I spent a few days last week trying to write up a comprehensive post on the important of integrating different elements/specialisms of marketing to create successful social media campaigns – by successful, I mean those campaigns that break out further than niche communities. The campaigns that have the same impact that a Nike TVC would have. Successful offline and online, integrated and successful.

It was harder to write than I thought. Serious writers block.

So I turned to Keynote, and here it is…

So, a couple of weeks ago I invented Convergence Culture. Then I invented URI’s. Then I thought I invented the concept of propagation planning.

It turned out that all three of these ideas had been invented by other folk before me. So instead of sulking (although I did sulk for a little while) I decided to look at how to use them all together.

You see, my idea of convergence culture was a little bit different – it was more to do with when people’s online and offline persona’s become a single entity. When you no longer ‘create’ your online persona, because you are it. Where Henry Jenkins looked at technology converging, I’m interested in people converging (please, please, please correct me if Jenkins mentions this, I wanted to read the book before I referenced the concept but I got all puppy-like and wrote the post pre-book).

So my theory is that as more and more people join the ‘social web’ we’ll be forced to reflect our true selves – we will no longer be the owners of our own brand, our social graph will. And our social graphs will collide – just look at Twitter and Facebook’s ‘people you may know’ tools – they actively seek to converge our networks. So, eventually, we’ll use single networks rather than niche networks (this idea is a little more shakey) because all of our friends will converge.

So, once our online and offline selves have become one (how very philosophical) we’ll be able to truly integrate into things like ‘The Internet of Things‘ and some basic semantic principles. Which means inevitably that we’ll each have to have a URI.

Every person will need a unique identifer.

While most of Silicon Valley races to create a network that will be our unique identifier, something struck me while watching Jan Chipchase’s TED talk. We already have one. Our mobile numbers. There are 500million people on Facebook, 550million on Skype yet and 3 billion people with mobile numbers.

3 billion.

So with more than half the population (and counting) already part of a URI scheme, would it not be much simpler to use mobile numbers as our unique identifiers? Yes. It would (and as Jan points out, mobile could also completely decentralise the banking system, but that’s another post for another time).

Our mobile numbers are already tied to much of our lives. Through Facebook (listed), Google Voice (multiple numbers for single person), and on and on with regardless to online connections. With offline, to a larger extent, they’re the ONLY connectors we have to many of our social graph.

Let’s think about this in semantic web principles for a second…

If instead of your name, you had a mobile as your core data point (all goes a bit scary at this point) then you could use that as the bedrock for the rest of your contact points – you’d have multiple email addresses, Twitter accounts – maybe even multiple numbers using Google Voice – but everything could pour into a single contact point. Making your whole life completely mobile and completely synchronistic.

So far I’ve written this post as a data geek, someone who wants to help brands see the whole world as a sample, and market to the individual – this system would certainly help do that.

But privacy-wise, how would we fare? I’m sure over the next five years we’ll find out… *gulp*.

You cannot send a video ‘viral’, it’s impossible to predict.

How could you even begin to understand how a video is passed from one person to another? How could we interpret individual, nuanced communications between two friends? Who’s on their email contacts? Or their Facebook friends? Or their YouTube account? HOW COULD WE POSSIBLY UNDERSTAND THE SOCIAL MECHANICS?

Well. Simple.

Understand the social structure, then the environment and you’ve got your roadmap to ‘viral’. Or ‘virality’ as I’d like to call it.

You see, ‘viral’ is an interesting subject for me. I spend a lot of time rebuffing the notion that social media is all about getting 8 trillion views on your video. And to an extent, I’m right – 8 trillion views from people that aren’t interested in your product is A WASTE OF TIME. But 8 trillion views from potential customers? Now that’s ROI…

So let’s lay out three scenarios for a client situation. The situation is as follows:

The client is selling product A and has produced (with our guidance) an intriguing video that has some ‘wow’ factor as well as a mention for product A.

OK. So here are the three possible situations (followed by the perfect solution )

1) you speak with some potentially interested communities – 3,000 views

2) you ‘seed’ the video on YouTube and hope for the best – 300 views

3) you send it to all your friends and ask them to send it to their friends too – 30 views

From what I’ve seen, these are pretty much the basic ways of ‘seeding’ a video to create a ‘viral’ effect.

So, here’s the fillet steak you’ve been waiting for, the coup de grace…

How do you send a video viral?

The term ‘viral’ comes from virus, something that is spread from one person to another via contact. This has exactly the same meaning when we refer to the ‘viral’ video – multiple contact points from multiple people within your social graph (IE your friends). So, understanding who has the most contact points is important – they’re the centre of a social graph (IE group of friends) so are more exposed to more people within that circle, who are then each exposed to more of other circles, and on and on.

Picking the social graph…. An interesting one really. If you’re trying to send a product launch video viral that’s of a new mobile handset, focus on the early adopters with large social graphs – the people at the centre of the technology universe. But here’s the key – don’t contact them, contact someone that influencers them, with a video/content that they’re likely to like. If influencer A is contacted by influencer B about some content that we’re sure influencer A will like (because we’ve analysed him and his preferences) then we can make the following assumption – the key influencer within a social graph is receiving content from a peer (remember people trust people like them) that has been created for her/him and is therefore incredibly likely to pass this content on to her/his social graph – spreading the message on behalf of the brand, unknowingly, to people that trust people like him.

Then we let the Matthew Effect kick in.

If Influencer A has 300 connections, each with a high level of trust in influencer A (and each influenced by her/him) then lets estimate that 10% of people pass this on to their 300 connections – reaching 9,000 people, each having a similar success rate (because each network is built around the same type of influence and trust, regardless of the perceived level) this reaches 900 people within two steps. So within two emails (effectively, we’ve reached three times the number you would’ve if you’d seeded the video on YouTube (leap of faith time).

This only works if you understand network dynamics. How a message moves within a network, who passes on viral’s and memes, who is a communicator, an early adopter, an innovator and on and on.

But let me make one thing clear, if an agency tells you that ‘viral’ is unpredictable, THEY ARE LYING.

(But understanding network dynamics is expensive, and they probably know you can’t afford it – after all, reaching 8 trillion of the right customers should be cheap…  )

When I was fifteen I decided I wanted to be a full time poet. My ambition was to become Poet Laurette within a few years, then I found out that the Poet Laurette only took home a steady 8k a year (and all the sherry he could drink – which was more of a draw either way). So I dropped that idea. And joined the world of marketing.

Then I started blogging, and said I’d never write a paid blog post. And I haven’t, ‘cept I’ve written one that gets me into a competition. Which isn’t the same, you cynical sods.

I’ve always worn my heart/mouth on my sleeve, and now is no different. Max (lovely chap) got in touch with me a few weeks back to ask if I’d like to get involved in a competition that eConsultancy was running – I agreed, then forgot, then he emailed me, and I apologised – repeat this for a few more weeks and we arrive at today. Three days after the deadline. Which is probably quite bad for my hopes of being crowned winner.

But, Max had asked me to write a blog post called “Why it’s worth your while to join up online and offline marketing” and this was something that I’d been thinking about since I’d seen Forbes’ top twenty social media campaigns, a list that was dominated by integrated campaigns.

So, regardless of missing the deadline, I thought I’d still write the post. Being one of the key areas in the future of marketing, I thought it might still be worth a shot .

So… Here goes…

Why is it important for marketing to be integrated online and offline? It’s pretty simple. In fact, you’ll kick yourself when I say it.

It’s important for marketing to be integrated online and offline because the consumer doesn’t distinguish between online or offline.

Or which department produced the content/wrote the script/spoke to you last Tuesday.

Or who should respond to their Facebook comment at 4:56am Sunday morning.

They. Just. See. A. Brand.

As marketeers, we are all far too close to our work/department/agency/industry to realise the simple fact that the consumer sees a brand, and nothing more. We see Nike. If we see a terrible television advert, we don’t go “Oh God, Wieden+Kennedy really dropped the ball with this one”, we say “Whoops, Nike screwed up”.

Almost all of the campaigns named in Forbes’ list were integrated campaigns. They tied an ad campaign with online content (more commonly referred to as a ‘viral’ – more on that another day) and a marketing drive with a Twitter campaign. Almost every successful social media campaign has been integrated.

The future of agency work isn’t understanding the next big thing, or figuring out how to charge more for less. The next big thing for the agency world is understanding how to work together, to integrate our specialisms to create huge campaigns that reach the consumer. The consumer that doesn’t see that there are six agencies behind the Facebook account that just pointed them to the augmented reality iPhone app that shows them where to get a free sample from – they see a brand. It’s our job to ensure that they always see the brand, and that that brand is truly integrated, regardless of how many agencies it works with.

Oh, and hopefully I’ll see you at Jump on my free press pass

This post is part of the #JUMPchallenge, a blogging competition designed to raise awareness of how to join up online and offline marketing, launched to support Econsultancy’s JUMP event

Ged Carroll has been prolifically posting videos in the last few weeks. I think that’s the right way to phrase that. Hmm. It doesn’t look right.

ANYWAY. Ged has posted some incredible clips and I thought I’d curate some of those little bad boys…

I like Yoshihito Nakano

What’s incredible is that Nakano see’s the tattoo as the leap between reality and art – like the cross section between the two. He doesn’t prepare, he just draws onto skin. Beautiful.

“I would like people to lose prejudices about tattooing. I don’t dare ask people to do so, but I would like people to see the essence of tattooing more.”

I’m about to get my first work done and this has only added to my excitement. This guy is an artist in the purest form.

The secret history of Silicon Valley

My impression of Silicon Valley was pretty much framed by the thoughts that it was born from the second World War and came from an excess and adaptation of ideas. This excellent video helps to explain that…

HTML5 – The force is with it

Watch. This.

Then tell me it doesn’t change things.

Clay Shirky on his new work Cognitive Surplus

More Google Talk stuff, this time from Shirky and certainly worth the hour.

This post has probably been written 56,341,463 times before, but this post is for me, not for you (ok, maybe you can read it too).

Facebook is due to announce some plans for some location stuff tonight (none of the other 56,341,463 posts are as technical as this one, I know) and everyone is speculating about how it’ll kill FourSquare. And Google. And Gowalla. And cure cancer (no one said this, but give it time). And for the first time, I agree.

Here’s why…

Facebook has more than 500million users. Each of those users feels warm and safe with Facebook. They log in, they stalk their friends, they upload photos and ask people to comment on them, they share too much. They know Facebook.

FourSquare has more than 2million users. Each of those (guess work here) is an innovator/early adopter. Each is waiting for the full value to be realised. They’ll all probably stick with FourSquare (ego-trap and all that).

Providing that Facebook doesn’t rock the foundations of it’s own platform, people will use location. If it introduces the ability to check-in at locations like you’d update your status, people will. 500million people will. Facebook introduced the ‘Like’ function – low latency, high pick-up. If location is as introduced in a similar way, pick-up will undoubtedly be similar.

New networks are like icey lakes, get on the ice and if it’s thick enough, you’ll slide about like Torvil. If it’s thin you’ll fall underneath and die. The same can be said for the way that we take up new networks – the risk is a barrier, the opportunity to fail (people perceive people that join every new network as ‘throwing enough at the wall’) and people don’t like to lose face. Facebook is the equivalent of Torvil picking you up, skating into the winter olympics and getting a solid ten. It’s safe.

It will change things in a big way. Imagine tracking 500million people around the world, each checking in and sharing their location with friends (and due to Facebook’s inventive approach to piracy, the rest of the world probably).

As a data geek I’m practically frothing at the mouth.

I was digging through the internet last night looking for interesting videos on the digital world and stumbled across this mental Romanian video from a few years back featuring Faris Yakob and Iain Tait!

It’s a pretty good interview (bar the incredibly loud sound effects between scenes) and Iain makes some interesting points about where advertising is moving towards (which we’ve seen proven in the three or four years since this interview).

The point is simple: digital isn’t a set of trends, it’s a way of thinking.

Also, early on, look out for Iain talking about how he’s online even in his sleep

Social media, and in particular, social networks, are a mental mess of ‘big data‘. Photos, text, links, videos, podcasts, FarmVille – our online lives have become busy to say the least.

When we originally signed up to the internet (bad terminology) we looked for people that we already knew (from real life) and people that we had shared interests with. Fine. Great, even. I think this is how we create our own little version internet – our network depicts exactly how we view the internet.

Our network shares links that we click, and that network is built from people that we find, people that we believe are similar to ourselves because they’re interested in what we’re interested in. Google is now starting to prioritise our search results based on our social graph – the friends that we choose now dictate the search results that we find.

Can you see the issue with this? We choose our own network, therefore we choose our own internet, content, links. We reinforce our own interests – which is great to find more out about what we already know, but is it good for widening our understanding of the world? Probably not…

This thought has been rattling around my head for a while, so I started to think how I could battle it.

The first thing I thought was: streamline my networks, therefore trimming out a lot of the tertiary friends and keeping the ones that I love. The next thing was to stop reading about 95% of the blogs I read and find new ones, using odd terms to find them. Terms that I knew nothing of such as ‘neuroscience’, ‘architecture’ and ‘futures trading’.

Streamlining networks
This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while now – you may have seen me (using the ‘hide’ function on Facebook, culling my Twitter friends and then categorising the remaining good few [:-)] and trying to use more traditional methods of keeping in touch with my closest friends (the phone, texts, email even). It’s been pretty successful, I can leave Twitter for six hours and have a very speedy catch up when I come back, Facebook isn’t dominated by stupid games updates and I’ve caught up with so many friends in the last seven days – just by understanding my own networks.

Finding new sources of knowledge
Search for things that you don’t understand – look for people that are specialists in their area, people that explain things in a clear way. That way you’ll stand more chance of picking up and idea quickly and transferring it to your industry (hopefully). Don’t be scared of what you don’t know.

Social media is about communication, both receiving and transmitting, and both of these are ultimately about relationships and understanding – we surround ourselves with people that we admire and that we learn from and love. If you’re about to suggest that I’m using my relationships like commodities, let me stop you right there – I’m trying to maintain existing relationships and build new ones by spending time with people – could you say the same if you followed 80,000 people? It’s important to give the right level of attention to each of these relationships – following 45,000 people or having 8,000 friends on Facebook surely cannot be conducive to having valuable relationships? And what could you learn if these people were all marketers?

What do you think?

Google knows all about you.  Yeah right, you know this, but do you know how much?

It knows how many times you’ve been rick-rolled (YouTube), it knows that you have an unhealthy obsession with Gogol (Google Books), that you spend your working day flicking between 4Chan and textsfromlastnight (Chrome) and that you don’t read any of the 500 feeds you’re subscribed too (Reader).

It knows that your blog is pretty influential (PageRank), that your house is exactly one hundred and seventy miles from your summer house (Maps), that you call your parents every third Tuesday (Android) and that you probably have too much time on your hands (TweetDeck for Android).

It knows that you’re a narcissist (Google: Jed Hallam).

It knows that you’re probably left wing because you almost always take your news and views from The Guardian (Google News), that your boss is a cheapskate (Google Docs) and that you haven’t the foggiest about French but you’d like to be seen to be romantic (Translate: ‘I love you’).

It knows that you forgot your wife’s birthday (a sarcastic GCal invitation from her for the romantic meal you should have booked) and that you’re now avoiding her calls (Google Voice). It knows that you then turned to it in your time of need (Google: great birthday presents).

It also knows who your friends are (SocialGraph), it knows what you look like (Google Goggles) and it knows where you live (Google Latitude).

Oh, and it knows that you don’t (and nobody else for that matter) use Wave. And that you’d probably like to work for them (erm, Googleplex anyone?).

Now the really scary part is that when you combine all of this information, you’ll find you have a pretty complete profile of someone. And you’ve signed in for all of it. Good old permission marketing, eh?

And this all comes on the back of Eric Schmidt declaring that the future of the internet relies on “true transparency and no anonymity” at Techonomy today…

Scary times.

Social media monitoring is a complete waste of resources. Total waste of money, time and understanding.

Yep.

You know why?

I’m guessing by now you’re either really intrigued or really angry. Hopefully both.

Social media monitoring is completely useless without context or clear outputs.

What are outputs? Your next steps once you capture something.

What is context? Context means understanding the data, turning data to information. Something meaningless to something useful.

Please read on, let me elaborate.

Let’s take an example: you’re on the board of BRAND Z, you decide that after fifteen years of traditional activity you should probably look into social media, but where do we start?! ARRGGHHH!!! TOO MUCH INFORMATION??!!!

*ring ring*

“Oh, hello social media monitoring service! You only charge £7 a month? And I get shiny graphs?! Where do I sign?!!!”.

Here’s why I’m so irked.

(Now my next point is going to irritate you if you’ve read a few of my last posts because it was born from the Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness. Which I appear to quote for everything. Even in Tesco.)

Fooled by Randomness is largely about the unpredictable being predicted and the uselessness of models, and Taleb’s context is the financial markets. Which doesn’t sound too transferable to ‘digital’ but a few chapters in he begins to discuss the probability of successful analysis at different rates for monitoring share price and how minute changes shouldn’t effect your overall view of the investment opportunity – basically, always take a long view on big issues.
Think about this in terms of a boat on the waves, just because it’s at the bottom of a wave doesn’t mean it’s going to sink.

So Taleb then pulls together a probability of success at different rates table;

One year – 93% probability of successful analysis
One quarter – 77% probability of successful analysis
One month – 67% probability of successful analysis
One day – 54% probability of successful analysis
One hour – 51% probability of successful analysis
One minute – 50.17% probability of successful analysis
One second – 50.02% probability of successful analysis

The point that he’s trying to make is that people are effected too much by minute by minute changes and cannot comprehend the bigger picture. The same can be said for monitoring; of course it’s important to look at ‘real time’ alerts and understand what’s being said, but it’s much more important to understand how this fits into the wider context.

If you cherry pick blog posts about BRAND Z without giving them context you’ll have an almost completely random view of the brand – monitor every blog post and hold monthly reviews and you’ll begin to gather insight, do this for a year and you’ll have a much more clear idea about your reputation online.

The point of this post is not to make you angry, but to highlight that monitoring only works if two criteria are fulfilled;

a) There are a set of clear next steps to take – listening is fine if you know how (or if) to react

b) Always look at the macro, not the micro and always, always, ALWAYS give your monitoring context

I know this is quite a long, ranty post, but if we’re to move the ‘digital’ industry along we need to be be more intelligent about this stuff.

*quick update: this post has also been cross-posted on The Wall so there may be some interesting comments there too!*