Rules of Engagement

[ photo courtesy ]

There’s no rulebook about how we should and shouldn’t be using the social tools that are increasingly becoming a central part of our digital lives. The way we use them is self-defined – we make it up as we go along, and habits change and evolve over time. Twitter’s infamous retweet function was recently implemented as an official feature, but it wasn’t originated by Twitter, it developed organically amongst users, and only integrated into the Twitter.com functionality once its use had become widespread. Facebook is having to work out its terms of use as users decide how they want to use the tool – are extremist or defamatory groups an expression of freedom of speech or an unacceptable usage of the service?

If it’s not clear cut for those who run these services, it’s even less clear what the rules of engagement are for the users. We use them how we want, working it out as we go.

But our own ideas of how we can or should be using social tools can vary immensely – and the lack of rules of engagement can be exasperating.

The public / private sphere, for example. Many of us use different networks for different purposes. For me, the asynchronous follow functionality of Twitter means I’m happy to follow people I don’t know (either online or in real life) and vice versa. For LinkedIn, because being connected to someone implies that I know and respect someone professionally to such a degree as to want to be associated with them – with the subtle hint of endorsement – I don’t connect with randoms unless I know enough about them. My Facebook account is private because I only use it for sharing and keeping in contact with real-life friends (and also because I can’t control what photos of me other people may post, and I don’t want personal photos of drunken nights out to be made public) – so I don’t ‘friend’ randoms. Same for Foursquare – I don’t want anyone but people I know and trust in real life to know where I am, so if I don’t know you, I’m not going to add you as a friend on Foursquare.

And it drives me up the wall when I get random strangers trying to ‘friend’ me on Facebook or Foursquare. It shouldn’t. They don’t know my personal preferences for social networks. But in my head, it’s perfectly obvious. If I don’t know you, why do you want to know where I am? And why would I be OK with you knowing where I am?

And even once you’ve got past who you do and don’t ‘friend’, then you get to what’s an acceptable way to use the service. The number of ‘No I don’t want your stupid application‘ groups shows that lots of us find the way others choose to use the service utterly infuriating.

 


[who actually does want to be a Zombie?]

 

Same goes with Twitter. There are no rules for how to use Twitter – there’s no right and wrong. But we all have our own personal views on what we deem acceptable and what’s not.

Meg’s post ‘A list of things that will get you removed from my Twitter list‘ is a great example of this.

I’m the same. Certain things drive me barmy. Re-tweeting yourself (egotistical self indulgence). Autoposting your blog posts to your Twitter feed (I have an RSS feed). Saying ‘please RT’ (if it’s good I’ll RT it, if it’s not I won’t). Constant self promotion (see RT-ing yourself). Autoposting your Foursquare location (see autoposting blog posts – if we’re Foursquare friends I’ll already know where you are. And if I turned pings off it was for a reason. I can’t turn your bloody Foursquare tweets off without unsubscribing to your entire feed).

But that’s just my own preferences. I’ve got no justification for getting riled at people when they break my ‘rules’ because they’re not my rules. They’re not rules full stop.

And other people have very different views. Where I find auto-tweeting blog posts excruciatingly self indulgent and bordering on the spammy, other people have observed that it annoys them when people don’t tweet their blog posts, as they rarely check their RSS reader and they like using their Twitter stream as pseudo-RSS feed. (To get round this one I set up a separate Twitter account for this blog so that those who want to get my posts auto-tweeted can, but my regular followers who don’t aren’t spammed every time I publish a blog post).

When there are no rules, we have to work out what’s acceptable by ourselves. And given that we can’t always agree what we find acceptable from our own friends, it means where brands are concerned, a further degree of caution is required. We’re more forgiving of our friends breaking our unspoken and unofficial rules – less so of brands.

There’s no hard and fast way to avoid pissing someone off. But the credo of ‘don’t be an asshole’ and ‘do as you would be done by’ helps.

February 2, 2010 in Communication | Permalink | 4 Comments

Time to move on from military marketing

[ photo courtesy ]

The below post is cross-posted from the newly launched WARC blog, where I’ll be posting the occasional ramble – nothing remotely groundbreaking here for regular readers, but musings I thought worth raising for the WARC audience:

 

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the holy grail for marketers is engagement – to build meaningful relationships between people and our brands. And yet the way we think about marketing is frequently diametrically opposed to the desired end result.

The vocabulary of marketing is largely one of warfare – with the consumer as enemy combatant, on the receiving end of our merciless attacks. The etymology of the word ’strategy’ is military – literally meaning ‘the art of a general‘. And it’s just as applicable to the world of marketing as it is to the battlefield.

Think about it. How many times do we start by referring to the ‘target’ when considering audiences? (The fact that we talk about ‘consumers’ rather than simply ‘people’ is another strange beast, as it automatically frames people purely within the context of consumption rather than as the multifaceted human animals that we are, but that’s a whole other issue). So we launch aggressive campaigns carefully designed for maximum impact and to gain captive audiences, thinking about strikeweights and guerilla tactics to do battle, gain market dominance and kill the competition.

Hardly the language of fostering engagement and relationship building, is it?

We all know by now that people aren’t receptacles waiting eagerly for our advertising messages, and very often could quite happily live without whatever we’re trying to sell – but surely trying to conquer the enemy and beat them into submission isn’t the most effective solution? Isn’t trying to earn the right for our brands to be a part of people’s world, rather than trying to force our way in, ultimately going to be more valuable in the longer term?

We’d probably all agree that this is what we’re trying to do, and that a relationship based on permission and trust is far more desirable than one of force and conquest – and yet the language of marketing doesn’t appear to have caught up.

The vocabulary we use undoubtedly affects the way we approach things – both consciously and subconsciously. So if we want to actually develop marketing that’s based on marketing with people rather than to them, awareness of the language we use, and a concerted effort to move away from thinking about marketing as warfare, has got to be a move in the right direction.

January 26, 2010 in Advertising | Permalink | 10 Comments

Collaboration vs Competition

[ photo courtesy ]

There is no limit to what can be accomplished if it doesn’t matter who gets the credit.

Normally attributed to either Ralph Waldo Emerson or Harry Truman, this quote is one of my favourites as it’s a pithy reminder of how much more we can achieve through collaboration than through competition. And a reminder of how much we often fail to achieve because we’re so focused on trying to make sure we get the credit.

It’s true in so many walks of life, but sadly particularly true when it comes to agencies’ work. We all talk the talk about integration with agency partners – but when push comes to shove, everyone’s constantly fighting to get the credit. Because in the main, we work within a model that doesn’t really reward collaboration, and in practice rewards singular ownership of ideas. Sure, awards entries may get jointly submitted, but the winner will always claim it as ‘theirs’. And of course the same examples appear in multiple agencies’ creds – and rightly so because good ideas have many fathers (or mothers) – but in each case you’ll generally have each agency claiming each idea as ‘theirs’, relegating agency partners’ contributions to the sidelines.

At Naked a lot of our IMC processes revolve around co-creation with multiple stakeholders, including people from around the client organisation and different agency partners. But when we share examples of work resulting from various IMC programmes with new prospects, we’re frequently met with a response along the lines of ‘yes, but whose idea was it‘.

Ideas are our currency. So it’s totally understandable that we want to protect them, lest they be stolen by a competitor and they claim the credit – with damaging consequences both to our reputations and our bottom lines. But in doing so, we lock great ideas down, stifling the potential of what they could be if we could collaborate instead of competing. And maybe it’s a utopian view that’s incompatible with the stark business realities of our industry, and how much appointments and remuneration are tied with being able to claim ideas as ours.

But just think what we could achieve if we were truly, genuinely able to be more open and collaborative in our day-to-day working practices, instead of worrying about who got the credit?

January 20, 2010 in Business | Permalink | 3 Comments

The Click Moment

[ photo (c) LEGO ]

LEGO just get it. And keep doing fantastic stuff to show how much they really do get it.

They recently launched a really natty free iPhone app, LEGO Photo (iTunes link), to Lego-fy your pictures [check out the Flickr group celebrating the awesome stuff you can do with it]

And now they’ve just launched the LEGO CL!CK community, a “collaborative environment designed for inventors, artists and creative enthusiasts to share their vision about new products and toys” – a virtual canvas of shared ideas and quirky stories intended to inspire and delight.

It’s got the usual social boxes ticked, so it’s got Facebook & Twitter functionality, and selected posts with the #legoclick hashtag will appear on the website, and users can offer feedback or submit their own ideas. But the overall idea is to get creative minds talking and sharing ideas about how to use LEGO for play and innovation, which can’t be a bad thing in my book. Unfortunately the actual execution lets it down, in that the site isn’t particularly easy to navigate, which is a real shame – but their heart’s in the right place.

What I love about LEGO is how they’re so comfortable in both the physical and virtual worlds – as demonstrated through their video games, the forthcoming LEGO Universe MMOG – or indeed bridging the two, through such initiatives as LEGO DesignByMe or LEGO Mindstorms.

Because actually, LEGO aren’t a company who sell plastic bricks – they’re a company who sell play and tools to spark your imagination. They seem to get the difference – unlike the likes of Polaroid who didn’t realise they were in the ‘telling stories through pictures’ business, rather than ‘manufacturing film & cameras’ business until it was too late.

And if all that lovely LEGO goodness wasn’t enough for LEGO geeks like me, they’ve created a delightful little film to celebrate the eureka moment when great ideas are generated – what they call a ‘Click moment’. Lovely stuff.

January 14, 2010 in Brands | Permalink | Leave a Comment

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