Decisions based on favours

'Sure I'll sponsor you.'

'Yeah, your party sounds as though it could be a laugh. I'll swing by.'

'Reckon I should buy that one, really? The green velour one? Oh well, if you say so.'

It's just occurred to me, as my slothful mind ambles into action, that so many of the decisions we make are based on a cypher of the facts: people we know. We defer responsibility and take things as read.

We simply don't have the time to assess every situation according to what is, isn't, and could possibly be. So we make a decision based on someone else. 

Sometimes it's their advice. Sometimes it's just because it's them. We assume they've done the legwork already, or that they're worthy of our time and attention.

This occurred to me as I listen to an album by If Wen, who's a mate of mine. It's come onto my office speakers and I've actually managed to divorce the singer from the song. A few weekends ago I agreed to post the video on my blog and seed it in a few music forums. I did this as a friend, somewhat unquestioningly, as it seemed the 'right' thing to do.

But now, as I have a bit of time and space to exercise my critical faculties, I find myself wanting to evangelise a bit. 

I enjoyed having the time to make a decision myself that wasn't coloured by favour.

It's HR, stupid, not just IT

One day computers will rule the world and, should we want to, we'll all be allowed to go to that lovely looking island off Australia and put our feet up for 6 months - not just that lucky charity worker - safe in the knowledge that business is ticking along nicely at home.

Indeed, even our Facebook profiles will be run by robots - the future is already written here.

But until such a day, my digital friends, if you want your digital marketing to be any good then please, for the love of whichever flavour of god you care for, don't think that it will run itself.

If you really want your social media programme - that comprises the very best of blog-commenting, forum-influencing, content-distributing, tweet-chirping, video-mashing and app-seeding - to work, then it will take real people to roll up their sleeves and get busy with their ears and their keyboards.

Because computers really can't tell which places in the digisphere are truly worthy of our attention, and certainly can't respond suitably, and with tonal subtleties, to the conversations that are influencing opinions.

It's great that you've realised that banners and a monolithic website maketh not a digital marketing campaign (although they may tick the digital box in the eyes of your line manager if (s)he's really that stupid) ... 

...so for the time being, given we're all human, please try to invest in HR when you invest in IT.

Nobody knows anything

So said William Goldman of the entertainment industry, as he tried to sum up his experiences of Broadway and Hollywood. 

It's one of those phrases that is used time and weary time again (oh, and once more now), possibly because it can be read a number of ways - but possibly because it's usefully provocative.

According to my mate Brian Dargan (who's usually correct in these matters, I find) he meant that if the film industry knew which films were going to succeed, it wouldn't produce so many flops.

I'd like to use this phrase today to sum up where we're at with the plethora of digital stuff we're all trying to evaluate at the moment.

Here are some of the questions that nobody seems to know the answers to:

- Is Twitter worth the alleged $700m price Apple wants to pay? Will it ever be able to be monetised?

- What is good web design protocol? At a recent EFP conference in Munich, one of the senior guys at healthcare social network www.doctors.net.uk said of his site, and of Facebook, that the design mattered far less than the sheer volume of content contained within. Is he right? I know plenty of UX / IA guys who'd say no. They'd probably also counter the fact that he reckoned that Google's success wasn't down to the design of its homepage (I, for one, would argue that the simplicity propelled it into popularity far faster than if it had been as cluttered as Yahoo!, for instance).

- Speaking of Facebook, hundreds of thousands of people publicly grumble about the design refreshes it gets from time to time ... but most of us go on using it. And I, for one, tend to forget the last one quite quickly. Was it any better, or are we just pretty adaptable?

- What are the best ways for Pharma marketers (or 'communicators', to use the suggestion in my last post) to approach digital marketing? What should we do first? Blog? Tweet? Film?Listen? Respond? Build yet another sodding great website with reams of dull tiny print that no-one even visits? 

Are we sure? Are we hell. (Perhaps excepting the last one, it would seem.)

So instead we could use common sense, adduce some lessons from the past, pull in the few bits of data we may have, try to find some parallels with consumer examples, and away we go. 

Nobody knows much here and, as a result, most are too scared to try.

They just build another sodding great website instead. Or don't do anything.

My point to all of this? 

We'll never know everything (for a variety of philosophical reasons - see future post on Occam's Razor vs. Goedel's Incompleteness Theorems).

But knowing something is about as good as we're going to get, and I'd implore the pharma industry (and the ABPI) to start with / sanction something rather than watch every other industry sector zoom past us in terms of modern communications effectiveness.

Many films may flop, but at least the entertainment industry keeps moving with the times.

When is a marketing agency not a marketing agency?

Perhaps when it's a communications agency.

What I mean is that as soon as one mentions the word 'marketing', people's defences go up. They feel (or at least I do) that there's a sub-text to everything marketers do.

Communications, in contrast, is far less threatening. I'd wager that more people accept the need for businesses and brands to communicate - after all, it might be about more innocuous activities than trying to take money and time from you.

Not only that, but a 'communications agency' immediately has more permission to talk to other functions of a client's business than just their marketing function.

Would people believe us if we were to say we could do this? I reckon so. After all, communications is a tricky business what with all the confusion that can get in the way of a perfect transferral of meaning from one person to another, and so anyone who can make things simpler and more easily digestible may well have a role.

And that's exactly what marketers do. But it's just rather too loaded and pigeon-holed a word.