The Medium is the Message
Does it get any better than this?
Too many people in advertising seem to think Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase is actually “the media budget is the message.”
Once again proving that a big budget is not a precondition for smart advertising.
(Found locked to a signpost outside the Porter Square T station.)
[And yes, I phoned in the headline -- this too is a bastardization of the intent of McLuhan's oft-misquoted line.]
No Love for Strategists?
I recently found myself explaining to a colleague why I keep a print of René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images hanging prominently above my desk. I certainly don’t have a profound intellectual appreciation for Belgian surrealism, nor can I speak more than fourteen words of French. This hangs alone to remind me of something.
In English, the subtitle reads, “This is not a pipe.” Many people who see this for the first time think Magritte was just being intentionally ironic — of course it’s a pipe! But it’s not; it’s an image of a pipe. Hardly as useful when you need a smoke.
I bought this print long before Bob Hoffman penned this vivid denunciation of strategists. I’m not sure what meeting Bob walked out of that pushed him over the brink, but I would have to describe his state of mind as “highly motivated.”
And he’s got a point. Talk is cheap. Strategy without execution is futile. (You may recall IBM’s Buzzword Bingo spot imploring us to “stop talking; start doing.”) People came out of the woodwork to commend his post in the comments.
But one comment caught my eye, and captured exactly what (to me, as a *cough* strategist) the discussion is all about:
as a former ad strategist, i actually love this. but i’ll also add that business needs DOERS who THINK. there’s a whole lot of doing going on, but not enough of what’s DONE is GREAT.
Plato called these individuals philosopher-kings – “thinkers as well as practitioners” in the words of Ken Roman – and suggested that only people such as these should we trust to lead us.
Thinking, or talking, without doing is meaningless — that’s all Bob’s trying to say. Talking about social media is not social media. The Treachery of Images reminds me of this on a daily basis.
Doing without thinking — well, ask Tropicana about that. There’s a role for strategists yet.
The Back of the Napkin
This book was an impulse buy at Borders over the weekend, and I’m already telling anyone who will listen to go out and buy it themselves. Even as someone with an addiction to words, I have an entirely new appreciation for visual problem solving.
Seriously, it’ll only take you a few hours to read the whole thing. Most of it’s cartoons anyway (who doesn’t love cartoons?). Go make yourself a better communicator already.
The Purpose of Writing
I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them. I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!
– Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes)
A couple of things I’ve read recently have shifted the way I now think about writing for this blog. Most recently, I came across an article from Cory Doctorow on how he approaches writing. Along with some great tips from a seasoned pro, he makes the inarguable point that “there’s always 20 minutes to be found in a day, no matter what else is going on.” So I’ll be making a concerted effort to write more frequently — there’s just no excuse.
The second bit comes from a chapter of Peter Drucker’s Management, on taking advantage of your own learning style. He writes:
Alfred Sloan — the man who built General Motors into the world’s largest, and for sixty years the world’s most successful, manufacturing company — conducted most of his management business in small and lively meetings. As soon as a meeting was over, Sloan went to his office and spent several hours composing a letter to one of the meetings participants, in which he brought out the key questions discussed in the meeting, the issues the meeting raised, the decisions it reached, and the problems it uncovered but did not solve. When complimented on these letters, he is reported to have said, “If I do not sit down immediately after the meeting and think through what it actually was all about, and then put it down in writing, I will have forgotten it within twenty-four hours. That’s why I write these letters.”
It’s certainly interesting to think about blogging as a tool for personal development — solidifying knowledge and distilling ideas. Sure beats the alternative — that we’re all just talking to ourselves.
Twitter Analytics: Where Are You?
Buzz surrounding Twitter’s quest for a business model has intensified recently, ranging from crackpot theories from unknown bloggers (like myself) to major media coverage. There was the unveiling of ExecTweets, a joint partnership with Microsoft, and more recently, major speculation about a possible takeover from Google.
In the meantime, it shocks me that Twitter is not selling one thing already: analytics. Brands, marketers, and even plenty of Twitter Elitists would kill to know more about their influence: from the really simple stuff like visits to your profile, to better understanding how your conversations spread (beyond invented metrics like ReTweetability). Omniture has rolled out a Twitter analytics package, but much of the data I’m envisioning can only come from the mothership. Not only would this provide value to those already well established in the community, but would be indispensable to those trying to build a business case for their companies and clients to dip a toe in the water.
This seems like a no-brainer. The talented developers at Twitter could launch this tomorrow if they wanted. So where are the analytics?
Donations to Social Causes: Closing the Loop
[As I was doing some blog spring cleaning, I came across this post, which I had written back in November '08. For some reason, it slipped through the cracks and I never clicked "Publish." At the time, it was just speculation; but more than anything, it's interesting to see how groups like CharityWater are now doing a much better job increasing transparency in charitable giving than what I described here.]
We’ve all seen the ads: “For only pennies a day, you can make the difference in the life of a child.” The thing is, this is absolutely true. Whatever the cause, whether it’s children in Africa or the homeless in your neighborhood, it doesn’t take much to make a difference. So why are so many of us reluctant to take that step, even if we believe it would be money well spent?
I had the pleasure of catching a live speech from Anderson Cooper in October. He summed up the issue very plainly, saying “transparency is the key to giving money.” This may not seem particularly profound, but it’s implications are. The biggest impediments to greater charitable giving as I see them are the following:
- We don’t trust the brand. Who would give money to an organization they’d never heard of, no matter how passionate a one might feel about the cause they claim to support? Larger organizations like the United Way and UNICEF attract donations despite the fact that they suffer from (relatively) massive overhead and there is no direct feedback about where one’s donation might actually be going. This is because they have built trusted brands, and donors know that these organizations sacrifice a certain degree of efficiency for trust.
- We don’t think it will make a difference if we’re the only ones contributing. A great majority of the decisions we make every day are dependent in a more or less direct fashion on our perception of others’ decisions given the same choices. It’s rooted in our DNA — throughout our evolutionary development, our ancestors were the ones who survived by keeping with the pack, while those who set off on their own more frequently took themselves out of the gene pool. In practice, this is why right now Wikipedia has a graph at the top of every page indicating collective progress towards their fundraising goal of $6 million. To this end, I see services like The Point having a significant impact as they become more mainstream.
- There is no money-back guarantee. This is invaluable in making purchase decisions. I may completely trust and even vouch for a brand like Apple, but if they accidentally ship me a faulty iPod I had better be able to get a new one to replace it. Conversely, I might be willing to make an online purchase from an unfamiliar supplier as long as I know I can get my money back if I don’t get what I paid for. There is no equivalent accountability in charitable organizations, but maybe there should be.
- We can’t see the direct results of our contribution. Even if I trust the “brand” of an organization, this is the final sticking point when it comes to making an actual contribution. If I knew that I could directly purchase lifesaving malaria vaccines for a dozen children in a developing tropical country, I’d do that in a second — after all, it would only cost me a few dollars. But with most charitable giving, there is absolutely no way to know where my money has gone. As a result, I’m going to be much more reluctant to give than if I can see the direct results.
In my mind, the internet and the many different channels of social media have the potential to remedy most if not all of these inefficiencies and ultimately drive verifiable social change around the world. As I’ve written before, social media creates unprecedented opportunities for the dispersal of messages that are truly actionable. Transparency, in the form of feedback and accountability, is the key to closing that loop.
Twestival and Beyond: Social Media Changes the World
I’m blown away by the role social media is beginning to play in international humanitarian efforts. When I wrote about how social media can change the world as part of Blog Action Day ‘08 back in October, I had no idea how close we were to seeing some of those concepts brought to life. I had written,
For the first time in the history of humanitarian aid, individual donors and worthy organizations can connect meaningfully on opposite sides of the world…. You now are beginning to have the tools at your disposal to have a direct, measurable impact on these causes — to help solve the immediate problems, on the ground, in communities with the most need. You can help build a school in Southeast Asia, provide clean drinking water for an entire African village, or prevent domestic abuse in your own neighborhood, with the social media tools you use every day. The real solution is in going straight to the source, and it doesn’t take much…
So I was stunned when this email landed in my inbox last week. It came from Scott Harrison at charity: water.
I attended the Twestival in Boston back in February, but to be honest hadn’t thought much of it since (just starting a new job might have something to do with that). But here was the result of synchronized events across 202 cities worldwide: a brand new well was being drilled to provide drinking water for a village in Ethiopia, and those of us who couldn’t be there in person got to see the actual result of our participation.
And it’s exciting to read about initiatives like SalaamGarage , featured just this afternoon in a post over on Mashable. Founder Amanda TK describes SalaamGarage as “humanitourism meets Web 2.0.”. Dana Oshiro at Mashable writes,
The group sends amateur photographers to developing countries to study and document the work of nonprofit organizations. One recipient organization,Vatsalya, provides food, education and health care to street orphans in Jaipur…. Through Facebook, photo blogs, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube, SalaamGarage has helped Vatsalya gain seven new onsite volunteers and media exposure in major outlets including the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Trip photos have been featured in Vatsalya founder Jaimala Gupta’s book “Eighteen Million Question Marks: Street Children of India” and a 2009 calendar – publications that have raised $15,000 towards the organization’s work.
This is the model for social change through social media — and it is now becoming a reality. Forget how many followers you have on Twitter, or how many eBooks you’ve published. This is meaningful stuff.
This is the power of social media.
The Mirror Test
The following excerpt comes from Peter Drucker’s mythic Management (Revised Ed.), which I finished yesterday on the train back from New York City where I had attended Social Media for Social Change. In the context of stressing the importance of ones personal and professional values, Drucker relates an anecdote establishing what he calls “The Mirror Test”:
As the story goes, the most highly respected diplomat among all those of the Great Powers in the early years of the twentieth century was the German ambassador in London. He was clearly destined for higher things, at least to become his country’s foreign minister, if not German federal chancellor. Yet, in 1906, he abruptly resigned. King Edward VII had then been on the British throne for five years, and the diplomatic corps had been planning to give him a big dinner. The German ambassador, being the dean of the diplomatic corps–he had been in London for close to fifteen years–was to be the chairman of that dinner. Kind Edward VII was a notorious womanizer and made it clear what kind of dinner he wanted–at the end, after the dessert had been served, a huge cake was going to appear, and out of it would jump a dozen or more naked prostitutes as the lights were dimmed. The German ambassador resigned rather than preside over this dinner: “I refuse to see a pimp when in the mirror in the morning when I shave.”
The Measurement Gap
(Note: This is a reprint of a post I wrote over on the Hill Holliday blog.)
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. — Winston Churchill
An annual marketing survey released by Alterian in February found that a startling majority of marketers fail to implement analytics to measure the success of their efforts. Only 47% of the 1500 marketers, agencies, marketing services providers and systems integrators polled asserted the use of analytics in their campaigns.
Most alarming, however, is the attribution of this statistic to the fact that marketers found analytics “difficult.”
Churchill had it right, but it seems some marketers have taken him too literally. “Occasionally” is not the operative word; it is of course intended for ironic effect. Measurement — regardless of how we may define success for a given initiative — is the only way we as marketers know if our strategy was sound. And it is one of the key inputs in defining and optimizing the strategy the next time around.
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