How to spot new trends

Once again I have Wired UK to thank for some great new ideas.
The June issue’s “How to spot the future” feature has sage advice from a host of tech success stories about spotting trends.

My favourites are: 

• Look for cross-pollinators: ideas which have been taken from one area and used in another. And people who integrate ideas from different fields.
• Demand deep design: where it’s a core part of the simplicity of something, the way Apple and Facebook, for example, do it.
• Favour the liberators: those who liberate something for consumers and users (like iTunes pricing policy did) and those who allow liberate underutilized resources by giving easier access to them, making them more liquid in the financial sense.

Go read the rest of the article for the rest and some inspiring examples.

Fake fans and likes are no fake risk to Facebook's reputation

The BBC’s expose that up to 6% (that’s 54 million) Facebook profiles may be fakes created by fraudsters using software to generate fake likes for ads and brand pages could represent a significant risk both to Facebook and its customers — advertisers, marketers and PR firms —.if both it and them don’t take appropriate action.
Facebook’s reaction seems, a little complacent, although their point about building in proper targetting is well made.

The question for marketers and PRs is how to play this with clients. If you play it down as a small proportion of users outweighed by a vast majority of genuine fans and likes, what do you say if the problem grows, as spam has done – to represent more significant numbers and in the geographic areas and demographic groups you’re targetting?

How can you recommend a Facebook campaign if the credibility of it as a channel through which to interact with target customers is under question? Would they be happy that up to 6% of their money spent on Facebook would be wasted on fake fans and likes? Those with a glass-half-full mindset may be happy to carry on given that, as per Lord Lever’s adage, you rarely know which bit of your marketing spend is wasted and which working (although these days monitoring as a lot better than it was then, if you can pay for the right tools). But what about the others who aren’t happy that some of their budget will be wasted on fake likes?

Perhaps, at least for now, the line with clients will just to be accentuate the positive — concentrate on the 94% of fans who will be real and to whom your carefully-wrought messages will reach and hopefully have the desired effect.

But for that line, and your advice, to continue to have any credibility, Facebook has to be seen to tackling this problem seriously and soon. If it doesn’t, it won’t just be its reputation which takes a hit — it’ll also be those of marketers and PRs recommending it unreservedly for marketing to undifferentiated groups to their clients.

Some clients might see such recommendations as evidence of you being just another firm recommending expensive campaigns which benefit you financially regardless of how effective they may actually be for them. And that would only lead to more client churn, less stability in revenues and profits and more time acquiring new clients rather than organic growth by building long-term relationships (and hopefully campaign spend) with those who can totally trust your recommendations.

The question for you, then, is are you doing transactional or relationship marketing? The answer will partly depend on how much you see client churn as inevitable, not matter what you do. Sure, some clients will never be happy and will always go off in search of their perfect agency which they’ll never find. But for the rest, surely retaining as many as you can, particularly in these tough times, makes sense. Ok, some may not be that profitable now, but once a recovery comes, as it surely must, that situation should change as marketing budgets increase. And that’s when your reputation as a source of trusted advice will help you compete against your many rivals and maximize your revenues and profits.

As ever, your reputation will be a key source of competitive advantage if you look after it properly. So absolute transparency with clients over what Facebook can and can’t do for them and what it takes to use it effectively will be essential, for both them and you.

It may prove to be a coincidence that the story surfaced on Friday the 13^th, but for Facebook that may prove to be an unhappy omen unless they can take sufficient action soon to shore up their service’s credibility with the marketing, PR and advertising communities and stop the damage extending to those who recommend using it.

A-B testing isn’t a-bsolutely right for everyone

Not for the first time, Wired magazine has been responsible for exposing me to an exciting new idea with a range of possible applications beyond its original use.
In this case it’s the notion of A-B testing featured in the June 2012 issue of Wired UK.
Put simply, instead of deciding which of all the proposed website designs are best, some firms or organisations simply put both or all of them live, split the website traffic to go evenly between them and wait for the resulting sales/conversion/hits data to tell them which the users/customers say is best. Once that’s clear, the winner runs solus. Simples!
It’s a neat idea which could be applied in lots of other areas, such as direct mail (one or more test postcodes could receive different versions of a mailing and response rates compared), TV and radio advertising or even newspaper page design (different geographical editions could have different versions of a limited number of pages).
But there are some areas you wouldn’t want to use this approach. Principally, those where the audience isn’t homogenous (of equal value to you or your client) or is a group of high value, such as key accounts, who you can’t risk being exposed to anything other than the best possible representation of your organization or client as a bad impression from receiving the ‘losing’ design could cost you/them a lot of money.
Doubtless, there are lots more areas where this would work really well. But think carefully before using it.

Changing the banking culture — not quick or easy, but necessary

Out of the furore and fuss over Barclays’ under-reporting of its borrowing rates in its LIBOR submission and Bob Diamond’s management of the bank has come a loud and frequent call for the culture of banking to change.
On the face of it, it seems a fair, reasonable and probably necessary step. But how can it be done?
The answer is not quickly or easily, but it has to be done if the banks are to repair the reputational damage their behaviour over “pay for failure”, bonuses, misselling and the risk-taking that led to the global financial crisis over the last few years has done.
The problem is that changing in an individual organization is hard enough, let alone changing that of a whole industry.
The reason is how organizational and industry cultures are formed. Geert Hofstede’s work looking at the different cultures within the national subsidiaries of international organisations showed that an organisation’s culture comes only partly from the corporate culture (espoused values and behaviours) promoted from the top — the rest is derived from the beliefs and practices people bring with them from their upbringing and local culture, as well as the industry culture elsewhere.
So Barclays management alone can’t fairly take the blame for all of the flaws in its culture which led to the mispractices as some of them will have come with staff who joined from elsewhere or came in thinking cheating was ok.
The other complicating factor is that the industry culture is partially derived from the nature of the work, as Deal & Kennedy have shown. Their model shows that places with different levels of risk (uncertainty) and feedback (praise, bonuses, promotions) create different cultures and that the high risk, quick feedback situation encountered in trading in the City creates a “tough guy, macho” culture. Which is why those who enjoy managing risk, competing with others and receiving very tangible rewards fit in well with that kind of environment.
So what can be done? Whether or not you believe that the City’s leopards can change their spots, the least the banks can do is be seen to be making efforts to change their behaviour with culture change programmes both at each organisation and industry-wide through accredited training programmes.
Each needs to be seen to reward those who live the new espoused organisational values as well as reward (rather than attack or sack) the whistleblowers who report misdeeds. By rewarding and praising those who behave in the new way required, they can be seen to be pushing for positive change and encourage at least compliance, if not belief change, in the rest.
Whether or not individuals’ actual beliefs about what is and isn’t acceptable will be changed, compliance with the new way of behaving is what everyone wants to see. And only once behaviour is seen to have changed will the rest of society be happy and prepared to improve their view of the banks.