device’s potential is great, but the immediate user experience is, well, less so. And having tried Kinect, I will add my voice to that chorus. The giddy sense of awe I felt when the sensor first began to scan my movements was quickly deflated by the task of using this breakthrough interaction to fly around and collect coins in a box (in the Kinect Adventures game, which is packaged with the product). The main function of the game seems to be to prove that motion detection actually works; at least they had the sense not to name it Kinect Calibration Adventures.
But such bellyaching is like writing an eyewitness account of the Wright brothers’ first flight and complaining that there aren’t yet any direct flights from Kitty Hawk to Cleveland. OK, it’s not quite that presumptuous; if you shell out 150 bucks for a console add-on, you should expect to have some fun right out of the box. But a new gaming experience is just one small part of what Kinect represents in the Big Picture of human-computer interaction.
We easily forget how awkward and constrained our interactions with technology can be until something new comes along and shatters that artificiality. Why click a mouse or a remote when you can wave or talk? This is, to me, the great promise of Kinect: it’s the harbinger of more natural, physical, dimensional ways of interacting with digital content that’s been historically artificial and flat.
I beg your indulgence for one more analogy: everyone knows that Marconi invented the radio, except that he didn’t. It was probably a Russian named Popov, who tested a radio receiver a year earlier. While doing so, he was struck by lightning, and he decided that his device was, instead, a “lightning detector,” which was something the world badly needed. You really have to admire that kind of flexibility.
It won’t take a bolt from the blue for smart marketers to see Kinect’s potential as a lightning detector rather than a mere gaming platform. Brands like Burger King have signed on to have their products visually scanned into the gaming experience, but the potential goes well beyond that. What if you could shop in an etailer’s virtual boutique and try on clothes that are fitted to your scanned-in profile? What if you could take a virtual test drive that perfectly mimicked the driver’s seat experience?
I don’t expect this brave new world to be Brought to You by Microsoft, and if it were, it might be closer to Brave New World than I care to imagine. But props to them for volunteering for the scouting party—never an easy mission. I’m still waiting for the digital world to deliver my jetpack, but in the meantime, my agency White Horse is betting on the promise of Kinect and other new platforms to begin to deliver the digital experience we have long deserved—one that’s closer to the way we actually live in the analog world.
Ad Targeting Doesn’t Suck. But the Ads Do.
The current hue and cry over online ad targeting should be of no great surprise to any student of history. Start with anything that’s widely used, but poorly understood, place it largely outside the control of your average citizen, then tell those citizens that this mysterious thing is actually good for them, and you’ve got a fine recipe for hysteria. See, for instance, the backlash against water fluoridation in the 1950s.
I try to keep history in mind when I encounter the inflated rhetoric that’s begun to attach itself to ad targeting. The Wall Street Journal ran a series on ad targeting a series describing the technique as “spying on users” (and I’m sure, given their high moral stance, that you will not be the target of any ad cookies while reading the article online). An Ad Age Digital columnist wrote a breathless account of the pants ad that “stalked” him. A Google search on “ad targeting” and “creepy” returns 3,150 results (though to put that in perspective, a search on “Lindsay Lohan’s dad” and “creepy” returns more than 80,000 results.)
I think these complaints miss the mark. Yes, consumers get annoyed when an ad follows them like a deranged stray cat. But it’s not because the ad is creepy. It’s because the ad sucks.
It’s true; I’m grinding my content marketing axe once again. We’re living in an era in which consumers are in a position to demand better content from brands, and retargeted ads rarely deliver. As an industry, we burn all of our mental calories trying to figure out which behaviors to target and how, and we give little thought to how it feels to be followed around by the same plain-vanilla ad day in and day out.
The usual defense of targeting is that it delivers more relevance to the consumer. And it does. If I’ve bought fishing gear on the Orvis site before, Orvis is right to assume that I’m a good prospect for more gear, and to serve me targeted ads on other sites. But do I need to see more ads telling me that Orvis has fishing gear? Um, no; I’m clear on the whole fishing thing. By treating me like a slot machine that has to be fed quarters, they’re missing a great opportunity to pique my loyalty with rich brand experiences, fishing tips, videos, destination ideas, etc. It’s easy for me to imagine being delighted by the sight of an Orvis ad, if only the content seemed to care about me.
If bad creative is the wound, then frequency is the salt being rubbed into it. Even the best creative cannot overcome this problem. I love the music of Sufjan Stevens, for instance, but if he were to follow me around all day and night, warbling like a wandering troubadour, I would quickly develop a headache. Eventually I would try to back over him in the driveway. What chance does a saturated ad have?
Right now, I’m being followed by a single childcare ad that has appeared to me literally thousands of times on dozens of sites. It would be very easy, in any ad server, to set an optimal frequency cap to prevent this headache-inducing waste. Yet many advertisers seem willing to follow the same prospects ad nauseam, reasoning that it’s worth a little annoyance to eke out better performance.
Folks, it’s not worth it. We’ve brought on the ire of the FTC by pummeling people with boring ads. It’s not that simple, you’ll say. It’s about privacy, transparency, control, etc, etc. Nah; it’s because the ads suck. I give up all sorts of personal data without hesitation when I install apps on my phone, because the apps delight me; they’re fun. When was the last time an online ad delighted you?
If I’m wrong, prove it. Spend a little more on creative in your next retargeting campaign, or convince your client to do so. Put some really different stuff out there. Give consumers some content they can care about, and keep it fresh. Then run a pre-post survey and see how those consumers feel about being followed.
Here in Portland, we still don’t have fluoride in our water. If online ad targeting goes the same way, we’ll have a cavity-prone generation being force-fed mass-market ads. Don’t they have it tough enough? Change starts with you, Orvis. I’m waiting.
The B2B Business Case, Part 2
My previous post described the social media adoption gap that our “B2B Goes Social: a White Horse Survey Report” identified, and it noted that social media curmudgeons among the B2B C-suite were largely to blame for it. I then promised a three-part guide for building a B2B business case to win over those C-suites, but then only managed to deliver one of the lessons, which involved widening your CEO’s perception of what constitutes social media. Have you done that? Great. Here, then, are the remaining two lessons:
2. Social media is what everyone else is doing.
If you’ve ever observed toddlers at play, you know that the desirability of a given toy increases exponentially as another toddler plays with it, and it reaches a fever pitch if the other toddler appears to be misusing the toy, e.g., eating Barbie’s hair. With all due respect to both CEOs and toddlers, I must report that this behavioral tendency does not disappear with age, and you can use it to good effect in your business case.
At White Horse, we’ve made it a standard practice to present a sample one-month social clients in order to show them that conversations are indeed taking place around their brand. They really lean forward in their seats, though, when we show them what their competitors are doing—what share of the social conversation belongs to them, what perceptions accrue to them, and what keywords are used to describe them. All of this data can easily be obtained through a low-cost social media monitoring platform (we use Radian6 for our clients), and ginned up in a few hours of analysis.
“All well and good,” you might say to me, “but if I had budget to spend on a social monitoring platform, I wouldn’t be reading your damn blog post on how to get budget for social, now would I?” Fair point, and since we’ve already established that you’re not going to call me, I have no choice but to point out some of the free resources that can get you started. At the top of my list is the trial version of Alterian’s SM2 monitoring platform, which caps the number of results but gives you many of the slicing and dicing features that make analysis easier. Then you have a number of good scraping tools that leave the analysis entirely up to you: Google’s blog search, Addict-o-Matic, and, oh, what the hell, here’s the entire list of free social media monitoring tools.
So what do you do with all that competitive data? Think of social media marketing as a competition for a very finite resource: your customers’ attention. If data shows your competitors commanding a larger share of the social conversation in your industry, that share is essentially coming at your expense, whether you feel it directly or not. If, on the other hand, your competitors are falling short in social, so much the better for your business case: there’s a vacuum waiting to be filled by the first company in your industry that’s ready to liven up the conversation. In all cases, C-levels need to see social media marketing in a competitive context in order to see the light.
3. It’s about pie, not ROI
For decades, we marketers prattled on about the ROI of our efforts. Today you can’t throw a virtual rock without hitting five blog posts about how we all need to simmer down about ROI. While I am firmly in the simmer-down camp, I also have to acknowledge that we did this to ourselves. We got our C-levels addicted to hard data, and it is axiomatic that once someone is addicted to the hard stuff, you can’t get them off of it. Solution? You give them hard data that’s not ROI data. You feed them pie.
CEOs love pie. One of their favorites is the one that shows them the proportion of their paid impressions that can be replaced or augmented with free impressions. PR agencies have long been selling the value of this pie as earned media or “ad equivalency value,” so CEOs are used to seeing it. They get it. Once you’ve done your social media market analysis, it’s relatively easy to project how big that social media pie wedge will be.
Social media can also produce a pie flavor that PR usually can’t: the proportion of site traffic attributable to social sources. It’s all right there on the “Referrers” tab of your Web analytics dashboard. At White Horse, for instance, we can say that our social seeding program increased the proportion of our site traffic by 6% to 25% in six months, and that total traffic grew accordingly. We know that more traffic means more leads, and that we’d be crazy to call that ROI. But it sure is some tasty pie.
Other pies are possible, of course, but bake up these two, and I guarantee* that you’ll be halfway to making your business case. And if that doesn’t work, you can always call me.
*Not a guarantee.
The B2B Business Case, Part 1
A couple of months ago, White Horse released the results of our Pulse of Social Media Marketing surveycomparing adoption of social media marketing by B2B companies vs. B2C, looking at issues of staffing, management buy-in, and the use of specific tactics.
The report got some good pick-up among our marketing blogging brethren, and their individual spins on the results were a veritable study in glass half-full/half-empty interpretation. Ssome declared that the B2Bs were stuck in the social stone age (not my conclusion), while others observed that B2B marketers were right in the thick of things, social-wise, if only they could get their C-levels to see the light (which was pretty much my conclusion).
As the author of the report, I feel I owe B2B marketers an apology. While I did manage to place the blame for the B2B social lag squarely on C-level naysayers in the report—noting that only 9% of B2C upper managers are bearish on social, compared to a whopping 36% for B2B—I offered frustrated B2B marketers a rather narrow and unsatisfying remedy: contact White Horse, and we’ll set those C-levels straight.
Yes, it’s true. I sullied the sacred cause of knowledge-sharing with a shameless agency plug. And the proof of my transgression is that not every B2B marketer in the land has so far beaten down our door to learn how we can turn things around for them. Thiscould mean that they’d prefer some method of building a business case for social media that didn’t involve talking to me. That is understandable.
And so as penance for my transgression, I now devote the rest of this post (and all of the next one) to sharing what I know about building the B2B business case for social media marketing—a kind of DIY for those who would prefer a sharp stick in the eye to an agency phone call. (Again, I get it.) There are just three things you really need to know.
1. Social media is not what your CEO thinks it is.
Imagine yourself as a busy CEO living in a kind of info-stream bubble, wherein a narrow stream of content demanded nearly all of your attention, and the only streams that filtered in from the outside were the ones that were too annoyingly pervasive to ignore. What stuff would get through?
Actually, we don’t have to imagine that, because Twitter’s Trending Topics will tell what’s floating at the top of the social stewpot. So let me just pop over there and see…OK, at the top of the list we’ve got Mel Gibson, #youlookprettystupid, #oldpeoplenames, and Bachelorette.
While it is demonstrably true that some old people have funny names, this alone will not bolster your business case for having a corporate Twitter account, especially if your CEO is old and has a funny name. A cursory glance at social media’s dominant content might leave any executive with the impression that it consists mainly of debates about Justin Bieber’s hair. They might also be forgiven for concluding that social media is comprised of Facebook, Twitter, and something vaguely sinister called ChatRoulette.
Which is why every B2B social media business case needs to begin where few of them actually do: by pointing out where the actual conversation is taking place. If this seems perfectly obvious to you, then at least allow that it may not perfectly obvious to your execs, and B2B social adoption has suffered for it. Our survey found that B2B marketers are about one-third less likely to participate on industry-related bog commentary and forums than to maintain outposts on major social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
Yet our own client research persistently shows that the vast majority of useful B2B conversations—the kind that influence decision-makers—take place on blog commentary and forums. This isn’t a revelation; studies of B2B social usage by Forrester Research, American Business Media, and Business.com have also underscored the importance of these venues.
B2B marketers need an expansive definition of social media. The litmus test is simple: is it a place where a) business conversations are occurring and b) you might be allowed to participate? When viewed through this wide-open aperture, social media becomes urgently relevant. B2B sales tend to be complex and consultative, after all, and where do B2B buyers go for consultation? A surprising number start with simple Google searches, and those Google searches increasingly lead to, yep, industry blogs and forums.
This, of course, begs the question: assuming all this juicy B2B social stuff is out there, waiting to be plucked and presented in a Teflon-coated business case, how does one set about doing that? This is the part where I leave off my blog post with shameless question-begging, so that you’ll read the next installment, in which I’ll cover what tools and metrics work best.
The 10 Commandments of Content Marketing
t’s only a matter of time before some marketing pundit boldly declares this to be the Era of the Boldly Declared Era. Our attempts to make sense of the rapid changes in consumer media consumption have spawned such era-defining labels as “Web 2.0,” “Emerging Media,” “Generation Facebook,” “The Death of Print,” and most recently, “The Splinternet.”
Historically, a mania for naming has been a sure sign of cultural anxiety, and in our industry, it’s a sure sign that marketers are still percolating over the big questions: Will social media take over the world? Will streaming content kill broadcast? Will someone eventually click on a banner ad? Will society finally grind to a halt when there’s nothing left to tweet about besides Twitter?
As an industry, we’re struggling with these questions because we’re stuck in outdated categories. We still think advertising is advertising and social media is something else. In fact, advertising and social media are the same thing: They’re content. We can find answers to the vexing questions of our time the moment we realize that all marketing is content. And at the risk of adding yet another era-defining label to the mix, I want to suggest that the new approach demanded by these rapid changes is something White Horse callscontent marketing.
Content marketing is already occurring; it’s all around us. Marketers that do it well might not even know that they’re doing it because they weren’t burdened by the old way of thinking in the first place. Fortunately, it’s possible to bring a stone tablet down from that mountain and share what works about content marketing. Its 10 commandments are as follows.
Content shall be shareableAdvertising will have its renaissance the moment a majority of marketers care about creating something worth passing on. Consumers don’t trust advertising because it shouts at them. But the broadcast advertisers that top the viral video charts week after week don’t shout — they amuse, entertain, and inspire. If every creative brief in every agency in the land asked, “Why would someone want to pass this on?” then we would have TV ads that don’t make us reach for the TiVo remote and banner ads that can finally make us cry for reasons other than frustration. That’s not just advertising, that’s good content.
Content shall be malleable
I mentioned the Splinternet. Sorry. But it’s true that we’ve got to start paying more attention to how the message fits the medium. It’s hard to do that with advertising, but it’s easy to do it with content. You stop worrying about reusing brand assets and think instead about things like, “Mobile’s great at location-based stuff. What can I give my customer that’s useful based on their location?” Our mania for brand consistency has allowed us to forget that brands are built on trust. And trust is built on relevance. Good content is always relevant.
Content shall be collaborative
Marketers love to let customers into the brand laboratory — as long as they don’t touch anything. We invite consumers to give us their ideas, but how often do we let their creations out of the lab to roam free? Doritos figured out that consumer-generated content was just as good as its own content — maybe better — and so it let consumers create the brand’s Super Bowl ads. From scratch. The only monstrosities to come out of that experiment were the results: Doritos’ ads were the most-favored and most-recalled of the Super Bowl. Oh, and they were the most-shared (see Commandment 1).
Content shall be measurable
Enough with the hand-wringing over ROI. If you can measure how much traffic a given piece of content has driven to your website, you have vastly exceeded the measurability of 95 percent of advertising since its invention. (Actually, 96 percent — we measured it.) When you put content out there — on social networks, on YouTube, on blogs, etc. — you can measure the traffic that comes back. You can even measure what that traffic does next. It takes a bit of work. Notice there is no “Content shall be easy” commandment. But it’s worth it. How do I know it’s worth it? It’s measurable.
Content shall be fearless
If advertising were a personality type, it would be obsessive-compulsive: ritualized, repetitive, controlling, and fearful of change. Content isn’t like that. Content concerns itself with an exchange of ideas, so it morphs and evolves as new ideas are added. Take Starbucks’ fearless crowd-sourcing experiment, MyStarbucksIdea.com — a simple idea engine that shape-shifts its content with every comment and contribution, all adding up to a pretty durable brand proposition that says, “We care what our customers think.”
Content shall invite comment
Most content that we produce for our customers will fail. This is a good thing; our success depends on knowing when things fail, so we can try something else. It’s only a problem if we shut our ears to it. For decades our industry didn’t hear customer feedback outside of the airless environs of the focus group; now we have a chance to get the full, pent-up barrage of feedback in every tweet, YouTube comment, and blog posting that our brands attract. We need to embrace it, monitor it, learn from it, and move on. We’re fearless now, remember?
Marketing no longer belongs to marketers. For content marketing to succeed, we’re going to need a big tent with room for the PR folks, the product managers, the researchers, the sales staff, and, yes, even the execs. They all have content to contribute, and we can’t do it all ourselves. The marketer’s core expertise will no longer be knowing how to produce marketing content; it’ll be knowing how to channel marketing content in ways that keeps the conversation going. We’re going to need ads, articles, opinions, advice, feedback, and pithy observations in 140 characters or less. And no, you can’t get an intern for that.
Content shall go everywhere
In the beginning, there was the marketing funnel, and the ad impressions did delivereth leads unto the marketing funnel, wherein many were converted. Today, leads bounce all over the place before they ever get sucked into the funnel. They visit blogs, message boards, review sites, and social networks to get the real scoop on the brand. You need content in all of those places. You need to coordinate that content with your marketing funnel and measure its impact. How are you possibly going to get all this done? See Commandment 7.
It used to be that PR content went to PR outlets and advertising content went to advertising outlets, and the two might nod to each other in the hall as they passed. Not any longer. Publishers are inviting both over to dinner, with package deals that include sponsored content in your area of expertise seated right next to paid advertising. Marketers that haven’t embraced content marketing will blow these deals by phoning in the PR content, or they’ll miss the opportunity entirely.
Content shall be forever
OK, “forever” might be an exaggeration; the planet is 6 billion years old, and today’s marketing content can’t be expected to endure longer than a billion or so years, depending on what happens with Facebook. But that’s a big change because traditionally advertising only lasted as long as you paid for it. Content marketing lives well beyond a campaign because it shows up in archives, on sharing sites like SlideShare and Scribd, on blogs, in tweets, and in content aggregators like Digg and StumbleUpon. It’s the swallowed gum in marketing’s digestive tract, except that the flavor endures.
That’s content marketing, and it’s where White Horse stakes its claim. Like all content marketing, this is an unfinished discussion; others will add and detract, and the end result is outside of our control. We’re good with that. We’re content marketers.
Raising a Glass to the Death of Digg
Last week’s report from Compete.com that the social aggregator site Digg.com had lost a staggering one-third of its visitors in a single month prompted many a dirge to be sung to the site’s imminent death. If this proves true, it’s a big damn deal, because sites like Digg are supposed to be going the other direction. As social content proliferates, we desperately need social aggregation/curation sites to keep our collective heads from exploding, and Digg has arguably been the top player in that space for half a decade. So what went wrong?
What we have here is a failure to cooperate. In my book on game theory and social media marketing, which I will shamelessly plug on this blog until someone eventually buys a copy, I suggest that the success of social media ventures like Digg is entirely dependent on delicate social contracts that demand cooperation from ALL participants. It takes very few bad apples to spoil the social media bunch. Digg’s value from the start has been predicated on the belief that stories are being promoted fairly on the basis of actual popularity, but that value has been compromised nearly from the start.
If you did a Google search for stories about Digg’s demise, you would turn up results stretching back to 2006. Only Castro has survived a longer deathwatch. But the incidents that drove those early predictions also sowed the seeds for the site’s present predicament. In short, popularity is the site’s currency, but there is no way to prevent counterfeiting. A small number of extremely active users have been able to hijack the site’s top content by relentlessly promoting their favorite stories, making a mockery of the site’s emphasis on the wisdom of the crowd.
Once users come to distrust the fairness of the voting system, they’re either less inclined to vote themselves, or they abandon the site altogether, which heaps even more unearned power on the bad apples. At that point, the site is no longer a curator for truly popular content, but merely a tyranny of geekdom. In game theory, we call this cycle of mutual defection a death spiral, because it is self-reinforcing and, well, because it leads to death. Digg’s death, in this case.
Digg claims that it has addressed its bad-apple problem by “tweaking the algorithm” that decides the weight of individual diggs. But no game theorist would be satisfied with this solution, because it fails to deliver any penalty for the bad apples gaming the system; it merely invites them to figure out the new algorithm and how to beat it.
So what could Digg have done differently? They could have recognized that they’re dealing with what behaviorial scientist John Platt called a “social trap.” In Platt’s simple formulation, social traps occur when a given behavior produces positive results for the individual—the content owner trying to promote their own stuff on Digg—and negative results for the group, i.e, the rest of us poor saps looking for good content. As long as the individual is only accountable to themselves, the negative behavior is self-reinforcing, resulting in “locked-in behavior,” even though the individual’s long-term interests are imperiled by the behavior.
Platt offers several ways out of the social trap; the most important of these is the notion of “counterreinforcers.” Since destructive behavior is self-reinforcing in the social trap, counterreinforcers discourage this behavior by offer some negative consequence that the player must evaluate before taking the action. This may not seem like a terribly radical notion to you, because, in fact, social media models that evolved after Digg had counterreinforcers built into their DNA. On Twitter, blowhards masquerading as worthy information sources are subject to immediate counterreinforcers—they get unfollowed, and their stuff doesn’t get retweeted. Friending and de-friending on Facebook work much the same way. These are self-perpetuating cooperative systems that can’t be easily gamed.
It’s no surprise, then, that Digg’s turnaround plan, announced by CEO Kevin Rose last week, involves making the site more like Twitter or Facebook by allowing the user to select which news sources to follow. Under such a system, Digg’s content bullies would have to earn their followings by digging good content, and the social trap would effectively be eliminated.
But it may be a case of too little, too late. Death spirals are nearly impossible to reverse, and old life forms must make way for new ones in the evolutionary chain. Liz Gannes thoughtfully observes that Digg wants to be the “Twitter of News.” The problem is that we already have a Twitter of News. It’s called “Twitter.”
Unsettler 