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.

Super 8 mystery

This is the new video from If Wen - a 'miserablist folk' singer who is a personal friend of mine, and whose music is, in my humble opinion, refreshingly good.

In some ways this is a shameless plug, but there are some genuine reasons why you might like to give this a few minutes of your time:

- My garden stars in it. The same garden that starred in the 1983 film The Jigsaw Man, with Michael Caine. So there's real pedigree there already.

- It's shot in Super 8, which gives it a stunning grainy quality, and even, I'm led to believe, a bit of Panavision. Pure 70's joy. Reminiscent of things with Felicity Kendal in them, and that's A Good Thing.

- There are bits of Chiswick House in there, with the rather elusive If Wen popping up in among its hedgerows.

- If Wen is also a bit of a star in his day job, but I've been told not to make that link too obvious - work it out yourself.

- And, speaking of working stuff out yourself, this is the first music video I've ever heard of that has a cryptic word game in it. No-one's worked it out to date - or even worked out why some of the letters are orange - but that's part of the interest value.

So there. Do yourself a favour, brighten up your day with a bit of 'Love Letters'. 

Mmm. Freshly brewed music. There's lovely for you.

Dead bodies

I'm 'penning' this from my seat outside the Bell and Crown in Strand on the Green. I have a sunny riverscape in front of me and a screaming child in my right ear. When I ran past here earlier the police had cordoned off the bit of the river by Kew Bridge as they were fishing out a corpse from the Thames.

Lovely river though it is, it serves as a watery grave for a surprisingly large number of people. We'll frequently hear the revving of boat engines late at night near Kew Railway Bridge next to our flats: bodies get tangled up around the bottom of the bridge pillars and it's the job of the RNLI and river police to extract the bloated mess.

Just a few years back, several dozen skulls were discovered in the 'Strand' bit of the river here. No-one really has a convincing reason why they were buried.

A bit of sunshine and a few ciders and it's easy to overlook the quotidien tragedies that flow past us.

There's cheery for you.


-- Post From My iPhone

21st Century Newswire

That's what Twitter is, I declare.

A Damascene moment a few days ago pointed me to Tweetdeck and the ability to pull together all the themes I'm interested in.

That plus the observation (thanks Robbie, Aimee, Craig) that this, by dint of the sheer volume of tweets, is primarily a listening medium. A listening medium with filters.

You can even conduct free polls on it: http://twtpoll.com/

We should contribute to make it a richer place, but that means removing all references to what we had for breakfast.

Now I can mix branded jounalism with citizen journalism and they can spar it out as to who gets the best stories first.

All I care about is being informed and entertained - and whoever does it best gets my vote.

If the technology of today gives an equal voice to all, then Twitter is the best platform we have to mix them up and cream off the best.

Churchill and iPhones

Finally got around to installing an iPhone app. From the comfort of the Churchill Arms in Notting Hill.

You're never alone with a iPhone, and it's really good to have a spare half hour - waiting for some friends and with nothing to read - to have a play around with App Store and find out what other techie wizardry there is that can make my life easier.

And not have Her Next Door upbraiding me for excessive device fiddling activity :-)

Attached: this pub has signs inside it. Surprisingly useful, especially as it's full of half-blind ex-military types today. Shame it's not in Braille.



-- Post From My iPhone

Bleeding eyes and industry-specific social marketing

Sorry folks, got to get some worky-worky things off my chest today.

Because it strikes me that there's no decent forum for pharma marketers to talk about digital media - or, more precisely, appropriate media given the market, the drug/device type, target audience etc. (after all, it's not just about digital however much my livelihood may depend on it).

Certainly nothing as useful as this one for Independent Financial Advisers: http://www.ifalife.com/

Woo hoo.

But I like the fact that it's crammed full of interesting articles that are well ordered, pertinent to the industry, and helps raise the collective bar of digital marketing.

Compare this site structure and content to the Pharma industry's highest Google-ranked forum: http://www.forums.pharma-mkting.com/showthread.php?t=1322

Frankly, it makes my eyes bleed.

There are plenty of learnings we can take from this comparison: structural, content, strategic approach, linking with social media … and these are all industry-based - not just personal / social!

Here endeth, etc etc.

Is Twitter rude?

I am frequently upbraided by Next Door Kate for using my iPhone too much in social situations.

Yup, it's so good that very often it's too tempting to dive into the various virtual yet social universes that this device offers to me by virtue of its being the #1 way of accessing the web.

But she does have a point: increasingly we're becoming permanently semi-connected. We don't all devote our attention to the task in hand, preferring instead to twiddle with our phones to check email, twitter, texts and so on.

It is, in many ways, plain rude.

But at a recent conference they asked for questions and contributions to the panel via Twitter. These were then posted on a 'Twitter Fall' app on the data projector and the best questions creamed off (so to speak).

Everyone in the room was head down, tapping away. But we got some good questions and some good banter going. Twitter made it easier for people to ask questions - it took away the embarrassment factor.

And that's got to be a good thing.

Oh - and no-one thought it was rude. Although it did feel like a totally different way of hosting a conference.