The first, the difference between brand and branding. He eloquently alludes to a brand as emergent from conversation, as organic through interactions over time, an image, and it is over time that these interactions shape our image of something – in this case a brand. That brand management is the process by which an emergent brand image is influenced – not controlled, and the role of public, private enterprises in this.

The second, the emergence of brand image. Brands have always been emergent, emergent over time in our minds in how we think, interact with and talk with others about them. However now with growing user-generated social technologies from Facebook to YouTube, Twitter and blogging platforms, a brand is not just emergent in our minds/perceptions or between other of our immediate social circles, but increasingly emergent from a partnership between public-private enterprises and the wider community on a mass scale. A brand is emergent from community conversations, community interactions, a social web of people bought together by their interest and/or action about a brand.

The third, the importance of brand community. This view of a brand emergent from community lends itself much to the the thinking of Albert Muniz and Thomas O’Guinn in their (2001) paper on Brand Community. Wherein a community sharing similar rituals and traditions, history and moral responsibility form a community around a brand, what they term a brand community. A community that regulates and inspires the brands meaning and in this can also harm the brand image.

And lastly, how everything communicates. Everything we do, say, share and cocreate communicates – be it the image of a person, place, organisation, movement, idea or product. These interactions cocreate meaning over time, something not new to social anthropologists interested in media and social research. However, today social and search technologies play an increasing role in their aggregation for search, retrieval and mass sharing.

As everything communicates, and social/search technologies give greater emphasis to the communities of conversations, with this comes new mindsets and digital social literacies. Literacies not just for professionals in organisational communication who attempt to ‘manage’ brand image (and more often than not think they own the brand and thus try to control it), but also the digital social literacies of personal-professional communication across most industries and professions – teachers, artists, politicians, nurses, doctors to name but a few.

In summary, this an interesting example and philosophy of emergent branding through/from community, using the example of Rebranding Greece. Here is the video. Please share.

Smiles

Kelly

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As a doctoral student you often have many questions that arise throughout your research studies. These include questions about the seminal papers you are required to critique, the methodological constraints during data collection and analysis, what contribution are you really making, right down to what is expected of when you go on the market. However for doctoral students researching the digital and social web, new questions are arising, questions around ‘should I’ or ‘how could I’ use digital and social web resources – professionally to build my academic research identity?

If you talk with me, you will note that I support a situated or participatory approach to digital media learning, and thus encourage individuals interested in  researching about digital media to not just read or talk about it, but also to use it for deep rich learning. We discussed briefly not just the functional technical aspects of one or two technologies (e.g., tweetdeck for twitter), but also the more strategic questions of ‘why’ and ‘what approach’ to take.

I’ve summarised some of my advice and thoughts I gave the students today in the remainder of this blog post.

Step 1. Devise a professional brand strategy
Building a professional online identity is about building ‘meaning’ about who you are and your research interests. This will evolve over time, should start small, but to ensure there is consistency in your digital footprint consider devising a strategy for the development of your professional brand. Consider the following:

1. What do you want ‘people’ in your professional networks and wider professional community to associate with you in a digital social space.
2. Compile a list of keywords from your research interests and/or focus to guide this.
3. Use ppl.com or google.com, search your name (and/or username) to see your current digital identity as ‘others see you’. Consider also a twitter search for your name (and/or username).
4. Write a 100 word bio inclusive of a) research keywords; b) location of graduate; and c) link to web page on your schools website. This should be used on all social web channels/platforms within which you decide to participate.

Step 2. Devise a professional network strategy
Building a professional online identity is also importantly about the networks within which you reside and co-evolve. You have the means to control and influence this coevolution based on who you add, follow, friend or tag in your social web space and thus: connect with, listen to and engage with through the digital social web. It is wihtin this social network that you will coevolve your professional identity with. Consider the following:

1. With whom do you want to connect with, listen to and share your digital social web space with. Consider organisations, academics and/or industry representatives who ‘fit’ with your professional brand strategy.
2. What is their digital social web profile like? In what digital social spaces are they? These are the spaces you want to be participating in.
3. Devise your personal ‘network’ policy for who your will connect with, won’t connect with, and in what spaces. Consider strong-tie and/or weak-tie, and social-bonds (trust). Much of what you will do professionally will be a public space, but what about your private spaces – who will you ‘let’ in to your inner circle of ‘personal friends’ and ‘personal digital spaces’. See my blog post about Friends, Friendship and Friendliness’ on Facebook, they are not the same.This is very important when considering professional spaces.

Step 3. Devise a digital social web channel strategy
So now we consider channels and/or platforms – or as some say, specific media through which to converse, listen and engage. As noted here, the technology/channel decisions are not the first decision, it’s first important to think about a) what do you want to converse/listen about (step 1); and b) with whom do you want to converse/listen to/with (step 2), before select the space to converse in (Step 3).

Be selective and strategic in your choices to be effective (not fragmented, and sustainable) and efficient in your adoption and usage. Consider the following:

1. In what digital social web spaces do you want to (or should be) in. You don’t have to be in every space, it’s about ‘being effective and efficient in learning, sharing and conversing’. Too many digital spaces can result in fragmented digital identity if you don’t have the resources (i.e., time) to manage the spaces.
2. Think about what would ‘compliment’ what you currently do, as opposed to ‘add more’ work. A blog for example, doesn’t have to be public (can be private), and can be used as a ‘diary’ to help you reflect on class readings, or your doctoral journey as you build confidence in the field, it also gets/keeps you in the habit or ‘wtiting (albeit in a journalist style/tone). Or your twitter feed can be updated from your ‘professional’ facebook updates automatically and thus won’t add additional burden to you time.
3. Consider how the discourse around these channels for the networks you want to participate in when selecting them (e.g., LinkedIn = professional network; FB = personal networks; However for an artist Flickr = professional network, but for others it’s for personal photos).
4. Select the channels/platforms and learn about how to use them relative to both their technical functionality and the social expectations of participation within them.

Step 4. Develop your dialogue strategy
This step, comprises thinking about ‘How’ and ‘About What’ will you converse in the selected channels. Everyone one is different and unique in how, where and why they participate and engage. It’s about finding your own professional and personal style with how you do this – no two blogs are the same. Some people just post lists of links in their blogs, others its a picture-blog. Some people send tweets out about ‘anything’ and ‘everything’ all day, others are selective and only tweet and re-tweet occasionally. However in this  consider the following in establishing your dialogue strategy:

1. Your time is scarce: Blogging, tweeting and connecting with other academics or doctoral candidates through these channels is useful, especially given what a researcher in digital media is researching. However it takes a lot of time. As a doctoral candidate, writing, reading and reflecting is more important! You need to consider when, where, what time, and how often is ‘realistic’ for you ‘converse’ (i.e., write a blog post, tweet, check updates). BUT be ruthless with your time as this is NOT your core job or role. It will become part of it.
2. Make social media a habit not a chore: Develop habits around your social web activity. For example, occasionally schedule your tweets so you only write them once a day; tweet when on the bus/train; blog at least once a month when you have something to say OR when at a conference, but it is okay NOT to blog everyday. As an academic/student – reading and writing is critical to what we do, so sometimes you may need the space to do this, so consider turning off all ‘social web notifications’ to your email inbox, when you don’t need/want to be distracted. But find your own time stamp for your social web activity.
3. Mind casting: Use social media to build your social capital relative to your area of professional interest (mindcasting), not about what you had for lunch (lifecasting). That said, invest some of yourself so people get to know you and your personality (i.e., people connect to people) and so it pays to be authentic.
4. It’s about sharing: Social web is not just about ‘you’, it’s about your social graph, so share with others, about others and for other’s interest. For example, if you are still learning about twitter, just listen and ‘retweet’ what others say if you think it is interesting or of interest to your followers. If you attend a talk, seminar, class or read a paper that is interesting, write a blog post about it, but send the speaker the link when it’s live (it’s polite) and ask someone permission to ‘tweet’ about their talk (especially if it is not ‘expected’ like in the class room).I often get asked, but what if I blog about a paper I’m working on and someone steals it? The thing to remember about blog posts, as they are ‘different’ to academic writing in both length and style and as such, chances are this ‘theft of your ideas’ is minimal.
5. Think conversation: It’s not about ‘shouting out’ its about having conversations, and engaging with people. So comment on others blog posts, retweet, thank people, comment when people comment on your posts/updates … use the same manners in a digital space as you would if the person was stood in front of you or ALL your friends where in the room.
6. Start small and slowly: Do what is comfortable for YOU, not what is expected. You don’t have to be all over the social web, but if researching it, it’s important to learn about it first-hand, and develop some profile on it, otherwise it’s consistent to ‘inventing a car but not having a drivers license.’
7. Raising your profile: Use the keywords devised earlier in your ‘professional brand strategy’ in your tweets, blog posts, tags, profile descriptions, so the keywords are strongly associated with your name (e.g., this will increase your google rankings overtime).
8. Engage don’t defend: People have opinions and chances are they might be different to yours. If you experience a situation in which a ‘negative’ comment post or response occurs and is linked to your social web profile, engage with … it is better to part of the conversation – in which your participation can influence it’s evolution, than to stand outside it, jumping up and down and disappointed. Most people in a social web space are honest, hardworking and respectful individuals, but yes, some will not agree with what you write or tweet. The core difference is that unlike the blind-review process we are conditioned to in academic publishing, in the social web space, the feedback is immediate, public and often reactionary. Learning the personal skills in how to manage and engage with this type of feedback is also important for aspiring academics.
9. With meaning: Write, tweet, update your status about what is meaningful to you in your academic work, as chances are it is meaningful to other people, also … if you love something it is easier to write about it, talk about and engage with it. So it won’t be a chore, but part of your everyday academic social activity.

Now that I’ve distilled my thoughts from today’s conversation, I’m going to get back to my academic writing. However, I did come across a paper published in the Harvard Business Review, by Soumitra Dutta, Professor of Business and Technology, INSEAD, France entitled: “Managing Yourself: What is your personal social media strategy?” It is an interesting popular read about ‘professionals’ managing their identity on the social web.

Smiles
Kelly

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Increasingly I am being asked to deliver talks within organisations, usually to marketing, communications or media teams about the evolution we are experiencing in digital and social web media. These talks are often used to open the dialogue within teams at the beginning of a workshop or as part of a ‘training week’ about how the ‘media space’ has changed considerably and how the host organisation can best approach, use and/or learn about social media.

I use these talks as an opportunity to encourage personnel in marketing, media or communications to consider the need to ‘unlearn’ and explore ‘new mindsets’ with which to approach their communications activities. To step outside the box from what is traditionally termed ‘marketing’, ‘PR’ or ‘media management’, and consider that their role in communications has fundamentally changed within society, within their organisation, within their own lives. With this has come the need to learn new skills, new ways of looking at the world, and new ways of behaving within it. Why is this important? To be sustainable, ethical, and effective in communications activities in a digital and social web space. When the world moves on, you have to move with it, it is the nature of evolution. It’s not easy, it’s not cheap, but it’s most certainly the fundamental principle of evolution – change.

In this talk I use a number of case insights to explore my position on this, comparing campaign-led communications initiatives by Skittles.com (2009) and Rage Against the X-Factor (2009)  to more sustainable community-led activities of Compare the Meer-Kat (Ongoing), Patients Like Me (Ongoing), Wiggly Wigglers (Ongoing) and National Theatre Wales (Ongoing).

The core message of this talk is that the “social web is about people, conversations, dialogue, listening, and being ‘a part’ of a community, not apart from it or promoting or communicating to it!” Something required by personnel in business, marketing and media management to learn following the unlearning of traditional ‘communications’ mindsets.

In September 2010, I delivered this talk for Community Housing Wales, and VerseOne, a major provider of CMS to the public sector. The slides from the talk are embedded below, and can be found on drkellypage on slideshare.

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In this post, we reflect on something that perhaps we should all reflect on: What do the terms ‘friends’, ‘friendship’ and the action ‘being friendly’ means to us, others and in our social worlds! An important reflection, especially before we add people to our FB profile; share or tag photos with/of them; email, text, call or hang out with them or better yet … invite them to be part of our world! It’s funny, because these terms are not new, they are not words we are unfamiliar with. However their meaning is so ever fluid today, more than ever before … as our digital space evolves, as it merges more with our non-digital world as we transverse spaces, so does the language and narrative we use to think and discuss ‘friends’!

If someone ‘adds’ you on Facebook, are they really your friend? What are the elements that we association with being a friend and why add someone, especially someone we might not really know? Is this changing what we mean by the term ‘friend’ or just changing how we interact with people who ‘could’ be our friends! So let’s espouse …

Having Friends – Being Friendly – Developing Friendships!

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term ‘friend’ as:

1. A person whom one knows, likes, and trusts.
2. A person whom one knows; an acquaintance.
3. A person with whom one is allied in a struggle or cause; a comrade.
4. One who supports, sympathizes with, or patronizes a group, cause, or movement

In history … A friend is a lover, literally. The relationship between Latin amcus “friend” and am “I love” is clear, as is the relationship between Greek philos “friend” and phile “I love.” In English, though, we have to go back a millennium before we see the verb related to friend. At that time, frond, the Old English word for “friend,” was simply the present participle of the verb fron, “to love.” The Germanic root behind this verb is *fr-, which meant “to like, love, be friendly to.” Closely linked to these concepts is that of “peace,” and in fact Germanic made a noun from this root, *frithu-, meaning exactly that. Ultimately descended from this noun are the personal names Frederick, “peaceful ruler,” and Siegfried, “victory peace.” The root also shows up in the name of the Germanic deity Frigg, the goddess of love, who lives on today in the word Friday, “day of Frigg,” from an ancient translation of Latin Veneris dis, “day of Venus.”

So, from the above we can see characteristics and terms such as: “to know, knowledge of, to like, trust, love, is allied to, supportive of, sympathize with, peaceful, friendly to, lover of, someone I love” … a number for wonderful, deep and emotive words that create a psychological boundary around what is a ‘friend’ is, ‘how friends behave’ and ‘our relationship with them’…

But what about in digital social networks, such as on Facebook, where the term ‘friend’ is used alot? Blurring the lines between connectivity and deep emotive social bonds. Are we connecting to ‘have friends’; ‘develop friendships‘ or are we just ‘being friendly‘ by adding people we have just met, chatted to, shared an experience and thought/hope they might become part of intimate circle of people who are our currently our friends. People who we might work with, grew up with or have known forever – such as family … in this the term ‘friends‘ and the activity of ‘being friendly‘ is about developing social bonds. In this we evolve from weak ties to deeper stronger ties with people … developed based on our level and type of emotive connectedness with them – similar values, loves, hates, opinions … but at it’s core development of mutual trust, respect and … love!

Connectivity – Connections – Connectedness

So from this it is important to distinguish between a number of other terms cognisiant with and used to describe the digital media space … ‘having connectivity’, ‘adding connections’ and ‘developing connectedness’. The differential between these terms is about the extent or evolution from the technical bonds to the emotive social bonds between users of a system (i.e., nodes in a network) and the technical infrastructure that can and does connect them. In this sense,

• ‘having connectivity’ = is the ability and functionality of a digital system to ‘connect’ nodes in a networks – be it people, computers or data points … i.e., being connected to the Internet gives you connectivity!
• ‘add connections’ = is the number and quality of nodes that exist in a complex system – be it people, computers or data points’… i.e., being on Facebook and adding friends gives you connections!
• ‘developing connectedness’ = is the emotive social bonds between nodes in a network – and in this essence is more about human social bonds and social capital that you develop… i.e., engaging in dialogue and conversation with friends through Facebook gives you connectedness!

So in essence, ‘adding a friend’, ‘having friends‘, and ‘developing friendships’ are not one in the same – be it in an offline space such as at work or university or an online digital space such as Facebook. Connectivity through social networks most certainly might provide the digital opportunity for the latter to occur, however it is the deep rich social bonds and thus ‘connectedness’ between ‘friends’ in a network, that makes true, deep and lasting ‘friendships’ develop, grow and sustain … no matter if you are in an online or offline space …

So next time someone asks you to ‘Add’ them as a Facebook Friend, and thus you are giving them permission to see into the privacy of your world … ask yourself three questions:

1. ‘Are they really a friend?” [See the definition above!]
2. “Do you want to potentially build a friendship with them?”
3. OR “Are you just being friendly?”

Smiles

Kelly

P.s. “Family are the friends you grow up with; Friends the family your choose; and Strangers the friends you haven’t met yet” (Dr. Kelly Page, 2010).

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How important REALLY is online word of mouth? How could an online community of music consumers use social networks to oppose an international music franchise and make British music history?

‘Rage against the X-Factor’: it was real; it happened in real time, and it had a real impact!

CASE Insights reviews the music campaign launched by Jon and Tracey Morter from Essex who showed Simon Cowell that they, their friends and their friends-friends certainly have much more than the X-Factor.

The X-Factor is a franchise originating in the UK in 2004, devised as a replacement of Pop Idol. Produced by executive producer Simon Cowell and his company Syco TV, X-Factor is franchise spanning 24 European countries.

The format sees aspiring pop artists and performers drawn from public auditions compete, with finalists being voted for by the viewing public for a recording contract and publicity. Despite, being highly criticised as exploiting aspiring music artists and for it’s lack of artistic integrity, it has been a hugely popular reality TV show watched by millions.

The UK Christmas Number 1 selling single is Britain’s most hotly-contested music chart of the year. Compiled by the Official UK Charts Company, for the past 4 years Simon Cowell‘s X-Factor winners, from Shayne Warne, Leonia Lewis, Alexandra Burke and JLS, have dominated the Christmas charts. However, this came to an end in 2009 with one of the most exciting and anticipated music chart battles ever in the UK. The British public sick of the manufactured artists widely supported and promoted a social web campaign to ‘Rage against the X-Factor’.

Fed up with the possibility of yet another X-Factor Christmas No. 1., Jon and Tracey Morter from Essex, started a protest campaign through a Facebook Group. They promoted the sale of their favourite single ‘Killing in the Name’ by artists Rage Against the Machine (RATM) as a possible contender for the 2009 No. 1 Christmas chart position.

‘Rage against the X-Factor’: Through over 1 million Facebook fans, over 50,000 YouTube search results and endless Twitter chatter, individuals encouraged their friends, followers and fans to buy a download of the single by rock band, RATM by the end of Saturday 19^th December (23:59pm).

The aim: to firmly contest conventional marketing techniques by publicly bringing down a major players mass media campaign through online social networks and word of mouth (WOM). Jon and Tracey felt passionately and wanted to stop the domination of the Christmas music charts by X-Factor manufactured artists and in that make a statement about the power of online WOM and marketing ethics.

The results: ‘Killing in the Name’, the single by RATM, officially released over 15 years ago, spent very little on it’s marketing activities, yet in December 2009, in one week, they sold over 502,672 copies of it’s single, beating X-Factor winner Joe McElderry by approximately 50,000, making it the 2009 Christmas No.1 in the UK.

In taking the title for 2009, ‘Killing in the Name’ also set two new landmarks for the music industry. It became the UK’s first download-only Christmas number one and notching up the biggest one-week download sales total in British chart history.

This has been matched with numerous fake websites, dozen of mock twitter accounts, hundreds of new blog posts, and thousands of YouTube entries for the single – Killing in the Name. The No. 1 search result on YouTube has received over 12 million views and been rated by 40,000 visitors. HMV’s Gennaro Castaldo said “This is a truly remarkable outcome and possibly the greatest chart upset ever”.

The campaign also raised through Just Giving over £93, 000 for the charity, Shelter.

In response: RATM announced on 19th December 2009, that they will be holding a FREE concert, a massive ‘Thank You Gig’ in the UK in Spring 2010 to celebrate the victory of the people’s campaign.

Marketers (and Simon Cowell) can learn a great deal from this social web campaign and how reality TV shows, audience voting systems and mass media ratings are not necessarily reflective of wider societal opinion and consumer choice.

WOM has always been a very important channel in marketing, but now coupled with increased reach and awareness because of digital social channels, it is by far the most powerful channel in marketing today.

For the digital immigrant or newcomer and the marketing traditionalist, take note: “The RATM campaign shows that marketing through the social web is about being real, in real time and having a real impact!”

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Increasingly we are seeing hundreds of uses of the term ‘Social Media Expert’ or ‘Web Expert’ on websites, titles, business cards, job descriptions and blog posts about “10 signs of a social media expert’. This is not a new phenomena, we have been interested in expertise and knowledge for generations, who has it, how do you recognise it, how do you measure it, how do you store or capture it?

This is especially evident as it pertains to technology. From computer expertise, to database expertise, system expertise, web expertise, social web (media) expertise. However technology is changing so rapidly, and our ability to keep up and keep abreast of the increasing tide of information starts to beg the question – can anyone really be a technology expert?

From this talk, my intention was to pose to the audience to consider that:

• expetise is about knowledge (type, scope, how acquired) not just usage behaviour, something we often use as a proxy for knowledge.
• different knowledge is acquired in differing contexts so although two things might be similar or related, doesn’t mean you have same knowledge in both.
• think about the terms you use to describe your knowledge, experience and understanding of technology, for what we think we know, doesn’t correlate to what we actually know and terms/labels can be misleading.
• If someone calls themselves a social web (media) expert, chances are they are still learning (and that’s ok!) – its a new young and rapdily changing field. We are all learning. But many of us are not experts.

You can watch my talk below at Ignite Cardiff:

You can also view and download the slides from slideshare or through Issuu:

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Imagine that you’re on stage in front of an audience of hundreds of people, doing a five-minute presentation using slides that automatically rotate every 15 seconds, whether you’re ready or not. What would you do? What would you say? The entry on Wikipedia provides a more detailed overview of Ignite events around the world.

Well having thought about this scary prospect and being an academic who makes a living out of lecturing and talking, I thought I might just be up for the challenge. Can an academic really only talk for 5 minutes?

So tonight at Wales Millennium Centre, I’ll be joining a list of 15 other speakers to talk for 5 minutes on a topic of my choice. My presentation is entitled: “If I can drive does that make me a mechanic!” and stems from two earlier posts on this blog about “the mechanics of social web expertise” and “measuring social web expertise.” Most importantly though this presentation is about my dad!

This Ignite Cardiff event is being hosted in partnership with Cardiff Design Festival and organised by Cardiff Web Scene and sponsored by Box UK.

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Is anybody exploring this question? Increasingly we see hundreds of reports telling us about how many people are using twitter, uploading photos to Flickr, the average number of friends we have on facebook.

But no one seems to be asking the deeper questions about how is the web making people feel? Or even discussing if this is an important question to ask? So we decided to ask it!

Over the last few months, I’ve had the fortune to work with some great people in the area of Social Web – DK and Mark from MediaSnackers and we’ve been asking just this question as part of a project called The Web Makes Me Feel (TWMMF)

TWMMF is a MediaSnackers project exploring the emotional responses to the web among 13-19 year olds in the UK. CASE Insights collaborated with MediaSnackers to analyse the data and produce a detailed report of insights from the findings.

Why TWMMF?

This project came out of discussion at MediaSnackers about how all the research about Youth and the Web we often see, hear and read most of it is about usage behaviour and profiling and segmenting youth based on their technology usage and is what we already know.

13-19 year olds are often called digital natives, super-communicators and mediasnackers. We know they are heavy users of mobile phones, Facebook and Bebo, they love downloading music and playing games online and we also know they are not using Twitter or reading newspapers. These insights are no thanks to the recent report by 15 year old Matthew Robson for Morgan Stanley, we’ve actually known this for a while (Oh Hum!!).

But a big question all this research is missing is: How does the Web Make You Feel?

Human beings are powered by emotion, not by reason!

Reason alone cannot make us feel anything and it’s how we feel that motivates our behaviour. Why then do we continue to treat human beings as rational consumers of the web?

Hundreds of research reports, papers and presentations scatter the web profiling and modeling economic and rational motives for web usage. Focused on how easy or useful the web is, or on complex formula and metrics profiling web behaviour, we thought we might be missing a trick.
Formulas can’t deal with human emotion. Formulas have no imagination or empathy. Formulas can’t tell you how the web makes me feel?

In reality, our experiences are shaped by deep feelings and emotions – feelings of joy, fear, love, hope, fantasy, happiness and sometimes even a little magic.  Every person we deal with is an emotional human being and yet we continue to treat them like: Numbers. Targets. Statistics.

When faced with complex or inadequate information we fall back on a hybrid approach in which reason and emotion become intertwined. However when they are in conflict, emotion wins every time. The neurologist Donald Calne puts it brilliantly:

‘The essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action while reason leads to conclusions.’

So How Do Youth Feel?

So coupled with over 1000 postcards, we targeted youth across the UK to tell us in their own words, one word to be exact: The Web Makes Me Feel …. and then in a few more words to explain: Becuase …

Over 431 postcards were returned and analysed, identifying over 143 emotions and over 65 reason why the web made them feel that way.

The top 10 emotions expressed by 13-19 year olds were: Happy. Connected. Good. Excited. Free. Entertained. Bored. Interested. Sociable. Independent. Overall youth found the web made them feel positive, however as they got older, around the ages of 17-19, youth reported significantly more negative emotions.

Yesterday, 15th July 2009 at NESTA in London we launched the website and report. To read more about the insights from the project and how the data was collected and analysed, download the detailed The Web Makes Me Feel Report.

Maybe this will start you thinking more about: How does the web make you feel?

« CASE Insights: Exploring Marketing’s Evolution Through Technology »

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Me Tarzan – You Jane!

Can you imagine the impact on sales if we treated our customers like this? Well maybe in some ways we do, but our customers haven’t known any better! But that is changing, and changing quickly.

One of the biggest things we are seeing electronic technologies having an impact on in marketing is not just how we do marketing. Electronic technologies are changing the mindset behind how we view marketing, talk about marketing and the roles of who is involved in marketing.

Them & Us = Mass Marketing

Has marketing ever been a linear process? Do we as human beings actually interact with each other in a linear way? Now time is linear, and because we organise processes usually by time, many of our working processes are linear. But in fact we live and work in social networks.

If we think back to the agarian age, before the inception of mass machines of the industrial era, we lived and shared goods in social networks of close geographical proximity. Bartering and developing strong-tie bonds to facilitate the exchange of goods.

But as large scale machinery was introduced, enabling standardisation in production and broadcast media was invented to reach the mass audience with a single message, so too did the mindset of marketing involving the formalisation of linear marketing processes and strategies to market to the masses evolve.

Born was the concept of sales processes and mass strategic marketing. These are inherently linear one-way processes in which organisations (them) – be it marketers, sales teams, advertisers or account managers, develop strategies and programs to sell and advertise to segments of consumers, customers, buyers (us).

But inherently in mindset there is a divide, a physical and psyhcological divide between organisation and community. It’s a them & us mindset, in which the community is something marketed and sold to! They are not participatory, but passive.

Even the language – customer, consumer, user – denotes a psychological position in the mindsets of marketers. ‘You are inherently someone who responds, purchases, consumes, or buys on behalf of an entity’. You should feel happy I’ve identified you as a attractive segment I’m going to market to.

I can see the relationship to Tarzan and Jane now - Me provider – You Customer!

With the social web this mindset is evolving and tomorrow’s marketers especially, are seeing the world differently. They didn’t grow up in a time of mass mechanical machines but in one of social digital networks.

Me + We = Social Marketing

With recent developments in digital social web services – be it tools, technologies, channels, or platforms – we are starting to see changes in how marketing is viewed, spoken about and the role of people within it!

Marketing is far more social today than it ever has been. By social I don’t mean ‘socially responsible’, I mean as part of a wider social network or community, not apart or distant from it.

Marketing projects are increasingly organised less and less in silos – such as advertising, PR, sales, distribution – and more fragmentated involving cross-functional teams across social networks. We are recognising the need for very differing skills in collaboration – be it in IT, usability, system design.

Electronic tools, technologies and channels are the enactors in this evolution, facilitating the rise in the ‘I’ generation (me), where my role in the media, in the message, in the marketing process I as an individual can define.

These choices are not just up to marketers, but to customers, consumers, buyers, employees etc to choose their role and participation in the marketing process. We also don’t want to be seen as a segment or number, but a person!

As a result marketing is being forced to focus more on people (me) and the social network, the community they are part of (we) and listen and interact within this community. Not just sit outside it, viewing the community as something we can break up to target or reach.

So perhaps marketing is moving out of the jungle … evolving from a mindset of them & us to one of Me + We!

I wonder who amongst us in this profession will survive? As Charles Darwin once wrote:

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

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Often in the discussion of expertise about technologies, many fall into the trap of associating the length of usage as an indicator of expertise. In the blog entries mentioned in the previous post, many discussed ‘usage’ of social web technologies – how many years used, in what ways, which tools – as an indicator of expertise.

Technology usage as an indicator of expertise is not new or unique to the social web context, but is most certainly fatally flawed.

Usage as a Proxy for Expertise

While researching consumer knowledge of technologies, I found that many research studies about technology, actually use experience (e.g., how long you have been using a technology) as a proxy for how knowledgeable or ‘expert’ you are. In other words, the longer the usage in duration, frequency and past experience than the higher reported expertise.

I found this methodology really flawed as it assumes people learn in the same way, from the same information and at the same rate. But why do they do it? Because it is easier to measure.

This is like saying that two people who have bee driving cars for 20 years, a car mechanic (who fixes cars) and a non-car-mechanic (who drives cars), have the same knowledge about how to drive a car and it’s inner workings.

In essence it ignores the context from which knowledge about a specific domain might be acquired,  the scope of this knowledge (is it specialised or more common knowledge) and assumes we all learn in the same way and at the same rate.

In the doctoral research about web knowledge, a study of over 2,500 web designers and users; and from one of the preliminary studies (see below) that compared the knowledge and usage of web design students and non-web design students, it was found that

• Length of usage experience with the web had a very weak relationship with what a a user actually knew about the web.
• User perceptions of how knowledgeable they were – also an indicator of confidence – had a weak relationship with what was actually stored in their memory.

So if someone says they are web expert, even if they honestly believe it, they are possibly not, as they are not the best judge of what they actually know. That would be like my students marking their own exam papers!

Here is a brief commentary about a research article on the measurement of actually web knowledge (what is stored in memory) that was published in the journal Psychology & Marketing.

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Usage of the Social Web & Expertise

In contrast, in the context of the social web, we are seeing usage as a criteria for expertise being used in a different way. In this context it is not so much how long you have been using the social web, it’s the fact that you are personally using it and the extent of this personal usage!

If you are on the most popular social networks (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Bebo etc), you have a large number of followers or friends, you use RSS feeds and have a blog, than you must be a social web expert! Well, maybe not!

Just because I subscribe to 3 of the most popular cooking magazines, have bookmarked some of the most trafficked recipes sites, watch religiously TV programmes starring Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsey and Nigela Lawson, and dine out with my friends 3 times a week – this doesn’t mean I can call myself a Chef!

As denoted in the last post, social web expertise goes beyond usage experience. It’s about the type, scope and acquisition of specialised knowledge about the social web, and the application of this knowledge – be it for research, client or self.

So perhaps if you think you are an expert, you just might not be! And just because you use the social web alot, this also doesn’t make you a social web expert.

This is where the role of peer and community recognition that you are an expert becomes very important and the use of case studies and case examples to show the application of your knowledge.

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