Author Archive

Dodge Ball Communications

Published on Sep 17th, 2010 by Patrick

For me, the most nerve-wracking and exciting part of dodge ball was always the start of the game.  Each team is lined up on their own base line, with the balls balancing on the centre line.   The whistle blows, everyone races to grab a projectile, and if you don’t get one, you’re in trouble.  You are both close-in and completely exposed to your opponent.  And unless you can back-peddle fast enough, you are probably going to get pegged and eliminated from the game.

Right now in the communications industry, there’s a four-sided game of dodge ball happening.  And there are some big players heading for the middle.  Advertising, PR, media and digital agencies are all fighting for control of the ball.   Each agency discipline is aggressively repositioning to ensure relevance and liquidity in the future.  The drive to own digital is at the centre, as a disproportionate share of reinvigorated marketing budgets is being redeployed to support online initiatives.  The big question is who’s going to left standing once the game is over?  I would argue that those who best understand of brands, and on what terms people want to engage with them online will win.

It’s remarkable to me that the idea of a convergent model is just now starting to take hold.  The big multi-national agency that I worked at 10 years ago had an interactive department.  Heck, it was almost as big as the “general” side of the agency before the dot-com world imploded.  360 degree thinking was our competitive advantage.

So why does it seem like now so many traditional advertising agencies are still scrambling to catch-up?  It’s probably because traditional agencies can see the end game now that clients are finally, truly interested in digital.  Social media is the catalyst for digital’s resurgence.  Because anybody can now easily own and alter a brand’s image online, marketers are taking digital more seriously than ever before.

It could be argued that traditional agencies that arguably have the most to lose in this game.  They have long been the coolest kids on the block, the owners of the big idea and the group best positioned to make their clients either rich or famous.  Without a credible digital offer, these companies risk going the way of the dinosaur, frozen out of the picture as newspaper readership and television viewing rapidly dissipate.

On the other side of the fence we see digital agencies now looking for employee candidates with general agency credentials.  That’s because digital agencies are increasingly getting the opportunity to sit at the grown-ups table instead of being forced to eat with the kids.  As interactive specialists, they obviously have the most credibility when it comes to generating innovative and engaging online solutions.  But can they do more than just think digitally?  This is a business model that’s typically been concerned with deploying projects on budget and on time, rather than focusing on the bigger picture.  This mentality must change for digital players to truly emerge from executioners into architects.

I sometimes find it surprising to sit in meetings with media agencies and hear them talk about digital.  I think that this group has the farthest road to travel, largely because they still think in terms of mass media versus mass personalization.  An example, at a recent event I attended had a media person on stage speaking about the millions of people who are flocking to social media.  To the listener, it seemed as if the speaker was recommending taking out targeted ads on Facebook, which to me is no better than your average pop-up.

Of all the agency disciplines, PR firms hold a slight advantage, having moved off the line on social media earlier than anyone else, it being a natural extension of their traditional line of business.  Media relations became blogger relations.  But PR agencies cannot afford to rest on their laurels, as the rest of the industry is speedily catching up.  PR agencies must make every effort to replicate the apparent success of firms like Edelman, who seemingly have broken through traditionally skimpy PR budgets to develop breakthrough ideas funded by marketing.   They must move beyond becoming a 21st century clipping service and learn to think more strategically about how to leverage social media.

So who will come out on top of this battle for digital and communications supremacy?  I would argue that no single discipline will win, but there will be victors from each quadrant.  Those agencies who can demonstrate that they understand brands, and how people connect online will ultimately reign supreme.  The rest will be left watching from the sidelines

Facebook: The new face of evil?

Published on May 20th, 2010 by Patrick

I always got a kick out of Google’s corporate motto, “Don’t be evil.”  To me, this ultra-altruistic philosophy was beautiful in its simplicity and intent.  But alas, when you’re in the business of making money it’s sometimes necessary to soften one’s ideals, hence Google’s revised slogan: You can make money without doing evil.

Despite its industry titan status and the realities of operating in a social media world where consumers have more control than ever, Google has done a pretty decent job of living up to its ideals and preserving its brand image.  Facebook, on the other hand, risks being handed a pitchfork and growing a set of horns should it not do more to safeguard its reputation and relationship with three key constituencies, government regulators, consumers and advertisers.  One must wonder if Facebook’s mind boggling success has led to a technological hubris that prevents the company from understanding that the Facebook brand is not invincible.  In the shadow of Myspace’s perilous decline, surely Facebook isn’t yet “too big to fail.”

Government regulators are making Facebook the poster child for privacy concerns

The privacy issues confronting Facebook have been well covered in the media.  Worldwide, government officials concerned with protecting the data of its citizens have expressed their grave concern with Facebook’s privacy policies.  In response, Facebook has made incremental changes to the site’s privacy settings, resulting in a confusing labyrinth of profile opt-outs that are unlikely to be altered or fully understood by the average user.

While the ongoing privacy concerns are causing some people (mostly tech insiders) to quit Facebook altogether, it has also led to applications like Reclaim Privacy, an open-source browser-based privacy scanner that automatically inspects your Facebook privacy settings and denotes settings that are risky privacy-wise.  While such tools are welcome, I honestly doubt the average person will use them, or be motivated enough to care.

The truth is that privacy has never been a top priority for Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook is about sharing information, and putting limitations on what gets shared runs counter to its interests. Sharing and capturing data is Facebook’s business.  Privacy will always be a casualty of Facebook’s success.  Or, as Pete Cashmore put more starkly, privacy is dead and social media holds the smoking gun.

But in an era characterized by government intervention in response to unregulated lending practices, inadequate safeguards for offshore oil drilling and overall corporate malfeasance, look for governments to remain on the offensive with this issue, and Facebook and others will have no choice but to cooperate.

Facebook dilutes the value of relationships amongst consumers.

Are people beginning to internalize how Facebook (the face of social media) debases the quality of our relationships?  Jarod Lanier, in his recent book You Are Not a Gadget writes extensively about how technology and social media in particular imposes an artificial layer between people – making it increasingly difficult for individuals to truly relate to one another.

If this is too ethereal of a concept for Joe Average to grasp, there still remains the steady stream of scams making news, such as the one reported by Bloomberglast week about an agency setting up fake personal profiles and “friending” people left right and centre, accumulating thousands of contacts, presumably to hit them up later with some kind of offer or deal.  It’s kind of ironic that a medium which markets itself on authenticity and transparency falls short on its ideals so emphatically.

It’s not always appropriate to “Like” something.

Then, there is the increasingly ubiquitous “Like” button.  “Like” used to be a feature found only on Facebook’s pages, serving as an invitation to show your appreciation or enthusiasm for a comment a friend had made, or content that she’d shared.  As a feature of Facebook’s new Open Graph policy, you’ll see “Like” embedded more and more places online – often times in the wrong context like this news story entitled “Thief lifts laptop with photos of deceased child’s battle with cancer.”  As this monolithic voting system permeates the web, Facebook is accumulating more data on the preferences and behaviour of consumers.   As Mitch Joel said, how about a “Don’t Like” button?  Or, Facebook could take a page out of The Huffington Post’s book, and give readers a chance to truly express themselves with a range of emotions /reactions.

Community pages risk alienating advertisers

Brands have always been uneasy about social media due to the lack of control and potential negative exposure.  Companies must develop rules of engagement for how to deal with online conversations involving their brand, including dealing with individual customer complaints or more organized brand jacking.   But just as brands are acclimatizing to this new environment, Facebook’s newly minted Community Pages changes the game again.

In case you missed it, Community Pages are the new home for topics of interest that aren’t brands, like cooking or basketball.  These pages automatically aggregate related content from the Facebook ecosystem and Wikipedia.  It’s inevitable that the aggregated information will include conversations about brands.  But unlike the traditional brand fan pages, there’s no means for brands to respond or redirect the conversation.  They might as well throw their newly scribed rules of engagement out the window.

This is an example of Facebook innovating at a pace that outstrips the market.  In stealing further control from their clients, Facebook is biting the hands that feed it.  I would fully expect Facebook to heed the feedback of its customers on this one.

There’s no question that managing an entirely new breed of company that’s growing as quickly as Facebook would be a challenge.  When you’ve got half a billion users, the slightest change to your product is sure to have unforeseen repercussions.  But in the age of Customer experience, Facebook should be more proactively thinking about how their moves impact the constituents vital to their being.

As Jeremiah Owyang tweeted just the other day:  “Like their founder, Facebook acts their age. Energetic, innovative, and fast, yet like most youth, they don’t think [things] through.” Too many more missteps and Facebook might just find itself wondering what went wrong.  Are we witnessing the beginning of the end to Facebook’s meteoric rise?

About the Author

Patrick Gladney

Patrick is the leader of Northstar’s social media practice, Social Currency™. A former ad man, working for companies like Doner Advertising, Ogilvy & Mather and Taxi Advertising and Design, Patrick has fully committed his attention to the fast-moving, ever changing social web based on the belief that its transformational effects are just starting to be felt and understood. When not keeping pace with the fast-changing world of social media, Patrick finds himself chasing other things, like hockey pucks and his two infant aged boys, Benjamin and Joshua. Patrick is a graduate of McGill University.