Sensei Blogs

Announcing New Book: Influence Marketing, by Sam Fiorella & Danny Brown

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The hype around social influence has been circling around me like a cyclone for a few years now, online, in-print and in-person. I’ve been open and honest with my views on the challenges with the current methodology being used by marketers and software providers alike until someone asked me to “put your money where your mouth is.”

And so I am.

This spring Que Publishing, a publishing imprint of Pearson, will release Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing coauthored by Danny Brown and me!

Danny and I will move the conversation beyond social influence scoring and give you a start-to-finish blueprint for making influence marketing work in your organization.

Featuring case studies, empirical evidence, digital workshops and much, much more, Influence Marketing is based on successful campaigns that Danny and I have jointly and independently executed in this space. We look forward to sharing more with you in early January!

In the meantime, you can take advantage of the Cyber Monday week-long offers on Amazon.

Reserve Your Copy Today!

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Which is Social? The Customer or the Business?

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT

With the exponential growth of social platforms, the face of the customer is continuously changing. Today’s customer seeks to do business with more than a product or a service; they seek to do business with a brand that stands for something and more importantly, with the people behind the brand.

This is a statement posted by the Canadian Marketing Association in advance of their annual Social Media Conference, which is scheduled for June 13^th, 2012 at the Allstream Center in Toronto, Canada. The conference promises to “dig deeper” into the business-customer dynamics of social businesses. Among the topics covered by the various keynotes and panel discussion: The Internet’s Culture and its impact on Digital Marketing, the C-Suite Insights on “Customer Trust” and of course, the ever-present Social Media Measurement. See full agenda/speakers here.

In advance of next week’s conference, the #BizForum community will be debating social business best practices in order to get the creative juices flowing as we head into the conference. Join us Wed, June 6^th, 2012 by following the #bizforum hashtag on http://tweetchat.com/room/bizforum between 8 and 9 PM Eastern.

Sample of the concepts that will be debated:

S1: Social engagement cannot be measured by monetary metrics. Agree/Disagree?

S2: Numerical measurement of a Brand’s social activity provides irrelevant insights into engagement. Agree/Disagree?

S3: A direct link can be made between a brand’s social engagement and profit. Agree/Disagree?

S4: “Social Business” is a misnomer. Social is a marketing function, not a business function. Agree/Disagree?

S5: Social engagement does not require “trust” to be meaningful to the brand. Agree/Disagree?
S6: A Social Business must focus on internal culture before it can address online culture. Agree/Disagree?

S7: Study of customers' online behaviour patterns reveal same conclusions as offline behaviours. Agree/Disagree?

Join on #bizforum tomorrow night as we delve into these subjects and more in preparation for next week’s full day conference.

Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

2012 CMA Social Media Conference

June 13 - Allstream Centre, Toronto

Social Customers Choose Social Businesses

The Uncomfortable Age of Transparency

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Mon, 28 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Gone are the days of the stand-alone customer loyalty card (or just plain loyalty for that matter) – we’re now seeing a range of new data, social media feeds and smart phones that are changing the way organisations engage with their clients. We’re in a generational and philosophical struggle between older, closed systems and the new, open culture of the Internet.

The open internet culture has proven to be at odds with both corporate cultures and political regimes.In fact it's open season on corporations. It’s become a war of wills between the over-connected public with free and instant access to publish and consume information and the traditionally private and secretive enterprise.

Egyptian filmmaker Amr Salama offered this warning: “Businesses now really need to understand something that governments, dictators didn’t understand. Someday you’ll be busted. Anything you do will be known. Social media’s gonna get you, and if you’re lying we’re gonna know.” While we've certainly seen this accountablity in the world of politics (See Mashable.com's list of the 9 Social Media Uprisings that Sought to Change the World in 2011), this phenomena is now taking hold in the global corporate marketplace.

“I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.” —Hunter S. Thompson.

Through blog and social networks, the public have become an army waging war on corporate irresponsibility, which is forcing the need for brand transparency. In a twist of fate, social media propelled the demise of media giant: The News of the World. The scandal saw employees accused of engaging in phone hacking, police bribery, and exercising improper influence in the pursuit of publishing stories.

When the news hit, the public honesty-police took up the call and microbloggers like Andy Dawson took to the Twitterverse to push known News of the World advertisers like Ford to drop their support of the newspaper. “Within about 90 minutes, it had started to snowball, and my timeline was filled with people tweeting at various companies,” reported Mr. Dawson.

The reaction speed of advertisers to the public outcry that eventually led to the closing of this over century old publication led many pundits to call it “Britain’s Arab Spring”. Rory Cellan-Jones, a technology correspondent for BBC Mobile summarized it best when he quipped: “a random collection of loosely organised people with no one leader have come together to deal a blow to the finances of a powerful media organization.”

The uncomfortable age of transparency

What does transparency means to business? According to the Business Dictionary, transparency is the “minimum degree of disclosure to which agreements, dealings, practices, and transactions are open to all for verification.” I’m betting that corporate executives & financial stakeholders have a completely different interpretation of this than their customers.

Where corporate executives saw investigative reporters as problematic, they now see the public as enemies in the war over brand control. It has forced many analysts to argue for greater transparency from brands yet most don’t know what transparency looks like or how to assess whether or not their companies are, in fact, being transparent. Many see corporate transparency as “grand gestures” (Deb Shultz) or clever marketing and PR tactics.

In my last post, I discussed the challenge to McDonald’s Corp. by consumer watchdog Corporate Accountability International to: "issue a report within six months of the 2012 annual meeting assessing the company's policy responses to growing evidence of linkages between fast food and childhood obesity, diet-related diseases and other impacts on children's health”, which was overwhelming rejected by McDonald’s stakeholders.

Should McDonald’s have taken that challenge? Should they have done it before being asked? What’s the risk of not doing so? Disclosure is now an element of transparency where companies no longer attempt to conceal their inner workings. They must figure out how to be “open” to sharing their activities and the impact of those activities with the outside world.

Patrick Doyle, President of Dominos USA said: “there is nothing more import or sacred to us than our customer’s trust” in his video response to the now infamous viral YouTube video of two staff members doing unspeakable things to Pizzas that were apparently served to customers. Trust is a constant theme in corporate marketing but that does it take to really gain that trust? Is it possible for a corporation to be truly open and still maintain their structural integrity? When it being open too much?

Join us this Wed, May 30^th, 2012 between 8 and 9 PM for the #bizforum Twitter debate where the community will be exploring this very issue.

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Challenging the Rules of Social Darwinism

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

"Survival of the Fittest”, first championed by philosopher Hebert Spencer is an extension of Charles Darwin’s theory on “natural selection”, which describes the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. Spenser’s sociological adaptation of Darwin’s biological theory has been sometimes referenced as "Social Darwinism” (note: the term “social” was not used to reference modern day “social media”).

In the business world, the term has been interpreted in many fashions but the main premise always remains: a product or brand whose attributes (naturally occurring by characteristic or manufactured by marketing) predisposes it to being beloved and supported by a the majority of consumers.

The economic applications of this principle have rarely included the social media factor; a new, disruptive player in the ecosystem. Can popularity, amplified by social media, alter the premise of Spencer’s fittest paradigm?

Case Study: Research in Motion (RIM).

Spoiler Alert: this is not another blog post about how RIM is circling the drain or speculating why or who should buy it. It’s about you and your part in dictating its history.

Recently, I engaged in a rather heated debate with colleagues about the merits of Apple vs. Google vs. RIM devices and operating systems. After what seemed like an eternity of technical diatribes, someone asked a simple yet pointed question and one that may be closer to the heart of the issue: how do consumers go from being diehard fanatics to diehard detractors over night?

Of course they were referencing the meteoric fall of RIM, which decended from "inventor of the Smart Phone”, enjoying the world’s largest marketshare to vulture food in what was really a nanosecond when you look back. RIM’s Blackberry was supposed to be (and for a short while was) to the smart phone what Kleenex is to facial tissues.

Was the debatable innovation or technical missteps of RIM’s executives what caused it to go from the world’s mobile “fittest” to economic “weakling” overnight? Even passionate advocates of Social Darwinism will concede that any form of natural selection does not happen this quickly without some external factor such as an economics-version of a tsunami or meteor storm that kills off a species in one fell swoop. So what’s the external factor at play here?

Disrupting Social Darwinism

While we’re still charting the full impact of social media’s amplification factor vis-à-vis social influence, social status and networking, we can all agree that social bandwagonism is alive and in fact, rampant.

What is the impact of social media’s mob-mentality on the rules of Social Darwinism? In the case of RIM we might argue that it expedited – or possibly created – the speed at which it has lost public and investor favor.

Is RIM’s product so poor, so deficient that its death should be preordained? It has a proven history of innovation, an international network and large recurring revenue stream (albeit drastically lower than it once was) so why have consumers jumped off the bandwagon so quickly to avoid the “Blackberry plague” that threatens to kill their social cool-factor?

It is possible that RIM or its Blackberry device would have failed regardless of social media’s spotlight but would it have happened so quickly? The new world-order for consumer brands seems to be ruled not by the survival of the fittest but social-popularity. Blackberry fanatics have thrust their “blue thumbs” into their pockets way too quickly for us to not concede that social media peer-pressure elevated social popularity to the top of the priority list over technical considerations and brand loyalty.

Mission Impossible: Overcoming “Social Media Darwinism”

In fact, I would argue the point a little further and state that it has created a hostile environment where even a very fit business can’t survive. RIM has not closed its doors yet pundits and analysts have all but written their epitaphs. The same way they wrote off MySpace, which despite the reports is enjoying a surge in popularity …and even revenue growth today.

I understand that this is their job...whatever sells the news but the general public isn’t selling anything? Or is it? Are we selling our own popularity…our own status? Are we all too happy – and too quick – to join the cool-kids that we’re inadvertently poisoning the environment for fit brands?

What are your thoughts? Has social influence created a social media tsunami? Have the rules of "survival of the fittest" been changed? Can a business overcome it?

Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Yoru Community, Not Your Ego

The Short-Sightedness of Customer Service

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

In my last post: Customer Service, Twitter and Why They Fail, I stated that the use ofTwitter for customer service communications may not be delivering businesses what it can or should. I argued that current customer engagement practices are filling up social media streams with public apologies and mea cuplas, which certainly demonstrate empathy, caring and listening in the short term but fails to convey competency in the long term. And without competence, trust cannot be established and so a re-think of the online customer service playbook must be considered.

Let’s take the “3 Examples of Stellar Social Media Customer Service” presented on Mashable Business this past November. Zappos, Pottery Barn and Boingo were announced as nominees for their annual Mashable Awards. They listed how each company’s customer service teams demonstrated active listening, “authentic” engagement with customers and how they used these opportunity to satisfy customer issues, avoiding the up-sell. Great right? Notice that in none of the write ups do they list how their efforts are designed to illustrate the competency of their respective businesses.

Customer Service is a Long-Term Strategy

I question whether they have a long term strategy for customer service. The reality is that many enterprise organizations – online or offline – look at customer service as a short term tactic vs. long-term strategy. Customer complains…we make it right…case closed…next.

What thought is given or tactic executed to ensure that the engagement will create a long-term impact on the business’ brand, customer value or profit? Is it even possible to create or measure long-term impact from immediate, short-term engagements?

Let’s use one of Mashable’s customer service award-nominated case studies as an example. A side table’s glass top, purchased by Pottery Barn customer shattered during an Arizona heat wave. The customer posted photos of the table on Pottery Barn’s Facebook fan page and within 30 minutes she had a call from a customer relations representative who worked with her to find a new tabletop and reimbursed her for it.

Excellent customer service delivered. Check.

What did Pottery Barn accomplish with this award-nominated experience? It demonstrated:

They’re listening
They’re quick to respond to complaints
They care about their customers
They stand behind their products

The engagement impacted the perception of that specific customer and all those who witnessed the immediacy of the response and any positive comments made post-transaction by the customer. It had a great short-term impact on the retailer’s brand. However, what would the impact be when 50 customers post pictures of products that failed to meet their expectations during the course of, for example, a month? Even if their customer service reps respond to each within 30 minutes with a “we’re sorry, contact us and we’ll make it right” message, all they’ve managed to do is demonstrate customer care – not competency. Anyone following their Facebook page or Twitter feeds will have an impression formed in their mind that Pottery Barn is responsive but their products are fraught with issues.

You can argue that they demonstrated competency in their customer service but in our social era, we can’t think in silos. We must consider the impact of every online action on the business’ bottom line.
Consider the airline or phone/cable industries who have embraced the social media channel for customer service like no other, especially through Twitter. Hindered by a 140 character limit, their customer service streams read like Step 8 in the Alcoholics Anonymous handbook: “make a list of all persons we have harmed…” What’s the long-term impact of that?

Demonstrating great customer service online is only half the required transaction

How does a business demonstrate competency through online customer service? In the Pottery Barn example above, one might consider:

Post a picture of the customer with their new product, that did not shatter
Write a blog post that provides customers with information about what glass table tops are best in what climates
Share 3rd party or manufacturer statistics about how infrequently such occurrences happen in the selected product range
Seek out other customers who have not had problems and incentivize them to share their stories and pictures
Where products are being discontinued because of poor customer experiences, share the rationale with the public along with the specs of the new product

Of course this list will change depending on the industry (E.G. retail, insurance, hospitality, etc.) or business type (E.G. B2B, B2C, Non-Profit, Government, etc.) but the premise would remain the same: extend your customer service tactics beyond the demonstration of customer care to include brand competence. Taking issues offline is a sound tactic but not circling back to showcase that such issues are rare or only a small percentage of the overall customer experience is short sided and fails your brand.

In fact, your customer service tweets are more than customer service; they’re advertising, they’re branding, and they’re sales initiatives and ultimately, with the right long-term strategy they’re profit generators. In many cases this will require collaboration with other departments but as with every other function in the enterprise, social media activity and measurement cannot be maximized or measured effectively if only operated within a silo.

You must move beyond public displays of affection and consider public displays of competence.

What are your thoughts on customer service as a long-term strategy? Are the current customer service tactics being deployed by top businesses only half the transaction? Share your thoughts below.

Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Customer Service, Twitter and Why They Fail

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I remember the days when the common response to public criticism of your brand’s product or service was: “as long as they’re spelling my name correctly” who cares? Burying one’s head in the sand was a perfectly acceptable response. How bad could it get? Who could they tell?

As recent as five years ago, many were quoting the fickle "48-hour news cycle", referencing the public’s short attention span lead by news agencies who chased the latest salacious story to capitalize on. How long could a negative story remain in front of the publics’ eye before another captured their attention?

Of course, today this is no longer an acceptable response since public criticisms live on in infinity (and beyond) on social networking sites and archives.

Fear and ignorance of the medium is no longer an excuse corporate executives can hide behind. A well-placed negative tweet, video or blog post can catch fire overnight and immediately impact your business’ bottom line. Just ask United Airlines whose share price dropped 10% after a passenger posted a video describing a bad customer experience, costing shareholders a reported $180 million. You can’t throw a virtual stick today without hitting a similar story.

Marketing and customer service managers are reacting with heavy investments in social media monitoring tools, socially-empowered customer service reps and community managers sitting in social media "command centers" to ensure they have their eyes everywhere. They seek out and proactively respond to criticisms and complaints with specific new rules of engagement that dictate they offer a very public, heartfelt mea culpa and links to offline forums to address the customer’s issue.

Even I've gone on record as saying negative criticism is your brand’s best opportunity to create fierce advocates if you quickly acknowledge the customer's complaint and deal with their issue on their platform of choice. More importantly, you demonstrate to the entire world that you’re listening, you care and that if anything does go wrong (and it does with everyone’s product at some point) that you’ll be there for them.

Competence is Missing From Customer Service Tweets

It’s about building trust. Trust is the operative word in our social era where public perception of your product’s quality and customer service is just as important - if not more - than the actual quality and service level.

In theory, publicly demonstrating your concern and attention to criticism will create publicly happy customers and observers who will influence others to positively engage you. But influence is about trust and more specifically the other person’s willingness to trust you. Trust is only established with equal parts of competence and character as Linda Hill detailed so well in the Harvard Business Review this month.

Arguably, honest, open and proactive communications with your audience through social media dialogue is an effective way to demonstrate your company’s character but how does it demonstrate competency? How does filling the airwaves with images of your apologetic mea culpas establish your business’ competency? When your social stream is filled with posts such as the ones shown above, are you not creating the exact opposite impression? That your product and business are, in fact not competent?

I'm not suggesting that we don't continue on this path of publicly addressing our customer's complaints. However, we must move beyond public displays of affection and consider public displays of competence if we wish to maximize this medium and the power of disgruntled-turned-satisfied customers.

Agree? Disagree? Share your opinions below. How can a business demonstrate its competence along with its character when engaging in social customer service?

[check out part two in this series: Customer Service is NOT a Short-Term Strategy]

Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Should We Get Executive Buy-in for Social Marketing?

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(2 Jeff Wilson) — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT

There is an old saying “It’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission”. In the realm of marketing, that is both sound and dangerous advice depending on the organization you are in. More innovative, customer-centric organizations embrace the likes of social for its potential value to the brand while more traditional business is highly reluctant proceeding more out of fear of being left out than value to the brand.

In an age of increasing executive and financial accountability results are everything. To that end, does social have the track record or level of accountability that would appeal to an executive sponsor? To be sure, social marketing is largely unproven in its ability to deliver to bottom line profit, especially in B2B sectors. But its potential cannot be denied.

Then there is the risk…

The list of spectacular failures is getting pretty impressive. McDonald’s #McDStories is the most recent but in the last two years major consumer brands have dealt with their own social nightmares including J&J, Coca Cola, Wendy’s, Chrsyler and Nestle.

At the same time we have some great successes out of the likes of Dell, Starbucks, Ford and Zappos. So obviously, when done right, social marketing can be highly valuable.

But do executives agree?

On one side of the coin, if we try to get sponsorship and fail we lose the opportunity to integrate potentially powerful social elements to our existing marketing mix.

On the other side if we don’t get approval and then fail, we risk not only the company’s reputation but our own jobs.

Are the risks of social worth the rewards if we by-pass executive approval?
Do executives understand the value of social enough to make an informed decision?
Does social carry too much of a negative reputation for executives?
Can we “boil the ocean” around the executive team to help them see the value of social?
What do we do if we ask and support is refused?
Are certain organizations and executives more likely to embrace or refuse social?

Share your opinions and challenge others tonight on #bizforum at 8pm EST.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Jeff - Sensei

Social Business. Enter the Matrix.

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

You have a choice. Take the Blue Pill or the Red Pill.

Take the Blue Pill and Run on the Corporate Wheel.

Acme’s Sales Executive Ted has a conversation with a prospective customer about industry needs, which sparks an idea for an innovative product upgrade. He e-mails the idea to Susan his Sales Manager, who likes the idea and suggests it to Sam the Sales VP at the following month’s regional sales meeting. Sam, knowing the corporate policy well writes a brief and “inter-offices” the document to Sheila, the Chief Operating Officer who files it with her assistant for inclusion in the quarterly product review meeting…

…fast-forward 12 months and that idea was downgraded into obscurity because of current product development issues and priorities or won favor but is in “committee planning”, waiting for systematic review, comments and rebuttals throughout the corporate chain.

In the meantime, an upstart competitor is winning market share by bringing the new product to life and hired Ted, who was “unsatisfied with the responsiveness of his former company” to sell that product to the business who inspired it in the first place.

[All names changed to protect the blissfully ignorant.]

Take the Red Pill and enter the Matrix.

Acme’s Sales Executive Ted has a conversation with a prospective customer about industry needs, which sparks an idea for an innovative product upgrade. Ted posts the idea onto an internal social network, which is read by Justine, the Product Manager, Tanya, the Customer Support Operator and Trevor, the Marketing Exec. The four exchange similar insights and their own discussions with various customer contacts. They post links to each the work each had begun.

Trevor invites his boss, Lucas the CMO into the discussion to get a reality check on what this ad-hoc cross-silo team has been brainstorming. Lucas quickly understands: the need, the opportunity, the challenges in bringing the product to market and the solutions, which he gathered from reading the team's discussion. Lucas opens an online collaboration room with the these participants and crowdsources a formal marketing plan that he presents at the next product development meeting.

…fast-forward 12 months and Acme is reporting a spike in category sales spurred on by the reintroduction and rebranding of an old product with new features. Ted receives a bonus for his efforts, additional commissions for the lift in sales.

And the upstart…oh, wait…what upstart?

Social business requires employees and managers to enter the matrix. The corporate matrix is both a culture and technology that encourages and even rewards open sharing of ideas, experiences, project statuses and, dare I say, opinions from every employee and across every silo regardless of hierarchy.

Next, it must enable on-demand committees to form around ideas not hierarchies.

Imagine. Open communication for the betterment of the business.Social Business. Revolutionary.

You have a choice. Take the Blue Pill or the Red Pill.

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego
Follow on Twitter

The Tides of Change: Capturing Customer Attention No Longer Enough

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Another battle has begun in the war for our customer’s attention and by extension, our marketing dollars.

This war is being fought on many fronts by many content producers and media channels, all of whom are vying for the attention that our Brand's audiences are giving to television and cable programming.

During last night’s #bizforum Twitter debate, our community explored the future of advertising and the impact that social engagement will have on it. The general consensus seemed to be: “television is not going anywhere anytime soon and ads don’t need to change much”. A sentiment I don't share.

As stated in my previous post, “consumers have, consciously or unconsciously, become accustomed to personal engagement with the brands they love or want to love”. Static advertisements and commercials that don’t find innovative ways to enable two-way, “real dialogue” with their audience will simply be skipped or fast-forwarded on DVRs.

During the debate Jeff Wilson, my esteemed colleague here at Sensei added that “new empires will be those that hold the keys to the content, not the channels”. The point being, keep content strong and you'll demand their attention. While content marketing is certainly a key marketing tactic today, in and of itself it is not enough to capture the imagination of a Brand’s audience that demands more than interesting content. They demand personal engagement.

There's a small group of national brands who have realized this and opted out of television commercials or other traditional ad networks (for some products) in favor of viral videos or Facebook campaigns such as Burger King, Ford and Nike - to name a few. Even perennial TV advertisers: candy companies are making the shift. Cadbury for example just launched a new chocolate bar, the Dairy Milk Bubbly exclusively on Google+, followed by mentions on Facebook and Twitter.

The Tides of Change

Appealing to the consumer’s need (and expectations) for engagement with Brands is only half the battle marketers (and television) face however. The viewing habits of our audience is changing.

According to Neilson’s 2011 State of the Media: Consumer Usage Report: 143 million people are now watching television programs on work or home computers; 30 millions are watching on mobile devices. Significant increases over previous years.

Even within the “off-TV” world there are drastic changes: ad clicks on mobile devices are growing faster than on PCs. Quarterly figures from Marin Software indicate that mobiles and tablets accounted for 10 percent of all search ad clicks in the U.S. in Q4 2011. That is double the amount of clicks seen on those same devices in Q3 2011.

The migration from traditional program-viewing devices to new, internet based mobile devices has started and moving quickly. And with it, viewer habits and expectations.

Google Upping the Ante

YouTube is betting on the changing tide (or maybe it’s creating it?) by investing $100 million into seeding professional production firms such as Young Hollywood, who is producing a series of YouTube-only programming that will premier this Monday. What does Google know that we should?

They are betting heavily that consumers will continue to spend more and more time consuming programming on their preferred devices: computers, tablets and smartphones, not televisions.

They also didn’t miss Nielson/Yahoo reporting that 80% of smartphone users multitask while watching traditional TV programs, choosing to look up products they see, discuss the programming on social networks among other tasks. Again, consumers are there waiting...expecting to be personally engaged with. Where are the advertisers?

Based on the comments in yesterday’s #bizforum debate, it may be just me, Google and a select few brands that see the trend currents and how radically advertising will have to shift to capture the audience’s engagement; however the P&L statements for those that continue to invest heavily in traditional media advertising and tactics will force a strategy re-think.

What say you? Am I reading the trend currents incorrectly?

By Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego
Follow on Twitter

An Open Letter to Media Publishers (and other Business Leaders)

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Publishers (and business leaders),

Your business is dying. You know it. Your readers know it. So what are you doing about it?

The belief that the Internet was the death knell of print – and maybe even cable news – was a bit of an exaggeration although your revenue statements clearly show it’s had a major impact.

I’ve seen attempts to move content online via tiered, paid subscription models, which clearly isn’t working to reverse your financial fortunes. I’m thinking you’re all sending Apple Christmas baskets to thank them for the iPad, which – for a time anyway – has enabled the sale of content via Tablet magazines. Still, adoption for paid digital magazines on tablets is a far cry from the heydays of the print publishing industry.

Lessons from the Music Industry

The music publishing industry took a similar, if not more devastating hit with peer-to-peer file sharing. Attempts by the industry to fight consumers in their revolution failed miserably and they finally had to completely reinvent their business in order to survive. Revenue is now bundled into “lifetime-contracts” that tie up a musician’s brand beyond their recordings to concert sales, endorsement, clothing and perfume lines, movie contracts and online activities. Compilation albums and digital singles have replaced traditional one-band album sales.

The Digital Pandora’s Box

If there’s one lesson we can borrow from the successful overhaul of the music business, it’s that consumers don’t want to be dictated to. Web and social technologies were the equivalent of a digital Pandora’s Box. Once subscribers were shown the free content possibilities accessible via blogs and peer-to-peer sharing, why would they ever go back to paying for a magazine?

The answer? Your audience no longer sees value in content so stop trying to sell it to them. Sell them what they really want and would be willing ot pay for: experience & choice…and the freedom to customize and access that experience across multiple channels from print to Web to mobile and whatever device the creative minds at Apple think of next.

Consider this future:

1. Content bundled with non-content products and services.
Imagine a fashion magazine bundling content with paid loyalty programs at top fashion retailers. Or bundling subscriptions with personal shopping or style consultation? The same could apply to financial publications that provide content bundled with access to financial planning services. Or technology magazines that bundles content subscriptions with access to conferences & trades shows or, better yet exclusive beta-access to new technologies.

2. “Content subscriptions” vs. Magazine subscriptions
The Web has opened up our views – and our demands – to limitless possibilities. We don’t want limits and a magazine’s covers and brand are limits. The past 2 years have seen unparalleled consolidation of publications and media yet why subscriptions are still fixed to individual publications is beyond me. Why can’t I subscribe to self-filtered content that pulls from multiple publications and pay for such a customized experience? Why can’t I have access to content about my beloved Maple Leafs only from Sports Illustrated and Financial News from the New York Post on the industries I wish to follow? Future publications cannot be defined by categories and themes created by you, but by me.

3. Master content licenses
If you wish to charge me for content, you damn well better make that content available on whatever device or medium I choose, whenever I want. And allow me to syndicate content to whatever device I want in order to customize my own experience based on my needs. Content should not be device – or print – specific

4. Interactive Content
Content is no longer static the way that advertising is no longer broadcast but conversational. Social Media has completed changed our expectations. So why is your content not more dynamic? I may value your article and its insights but I would more likely pay for it if I was able to engage a focused, private business group around the content. For example, why can’t I engage industry content along with a dedicated group of colleagues or industry execs to brainstorm how the theories presented could impact our businesses. Imagine the impact on the evolving social enterprise!

You cannot win a revolutionary war against your customers.

This lesson should be heeded by all business leaders, not just the publishing industry. The changes forecast by Web and social technologies require a complete deconstruction of your business model, culture and expectations, not simply a shifting from one channel to another. Leaders today cannot afford to be lazy in their creativity and certainly can't afford to "stay in the box". More of the same will yield less than that which was previously achieved.

Are you brave enough to take that leap?

Signed,

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego
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