Art made on an iPhone

The ultimate potential of the revolutionary iPhone was not realised when admirers first lauded its aesthetic appeal. Nor was it appreciated when they praised the power of the hardware that was housed within this sleek exterior. Only now, when looking at the ever-expanding choice of iPhone apps available, enabling the smart phone to become a device that rotates around the user, taking on the function of what the user desires, as a truly customisable phone that can become anything you want it to be, can we appreciate its true capability.

iPhone

The most successful apps are those that use the phones inbuilt software and hardware features effectively i.e. Accelerometer, GPS, Compass, Camera, Touch-screen etc. However, the most successful branded applications are those that seek out the part of the brand that provides an engaging mobile user experience. Carling’s iPint entertained pub-goers with a simple yet fun visualisation that could be pulled out at your local for some banter, whilst Oakley uses the GPS function to create an app that surfers could use as a utility for checking wave height and location, adding to the brand’s product truths of functionality and reliability relevant to the sport.

With the total number of “Active Apps” shooting past the 85,000 mark(and counting) there are a fair share of brands that have dipped into the world of Apps, some offering engaging mini-brand experiences, others offering not so engaging branded experiences. In order to take a snapshot of the state of the branded iPhone app segment, a modestly-sized document with some examples of the latest brands trying their luck at mobile is available here, including our ten pence on just what we think of their efforts.

For a more detailed list, including more on this and other information, head over to Johnny Makkar’s blog at Attention Digital and take a look at his extensive spreadsheet. If you know of any applications he may be missing then help the gentlemen out with some good old-fashioned crowd sourcing.

Social Media

Having been in the process of writing a conclusive (And slightly overdue) piece to summarise the social media film review, I stumbled upon an article written by Andrew Hampp of AdAge that evaluates the phenomenon in a respectable fashion. The article takes a mature and well balanced stance on exploring the relationships and variables involved. Hampp also uses the studies that were featured earlier on The Hive Blog social media film review, adding to the relevance of the inclusion of this piece, so without further adieu, view the article after the break. All credit is due to the author and publisher.

Forget Ebert: How Twitter Makes or Breaks Movie Marketing Today

by Andrew Hampp
Published: October 05, 2009
Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Submit to Digg Add to Google Share on StumbleUpon Submit to LinkedIn Add to Newsvine Bookmark on Del.icio.us Submit to Reddit

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Can the so-called Twitter effect boost a movie’s box-office performance faster than any traditional form of word-of-mouth? Not yet, say many top movie marketers and researchers, but the social networking platform’s impact on a studio’s media mix and campaign management has already taken shape.

Witness Sony Pictures, one of the first studios to create branded Twitter pages for its films, which saw releases such as “District 9,” “Julie & Julia” and “The Ugly Truth” open strong and maintain momentum by keeping the branded conversation around each film active and updating the films’ followers on the microblogging site with exclusive content in the following weeks. The results? Grosses of $113 million, $90 million and $88 million, respectively, and counting.

But the idea behind a Twitter effect gained traction this summer after the Hollywood press and the blogosphere blamed Twitterers for shortening the box-office life of films such as Universal’s “Bruno,” which opened to a strong $30 million but quickly sputtered to a $12 million second weekend based on poor word-of-mouth and a high volume of negative tweets. Could moviegoers with nothing but a cellphone and a Twitter account really be undermining the millions of dollars poured into a movie’s marketing?

Market research firm 360i recently tested the Twitter effect by comparing Twitter traffic for “Bruno” during its first weekend at the box office with three other summer films, and found “Bruno” to have the highest percentage of drop-off in second-day box-office grosses (-39%) and negative tweets (21%).

But making a direct correlation between the two is far from scientific and hardly one-size-fits-all for all films, said Sarah Hofstetter, 360i’s senior VP-emerging media and client strategy. “A movie like ‘Bruno’ is exceptionally polarizing — either everyone wants to see Sacha Baron Cohen naked or they don’t,” she said. “You have to differentiate in the content and context of a film — if you give too much credence to Twitter marketing and you say, ‘Our efforts contributed to a 10% lift in ticket sales,’ no one’s going to agree on what caused that.”

Little impact
And Twitter, as well as other social media, has yet to directly affect the methodology behind the metrics supplied by box-office forecasters to the studios to gauge all-important first-weekend ticket sales weeks in advance. One major movie forecaster said active Twitter and Facebook users have yet to be included in the sample size because it “needs to be reflective of how the studios spend their money. To chase Twitter or social networks would be a disservice to that population.”

In fact, Twitter has helped forecasters such as Marketcast and Nielsen NRG steadfastly hold on to their role in manufacturing hype around those all-important first three days. In the case of “Bruno,” analysts correctly predicted the $30 million opening weekend, but stayed away from managing post-debut expectations. “Our job stops after opening day. The rest is up to the universe,” said one forecaster.

Nor has Twitter had a measurable impact on studios’ marketing budgets, even as they add dedicated staffers to manage and measure social-networking activity around their slates. “While Twitter is important as social media, it is a very small sliver of our marketing campaign,” said a Sony executive. “I think it is more effective as a gauge of how effectively your materials are working and it allows marketers to take a real-time pulse on consumer attitudes towards your brand or property.”

Instead, Twitter has become the campaign-management tool of choice, one that studios and other marketers can harness faster and to a greater extent as more case studies crop up on a weekly basis. “The name of the game for the studios is to take full advantage of all early signals,” said Pete Blackshaw, exec VP-Nielsen Online’s digital strategic services. “The downside for them is a movie can be damaged really quickly — the flow of information on these platforms, and degree to which influencers are tapping into those signals is quite profound.”

But one former marketer at a major studio suggested that Sony has harnessed Twitter more effectively for a $30 million movie such as “District 9″ than other surprise blockbusters such as Warner Bros.’ “The Hangover” or Disney’s “The Proposal.”

“Sony did a very good job at continuing engagement with consumers. The film got such positive buzz from consumers that they started talking about it through [Sony's] real-time stream,” the executive said. “I don’t think those other studios knew what they had on their hands at the time.”

Sony’s fall-movie forecast
If early numbers are any indication, Sony Pictures’ fall forecast is less “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” and more “Sunny With a Chance of Blockbusters.”

EARLY HIT: ‘Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs’
EARLY HIT: ‘Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs’
The studio is taking big bets on summer-level success with a slate that got off to a strong start with the 3-D animated “Meatballs” ($60 million grossed in its first two weekends) and is off to more ambitious heights with the Roland Emmerich apocalypse flick “2012″ and the highly anticipated Michael Jackson concert film “This Is It,” each slated for the coming months. Even last weekend’s “Zombieland” was expected to top the box office with a $25 million haul, which, leading up to the Oct. 28 release of “This Is It” could give Sony a No. 1 film for at least four of the season’s first seven weeks.

“They’re positioned really perfectly,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box office at Hollywood.com. “The other studios have some good stuff going on, but it’s not like in past years where we had a ‘Lord of the Rings’ movie or a ‘Harry Potter’ to dominate the season.”

“It’s really anyone’s game, and the momentum they’re going to glean from ‘This Is It’ is really going to help them,” added a former marketing chief for a rival studio.

The concert film has already sold out more than 200 showings based on advanced ticket sales on Fandango.com, breaking the site’s records for highest-ever Sunday sales. Although scheduled for a limited two-week release, the film could be extended much in the way Disney’s “Hannah Montana” concert film was in 2008 should ticket sales soar. “If the demand’s there they’ll keep it out there,” said the former marketing chief.

“2012″ is also poised to be a summer-sized blockbuster when it opens Nov. 13, preceded by what was believed to be the largest-ever simultaneous media roadblock on Oct. 1, with two minutes of new footage from the film airing on 92 TV networks, reaching 90% of TV households and an estimated 110 million viewers.

“If you look a couple years back to ‘I Am Legend,’ there will always be a place for a movie like that in the fall,” Mr. Dergarabedian said.

And while boutique arm Sony Pictures Classics rolls out Oscar bait in November and December (“An Education,” Pedro Almodovar’s “Broken Embraces”), the main branch seems to have gotten its Academy-courting out of the way in the summer with Meryl Streep in “Julie & Julia” and the critically praised “District 9.” Instead, it’s prepping popcorn fare such as the action flick “Armored” and the romantic comedy “Did You Hear About the Morgans?” for the final weeks of the year. “It’s not about chasing Oscar, it’s about chasing the audience,” said Mr. Dergarabedian.

adage.com/madisonandvine/article?article_id=139444

As part of the social media film review we have been looking at new benchmarks for successful marketing campaigns by films exploiting the social media space to engage and disseminate information to potential cinema-goers. Dark Knight threw down the gauntlet to potential adopters of viral marketing strategies and the success of the multi-pronged Cloverfield campaign saw a creative and intelligent teaser campaign that involved moviegoers beyond the conversations at the water cooler. However, neither of these used the social phenomenon Twitter as effectively as Quentin Taratino’s Inglourious Basterds.

Recently we have seen correlations drawn between Twitter activity and box office performances. “Twitter sinks Bruno” articles, for example. However, according to Steven Zeitchik at Risky Biz Blog, Inglorious Basterds is the first film that can directly thank Twitter for its opening weekend box office success. A bold statement, indeed, given the proven audience-pulling power of both Pitt and Tarantino.

So, how can we/anyone make the claim that IB has, in fact, tamed the mob that runs the Twitter trending topics thus benefiting hugely from the “Twitter factor”?

The first step of any successful social media campaign is to recognise the medium that suits the project/message, and Twitter definitely facilitates the Tarantino fan. It’s a cult film director, slightly niche yet mainstream and with more one-liners per minute then most. It’s the perfect habitat for Tarantino fans to mingle and create conversations around the latest offering. This, in part, might explain the substantial 7,000+ following already acquired. (The Twitter population demographic breakdown indicates that circa 75% of users are over 25 and male and IB Distributor The Weinstein Company’s exit polling indicated that 58 percent of the audience was male and 72 percent was aged 25 and older.)

So far this summer the “Twitter factor” has been blamed for the poor takings of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Bruno on its second day at the US box office, plummeting almost 40% after the first day, and the unexpected success of low-budget sci-fi tale District 9. And the effect seems to have influenced the success of IB. When analysing the timing of its popularity in relation to the tweets about the movie, like Bruno, the effect can be seen after the first showing so that fans can make their mind up, spread opinion and thus influence those waiting for peer reviews before seeing it themselves.

To support this analytics provider, Crimson Hexagon, has commented that “78% of those who commented on Inglourious Basterds on Twitter gave positive responses, and that may have helped encourage people to see it.”

Prior to its release the film had provoked division among critics but Friday and Saturday tweeting swung it in a decidedly favorable direction. And it picked up momentum as the weekend went on, with Saturday Twitterers enthusiastically tweeting and re-tweeting their approval.

it is interesting, too, to compare positive and anticipatory tweets, given that conventional review sites such as Rotten Tomatoes had rated the film as low as 40%.

Positive tweets – Loved It, Pitt was Great, Have to See It, and Vintage Tarantino – make up 78% of all Twitter coverage, whereas combined negative tweets – Not Tarantino’s Best, Unimpressed – make up only 8%.

With that kind of data, it’s hard not to believe that the overwhelmingly positive response from the Twittersphere convinced at least some moviegoers to check out the movie.

As with Cloverfield and The Dark Knight, below are some statistics on the social media campaign, highlighting the importance of this digital element in marketing one of the most popular social past-times.

Trailer Diggs – 1234
Bebo members – 65
Facebook fans – 60,547
IMDb reviews – 42,837
YouTube views – 2,236,026
Box Office weekend total – $38,054,676
Twitter followers – 7,355

Sources

www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/aug/25/inglourious-basterds-twitter-box-office

www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=2611

digg.com/search?s=inglourious+basterds+trailer

mashable.com/2009/08/24/twitter-inglourious-basterds/

www.bebo.com/Profile.jsp?MemberId=7601813869

es-la.facebook.com/inglouriousbasterdsinternational?ref=share&_fb_noscript=1

twitter.com/therealbasterds

www.slashfilm.com/2009/05/20/early-twitter-buzz-inglourious-basterds/

www.riskybusinessblog.com/2009/08/inglourious-basterds-twitter.html

mashable.com/2009/07/13/bruno-twitter-reactions/

Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution:

If Twitter were an employee, it would be approaching the end of its first three months with me – that probationary period is a vital proving period in any relationship, and it’s a good idea to take stock of what you’ve learned, what’s been fun, and what needs to change. In an attempt to make this useful for the Hive, I’m going to use the tried-and-trusted list of 11 points.

Twitter veterans will have nothing to learn here, but hopefully the newness of these perspectives will be of use to some of you.

1. Pedal! Pedal!

I read today that 20% of Twitter accounts are completely and utterly dead. Yep. Never lifted a finger. I am surprised this figure isn’t higher, as the sign-up to Twitter is like being thrust onto a dancefloor in complete darkness. You don’t know what to do, who to follow, or even if anyone cares about you. Like those tiny turtle hatchlings that have to scuttle down the Mexican beach through a gauntlet of dogs and seabirds, it’s a wonder that any of us made it. We’re still at the stage where virtually none of my personal friends use Twitter, so I was lucky to have a load of Profero friends to help me get started. The conclusion is that Twitter needs to make getting started a little easier, tutoring people in how to build what I consider the all-important safety cushion of 10 people following you. As an unreformed user of analogies, I’d suggest that starting out on Twitter is like riding a bike. If you don’t pedal, you’ll fall straight off.

2. Starstruck?

I admire Stephen Fry. I think he is a staggeringly clever, funny bloke. But his Twitter feed, allegedly the non-plus-ultra of ‘Twelebrities’, was an anticlimax, and the same goes for the other famous people. Even Ashton Kutcher. I think I expected too much, and discovered instead that Twitter lays bare how embarrassingly ordinary the contents of celebrities’ heads are. But there’s a flipside to this: the same effect uncorked the personalities and minds of lots of ‘little’ ordinary people who deserve just as much adulation. In the same way as Stephen Fry has underwhelmed me, the ‘ordinary’ people I follow have been a revelation – colleagues here at Profero as well as employees at other agencies. Rather than bleat on about their work, Lean Mean Fighting Machine has popularised the ‘pant jump’ and I always look forward to the ‘squid news’ coming out of Dare. Profero has its own Yellow Bin – possibly the only recycling bin in the world to have gone on a drug-fuelled bender in Camden. This is a wonderful marketing point that I think is coming closer than ever to the magic 15 minutes that Warhol is on about.

3. Bland identity

As I’ve mentioned in a previous article, I am dismayed at the output of brands out there. Thinking that it is ‘enough’ to have someone sat at their desk, engaging with the audience, they are tweeting me to sleep with their harmlessness. I promise to buy the products of any brand that steps up to the mark and starts making the walls shake.

4. In our bubble

I’m going to take a punt and speculate that advertising and new media types might over-index on Twitter a little. Yep. Thought so. In between thrilling the crowd with urbane, witty thoughtfulness, and rehashed news, we should take time to step outside into a real world in which Twitter is about as front-of-mind as Chilean domestic politics. People in our industry are currently talking about Twitter as if it is social marketing. In fact, Twitter is the Manchester City of social media – all the news, all the column inches, much expectation, but nothing like the proven reputation, reach and size of other outfits.  It’s nothing insightful to suggest that Twitter still has a way to go in terms of mainstream penetration, but I’ve got my doubts as to whether the surge will continue for long. A forgivable perception of Twitter is that you’ve got to have something to say; just look that vacant white box at the top of the page. It’s as terrifying as a switched-on mic. The problem is, the majority of our audiences don’t feel they do have stuff they want to publish, but they’re happy to listen. Twitter perhaps has to be repackaged into more of a one-way product to reach out to the real masses.

5. Two vaginas

Did you know this: residents of the Colombian town of Villa Vieja got a bit of a surprise when a mutant calf was born. ‘The calf has six legs, two vaginas and six nipples,’ explained the animal’s owner, Salvador Vanegas. Mr Vanegas, who has been raising cattle for many years, said it was the first time he has seen a calf born with that many legs and vaginas.

6. Tales of the unexpected

See previous point. The most absorbing people I’ve seen using the service understand how to stop you in your tracks, and it isn’t through being permanently relevant or predictable. They do it through building a pattern, and then throwing something in there that completely wrongfoots you.
Cricketers call it a googly.
(This the only thing I know about cricket).
Thing is, you can’t beat something that momentarily makes you think that the writer has lost his marbles. As anyone in email marketing will tell you, if you can’t mix it up, you’ll lose people.

7. Show me the money!

I can see how brands are agonising over how to monetise the conversation on Twitter. It’s a massive question, and one I’m not going to elaborate on. Instead, I’m just going to answer it. If 4 out of 5 of your tweets are addictively useful/funny/inspiring/quirky, then followers will be comfortable with it when the fifth one gently wafts something with a pricetag in front of you. The genius bit here is that people involved in a mutually-admiring conversation won’t need to be sold to. Products shouldn’t be sold on Twitter; they should be bought.

8. Twitter turbocharged

One thing that annoyed me about Twitter was that URLs and pictures were hidden behind shortened codes. How do I know if they’re any good? Wouldn’t it be good if you can see the pictures and play the videos in your stream? The bad news is that loads of people had that idea before me, the good news is that it is only a couple of minutes adjustment away if you use Firefox. Courtesy of our Tech Director @hellquist, I use a Firefox extension called Greasemonkey that permits me to add bolt-on scripts to everything, then you visit a site like userscripts.org and discover things like the wonderful userscripts.org/scripts/show/40617. It also gives me the fleeting impression that I am far more technical than my friends. If you don’t try it, you’re a cissy.

9. Social, but how social?

On this point, I’m willing to be corrected, as I’m aware that everyone uses Twitter in their own way. Still, I’ve been alarmed at how many times I’ve heard Twitter referred-to as a way for people to keep in touch with their friends. I’ve been even more alarmed when I’ve started to see people having IM-style conversations about hooking up on Saturday. To be honest, it’s only worth doing if you are hooking up with someone who you want to show off about. Like arranging lunch with Stephen Fry, perhaps.
At the same time, people who have nothing to tweet but links are a little bit boring. It’s even more boring when you are given no sense of anticipation about what mystery item might be behind the link. You just become one of thousands.
These are just two ways that Twitter is used in the wrong way, and in my own humble view, they’re the less inspiring users.

10. I’ve had an idea

Suppose that Twitter offered you a premium membership at $5 a year, entitling you to write 280 characters instead of the standard 140? As you can probably tell, I’d sign up, and also take the credit for giving Twitter the keys to finally monetise their business.

11. Do not drink and tweet

Never tweet when drunk. I can’t stress this enough. The cool thing about drunkenness is that it is temporary, and also has the happy effect of wiping your memory of inconvenient details. Twitter, on the other hand, is permanent. In theory, your drunken piece of incoherence is committed to permanence just as much as the Digital Britain Report.

That’s it. For my part, a significant challenge is knowing who to be on Twitter. I don’t feel comfortable uploading my personal life onto the Internet, and equally my professional expertise is spread across fields that are more densely populated with knowledgeable search, media, tech and creative specialists. I’m happy to listen. Instead, I’ve started to use Twitter as an outlet for every non-professional observation I have. It sort of fits.

So in summary, I’m happy to welcome Twitter on board full-time. But it won’t be allowed to go on holiday yet.

I read Rory Sutherland’s engaging blog post in Campaign today validating the continuing need for great copy in advertising. The only thing it was missing was a purposeful discussion on the subject within the digital world, so that’s what I’ll attempt here.

In our digital industry, we are seduced by the ever-expanding list of things technology allows us to do. With the emergence of technologies like Natal, Android and ARG, we exist in a wonderland of visual excitement and pioneering knowledge. It’s a great place to be. Even glancing back for a moment, our industry has been one that has up till now been sustained by audiovisual excitement of subservient poultry, wayward balloons and smartphone apps that really do make it look as if you are drinking that beer. We have been the Willy Wonka to the Cadbury factory of the good old traditional ads.

But social media has brought about one fundamental change and dusted down a discipline that I was worried had almost expired within the so-called ‘new media’ agency.

I doubt very much that readers can point to a piece of digital work whose awards were garnered by its masterful use of copy; the Ogilvys, Bernbachs and Abbotts would have little to detain them if they were to be brought into a judging panel for digital work. Yet, when I flick through my social media accounts, there is one thing that exerts a stopping power so great, I feel like a galloping, excited greyhound that’s just forgotten that it was tethered to a concrete wall.

You can see great copy coming. As you flick down the endless retweets and automatic blog posts, it’s almost like your eye sees the great words before your brain has had time to start reading. Beautiful writing never goes out of fashion, and it’s just about to become very important indeed.

On Twitter, there are certain people whose avatars are a prompt to stop scrolling out of pure habit. Charlie Brooker, Richard Herring and Paul Carr are all people who have the power to captivate you with no more than 140 keystrokes. They make you smile, think, flinch or disappear into a fit of giggles. On the other hand, there are people who should hold far more sway in the digital world who are truly undermined by the high volume and low readability of what they put out there. Please take a bow Robert Scoble, Piers Fawkes and Guy Kawasaki. Don’t get me wrong – once I connect with what these people are on about, they are as compelling as anyone, but words aren’t their forte.

I have seen precious few brands that have invested in a truly arresting voice.  Typically, their social media efforts are a mixture of platitudes, harmless observations and @answers dripping with well-intentioned banality. Granted, Brooker, Herring and Carr all push the boundaries to certain limits, and brands have reputations to manage.  But these same brands manage to approve the creation of advertising campaigns that are just as provocative and arresting as their social media voice should be. They need to develop a voice that is invested with the same brilliance and power as an ad campaign. Only this time, you add spontaneity. If that terrifies you, then it’s good confirmation of how things have changed. In terms of great examples lighting the way, it’s all a bit limited. Aleksandr_Orlov from Compare The Meerkat is only one I can think of, but I’d love to have some more voices to listen to.

So the recommendation is simple. Talking isn’t enough. Brands should actually pluck up the courage to write something involving, human and compelling. And for heaven’s sake, write it well.

Profero Sydney has recently launched a new campaign with Universal Music to promote Canadian artist Anjulie and help break her into the Australian market.

Based on the premise that seeing an artist live is the best way to get punters excited about a new music artist on the scene, we have developed a campaign for Anjulie that ignores the boundaries of geography and distance to give Australian’s a live music experience of an up and coming star.

From July 6th, visitors to the <http://www.anjulielive.com.au> site will be able to discover who Anjulie is as an artist, download tracks, get their VIP concert ticket and share their experience with friends via social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. August 3rd will see the launch of Anjulie’s “online concerts”- fans will be given a live music experience and see Anjulie perform songs from her upcoming album online. “Gigs” will be on twice daily and will have a unique theatre and stage simulation as well as allowing fans to communicate with each other via an innovative “whisper” feature, just like being at a real concert.

Those brilliant folk at Profero Sydney have put together this smart showcase of some of the widgets they have built for clients in recent months, including Universal Music and Smart Online, Safe Offline (SOSO). There’s some really great stuff coming out the Sydney team right now and they are showing time and again that they are leading from the front of the pack.

http://profero.com.au/widget/ 

Profero Sydney have created a unique social media campaign to promote the release of much anticipated Electronic Arts game The Sims 3.

The Sims 3 Ultimate Aussie Fan Competition calls for Sims fanatics to build and promote their own Sims fan page, recruiting friends, family and anyone in sight to become a supporter of their page. Entrants to the competition are competing within 2 major prize categories – Most Supporters, for those who are able to spread the word of The Sims the furthest, and Most Creative. Competitors are encouraged to populate their pages with interesting Sims content in order to attract the vote from supporters, who can also win a copy of the game. In just over a week after launch, the competition attracted over 2500 entrants with Fans creating a huge amount of Sims 3 fan art, including YouTube videos, facebook, twitter activity and more. Among various user generated content, some fans have created their own t-shirts, parody videos, advertising concepts, rap songs and more.

The competition is open to Australian and New Zealand entrants and ends July 3rd.
Website: www.sims3fan.com.au
Twitter: www.twitter.com/sims3fancomp

As many will know, the reason we launched the Hive over 6 months ago was because we firmly believed that Social Media should not sit in a silo and should be integrated throughout the agency. It was therefore really refreshing to see an article by Jonah Boom, the Editor of Adage stating exactly that (I have replicated the article below simply because some people will not have a log in.

However I do think the piece probably misses are some of the challenges that exist in the space for agencies. For a start many marketers view social media as cheap and quick, which it isn’t and shouldn’t be. It takes time to deliver meaningful results and time as we all know means money. Delivering through the existing agency framework and making it cost effective just isn’t working. There is definitely an education job to be done here, and some of the more entrenched agencies are going to find it hard to adapt quickly.

Secondly digital natives behaviour has fundamentally changed. It’s changed so much that it now requires a certain re-wiring of the brain for many people within agencies. For some this is proving to be painful.

I have no doubt that for those that get it right, there are amazing opportunities to be had here. Matching basic human motivations with the evolving online behaviours allows us to play in a far wider marketing sphere (although that role in many cases will be that of guidance as clients will need to internalise social comms). In the short term though, it is clear that some agencies will struggle to cope with this shifting landscape and some specialised outfits will continue to make hay whilst the social sun is shining. We will obviously continue to integrate social media across our whole business while investing in new skills set and services to meet the changing needs (e.g. our investment in ‘online PR’).

Anyway here is the original article:

Dedicated Social-Media Silos? That’s the Last Thing We Need

by Jonah Bloom

You know that social-media department you just built? Go and dismantle it right now, because this stuff is too important to be left to the experts.

Every time an apparently foreign object is identified in adland, it seems the inhabitants split, roughly speaking, into two parties — those who fear the foreign body and those who are excited by it. The excited annex the object and create their own nation around it. The fearful homelanders breathe a sigh of relief and go back to doing whatever it was they were doing — albeit with just a few nagging fears about the ambitions of the fledgling country being built next door.

Before digital media it was media planning; before media, it was direct marketing. And if we want to go back through the history books, we can see that the same happened with TV and even radio. On each occasion, the newbies create their own jargon, their own law-making associations, their own cultures, their own ways of measuring success.

There are, of course, good reasons for separating new and old. There is money to be made for the prospectors and existing business to be defended. By dedicating resources and attention to the new medium, discipline or, in social media’s case, idea, those who work in the field are able to quickly advance it and ensure that it prospers.

The problem, however, is that the new and old states cannot exist successfully without the other, a fact they realize after they have set up separate and often competitive fiefdoms that barely speak the same language.

Direct marketing splintered off, taking important data-driven processes and analytics expertise with it. Yet now, it wrestles with how to reintegrate the creative, emotional thinking it left behind. Media planning’s separation from ad shops erected a wall between the thinking about medium and the thinking about message, which many are still trying to break down today. The rush to online as entirely separate from offline led to mainstream ad shops without the talent needed for today’s digital world and a host of new digital shops that had great tools and talent but were quickly frustrated by only getting to work on one part of the integrated effort.

It’s happening again with social media. Marketers are constructing social-media departments, social-media agencies are popping up everywhere, there are already too many social-media associations to make sense, and there’s an ever-expanding list of social-media measurements and measurement tools. In the last few months, we’ve heard dozens of marketers identify themselves as “wanting” or “doing” a social-media campaign.

This will prove to be the wrong approach — again. Social media isn’t a box to be ticked or a department to be manned or even a campaign to be launched. It’s about thinking differently about marketing, customer service, the entire company. It’s about realizing that consumers are running the biggest recommendation service in the world and that, as has been tiresomely often repeated, they define the brand (no, this is not new; yes, this is becoming more obvious and important by the day). All thinking about product, customers and communications, needs to take this into account — it cannot sit in a silo.

Sure, there are a bunch of new two-way communications tools at marketers’ disposal, and they’re all going to have to learn when to use them and in which combinations. And yes, there are definitely important roles for experts to offer guidance on this. But the social-media experts need to live among the experts in all the other marketing tools rather than in a new nation that adland will spend the next 20 years trying to reintegrate.

Via AdAge