The Future Of [Social] Media

The Future of Social Media

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We all use social media, some of us work with brands who
use social media to greater or lesser effect.
And we’ve all seen case studies, from media owners,
distribution companies, colleagues and bloggers. So I’m
not going to cover the same ground. I’ve been to a couple
of conferences recently which were mainly meant for
marketing folk, and the speakers were some of the top
strategists working in social media, some techie, some
agency and some brand marketers. And they were trying
to explain a little bit further ahead than the case studies
do, to really go into why stuff works on the internet. So I’ve
tried to pull some of the strands together.….

What’s going on,
What we can do to help our clients.

And what we can do ourselves

I’m going to talk a bit about how changing technology
affects brands, so it is worth having a look at what a brand
was. If you go back to when products like Coca Cola were
launched, the brand was a symbol that you could trust and
rely on to deliver quality and value for money. This worked
because in the days before fast communications, the only
people you could rely on for information were family and
friends, and probably only those in your immediate vicinity.
The brand became a mark of reputation – almost like a
substitute for someone you know having told you that
coke tasted good.

We haven’t changed – our species has grown up around
narrative. Linguistic development gave us the competitive
advantage to out-evolve our closest competitors.
Companionship and a sense of belonging are basic
human requirements. We need to belong to tribes,
whether through shared interests, family bonds, religious
beliefs, or supporting the same team, as this feeds our
sense of who we are – it makes us human. Technology
just opens up wider groups of people who share our
interests – the tribes become bigger, and better informed

The idea of brands as a substitute for information grew up
in the industrial age. The broadcast transmission of
information belongs to this era too: it is a linear process

where raw materials, labour and distribution are
expensive, so needs to work on a huge scale in order to
be effective. Linear production meant standards of living
soared during the 20th century

And this production line model was used as the basis for
marketing products too. Like the in factories, raw materials
(ad agencies) were expensive, so huge scale was needed
at the start of the process. Remember, brands are
substitutes for information and recommendation.

And how did that work?
Well how did that work? W.H. Lever was a soap
manufacturer in the early 20th century. He made the very
famous, and extremely over-used quote half his
advertising budget was wasted, but he didn’t know which
half. (the effective half was very effective though, and his
company has since changed its name from Lever Brothers
to Unilever).
That has become a truism in our industry that we have
spent vast sums of our clients’ research budgets trying to
correct.

And this is a picture of what we’ve come up with. If anyone
has ever tried feeding an 8 month old baby then they will
know that it is messy, there’s a lot of wastage, and it
quickly becomes very frustrating that any sort of dialogue
or reasoning won’t happen until some unspecified point in
the future. But after a lot of work, the baby gets enough to
keep going. And I’m sure you can guess the point that I’m
labouring… this is pretty much the same as mass media
advertising
(thanks to Rohit Bhargava at Ogilvy for the analogy)

We know it would be better if communication was a two-
way idea, but for now we keep shovelling in the food. All

that research to find out which 50% was wasted has
confirmed that recommendation is the best way to
convince people of something. And going back to our coca
cola example, a brand is still a substitute for actual
recommendation.

But marketing is still means to create economic
advantage. So has economics changed? (ignoring the last
couple of months’ worth of banking disasters). Well here is
a definition of ‘economics’, and this starts to explain where
the change comes in. The key word is ‘scarce’. Because
networked distribution changes everything

This is Gordon Moore, who set up Intel. In 1965 he
observed that although the number of transistors that

could be placed on a circuit board had doubled every two
years since the invention of the integrated circuits in 1958,
and predicted that this exponential growth would continue
unchecked. So far he has been proved right, and this law
of exponential increase in computing speed and memory
capacity is what has fundamentally changed our methods
of communication.

In the industrial age, media were expensive. Movies
needed people and technology to create, and time, space
and money to distribute and store. Newspapers were
hugely labour intensive to write, expensive to physically
print, and had to be distributed quickly to maintain
demand. Increases in processing power and storage
mean that production and storage is now virtually free.
The internet means that distribution is virtually free. So
information and entertainment is now free, while
Economics relies on scarcity to define value. And a
virtually infinite amount of information and entertainment is
a drain on the finite amount of attention available to
consume it. What is scarce, and therefore valuable, is
attention. As people form networks, their attention
becomes focused more on conversation – on non-
commercial media. Familiarity breeds trust, as it did for the
industrial era brands. So now we trust people we don’t
know just as much as we those we do.

In this environment where immediate open global
communication with people that we don’t know but that we
trust is the norm, there is no need for a substitute for
recommendation. A brand is whatever people say it is.
This is important, as it isn’t what brand marketers or the
media say it is. Rather than being a one-way substitute for
recommendation, as it has been all the way through the
era of industrial marketing, a brand is now the sum total of
all the recommendations that already exist for it. And this
is a dialogue. As long as the positives outweigh the
negatives, then the main thing a brand has to do is be
talked about. And if the conversation is negative, then it is
easy to find out using a whole range of free tools like
Brand Tags, and to address the negatives. In an open
conversational way.
So individually we have more conversations in real life
than online. It‘s just that online conversation is stored and
indexed forever, and it happens globally and immediately.
And recommendation online also helps your product’s
sales directly. ‘Recommendation’ online is hyperlinked.
When Google launched, the huge advantage it had over
all the other search engines that were around at the time
was that rather than just counting the number of time a
word appeared on a page to give a relevancy score, it also

included the number of links to that page – ie it counted
how many times the page had been recommended. The
total number of recommendations made up the page’s
Reputation, or quality score. So it follows that to grow your
market, a brand must be part of the conversation

In fact, markets are conversations. I like the first quote, not
just because it is true, but because it sort of proves the
second. We forget how revolutionary the Cluetrain
Manifesto was in 1999, and sure enough it took longer
than two years for technology to change the world. But it is
worth remembering when listening to geeks like me get
overexcited about the future that this I’m probably
underestimating the change in the next ten years

Why? Well since the internet was invented, it has slowly
grown to a point where it has roughly the same number of
computers connected as there are cells in the human
brain, and about the same number of links as there are
connections. The number of synapses, or connections, in
our brains is taken as a proxy for intelligence – it is
basically processing power. So in 16 years between 1990,
when Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote the worldwide web, and
2007 when Kevin Kelly wrote this theory, the internet has
developed the intelligence of one person.
And as we’ve seen, Moore’s Law means that all the
processors, and all the storage, and all the other capacity
will each be doubling in capacity every two years. By
2040, the internet will have the brainpower of 4 billion
people.
The next big development will be the move from the
Internet of data to the internet of things – everything can
communicate with everything else.
We are going to move over the next few years from
millions of computers CONNECTED by the internet, to
one huge computer that IS the internet. Every device will
be a window into it. Your phone will be able to socially
network with other people in the surrounding area, and
only alert you if you need to know about them. This will
obviously mean that a huge amount of data is flying
around, and that where there is more information, there is
less attention. So brands will have to work even harder to
earn that attention. Most of the time they will not be able to
communicate with us unless they are invited into our
digital life by our devices. As an example, if you switch on
your phone, only ads that are better than the programmes
you want to see will have been showing up as
recommended for you. You will not need to look any
further than your phone’s recommendations, as it knows
far more than you could ever have time to about what you
want to watch. Gaining attention by interrupting people
starts to look a bit outdated.

So the result in a completely connected, always on world,
is that the internet is like air – always there, but in the
background. People are starting to worry about Googlism,
where they are no longer able to remember things
because they have come to rely so much on just being
able to search. I get withdrawal symptoms if I am away
from a Wifi connection for very long. But is this reliance on
an information system really such a bad thing?
Remember, the internet is not a medium, it is a way of
organising and structuring information. To have more
chance of unlocking its potential, we need to think of it in
terms of other systems for structuring information. For
example, the alphabet. We haven’t worried about relying
on the alphabet to store our information for the last 1500
years. And we don’t use the alphabet as an advertising
medium. Well, we do, obviously – copy is written in words,
ideas are created and sold in words. But it is something so
fundamental that it goes on in the background. If we think
of technology in terms of media channels like TV and
radio, our frame of reference is too narrow

Now I don’t think that very much of that is futuristic…
As sci-fi author William Gibson said, and every advertising
blogger has repeated, the future is already here, it just
isn’t evenly distributed yet. I can already screen out all TV
advertising, and all online advertising, search and display.
But I don’t, cos I work in advertising. Most people don’t
know how. Yet. Historically there was an understanding
that advertising was a necessary evil, because it paid for
content, and content was expensive. Now content is free
and on YouTube (this is why YouTube are struggling to
make money out of the old media economic model).
Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information….
And content is just information.

Change has never happened faster than it is doing, and
change will also never happen this slowly again. So it is
important to understand what has changed and what
hasn’t
Are the ones on the right technology? Are the ones on the
left museum pieces? Technology is a relative concept -
just a word for anything that wasn’t invented when you
were born.

And what will media look like? Media is just the means for
distributing information, and this is one of Chris
Anderson’s examples of what has changed. Hollywood
was based on the fact that there were a limited number of
really successful movies, after which demand fell quickly
away to zero. Actually turns out it wasn’t that people only
liked a few movies, rather that the distribution system was
really inefficient at matching supply to demand. Although
over 10,000 movies were being professionally made each
year the capacity of US cinemas was only 120 movies –
so they created the concept of the Blockbuster – the
syndicated, extended, marketed extravaganza.. Now
technology is able to cater for demand, the Blockbuster
model starts to look very inefficient.

This is an image of the Blockbuster model from social
media consultant David Cushman. Messages are one-
way, and value is all about the number of eyeballs. This is
industrial information.

But what about when the audience BECOME the media
channel – when they can create and distribute through
networked conversation without relying on a broadcaster?
And it is harder to interrupt a conversation than it is to
interrupt content. Brands will have to become part of the
conversation.

What does this all mean?
The role of a brand in the age of industrial marketing no
longer exists
Attention is scarce and expensive. Media is not
We already have tools to avoid advertising. They will
increase exponentially
And what to do about it? Understand that all media is
social. The revolution will be hyperlinked. We are now the
producers and distributors of media. And there’s more of
people than there are media outlets. Change is only going
to get faster, so the main thing for a brand to do is jump
into it. I’m going to try and explain without referring to the
same old case studies again

Confucius wrote this 2,500 years ago and it is still just as
true today. What has changed is that the involving bit was
always difficult, so as advertisers had to show & tell.
Technology makes involving easier, and as we’ve seen,
also make it much easier to avoid the show and tell stuff. If
something is entertaining and involving, we will
understand it and talk about it. This is the first thing brands
can do to be part of the conversation

No, really. We are. When all media was mass,
demographics made sense. Now a lot of media is
becoming about one to one conversations, there’s no
need to deal in averages any more. Remember, the
average UK resident has one breast and one testicle. We
could of course track and monitor everything that people
do online, so that we can interrupt people in new and
more relevant ways. But that is still jumping straight into
the middle of the conversation. If a brand is a sum of all
the recommendations that exist for it, then all the brilliant
targeting in the world won’t make up for crap products or
poor customer service.

But won’t that all just be a bit half-arsed? A guy called Bill
Buxton, who wrote Sketching User Experience, talks
about an art college ceramics professor, who comes in on
the first day of class and divides the students into two
sections. He tells one half of the class that their final grade
will be based exclusively on the volume of their
production; the more they make, the better their grade.
The professor tells the other half of the class that they will
be graded more traditionally, based solely on the quality of
their best piece. At the end of the semester, the professor
discovered that the students who were focused on making
as many pots as possible also ended up creating the best
pots, much better than the pots made by the students who
spent all semester trying to create that one perfect pot. I
like this analogy as it is what the more forward thinking
brands have been doing. Testing everything. Orange’s
Internet Balloon Race might have been a huge success,
but equally, their island in Second Life looked great and
had no visitors. So they are investing more in ideas like
Internet Balloon races at the moment. Actually that’s an
interesting example for media agencies to take note of –
the balloon race is an example of advertising that media
owners want to carry for free – 3000 sites, including the
Sun and Vodafone, asked to be included. No media
budget changed hands.

Because we don’t ignore advertising…. we just ignore shit
advertising – it’s become really easy. Anyone know what
OTHER blender ads look like? Thought not.

Fail little and often

"..our company's success rate runs between 50 and
60 percent. About half of our new products succeed.
That's as high as we want the success rate to be. If we
try to make it any higher, we'll be tempted to err on
the side of caution”
A.G. Latley – CEO, Procter & Gamble

So the real step change for clients is about not trying to
build that perfect pot – it’s about not worrying about the
bad ones. Charles Darwin said “It is not the strongest of
the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that
survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to
change.” We know that species of animal can remain
unchanged for millennia, and then suddenly evolve in a
few generations as their environment changes. As the
internet ushers out the era of industrial marketing, we
need to help our clients avoid erring on the side of caution.

The first seven are print, audio, cinema, radio, TV, internet
and mobile. As I paraphrased from Kevin Kelly, soon these

will all just be screens into the internet, and the mobile will
presumably be the most important screen because it is
always with us and always on.
WE are the distribution,
WE are the content,
WE are the 'user journey',
WE are how messages are transmitted.
WE are the medium and the media carried by it
(again, borrowing from David Cushman)

And where does that leave the things we have watched
and listened to? This is what TV was all about – the
watercooler moment. This is why music drives popular
culture. Now back in the early days of commercial TV,
when people were first working out what to put on it, how it
differed from press and radio, how you might use it to
advertise, FMCG brands realised that there wasn’t enough
of the right kind of shows to target their housewife target
audiences. So they got together with the broadcasters and
created regular chunks of real life drama that they could
advertise households around. Because of the way these
shows came into being, and the content of the ads around
them, they were dismissively referred to as ‘soap operas’.
Today NBC are setting up social viewing rooms to allow
people to connect with other fans of shows in real time,
and schedule their non-scheduled viewing around when

their friends are watching (whether or not they are friends
they have met). In the 50s, value was in content that
appealed to mass audience. Today it is in the network that
talks about that content.

Content isn't king... If I sent you to a desert island and
gave you the choice of taking your friends or your
movies, you'd choose your friends -- if you chose the
movies, we'd call you a sociopath. Conversation is
king. Content is just something to talk about
Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing post 2006

Because today, we are not limited to 2 TV channels or the
radio as a choice of our evening’s entertainment. The
advertising industry grew up on the basis that if it
interrupted your viewing, there was very little that you
could do about it. When the internet came along, it
repackaged those expensive TV ads into small screen
formats, and created something called a microsite, an
online version of the millennium dome that cost lots but
contained nothing. Content may “just” be something to talk
about, but the value in a network economy is not in the
content, it is in the talk.

Using advertising to generate PR isn’t a new idea, it’s just
much easier now. Mainly because ‘PR’ didn’t used to be

true. It wasn’t Public relations, it was media relations. Now
the media and the public is becoming the same thing, PR
is becoming real and therefore has to be transparent and
true. Anyway…these are the ads that made the careers of
the Saatchi brothers and Trevor Beattie. None of them ran
for long, and not much was spent buying media, but they
were all about getting people talking. Back then, this
meant do something so different or risque that the national
news media talked about it, which meant everyone else
found out about it. Now, it means the same except there is
no longer a requirement for the national media. It isn’t a
top-down broadcast economy any more.

But being talked about is still about creating things that are
remarkable. As Seth Godin says: a brown cow isn’t
interesting. If you have a purple cow, people will talk about
it. Whether that is great advertising, exemplary customer
service, a perfect product, even brilliant packaging, if
people talk about it, then it will mutate and spread.

Mutating and spreading is what it is all about. The concept
of owning copyright on something that costs nothing to
produce or distribute is fairly odd one. In the networked
world, intellectual property is called reputation, and
reputation is a result of sharing. Most businesses that
relied on copyright during the industrial marketing era
have realised that the world has changed: the quote on
the slide is from the CEO of Disney. But it is more
important to realise how things will change from now. For
example, the Guardian became the first traditional
newspaper publisher to publish full RSS feeds last month.
This frees up all their content to be shared, embedded,
linked and remixed by anyone that wants to. The New
York Times has gone one step further, and released a
number of APIs – if you don’t know what one of those is,
think of Facebook apps or Google Maps. They allow any
developer to build their data into new applications. To
share and re-distribute is now the goal of business.
Brands need to open up and copy publishers, because the
user is the destination, not the website

And part of opening up is treating the brand less seriously.
It is difficult to work with people who are co-creating stuff
around your brand, if you have a restrictive set of brand
guidelines. Now if people are interested in your brand,
then they will create and share around it regardless of
what guidelines you have. The value in a networked
economy is in what is shared. So if you want to take full
advantage of this value as a brand, you need to lighten up
and accept it. In fact, you really need to help and
encourage it. People form networks for fun as much as for
support, and brands that want to join in have to be able to
do fun in a human voice.

And whatever voice you use, the most important thing for
brands to remember is that listening is more important.
Brands aren’t good at listening because they’ve never had
the opportunity to practice before. Industrial marketing is
too expensive to do as a dialogue, so brands had to rely
on focus groups as a proxy. This tended to be
conversation in a marketing voice, not in a human one. It
was also only a quick chat, not an ongoing conversation

Dialogue is an ongoing process – brands will be found out
if they screw up at any stage of their relationship with
people.
Comcast had a similar reputation in the US to NTL/Virgin
in the UK: the ISP equivalent of Ryanair. Or at least it was
until one bloke in their minimal customer service
department realised that he could cut through the
bureaucracy and speak to people directly and in a human
voice on Twitter. Google ‘comcast customer service’ and
this is in the first three results. Markets are conversations,
and marketing is customer service

So if brands are just the sum total of all the conversations
that they are involved with. and content is just information,
and all information is free to Google and to the Single Big
Computer that all our screens are going to peer into, and
media is no longer scarce and it is now attention that is
valuable.

This is why really nearly free is now a viable business
model. IBM for example used to be in the computer
business. As we’ve seen, there isn’t much value producing
hardware any more, so they moved to the consultancy
business. And a lot of what they do is given away by an
research organisation called the IBM Institute for
Business Value. This is all research from top level
academics, that would cost thousands of pounds a few
years ago. By giving this away, their content reaches the
attention of more potential customers than other
consultancies. They develop reputation and authority. In
the past, we were what we owned. Now we are what we
share.
Closer to home, anyone in a media agency who has tried
to present social media to a client soon realises the value
of sharing. The only robust global survey on social media
usage was conducted by Universal McCann. Rather than

locking this expensive research away for their own clients’
use, it has been widely shared to planning bloggers, and
distributed to agencies round the world. If I try and present
any facts about social media to a client, I will refer to our
competitor’s market leading research, and position
Universal McCann as the authority on social media.

So if image isn’t enough to create business advantage any
more, and both the production and distribution of media
are close enough to free to be done by anyone, how do
you stand out enough to build reputation? How about
looking at what isn’t abundant? Creating experiences.
Standing for something. Being generous. Orange
Rockcorps connects worthy causes with willing volunteers
(whether they are digging a hole or playing at the Royal
Albert Hall), it connects music fans with live music, it
CONNECTS. It puts the brand at the centre of a network –
enabling the network, creating experience and doing
good.

Listen to what people want. Enable it. Commit don’t
campaign, and remember communication is a two-way
process.

So what can we learn from the most expensive marketing
campaign in the history of the world? From the moment he
became the Republican nominee, McCain focused on one
thing – making sure he had people’s vote on 4th
November. Obama on the other hand had been asking for
people who supported him to give $10 since the start of
2007. The 4m people who did remained in contact through
email, through the campaign Ning network
mybarackobama, and via Twitter, Facebook, etc. When

the time came to ask people to come out and vote, there
were 4m people ready to make 5 phone calls each to
undecided voters when they were asked to. The campaign
didn’t need to rely on overworked campaigners, just
millions of volunteers doing a little bit each. And those
donations that started them off meant that the Democrat
campaign could outspend the Republicans by 3 to 1 in
battleground states. (and do something different for half an
hour of mainstream primetime television, as the future isn’t
evenly distributed yet)

There’s lots of people out there who know a lot more
about this than me – these are some of the ones whose
ideas I borrowed, mashed up, expanded upon and
generally stole. Conversations start with listening, so listen
to what these people are saying before conversing with
your clients!

http://graewood.blogspot.com/

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