The Steve Rubel Stream

13 Apr 2010

The Swiss Cheese Web Ain’t The Web

The following essay is also cross-posted on the Edelman Digital blog.

Edelman Digital Homepage

Seemingly overnight the Information Superhighway (does anyone call it that anymore?) became littered with potholes. In the last week Apple sold nearly 500,000 iPads, none of which support key technologies that we have come to rely on, including Adobe Flash, Windows Media and others. (Adobe and Microsoft are Edelman clients.)

For the last week I have been using my iPad as my primary device. I enjoy the slate format and think it’s the next big thing for computing – one that will see lots of winners. Unfortunately, this comes at a cost. I don’t get to experience the web like I used to, but a version of it that only Apple approves of – one that’s peppered with potholes that turns it into the swiss cheese web. The above image is what our own web site looks like on the iPad, which proudly uses Flash for certain features.

This poses a challenge for Web developers – one that Josh Bernoff so eloquently details on his post on the “Splinternet.” Should one develop the most robust experience using the best technologies on the market or should they kowtow to Apple’s vision for the Internet? Tough call.

In the end we believe that marketers should develop for the masses – the common denominator that unites the broadest universe of consumers. Right now, that’s desktop browsers with plug-ins. However, if developers need to start coding different versions of their site for different platforms, then we have trouble ahead. Standards are what made the web become a mass consumer medium.

Edelman Digital calls on Apple and all companies to support consumer choice – to allow consumers to have the same experience they are accustomed to on the desktop. Where once mobile devices were not powerful enough to run rich media technologies, that’s no longer the case. Why ban Flash and WMVs yet support Quicktime and PDF – two other standards. It makes no sense.

The Swiss Cheese Web ain’t the real web. At minimum Apple and others need to convey this up front (a disclaimer in their ads would be a nice start). However, it is our hope that they will open more and embrace the same standards that have allowed online innovation to blossom.

12 Mar 2010

How Google Approaches Social Media As A Team Sport

Photo credit: Karen Wickre via Danny Sullivan

The following was cross-posted on the new Edelman Digital web site.

Another month, another visit to Silicon Valley – my home away from home – and, with it, another visit to the Googleplex in search of insights. This time I chatted with Karen Wickre, who oversees Google’s growing armada of blogs and Twitter embassies.

Google, perhaps more than any other company, has a culture of openness. Often a company’s culture shapes its communications strategy. And that’s certainly the case with Google. So social media comes naturally.

Karen first launched Google’s corporate blog back in 2004. Today the company has digital embassies for virtually every product. This armada spans dozens of blogs, Twitter profiles, YouTube and more recently Facebook.

Back when the Official Google Blog launched, posts were conservative. Wickre, a former tech journalist, told me over breakfast that early items were almost whimsical, focusing on the food at Google (which I can assure you, rocks).

While the blog still features some trivial fare, no one could call it – or any of Google’s other digital assets – a light weight. In fact, the opposite is true. Google uses its armada to take on hard issues likeChina, public policy and privacy. And it largely eschews press releases, unless they are financial or material to shareholders.

While Wickre doesn’t oversee all these embassies, she serves as a beacon for the teams that manage them – subject matter experts like product managers, engineers and marketers. Like a good coach, she provides templates and best practices and answers questions as they come up. Wickre, in the meantime, is turning her attention to how the company can strategically use its own Buzz product.

Wickre is one of an emerging breed of professionals that companies hire to manage/lead companies down the social media path. Not nearly enough credit goes to people like her. These individuals are often the ones who have to effect change – with the help of partners like us.

Google, perhaps more than any other company, is a model of social media success. One reason is that they tap into the three key trendsthat I wrote about earlier. They are real-time, visible and data driven. However, what they do best is embrace using multiple messages, formats and stories.

I subscribe to a fire hose feed for all the Google blogs as well as their Twitter and Facebook embassies. On any given day you will find a wealth of news, tips and stories that are tailored to specific interests. Only care about Gmail? There’s an embassy for that. How aboutpolicy? That too.

However, Google’s social media success goes beyond just having lots of teams engaged. Each venue slants the content to the reader/viewer’s needs and utilizes different formats – short form, long form, video, images and more. The end result is that Google creates massive surface area that make them hard to miss in an age where information choices are ubiquitous.

The takeaway here for companies is that, when possible, they should consider creating several blogs and – more likely – digital embassies inside existing communities. One Twitter presence might not be enough. The same goes with Facebook. (Note that this is just one approach and not the only one. Some advocate centralizing content into a single place. There are pros/cons to each.)

Businesses today need to consider having multiple streams that are mapped to high priority interests. This creates surface area and lots of entry points for stakeholders to get engaged. What’s more, the content should be “hand crafted“- eg tailored to each community. And these spaces should be managed by identifiable employees who are subject matter experts.

This is how I am tailoring my own content. I use Twitter for sharing/conversing around links and news. My new Facebook community is for discussions and sharing insights and observations. While my Posterous blog site is for essays, videos and the occasional digital doodles.

Now scaling might intimidate some. According to a recent Smartbrief survey, time is the chief obstacle to engaging in social communities. However, if a business makes social media a team sport, as Google does, anyone can succeed.

3 Feb 2010

Go Big, Get Your Employees on the Bus or Go Home

The following is also my column in next week's issue of Advertising Age.

Go Big, Get Your Employees on the Bus or Go Home

Photo credit: Traffic by scottpowerz

The single biggest challenge that marketers face over the next ten years is attention scarcity. Bank on it.

According to Andreas Weigland, Amazon.com's former chief scientist, more data was generated by individuals in 2009 than in the entire history of mankind. Human attention, however, is finite - and arguably, it shrinks as we age.

The end result is downright ugly. It's like 25 lanes of traffic trying to squeeze through two Lincoln Tunnel tubes during the peak of rush hour. Your marketing programs may be the biggest, baddest bus in the flow, but you're competing with everyone else for the same space and time. Chances are, however, your bus is empty. Park that idea for now. We'll come back to it.

Each individual, whether it's a stay-at-home mom or a twenty-something online addict, will develop his/her own coping mechanisms. Some of these decisions will be conscious. Many of them won't be. And that spells trouble for marketers.

Already one of the ways we're coping is by digging deeper into social networking sites to connect with our friends and interests. According to Nielsen, globally consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites in December. This represents an 82 percent increase year over year. Human beings have always been drawn to each other. Social networking just makes this easier and scalable - or does it?

Robin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, discovered that we are only capable of managing 150 friendships - this includes brands. Once again, we're handicapped by our darn brains.

Marketers know they need to be engaged in social networks. Some 45% of senior marketers surveyed by The Society for Digital Agencies said that social network engagement is their top priority. However, many marketers that I speak to don't understand the sheer scale that's required, given the above challenges.

To succeed in a world where attention remains scarce and our brains are limited, businesses must go beyond campaigns and move to real-time engagement. I believe the best way to accomplish this is scale. This means every business must become a social business by deeply integrating their often decoupled employee engagement and digital engagement initiatives.

In short, to revisit the aforementioned metaphor, you must go big, get your employees on the bus, put more buses into the traffic flow or go home.

So what exactly does this look like? It means unshackling your employees. It means equipping them with tools, policies and the means to engage with stakeholders around the clock. Finally, above all, it means allowing your workforce to unlock and share their company and subject-matter expertise.

According to fresh data from our own Edelman Trust Barometer, we're desperately seeking expertise. Informed publics are more likely to trust what they hear from experts over any other source.

However, the reality there are very few companies understand this. Most are still taking a campaign approach to social networks where it's the brand, not the people, that are the voice - and there's usually only one.

What's worse, the Berlin Wall stands tall inside Corporate America. Robert Half Technology found that only 10% of corporate chief information officers grant their employees full access to social networking sites. Those that do probably aren't guiding them. Manpower reports that only 20 percent of companies have social network policies.

Change must begin at home. If you don't get your employees on buses, your competition will and it will be harder to covet attention. This is every business' challenge in 2010 and beyond.

19 Jan 2010

Ten Ideas for the New Decade - An Edelman Digital White Paper

You must have flash to see this embedded document.

One of the best parts of my job is that I get to every day work with and learn from some of the smartest minds in the business - the Edelman Digital team. Today we published a brand new white paper with 10 ideas for the new decade. You can download the white paper here (PDF) or view it below.

In the video below I outline the big themes in the paper. My full introduction follows.

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During the last decade, we’ve seen social and digital media move from being purely the domain of tech-savvy types into a mainstream phenomenon. All you need to do is consider one statistic: Twitter was mentioned on television nearly 20,000 times in 2009, according to SnapStream. As a result, companies are investing in it and – slowly – seeing results.

Given the hype, much attention has turned to guessing what will become “the next Twitter.” It’s ample fodder for tech and marketing pundits, the media and clients - especially at the beginning of a new year and a new decade.

However, in many ways this is the wrong question to ask. Where once it was hard to sleuth out emerging platforms like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook before they grew, now they just seem to surface out of nowhere. You’ll know the next Twitter when you see it.

The bigger opportunity for clients, we believe, is to identify the global societal and technological trends that are reshaping how we think, act and buy - and to pivot into them early. Trends today tend to develop more slowly and are harder to see, allowing clients to take a more thoughtful, thorough and systematic approach.

In the following pages you will find 10 essays on such trends written by some of the smartest thinkers in digital marketing. These ideas, when looked at together, reveal four key themes:

The shift to digital technologies by both consumers and marketers is now global and pervasive across all aspects of our life and growing daily.
Our engagement with each other is migrating rapidly from computer to handset.
Companies (and organized interests) are just beginning to wake up to the engagement imperative - and how to fund and develop it over time.
And finally, the future is about carefully using the data people generate to make smarter decisions, while adhering to concerns over privacy.

We hope you enjoy our 10 ideas for the new decade. We welcome you to challenge us on our thinking. After all, that’s the only way we can grow.

7 Jan 2010

The Age of Media Agnosticism

According to Nielsen, the average American visited 87 domains and 2,600 Web pages in September. Outside the U.S., those numbers tend to be smaller, and fresh data indicates that just a few sites dominate the mix. Many rely on the news to find them rather than seeking it out - and those who do hunt for news are likely to do so via a single outlet of their choosing and/or via a search engine or even YouTube. It seems that, curiously, the diversity of the sites Americans frequent remains small even though their choices have grown infinitely.

In this essay I touch on why - faced with infinite choices, powerful search tools and equally helpful friends - Americans are adapting their habits and becoming less loyal to general sources than ever before, and why engaged companies can still find relevance in social spaces and influence their stakeholders in this Age of Media Agnosticism.

You can find the full article here (PDF) or below. For more visit, our insights web site.