Archive for 2013

Over the past three weeks I’ve had the chance to meet with a number of CMOs. What’s interesting isn’t that they are all doing social, but rather that what they think they are doing actually isn’t social.

At first glance its all very hip and cool. The campaigns are creative. They’ve got Pininterest, Facebook, Twitter, and Linked-in cooking. rAnd yeah, they are seducing plenty of followers along the way. But here’s the rub. The fact you are doing all this in social media doesn’t mean you are doing social.

The missing ingredient is real engagement. Not just followers following. Not just viewers viewing.

What they aren’t orchestrating is the conversation that engages consumers up front, and gives them a reason to come back. In fact, there is little thought as to why they might come back and what they might do when they get there. There is little look at how information is really being shared. The majority of links are still shared via good old email, for instance. But because most don’t ahve a formal listening program, they don’t know.

And there is little consideration for the real difference between Facebook and Twitter. Where Facebook is a massive walled garden for social expression, Twitter drives the sharing of signals across the open web – it captures moments and is a critical news feed.

Advertising is a shallow art. Social isn’t. The real measure is depth of conversations over time. Bathing in the shallows is easy. It might buy you some transactional sales. But what it won’t do is build you a vibrant community sustained by vibrant conversations.

The trick is to make the switch from the measures of effective transmission to measures of effective participation.

Great to see The Martin Jetpack getting covered on TechCrunch. They are getting some nice props in US media at the moment.

Kiwi companies PowerByProxi and SurveyLab have both attracted solid funding rounds from offshore investors. Both CEOs have put a ton of work into building quality ventures with strong prospects. Great to see Kiwi companies winning like this.

SurveyLab is backed by N08 Ventures of which I am a director.

This story on Nokia’s demise gets at the real issue behind why so many companies fail to innovate. They listen to users. It’s the one mistake Apple didn’t make. Nokia did, as told by its lead designer:

“That is a pain point for me, because by far they didn’t invent the touch screen phone, we had applications, we had internet phones, we had all that functionality . . . but all of our user testing pointed to the fact that no-one wanted touch phones.”

That feedback look then results in lack of urgency.

“We realised at Nokia that touch was increasingly important and were working towards doing it, but when a company is really busy holding on to what it has built, it is difficult to put enough of a push towards something so drastically new and engender urgency in it,” he says.

“Kudos to Apple though, they had absolutely nothing to lose by taking the risk of re-thinking the interface in such as way, as it was their introduction to the market.”