The Niche Fulcrum

Country by country social behaviours....

Often we have quite a time explaining to clients user behaviours differ between countries. This infographic captures the point nicely. To be clear - the data on which this is based is "declared behaviour" - data from people filling in surveys as opposed to our approach, which is pure listening - actual.

The point being - people use the web very differently around the globe - the idea of a global propositon for a brand, that speaks to everyone in the same way (unless your'e a utility / platform - Google / Facebook) doesn't make much sense.

The 3 Routes to Social Media ROI

3 Routes to Social Media ROI

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The Social Business Value Map

Social business value map

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There is a lot of talk about social business and how each department within a brand can harness social media.

To clarify some of the issues, I took front line social business units within an organisatiuon and described a single, basic objective for each department. I then mapped those onto some of the most widely understood startegies being used by different brands, to see which strategies supported which goals

Finally I mapped measures against each strategy.

Biggest take away?

Look how (relatively) balanced it is.

Social media really is impacting across the business. No wonder brands struggle when they leave it to the marketing department!

Human Digital - what we do....

Human digital new business deck

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Reflections on the agency model

The world is changing for agencies. Revenues from traditional offline products and services are declining. Digital per se is not the answer. Much of what would be considered traditional digital work (website development, search, SEO etc) is now a highly commoditised offering wafer thin margins.

From the client perspective, the world is fragmenting. Meaning brands are finding it increasingly difficult to engage and retain customers.

A successful agency model would reconcile these 2 positions. Finding products and services that offer sufficiently high barriers to entry that margins won’t be eroded in the medium term, whilst offering brands a solution to their differentiation and customer engagement issues.

In a world where the “work” is a commodity, but understanding what that work is, is increasingly hard. An agency must then logically sell understanding.

That understanding is, at its core, the understanding of customer.

Some social experience principles....

“Brand as publisher" - content is the catalyst around which engagement occurs. Stands to reason, that content and content strategy become incredibly important. Good link here

Fish where the fish are - accept users often prefer to use 3rd party platforms and not necessarily a brands' own website - engage them on these platforms where they have indicated they’re comfortable here

brand authority - the sensitivity we must acquire in understanding our brands’ authority is often limited - in other words - our right to a voice is presimsed on our participation, often for extended periods of time, building credibility and trust here

Iterative / fail fast - embracing the notion that in a connected, engaged world, we must constantly iterate - push new thinking, content, applications etc into those networks where our users exist – growing tactics which resonate (and as importantly) quickly decommission those that don’t work. In other words, strategy is often a drip feeding of a larger number of smaller ideas, as opposed to less frequent, larger ones here

“Architectures of participation” (networks not destinations) - building a brands’ authority through the visibility it has within different networks – thinking of our primary marketing tools as our most engaged networks, not necessarily the websites or destinations we own here

Always on - as is often the case, when something is so intrinsic to a concept - it is often forgotten - social business / media / whatever is always on - you can't have a social campaign - if you invite people to a house party you can't send everyone home just because someone plays a song you don't like