This last year has seen logarithmic changes in marketing, fueled by different concepts like Utilities, AR, The Collective Exchange of Ideas, Transmedia, Digital becoming ubiquitous, Mobility and more.

I have tried to be a part of some of these discussions online, and have as a result of other peoples shared and collective wisdom published a range of posts, presentations and tweets on the subject.

What I wanted to do before leaving on a short summer vacation was recombine all the best ideas, into ONE Post Digital Marketing 2009 presentation. Summarizing all the major thoughts finding its way to my “ideas”-folder this last year.

View presentation below or here.

Hopefully it will both be interesting and inspiring to some, and the format introduce what Erin McKean defines as Serendipity:

“Finding something you weren’t looking for because finding what you are looking for is so damn difficult.”
- link

Please enjoy, and have a nice summer (winter).

Best Regards
Helge

As long as the standards for measuring value belongs the old Attention Web mindset, the ability to prove new value and need for new strategies will become increasingly difficult. Fortunately the solutions are right under our noses.

Explanation of Attention Web and Everyday Life mindset.

In this presentation, held at the INMA conference Wednesday, I asked if the numbers generated by web analytics software are generating the right kind of value? And to which degree the simplicity and accessibility of these numbers are moving our focus away from what’s really important, (creating “situational” value), to something that’s important for something else (understanding movement patterns).

It’s an idea I picked up from Adrian Ho a couple of months ago, which rings stronger and stronger as I see that the Everyday Life mindset demands us to understand that our solutions, even our brand foundations, might be built around a completely new set of values as both peoples behaviors, and their accessibility to companies change.

Slideshow below, or here.

How can we to effectively help companies and organizations enter a new digital mindset when the ways of measuring effect still relies on tools “invented” in the sixties. (Or so?) Where effect is measured AFTER an event has occurred when all authentic value has disappeared. We are left to rely blindly on people’s shoddy memory.

Two things:

1. People tend to remember events as they imagined them to be. According to Dan Gilbert our memory is a set of snapshots of an event, and remembering stuff consists of collecting all the relevant snapshots and filling in the blanks in between. We tend to fill these holes based on perception, not what actually happened. So asking someone about something would give you an answer more similar to how they perceived it to be beforehand rather then how they actually felt as the experience occurred.

2. We are already measuring stuff as it is happening. But this consists mainly of behavioral patterns, tracking people’s movement. The problem with this is that we only observe what people do, not discover why they do it.

So this is the challenge/opportunity: We need to get inside the situations and measure REAL value AS it is happening.

The Internet used to be simple, a digital reflection of the old media industry. The beauty of this beast was that media companies and media agencies really didn’t need to change that much. They kept their business models, they knew the formats, and they knew the product they sold. Everything was simple, undisruptive and perfect. The need for new measuring instruments – which measured different stuff in different ways wasn’t in demand.

Now, what I’m saying in the slideshow Changing the Currency is that we are entering a new digital landscape: The Everyday Life. This is a result of behavioral change from technology’s immersion into our daily life.

In this new mindset, value is not about attention, interest or in many cases sales. It’s about creating additional value, building relations and generating exchanges of ideas.

We are in a place where we need to start measuring completely different stuff from the stuff we are good or bad at measuring today. Because it’s not only media, the Internet or people that change, it is also the platform on which valuable companies and brands are built. And by that we also need new methods and tools to measure it.

My proposition is to learn from the car industry, Nike ID, Fiat Eco:drive, Nike Plus and the likes. Create an arena for measuring value. Where tools are designed to generate real time, live data, by the participants – to be shipped back to the company giving us the data we need in order to develop groundbreaking insights.

Measuring stuff in the Every Day Life mindset doesn’t happen outside an event, it needs to be integrated inside of it. We need to understand what value is and what’s important. And then have concepts built from the ground up around the goal of discovering new stuff, not add research on at the end as a way of finding out what we already knew.

We seem to be looking for universal principles, when we should be looking for fragmentation.

It’s quite common when trying to understand something that we try to simplify it, searching for consistencies and core principals. The problem is when we apply the find to other stuff as well as a universal principal for everything similar.

Even though universal laws or guidelines might seem like a good idea, it is often the complete opposite of something useful.

Take the Music Industry as an example. These days they are trying to find the ONE law to rule them all, to solve the problem for both universal, international, national or independent artists and bands – but is there ONE undiscovered answer? Or should there be many?

As we become more insightful and smarter regarding a subject, our articulation of it increases which leads us to discover details that we didn’t know existed to begin with. As a subject gets bigger we also find minute differences and details that make what seemed similar quite opposite.

Ignoring the nuances and fragmentation’s inside a subject as we try to make our ideas accessible to other people through graphs and sound bites :o), makes it easier to get understood, but demands the reader to ask more questions. (which is a good thing)

I hope the people reading this blog understand that I’m not trying to find universal answers. I’m exploring a landscape, square inch by square inch. And one answer might be a good solution to one problem, but might not give a full and complete answer to a lot of other stuff, or even be downright terrible.

Malcolm Gladwell inspired me to start thinking of this whole thing as a giant puzzle:

“We are all collecting small pieces of the same puzzle. One day maybe we’ll get so far that it starts making sense.”

The first ten years of digital was (to a large extent) the same siloed ideas that we’d already been exploiting for decades on other content and messaging transportation infrastructures (media). It was a carbon copy.

It is only in the last 2-4 years something interesting and revolutionary has surfaced through the emergence of social media (the collective exchange of ideas) and digital utilities.

This creates a new currency for marketing online, not replacing traditional advertising / messaging but competing for the same budget and offering a completely different set of returns.

Since posting this presentation two days ago, I’ve added some ideas to it, relating to Time and Direct Relationships.

Apologies for re-posting, but this is the conclusion to my series on the new currency online, with special focus on opportunities for media companies.

- What is value in Everyday Life marketing
- A New Business Model, for content that Grows, Connects and Augments
- The Direct relationship Business

Find the Slideshow below, or here.
(If you have already seen the first version the second one might not cache, there should be a yellow ribbon in the upper left corner if you are watching the updated version).

Jeff Jarvis in this video, from the Nokia Ideas Project, states that since the Internet is a connection machine, anything creating artificial middle men, preventing companies from connecting directly with their participants, will become problematic.

All that is true for the old Attention Web, but the whole problem seems to be turned into an opportunity when we change to the Everyday Life mindset: In which digital media companies become partners with their clients in order to supply a direct relationship with the readers and participants.

As Geoff Northcott of *supercollider pointed out very clearly in his post “visualizing the decline of the destination web, the rise of the social web”, the destination web is on the decline. And if Jaap Favier of Forrester is correct, then the Media Companies that will survive are the ones that create and facilitate arenas for brands to connect with their customers on.

This would give, that in the new perspective of digital media, what Jarvis points out is not a problem, it’s an opportunity. In the Every Day Life mindset, digital media is in the “Creating Direct Relations” business, not in the “messaging” or “middle men” business.

There is a big difference between how the existing media business models work in the old landscape compared to how they will work in the new.

Blindly copying concept from platforms where content actually disappears removes us from the ability to create value in an updated reality where content is stored in the “long here”. Where it isn’t static, but grows, connects and augments.

If media is to take advantage of the opportunities in the Everyday Life marketing landscape we need to shred the idea of short term, Attention Web concepts like clicks, views or time.

Explanation of terms here..

As some of my readers know, I’ve tried the last week to digg up some hopefully interesting or inspiring thoughts on the challenges of the media industry. I believe in the industry, but I also believe it needs to break out of the limitations of their traditional mindset if they are to discover new and innovative opportunities. There is a lot of artificially constructed walls limiting their creativity when it comes to developing new ideas.

Understanding how the concept of time has changed, unlocks a few barriers:

1. There is no time. As I stated in my introduction. Content doesn’t disappear, it gets more valuable. We need to connect companies with this content, help it grown, and build mutual and extended value.

2. Time introduces an artificial constraint into the company / participant relationship that limits the participants opportunity to engage and connect with the companies brand values.

Now it’s artificial in the sense that it is not designed by the value proposition offered by the brand to the customer (summer, Easter or Christmas related products could have done that), but it’s limited by money. To be more correct, it’s limited by the cost of running messages in media.

Now in the Everyday Life marketing landscape the goal is to connect and share values with the participant. Constraints on time creates a problem, best articulated by Amanda Mooney back in January:

“If you’ve only budgeted 2 months to be available to our community, we’re only going to give you 2 seconds of our time … at best.” – Amanda Mooney

As I see it, if Media Companies are to have a role – or get value out of the Everyday Life Marketing potential they need to put aside this limitation, they need to develop products for companies and participants without the constraints of time attached. Not putting clicks or views or days as a business model – but shared value.

If digital and real life is the same place, what is digital marketing? And is there a better way to articulate the new opportunities?

In the two previous posts in this stream (first and second), I try to argument that developers and designers of digital platforms are the only ones referencing digital and real as different. Technology’s seamless integration into real life has made it ubiquitous enough to become the same place.

This puts forth the interesting question: What is digital, and by which grounds do we treat it different from other options?

My take is that the focus on “digital” being a technology removes us from understanding it’s real opportunities, because in doing so we are fusing together concepts and abilities related to storytelling, conversations and utilities, not understanding them as different or exploring them as different.

The first post in this stream suggested that digital is not a platform because there is no “digital” in consumers lives anymore. Digital and real life has become the same place – so why should we separate the two – based on what?

The second post tried to state that by minimizing digital to being a “platform” we loose the focus on the richness of the opportunities and abilities gained from the maturing experience audience have with digital technology. And muddling everything together into a terminology that is unhelpful in understanding what we are able to achieve and giving clients fewer good reasons to invest.

What I am suggesting is that we rethink how we articulate the stuff we are doing every day.

New opportunities brought forward in the latest stages of social and cultural adoption of digital technology introduce a new set of abilities for marketers. It is infertile to discuss “digital”, “analogue” or “real life”, instead we need to dig into the abilities of our tools, identify their common traits and find terminology differentiating the different, and clustering the same. This is a suggestion, An Abilities Based Marketing Mindset:

1. Messaging.
Monologue or interaction where the goal is to control an experience the customer is consuming. This in order create or manipulate the receiver’s anticipation for a given experience, product or brand. Key words being control and anticipation.

2. The collective exchange of ideas.
The social and conversational approach. Where participants exchange ideas, creative content or meaning. The goal is to enrich or help shape the collective perception of an experience, product or brand through participation. Key words being collective and exchange.

3. Utilities.
Identifying a situation where the brand itself or its existing products or services are generating value, then building additional loyalty and preference in this situation through services. The goal being to extend the reach and value created by the brand to outside of what the original product provides, increasing loyalty and unique brand value. Key words being situation and value.

Tim Brown makes an excellent argument against technology becoming to ubiquitous in the sense that it just solves our tasks without including us in the experience.

The best services are the ones that demand participation, and where this participation becomes an important part of the value created:

“Any Service organization has got to get over the idea that a great service is something where the consumer doesn’t have to do anything. That’s a really bad service. A great service is where the consumer actually participates, and where they et drawn in, and where they become part of it.” – Tim Brown, IDEO

via Nokia Ideas Project.

Technological and media related innovation is not moving us forward, it’s not really moving us at all, if anything we are expanding. Innovation is extending our opportunities and perspectives, not finding new stuff in order to kill of the old stuff!

- Things don’t die, they reformat.

I believe this means that the opportunities are getting more and richer. Which again gives us a greater chance of finding what’s right for us, not having to force ourselves into available formats because there are no other alternatives.

The problem is that we are too used to having a limited set of opportunities. And since we at the same time are using the wrong analogies to describe media related innovation (“moving forward”). We are creating an atmosphere where we think old stuff needs to die in order to make room for the new stuff.

It couldn’t be more wrong!

We seem to think that the situations is constant, that we need to fill it with certain stuff – stuff that needs to innovate. Not the other way around, that the stuff can stay (almost) constant, but the situation is the one that needs to innovate and change…

Like TV advertising, or the website (Mike has a related discussion here). In the same breath of air we discuss if we do or don’t need them. If they are “excepted standards” or old formats, if they are obsolete? In my opinion it’s not about the objects, it’s about the eco-system.

What we should be working on is the richness, the palette, the opportunities, the reformatting. The chance to choose a tool that fits the person or the company. What we should be embracing is the bouquet, not the flower.