Only Dead Fish

A Missed Opportunity?

I had a fascinating breakfast meeting yesterday with Ed Bussey who is the CEO/Founder of Quill. Ed is a longtime digital and mobile exec and entrepreneur. Quill, his latest venture, is a rapidly growing content marketing company that specialises in content strategy, production and increasingly distribution.

There were several things that struck me as interesting about the way they work. They have built a global network of specialist writers, editors and producers (numbering in the tens of thousands) that is supported by a proprietary technology platform which provides the community and input interface. The workflow incorporates some technical quality assurance capabilities, which is then augmented by in-house editors in order to ensure a consistency in quality.

The platform optimises content for the web, and the use of local experts, writers and producers helps to alleviate one of the trickiest issues for global companies - the balance between global consistency and highly relevant localisation that goes beyond simple translation. 

Content strategy and production is informed by brand profiling tools that ensure relevant subject matter and tone. A platform API means it can be linked directly to a client company CMS, enabling content to be pushed direct to client owned media properties, subject to the approval of a brand editor if necessary.

Their vision is to be the leading worldwide platform of this kind but the most interesting thing is that their model of distributed production facilitated through technology potentially solves the extremely tricky balance of doing quality content at cost-efficient scale. It's interesting too that having started with production, they are now moving quickly (facilitated by client demand) into strategy, idea generation, content curation and distribution.

Companies like Quill are benefitting from the rapid growth in demand for tailored digital content which is in turn being powered by the increasing significance of always-on, content hungry owned and earned media channels. They are filling a gap, and it's a potentially significant one. It's kind of interesting that at a time when clients have ever increasing and very real needs for content, companies like this are moving into territory that advertising agencies and media owners have largely not adapted to address. Might this be a big missed opportunity?

Planning for Patterns

One of the interesting aspects emerging around multiplatform approaches to content is the dissemblance in device consumption patterns. Differences occur in not just how people use different devices to access content but when. The Media Briefing had a good round up featuring the graph above showing subscriber access to the FT during the day. Desktop and laptop access (in blue) peaks when subscribers get to their desks before declining steadily during the day, and this type of access is really low at weekends. Mobile access (in orange) is almost the reverse, with a spike as people check the FT on a mobile device when the get up, and into their commute, lower usage during work hours, and then a smaller spike on the evning commute and during the evening at home. At weekends, mobile is by far the most used form of access, with a peak on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and a small one on Sunday evening. It's interesting that the FT have pointed out that much of this consumption is additive and not substitutional - in other words people are using different devices to access the FT at times when they wouldn't have before, and multi-device consumption means that they are reading more and for longer.

This pattern is replicated at the Guardian which shows a variable pattern of platform access across the day:

...and at weekends:

The implications stretch beyond distribution and platform strategy, and into a requirement for media owners to think carefully about changing workflows, and daily working patterns and commissioning processes for journalists and editorial staff.

Twitter recently released the Twitter TV Book, a useful guide to the relationship between Twitter and TV, produced using data from social analytics firm SecondSync. According to SecondSync upto 40% of all UK Twitter traffic at peak TV viewing time is about TV content. One of the interesting aspects to SecondSync data is the ability to construct ‘social profiles’ for programming showing the patterns of tweets that occur as the content is broadcast. These profiles differ by genre, demographic and time slot, and are often driven by storylines, content and on-air integration. It's all rather fascinating. Tweets for entertainment programmes are typically content led and also happen during ad breaks, those for films follow storylines and often incorporate quotes, whilst dramas often see peaks in conversation bookending episodes, and patterns for factual programming peak at key events or revelations, but may have a long-tail of discussion that stretches out beyond the programme itself. 

The granularity of this kind of data leads to some interesting possibilities. In the last series of X-Factor for example, the mentions for the eventual winner James Arthur consistently outstripped those of every other contestant through the series. In the final, the pattern of conversation (below) showed over four times the volume of tweets (and consistently higher tweet-peaks) for James compared to the runner up, Jahmene Douglas, showing how Twitter can act as a barometer for public opinion.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the research also shows the benefit of integration (hashtags prompt and organise conversation, trends drive discovery, links help spreadability, integrating with content helps talkability) which you get a sense of seeing the profile for the on-screen launch of the #DancePonyDance campaign for Three, across five hours of a Friday night.

The interesting angle to this though, as SecondSync point out, is how the second biggest peak of conversation (in Alan Carr's Chatty Man, with under 2 million viewers) was not that far behind the biggest peak which happened when the ad premiered in Coronation Street (with 8.5 million viewers). Despite the latter having a much larger TV audience, the former had a larger social audience, showing that awareness of a programme's 'social profile' enables advertisers to optimise the positioning of creative designed to stimulate online buzz. 

Conversation is not the same as engagement of-course, but it's easy to see how this kind of data might be used not only to maximise the opportunity to create conversation, but to schedule creative with programme social profiles in mind, and optimise the scheduling of brand tweets and online content sharing to capitalise on dual-screening. A more granular understanding of the specific content within programming that is generating the most conversation also enables the referencing of popular moments or key story-line events to inform content creation. With Twitter's acquisition of Bluefin Labs, SecondSync's integration with BARB data, and with the potential to create a syndicated-standard social TV ratings metric in the form of Nielsen’s Twitter TV Rating, this space is starting to get really interesting.

The point is (again) how both publishers and marketers/agencies will need to adapt working practices and processes in order to deal with a world where content is optimised for delivery using a more three dimensional view of how and when people consume it, and where realtime feedback can inform more adaptive planning, and content adapted on the fly in response to that feedback. That may not feel like a fully formed possibility right now but its intriguing to think of the potential once (instead of traditional linear scheduling) more TV creative is ad served, which we're already starting to see the beginnings of. In that world, conversation patterns and social programming profiles could become another useful data point by which to schedule creative in far more agile and targeted ways. Automation would perhaps play a significant part in dealing with the compexity of optimisation using multi-dimensional data points, but so might smart human intuition and application of that data.

Most publishers are a way off figuring out the kind of working and commissioning processes that enable true platform-neutral creation but which are platform-specific enough to optimise based on more three dimensional consumption and conversation patterns. Brand are too. But for how long?

On The Future Of Feature Writing

Multi-chapter, multimedia, highly immersive digital features from publishers seem to be becoming quite the thing. The latest is the rather lovely ESPN Grantland story of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, which follows on from their similar feature on The Long, Strange Trip of Dock Ellis. Then there was the beautiful Pitchfork cover story on Natasha Khan which wonderfully integrated text, imagery and audio.

And this example from Outside magazine, which graphically tells the story of an early ascent on Everest, is notable for incorporating third party commercial sponsorship (albeit in a pretty clunky way).

The best known example is the New York Times' Snowfall of-course, which integrated video, images and graphics in a seamless, flowing narrative. And as The Atlantic described it, did it in a way "that makes multimedia feel natural and useful, not just tacked on".

Inevitably some have lauded Snowfall and its ilk as the 'future of journalism', but others have pointed out (mostly on Twitter at the time) just how time and resource intensive such projects can be. How can Snowfall be the future of journalism, they say, when it took six months and the involvement of 16 people to produce?

I think that kind of misses the point. To paraphrase The Atlantic, Snowfall (and others like it) are not the future of journalism, but that's OK. Snowfall recently won the Pulitzer for feature writing. This kind of reader experience where one element flows seamlessly into the next is uniquely suited to longform feature content (and to creating immersive feature experiences on tablet devices), and I'd argue far less suited to punchier, news driven content. Snowfall was produced as as the result of an off-and-on project, and an almost documentary-style approach outside of the realms of that which was possible with the normal CMS.

As the skills of journalists develop, as the shape of the skillset in media organisations expands to encompass new design, video, and graphics skills, as commissioning proceedures change, as integration with third party tools improves, as CMS's develop to enable a greater, more intuitive use of multimedia content, this kind of immersive experience will only get quicker and easier to do.

In the meantime, it's a good time to experiment and learn. Andrew Kueneman, Deputy Director of Digital Design at the NYT said of Snowfall: "In the long term, we also walk away from an effort like this with many valuable lessons in design, development, team collaboration, editing, promotion, etc.—lessons we can apply going forward, and ones we could only learn while working on deadline."

So whilst this kind of thing might not be the future of journalism, it is surely at least part of the future of journalism, and a potentially quite significant one at that. This kind of mixing of traditional writing skills with techniques that are more akin to filmaking enable a far richer pallette for features writers. Given that, I'm really surprised that we haven't seen more magazine publishers experimenting with this type of approach.

HT @Mrjamescarson for the Outside link

The 3D Printed Building

I've written a couple of times about Enrico Dini, the Italian who has developed a 3D printing machine that is big enough to print houses. At Next Berlin I saw a talk from architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars (from Universe Architecture) whose vision is to take this technology and 3D print not just a small dwelling, but a large, architecturally innovative building. The Landscape House is designed as a continuous structure that has no beginning or end, and one where the ceiling flows into the floor of the next level and vice versa. It's a design that is enabled by the radical way in which it is to be built, utilising Enrico Dini's huge D-Shape printer that uses ground-up rock or sand which is put into the printer and hardened by adding a binding agent.

What particularly interests me about this is that most of the focus on 3D printing is (understandably I guess) on the distributed manufacture of small, fun, practical or useful objects. But this is totally different. And the end result will be something quite beautiful.

Google Firestarters 8: The Agency Innovation Conundrum - The Event

The great and the good from UK planning were at last night's Google Firestarters event to hear 8 rapid fire talks on the subject of agency innovation from 8 of the smartest minds I know: Patricia McDonald, Anjali Ramachandran, Antony Mayfield, Phil Adams, Beeker Northam, Glyn Britton, Graeme Wood and Nadya Powell. 

I made a joke in my brief summing up at the end that it was going to be quite some task to attempt to capture even a part of the richness of thinking and ideas that we heard on the night. So much so that I'm going to take a little longer to digest what were 8 fantastic talks and write some more thoughts on it in due course. In the meantime, James has a few cogent ones here. But I did want to reflect some of the content and capture some of the (considerable) buzz around the event whilst it was still fresh. So I've put together a Storify of the event and have embedded it here. There are a number of the presentations from the evening within it (I'll update it as we go), and there's a great collection of Tweets and pictures which are well worth looking through.

My thanks to all the speakers for such great provocations (and they genuinely did follow my brief to be provocative), to John for our Firestarters branded Artefact cards which we had especially commissioned, and to Google of-course for hosting. And thanks to everyone who attended and made it such a great debate and such a great event. Watch this space for more about the next one.

Digital Shift

I've been doing a fair bit of work with the smart folk at Econsultancy of late. Our latest venture together is the launch of a new trends service we're calling Digital Shift.

As we all know the pace of change that digital marketers face is relentless. Every day it seems that there are reams of articles, blog posts, product announcements and tweets about things we feel we need to keep up to date with but find it difficult to find the time.

At the same time, many existing ‘trends’ services are focused on relatively intangible and/or longer-term consumer trends. So the idea behind Digital Shift is to curate the real need-to-know changes, and combine it with an interpretation in order to deliver actionable insight into upcoming trends and developments in digital. We're not going to be attempting to talk about everything, but once a quarter to focus on the larger and more significant trends that are impacting, and will impact, on digital marketing.

Our first webinars are tomorrow, at 9.00am and 4.00pm GMT, with me and Ashley Friedlein (CEO of Econsultancy) at the helm. Amongst other things we'll be talking about vertical stacks, embedded social and Facebook Home, new developments in content aggregation and curation, social TV planning and collaborative consumption.

Digital Shift will be a service available to enterprise level subscribers to Econsultancy (Econsultancy has a membership of over 180,000 digital marketers worldwide so there must be a few of those reading this blog), but for this first webinar we're opening it up to enable readers of this blog to sample it. So if you'd like to be part of it, you can find out more here.

Managing by Anarchy

I've done a fair bit of work over the past couple of years on how organisations can adapt structures and resourcing to better equip themselves for the world in which we find ourselves, and so I'm always interested to read about approaches that challenge the norm. James said I should look at the way Github work, so I found and read this piece by Ryan Tomayko, Github's 'Director of Engineering' which describes a non-hierarchical, self-organising approach to resourcing and working that many would call anarchic, yet one that has some clear themes.

Thus, employees work on whatever they want, with autonomy bringing it's own kind of efficiency ('instead of assigning 100% management duties to individuals, the basic role of management is spread between 1) every single employee, and 2) a set of custom in-house tools that serve to keep everyone in the know with regards to other projects'). Leadership is less about authority and more about enabling and inspiration ('lead by example as loud as possible'), which brings another kind of efficiency ('telling people what to do is lazy. Instead, try to convince them with argument...If you can't convince people through argument then maybe you shouldn't be doing it'). The currency of the workplace is trust and contribution ('…go build the thing in your head, show me how you got there, and then sell it to me and all your peers').

There are challenges that come from working in this way, as this post authored by a Github employee acknowledges, but as the post also notes these can be outweighed by some pretty meaningful benefits. Whilst the founders of the company set the vision, having everyone take responsibility for deciding what to work on is a way of both empowering and motivating employees. Ensuring that each person has the responsibility to sell their ideas to the rest of the company means that there is a natural efficiency ('I quickly learned that if I can’t get anyone else interested in the project that I want to work on, then either I poorly articulated my vision, or more likely, it does not benefit the company'). If, as Dan Pink suggests, what really motivates people and drives high performance and satisfaction is autonomy, mastery and purpose then this is a structure designed to give employees just that:

'Anarchy works wonderfully in a small group of individuals with a high level of trust. Everyone at GitHub has full access and permission to do whatever they want. Do great things and you earn respect. Abuse that freedom and you violate everyone’s trust.'

I'm not suggesting that such an anarchic way of working would suit every organisation but I often think that there are learnings to be had from engineering driven cultures where everyone feels direct responsibility for the product and the output, a large degree of autonomy is framed within broad strategic objectives or principles, and resourcing for projects incorporates more voluntary working and is focused around small, nimble, self-organising teams. Especially for companies that are working hard to increase agility and address organisational silos (and if you're not trying to that right now you should be). They are learnings that I'd argue should be applied beyond tech teams and into wider organisational practice.

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Rapid Prototyping Google Glass

It's tempting to think that the prototyping for a project such as Google Glass would have been a complex, lengthy process lasting months if not years but this short, charming talk from Tom Chi (experience designer in the Google X team) gives a fascinating insight into how their process of creation was greatly accelerated through rapid prototyping. The first prototype was built in an hour using coat hangers, a tiny projector and a piece of plexiglass. Subsequent prototypes took even less time and used materials as diverse as paper, clay, modelling wire, chopsticks and hairbands. From these models they were able to glean useful insights into the social awkwardness of gesture controls which led to them dropping fetaures which had been thought integral. As Chi says, “Doing is the best kind of thinking”. Fascinating.

HT Tom Uglow

Briefs Based on Social Data

I just mentioned this in my weekly email but I really liked Colin Nagy's (exec director of The Barbarian Group) Realist's Guide to Marketing in 2013. We've not been short of predictions posts over the past couple of months but here is an uncommonly good list describing some key shifts in the coming year including (amongst others) more examples of clumsy native advertising, zombie audiences coming back to 'bite' brands and apps (see what I did there) and apps becoming the new microsite. That last point, relating to the challenge of preventing your brand app from becoming just another coloured square gravestone in the great app graveyard segues nicely into the point I made below about why Growth Hacking is so interesting.

I particularly liked the point Colin made about a new generation of Community Managers becoming far more actively involved in shaping more fluid content calendars for brands (although it has to be said that many still haven't got their heads around the fact that they need a content calendar in the first place), and using paid media tactically to amplify earned media opportunities.

Related to that was an additional thought around more creative briefs being based on social data, and not just on traditional research. A lot of the focus for social monitoring and its relationship to paid media execution has been around the present and the future - assessing immediate and ongoing feedback and impact. This is moving into also being about informing tactical opportunities not just in social channels, but in other channels as well (for example keyword strategy in search marketing).

It's logical that social data should be increasingly used not only to inform creative briefs in advance but also to enlighten a whole content strategy. One simple example I've used before comes from gaming, whereby games creators use what they know about how the conversation of fans around the launch of a game typically changes to help structure a content strategy that extends out activity so that there is a much broader deployment of content before, during and after the launch. That might involve smart use of teaser and downloadable content before launch, curation and amplification of user and third party reviews around launch, and additional downloadable or other content post-launch in order to keep that buzz going. So as well as augmenting existing research in the formation of creative briefs, it's reasonable to believe that we'll see more examples of social data creating the opportunity and informing the starting point for the brief itself, and helping to structure activity and experiences that stretch over a longer period of time than a typical campaign might last.

Growth Hacking

I'm not one for jargon (lord knows we don't need another catchy phrase to describe something in marketing) but I rather like the applicability of some of the concepts around so-called 'growth hacking'. Lifting and paraphrasing liberally from these different definitions of the term from specialists (worth reading the whole thing) growth hacking is "a fancy term for high-impact, high-velocity product marketing", and describes a new process for acquiring and retaining users that combines traditional marketing and analytical skills with those more akin to product development (including trying lots of ideas, optimizing successes and discarding dead ends). It's important because it drives user growth, can get your product established, enables you to capitalise on network effects, and prevents you from being outcompeted. In their early days Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Quora all employed people to hack their growth.

Before now, marketing and product development teams have often been at odds: the former spending marketing budget to acquire users but struggling to get development resource to build something quickly (even relatively simple builds such as custom landing pages); the latter often building that which they believe will attract users but without benefiting from softer insights, and perhaps deeply measuring and understanding the impact of their changes.

The concept of growth hacking crosses this divide and utilises an understanding about how your users discover and adopt your products to build features that will help acquire and retain more users, so making the spending of marketing budget a lot more joined up with the building of product features and vice versa. So it mixes engineering with marketing, and represents the combination of product management, data science and marketing. It mixes art with science - the need to be creative in how you are acquiring new users with staying close to hard measures and metics. It's less focused on buying attention in order to drive awareness and interest and more on creating rich and appealing experiences for users.

There are downsides to having a catchy descriptor like 'growth hacker', as Josh Elman (a product manager who has worked at Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook) points out. There's a danger that people will believe the concept to be a fad, or that they are not focused enough on the depth and sustainability of the companies, products and networks that they are building. Attempting to artificially generate growth may create spiky numbers but rarely adds longterm value ("It's kind of like eating empty calories" says Josh).

But it is about getting to these points of sustainable growth, understanding what the data is telling you about the core patterns from your more active and passionate users, how they became more active, and then building sustainable features and experiences that can help continuously attract new users, and encourage them to be active as quickly as possible. Part of that may well be finding neat ways to engineer how your most actve users can attract new ones more often. Part of that may be about finding ways to get those users more quickly involved, and coming back more often. It is about getting to those initially important numbers and ratios, like the 30/10/10 ratio that Fred Wilson talks about. There's an interesting example that Josh uses from his days at Twitter:

"When I joined Twitter, we had an interesting puzzle. Many many users were hearing about Twitter each day from press, blogs, their friends and were signing up. But none of them stuck around. Typical marketing efforts in the past would have been to use email newsletters to bring users back, or spend money on display retargeting. But instead we invested in the product. We dug in and tried to learn what the 'aha' moment was for a new user and then rebuilt our entire new user experience to engineer that more quickly. It turned out that if you manually selected and followed at least 5-10 Twitter accounts in your first day on Twitter, you were much more likely to become a long term user, since you had chosen things that interested you. And if we helped someone you know follow you back, then even better. As we kept tweaking the features to focus on helping users achieve these things, our retention dramatically rose".

The interesting thing about this for me is that, as products and services become ever more digitised, and product has marketing baked-in, and agencies progress to creating customer experiences rather than just content, this combination of marketing and product development skills will become increasingly important. I'm not suggesting that we'll suddenly see lots of marketing or agency types with 'growth hacker' as a job title, but I am suggesting that these are the kind of skills that will become increasingly useful. You might even say that the effective marketers and planners of the now and the not so distant future will need to become their own kind of growth hackers. As Josh Elman says: "Knowing how to build and market great products have always been core attributes of successful companies. I think we're going to see these blend more and more in the future". So do I.

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