Brands In Networks I Crossing Ebook

brands
in
networks
an e-book by Antony Mayfield
from iCrossing

V 1.0 updAted 09.09.08

image: web
by: kliverap
www.sxc.hu/profile/kliverap >

icrossing.co.uk/ebooks >

excerpt
2

in his book on complexity theory
and economics, the Origin of
Wealth, eric beinhocker tells a story
about a conference to exchange
ideas between leaders in physics,
mathematics and economics.

brands in Networks: an e-book by antony mayfield from iCrossing updated 08.09.08

The physicists and mathematicians were shocked by the models that the
economists were using to develop their ideas.

“...to their eyes, economics was a throwback to another era. One of the
participants at the meeting later commented that looking at economics
reminded him of his recent trip to Cuba. As he described it, in Cuba, you
enter a place that has been almost completely shut off from the Western
world for over forty years by the uS trade embargo. the streets are full of
packard and deSoto automobiles from the 1950s and relatively few cars
of more recent vintage. He noted that one had to admire the ingenuity of
the Cubans for keeping these cars running for so long on salvaged parts
and the odd piece of Soviet tractor. For the physicists, much of what
they saw in economics had been locked in its own intellectual embargo,
out of touch with several decades of scientific progress, but meanwhile
ingeniously bending, stretching, and updating its theories to keep them
running.”

economists had been stuck in ways of thinking that glossed over the true
complexity of the world. They treated everyone as a rational player, and
marketplaces as complex but explainable and predictable mechanisms that could
be managed.

it is early days for media and communications on the web – we are only a couple
of decades in, give or take. if a native digital strategy is to emerge, as opposed
to imported values, models and thinking from the age of channel media, we
need to embrace the complexity. That means reaching out for new analogies,
for the experiences and models of people – ecologists, financial traders, lean 3

manufacturers – who have succeeded in developing models that make sense of
complexity and allow them to develop successful strategies.

Complexity is daunting because we are used to squeezing reality into stable,
understandable models. even with a market segmentation that breaks down
“consumers” into hundreds of groups, we’re still oversimplifying the case. We
usually end up making advertising and other planning decisions modelled on
reaching people via single websites with high traffic. We ignore the reality that
people don’t fire up their web browsers and spend their time on mSN or the
guardian accessing content and absorbing the advertising and PR messages they
find there.

Search engines and social media have set our attention free, allowing us to move
swiftly through a network of experiences and information that add up to the media
we want. Consumers and audiences aren’t appropriate terms here. They are us.
and we’re all – brands, media, governments and private citizens – players in the
great networks of the web.


4
CoNTeNTS 4>
iNTRoduCTioN 6>
The RevoluTioN 7>
meaNS of PRoduCTioN 9>
meaNS of diSTRibuTioN 10 >
fRom ChaNNelS To NeTWoRkS 11 >
WhaT haS Really ChaNged? 13 >
uNdeRSTaNdiNg NeTWoRkS 19 >
hoW To be SuCCeSSful iN NeTWoRkS 24 >
The ThRee fuNdameNTalS of
bRaNdS iN NeTWoRk 28 >
Re-eNgiNeeRiNg bRaNd maRkeTiNg 30 >
dealiNg WiTh ComPlexiTy:
iNSPiRaTioNS aNd modelS 32 >
CoNCluSioN 40 >
abouT iCRoSSiNg 41 >
abouT The auThoR 42 >
CReaTive CommoNS CoPyRighT 43 >
gloSSaRy 44 >
ReCommeNded ReadiNg 47 >


“it is difficult,
indeed dangerous, to
underestimate the huge
changes this revolution rupert Murdoch,

will bring or the power of Speech to The

developing technologies to Worshipful Company
of Stationers and

build and destroy
Newspaper makers,
march 2006 5

– not just companies but
whole countries.”


introduction

here is what we believe: the phenomenon of social media
changes everything. Since mass marketing has been
built around mass media, it follows that sociality changes
everything about how brands can be successful. This is true
right now and will be even more so in years to come.

This e-book is an attempt to share my thinking and ideas, and those of my colleagues
at iCrossing, as we have worked to make sense of the significance of the web
revolution and what it means for brands. it considers:
• how media are being changed by online networks and our growing
understanding of how they work

• what brands and their partners need to do in order to be successful in a

media world dominated by networks

• The broad strategies and models that will be important in the next decade

Predicting things is a dangerous game, but even if it is asking
for trouble, let’s kick off this e-book with two predictions:
6

1. expect to see the first With people’s attention migrating to the web from traditional,
major global brand channel media (what Clay Shirky calls “gutenberg era” media)
appoint a digital agency like television, print and radio, digital marketing will become the
as its agency of record central discipline in marketing, informing all others – just as Tv
in the next year
advertising was the dominant discipline in marketing during the
last 50 or 60 years.

2. complexity and The web has not arrived, it is arriving. it will take decades
rapid change will for the full implications of the web to play out in society,
define the career of commerce, politics and the media. We don’t know if
anyone in media and facebook or google will be major players in ten years’ time,
marketing today.
but we can be sure that complexity and change in the media
landscape will be as important for us then as it is now.

The arguments for – and implications of – these two predictions are deserving of an
e-book all of their own; but for now let us simply leave them as predictions.

What this is not is a manual for social media marketing. i don’t think that that book
can be written yet - things are moving too fast and the current signs are that they’ll
continue to do so for some time.

antony Mayfield
icrossing


the revolution

“it is difficult, indeed dangerous, to underestimate
the huge changes this revolution will bring or the
power of developing technologies to build
and destroy – not just companies but whole countries.”
rupert Murdoch, Speech to The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper makers, march 2006

liVing tHrOugH A reVOlutiOn
one thing that has stuck with me from my days as a history undergraduate is just
how little it is that people understand the implications and eventual outcomes of the
revolutions they are living through at the time.

generals talk of the “fog of war”; how difficult it is to know what is going on in the
wider battle when you are at a point in the middle of it. When we are thinking about
the future of the web, of media and of marketing we would do well to acknowledge
that our understanding is blurred by the “fog of revolution”.

We do not know what the outcomes will be. The smartest people in the media – who
are furiously innovating and adapting their organisations to survive and (hopefully) to
be successful now that the web is defining their fortunes – acknowledge that they do
not know where all of this will end.
7

We need to stand back from the day-to-day of the web and social media hurly burly,
and to try and understand the fundamentals: what it all means and what strategies
are likely to work.

tHe nuMberS
let’s start by taking a look at some numbers that suggest something very profound is
happening:

1.4 billiOn (one-fifth of the world’s population) people online in the world today.1

400 MilliOn of them are members of social networks.2

There are OVer A trilliOn web pages indexed by google.3

tHere Are 112.8 MilliOn blogs being tracked by specialist search
engine Technorati.4

10 HOurS of video are uploaded to youTube every minute.5

in 2008, for the first time, tHe VOluMe OF internet trAFFiC in tHe
WOrld generAted by COnSuMerS Will OVertAke tHAt CreAted by
COrpOrAtiOnS and other organisations.6


1 idC, digital marketplace model and forecast, June 2008
2 mySpace, Never ending friending, april 2007 http://creative.myspace.com/groups/_ms/nef/images/40161_nef_onlinebook.pdf
3 google’s count of the pages it indexes.
4 Technorati’s own statistic. http://technoratimedia.com/about/
5 google’s statistics, June 2008
6 Cisco Systems, global iP Traffic forecast and methodology 2007 - 2012 http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2008/prod_061608b.html

tHe nAture OF tHe reVOlutiOn
but the revolution isn’t about the numbers, even though the scale of the changes in
the way that people communicate, create and collaborate make the mind boggle.

after a certain point, except for the most mathematically gifted of us, numbers cease
to provide us with meaning.

it comes down to two changing fundamentals:

the means
of production the means of
distribution of content

The last time that these fundamentals shifted as profoundly as they do today, was in
the 15th century, when Johannes gutenberg invented the printing press. before that,
content creation and distribution was both labour–intensive, and largely in the hands
of either the state or the church.

The revolution was swift, certainly by medieval standards, with printing technology
spreading across europe in a matter of decades. The invention of the printing press
allowed martin luther’s easy-to-read attack on the Catholic Church’s indulgences
racket, the 95 theses, to be picked up by a network of printers across europe.
These could be considered the bloggers of their day, and their actions helped
precipitate the birth of Protestantism.
8
but print’s impact on our world went far beyond the political and religious shockwaves
of the Reformation. over the following centuries the printed word changed how we
thought, and how information was shared.

here are just a few of the ways that print changed the way we think:

survival of knowledge: texts survived in the medieval world because before one
calf-skin edition of a book decayed beyond repair a monk would decide that it was
important enough to spend three months of his life copying it out again. how many
texts weren’t worth it?
Glossaries: the idea of cross-referencing to other texts was partly about marketing
– consider it the humble ancestor of amazon’s “if you liked this book” approach.
accuracy and errata: texts in the pre-print world became less accurate with
each edition. every time they were copied, even by the most diligent of monks,
some errors would be added. in the print world, more eyes saw the text, more errors
were spotted and the next edition would have fewer typos and mistakes – steadily
becoming more accurate.
reliable maps and anatomies: for the first time, a scholar in an italian
university could correspond with a counterpart in france about a map or a diagram
and know that they were both looking at the same image.

Similar, parallel effects are taking place today with the web. Critics say things like:
“google is making us stupid.” They fret about attention spans and the ability to write
original essays, just as the abbot of Spondheim worried about monks losing the
benefits of copying out texts7.


7 an excellent account of the printing press’s impact on the medieval world can be found in The Printing Revoution in early modern
europe, by elizabeth l eisenstein. it’s a great read for anyone trying to understand our own media revolution.

means of production

any one of the 1.4 billion of us who is connected to the web
can create content. from basic, written-word web pages,
via interactive blogs and forums with podcasts, through to
videos and pictures and endless commentary from us, and
from anyone else in the network.

We can create content that can be
viewed by any of the other web-
connected people in the world.

Starting a blog is about as complex
as setting up a web-based email
account, like gmail.

Two minutes after the idea that you
would like to start a website called,
say, “my fabulous Cat”8, you can
have that website live on the web
using a blog publishing platform like
blogger or Wordpress – for free. 9
in fact, after the purchase of your
computer and internet connection,
you can do an awful lot of content
creation at almost no extra cost
to yourself.

Contrast that with the offline
equivalent. Sure you can create a
word-processed, typed-up or even
handwritten newsletter version of
my fabulous Cat, but then you’d
have to pay about 5p (20 uS cents)
a page to get new copies of
it produced.


8 None exists to the best of my knowledge at the time of writing. if you run this site, i hope you don’t mind me using it as a
hypothetical example

means of distribution

Just as important as the means of production is the way
that the web has changed the means of distribution. The
proliferation and improvement of the means of distribution in
the past few years has been profound.

let’s return to the hypothetical my fabulous Cat newsletter/website comparison.
The hurdles to the distribution of your lovingly-produced print newsletter are
significant: you could start a subscription mailing list, leave copies at the local library
or push it through the doors of people who you know like cats, maybe. but without a
publishing deal or significant personal wealth to fund distribution it isn’t likely to reach
many people.

have a look at all the ways in which for little or no cost you might go about distributing
your latest articles, videos and photos from your my fabulous Cat website:

email: you can send content or alerts to people’s inboxes. email is already so
embedded in our lives that it doesn’t feel like a revolutionary medium, but it is9.

search engines: People think of search engines simply as tools they use to go
and find things. it’s worth thinking about that in reverse though – as they index my
10
fabulous Cat articles, they are making them available to people who are suddenly
interested in, say, you and your cat, or just content around cat healthcare, grooming
or whatever else. you’re steadily becoming a useful source of information as you
update the site. Search engines are arguably the most powerful method of content
distribution on the web.

rss feeds: rSS feeds allow people to subscribe to websites and have new
content sent to them via their inbox, a newsreader like google reader, or a widget
sitting on their computer desktop. RSS means that none of the people who enjoy
my fabulous Cat has to remember to check your website everyday to see if there is
new information: they wait for the RSS tool to bring your cat articles to them. This is
the same distribution method that powers audio and video podcasts.

bookmarking and sharing: People share content they are interested in with one
another, via bookmarking websites like delicious or by posting links on their social
network profile, or in the groups and forums to which they belong. if my fabulous Cat
starts to build up a fan base of cat lovers or people who simply enjoy your pithy, witty
accounts of life with your cat, they will start to tell others.

aggregators: There are lots of websites that aggregate content from elsewhere
using combinations of search, sharing and RSS distribution methods; sometimes
around a niche topic (e.g. techmeme, for web industry news, or Marktd, for
marketing industry news) or just around the general interests of their users (e.g.
digg).

Notably, distribution of online content doesn’t just rely on its creator or publisher. if
third parties find it interesting or useful they will continue to distribute the content


9 for more on this line of thought, see Clay Shirky’s here Comes everybody,

from channels to networks

it’s helpful to think of the pre-web media world as being one that
was structured as channels, and the web as being all about open
networks.

let us add some detail to these two models.

CHAnnel MediA
Channel media is defined as a channel created between the originator of content
(newspaper, Tv or radio station, for example) and audiences who receive the content
passively, for the most part.

To be a player in channel media you need to invest a lot, both in creating content and
in distributing it. if you are a newspaper, you create content with a team of experts
in writing, editing, photography and printing, amongst other things. you then need
infrastructure, or access to infrastructure, to create the newspapers and take them
out to newsagents and other outlets who have agreed to sell or give away your
content-laden product.

if you run a Tv or radio
station, after going through
11
the intense challenges
of acquiring a licence
from the government
or governments with
jurisdiction over the
territories in which you plan
to broadcast, you’ll need
to invest in production
and perhaps in buying
third-party content for
your channels. and you’ll
need access to antennae,
satellites or cable routes to
your audiences.

once you are set up, however, you have the potential to reach millions of people with
your content. This becomes an attractive proposition for brands, which will pay for
access to use your channels for advertising.


Open netWOrkS
on the web, the dominant model
for media is one of open networks.
as we have said, in these
networks, anyone can create and
distribute content, and millions of
people do.

access to the open networks
of web media is a lot simpler.
Success may be infinitely more
complex.

brands, websites and items of
content are all set within the
context of the network.
unlike broadcast networks, online
networks are multi-directional.
any content in the network can be
linked back to; conversation is the
default mode.

it isn’t just the dynamics of creating and distributing content that have changed: the
way that people use content is also defined by the network. it’s what we at iCrossing
think of as a “network of experiences”. 12

Think about a time you used the web recently with a purpose in mind, whether that
was looking for a deal on a new car, wanting to catch up on the latest news or just
to find something entertaining. it’s rare that you go to one website and click on a
few items, isn’t it? The chances are you will look at a search engine; either google,
yahoo!, or a specialist engine. you may follow a few links, have a few tabs open on
your browser and flick through them.

you pull together what you want from the networks, and move through the networks
to find what you want. it’s a long way from the take-what-you’re-given media
environment of sitting in front of a Tv with a handful of channels, or of perhaps flicking
through a newspaper or a magazine for something interesting, or even of making
a trip to a library to track down the specialist information from a few books on the
subject you’re interested in.


what has really changed?

We may be living through a media revolution, but we still
have day jobs to be getting on with while the universe
reorganises itself. So what, on a practical level, is going on
in the media? What are the things that are different in the
communications landscape, and that we need to bear in
mind when developing strategies and pulling together our
plans for brands online?

SC Al e
an individual going online today has, for all intents and purposes, an unlimited choice
of things to look at, read, and become involved in. Whatever their interests, it’s likely
that the web can show them something interesting.

Twenty years ago when i was a teenager, i had the choice of a handful of national
newspapers, a few lifestyle magazines that might be interesting, ten or so legal radio
stations, some erratically available illegal ones and some fanzines (photocopied
homemade magazines, distributed through record shops or at college). or i could
13
go to the library or bookshop and acquire one of the texts they had in stock (limited
to the mere tens of thousands). if you wanted to get an advert in front of me it would
have been incredibly easy – you just put it in one of these few channels. a few spots
on a music programme on Channel 4, a Sunday morning “yoof”10 magazine show, or
something on kiss fm would most likely have done it.

Think of the contrast in choice that the equivalent youth has today: virtually limitless
access to music, videos and ad hoc groups in online communities and social
networks. it’s no wonder that this demographic is barely watching Tv anymore.
Why would you?

from the perspective of the brand or media owner wanting to understand their
media environment, the scale has increased exponentially. a few years ago a head of
communications for a global company might have had to ensure they were able to
monitor and influence perhaps 10,000 media outlets worldwide. Now they potentially
need to take account of millions of blogs, forums, social networks and other social
spaces online: a near-impossible task, were the old models of media management to
be adhered to.


10 mocking uk media slang for patronising attempts to create programming aimed at a youth audience.

Sp e e d
information, news, fads, gossip: everything moves faster on the web than it did in the
offline world.

online networks are not constrained by news cycles, commissioning or feature
planning. Similarly, they don’t wait for media buying, campaign planning or press
release approvals.

This speed even applies to platforms. in mid-2007, talking to audiences of digital
marketers i was able to ask “how many of you are on facebook?” and be confident
of a good show of hands: facebook was the runaway social media success story of
the year. “how many of you had facebook in your media plans for this year?” would
be met with significantly fewer hands, if any. in late 2006, in the uk at least, facebook
was barely on the radar.

lOngeVity
although things move much faster on the web than they did in channel media, they
hang around for a lot longer.

in the uk we have the saying: “Today’s news is tomorrow’s fish’n’chip paper”,
originating from a time – not so long ago – when takeaways used newspapers to
keep your supper warm while you carted it home. The sentiment was that what was
said in today’s paper could well be forgotten tomorrow, as the press pack moved on
to a new story, taking their readers’ attention with them.
14

This view encouraged many a crisis-management expert to advise his client to hunker
down and wait for the journalists to shift their attention elsewhere.

The flip-side is that success in channel media has often been built around an
integrated “burst” of marketing activity, to grab the attention of audiences and stand
out from the crowd.

but online, people won’t pay attention simply because you are shouting loudest. in
networks, your target audience may not even hear you – until they are ready. and
if the campaign has been and gone at the moment a customer puts your brand
or product into a search engine box they may just arrive at a microsite that has
effectively been abandoned.

So from a brand marketer’s point of view, the consideration is that “one and done”,
campaign-focused marketing approaches may not be as effective in open networks
as they were in the channel world.


interACtiOn

on the web, interaction comes as standard. even if a news site or brand homepage
lacks a comments section or forum where people can discuss what has been said,
they can find or create somewhere else to do it.

many columnists have recounted how their job has changed in recent years.
Previously, as a newspaper-sponsored fount of opinion, they were able to throw
together a few hundred words once a week and lob it out to the readers. No longer.
Within moments of being published online, people will begin to cross-examine their
point of view, pointing out factual errors. it changes how the professionals think about
what they write; it makes them think twice before they begin.

Speaking after The guardian’s Comment is Free website had been launched, the
newspaper’s editor, alan Rusbridger, noted that on average the paper used to receive
300 to 400 letters each day. it typically printed 15 or so on the letters page. Within
three months of the Comment is free launch, it had received 72,000 comments from
readers.11

information, news, fads, gossip: everything moves faster on the web than it did in the
offline world.

15


11 alan Rusbridger, lubbock lecture at the Said business School in oxford, June 8 2006 http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/news/archives/media/
is+it+all+over+for+bloggers.htm

StAbility iS replACed by COMplexity

“...to their eyes, economics
was a throwback to another
era. one of the participants at
the meeting later commented
that looking at economics
reminded him of his recent trip
to cuba. as he described it, in
cuba, you enter a place that
has been almost completely
shut off from the western
world for over forty years by
the us trade embargo. The
streets are full of packard and
Desoto automobiles from the
1950s and relatively few cars
of more recent vintage. he
noted that one had to admire
the ingenuity of the cubans
for keeping these cars running
for so long on salvaged parts
and the odd piece of soviet
eric beinhocker,
tractor. for the physicists,
16
much of what they saw in The origin of Wealth

economics had been locked in
its own intellectual embargo,
out of touch with several
decades of scientific progress,
but meanwhile ingeniously
bending, stretching, and
updating its theories to keep
them running.”

for media and marketing alike, the defining feature of the shift from channels to
networks is that relative stability is being replaced by complexity.

Not only is the number of sources of information and opinion growing exponentially,
the landscape remains in flux: blogs and groups might spring up overnight and
disappear the next day. Today’s über-blogger might be tomorrow’s interested
bystander, if he or she suddenly needs to put all their effort into a new project and
their posts dry up.

So what does that mean for marketing; its models, tactics and thinking having
evolved largely in the world of mass audiences reachable via channel media?


in his book on complexity theory and economics, The origin of Wealth,
eric beinhocker tells a story about a conference to exchange ideas between leaders
in physics, mathematics and economics.

The physicists and mathematicians were shocked by the models that the economists
were using to develop their ideas.

economists had been stuck in ways of thinking that glossed over the true complexity
of the world. They treated everyone as a rational player, and marketplaces as complex
but explainable and predictable mechanisms that could be managed.

it is early days for media and communications on the web – we are only a couple
of decades in, give or take. if a native digital strategy is to emerge, as opposed
to imported values, models and thinking from the age of channel media, we need
to embrace the complexity. That means reaching out for new analogies, for the
experiences and models of people – ecologists, financial traders, lean manufacturers
– who have succeeded in developing models that make sense of complexity and
allow them to develop successful strategies.

Complexity is daunting because we are used to squeezing reality into stable,
understandable models. even with a market segmentation that breaks down
“consumers” into hundreds of groups, we’re still oversimplifying the case. We usually
end up making advertising and other planning decisions modelled on reaching people
via single websites with high traffic. We ignore the reality that people don’t fire up their
web browsers and spend their time on mSN or the guardian accessing content and 17
absorbing the advertising and PR messages they find there.

Search engines and social media have set our attention free, allowing us to move
swiftly through a network of experiences and information that add up to the media
we want. Consumers and audiences aren’t appropriate terms here. They are us. and
we’re are – brands, media, governments and private citizens – players in the great
networks of the web.


“Google is not a search engine.
18

Google is a reptuation- clive Thompson,

management system.”
WiRed magazine


understanding networks

We have a new model for media then: networks.
and what do we know about them? Not a lot, it turns out.

instinctively we understand social networks. it is, as humans, something we do
very well indeed: connecting with people, sharing information, keeping in touch,
collaborating, knowing just the right person to ask about this, that or the other; who is
a friend, who is a foe, who is a friend-of–a-friend or a friend-of-a-foe; if i tell him this,
he’ll let her know about it in a heartbeat, and so-on.

our finely-honed social senses are tuned for smaller numbers than we are dealing with
on the web, though. Research12 suggests that we are able to handle, in our heads, a
friends list of no more than 150.

So our social network
hard-wiring – our brains
that have evolved for
living in groups – is good
for understanding niche
networks, but not the larger
ones. Thankfully, though,
we have computers, and 19
ways of making sense of
the bigger networks. and
a lot of the principles we
evolved in smaller social
groups should hold true on
the larger scale – it is, after
all, humans that have built
the web and who continue
to grow it.

and as for the kind of massively complex, rapidly growing and changing networks we
see on the web, well these fall within the realm of complexity theory, previously
known more popularly as chaos theory (butterflies, hurricanes, and so on).

This e-book doesn’t aim to explain how networks work, however. if you’re interested,
take a look at the reading list, or pick up linked by Albert-laszlo barabarsi or
Six degrees by duncan J Watts for two good starting points.


12 british anthropologist Robin dunbar published research in 2007 claiming this is the maximum number of friends a human being
can manage. Similar claims are made by malcolm gladwell in ‘The Tipping Point’.

“Seeing” netWOrkS like gOOgle dOeS
The web is the most complex and vast thing that people have ever created, and there
is no designer. Just an idea, some rules, and more than a billion and counting people
who are creating content and affecting the shape of the network by their interactions
with it.

imagine if you were a search
engine. What would you imagine
yourself seeing as you approached
the web? What you saw at first
might be like a shining cloud, like
one of the more spectacular images
from the hubble telescope. a
boiling, chaotic mass of web pages
and the connections between them.

Now, imagine you are looking for
something. your view of the web
would change. your perception
would begin to shift so that only the
pages – represented by bright, star-
like nodes of light that were relevant
to that subject – were there. you
would zoom in looking more closely
at this network of websites – university pages, corporate sites, blogs and discussion 20
forums – that mention the search term you’re focusing on. Though most of the trillion-
plus pages of the wider web have disappeared from view there would still be literally
millions. Which to choose? Which to rate as your top ten, pages on that subject: the
front page of your search results?

in an instant, you know. The network shifts and at the centre, several great, planet-like
hubs become apparent. They are large because they have the highest reputation for
the subject you are examining – that is, they have the most links from other websites
that say that they are relevant to this subject.

in your top ten you have hubs representing an entry from Wikipedia on the subject, a
company that specialises in services related to the topic, some recent news articles
about it and even a couple of pages that have videos from youTube with experts
speaking about the subject.


Connected to them are other sites discussing the subject or those related to it, and
further out – with less reputation – catalogues, listings, marketing materials and then a
sea of spam. The spam consists of sites that are all connected to one another in the
hope of looking like they have a strong reputation on the subject, but, as the search
engine, you’re wise to the tactic: they’re relegated to the periphery, to closed ghettos
of content. if you looked at one it wouldn’t be that interesting or useful: these pages
aren’t there for people, they are there to fool machines, mainly google’s machines,
into thinking they have a strong reputation.

as Clive Thompson so brilliantly put it in an article for WiRed magazine13:

“google is not a search engine. google is a reputation-management system”

People get too distracted with the idea of search engines as machines, and lose sight
of what they are desperately trying to do: make sense, from a human point of view, of
the vast, mind-boggling complexity of the web.

The other point to bear in mind is that search engines are constantly getting better
at assessing the reputation of web pages, websites and content. This is not just a
simple arms race with spammers and unethical search engine optimisers, it is part of
the search engines’ ongoing mission to be useful; to find the useful and to be able to
second-guess what our own decisions and choices would be if we were able to see
and make sense of the web.

21


13 Wired, march 2007

nOt A ClOud

if you’ve ever worked with someone creating an iT network or web solution, the
chances are you’ve caught sight of a diagram that looks something like this. Person
connected to a terminal, connected to a box, connected to servers, connected to a
picture of a cloud.

The cloud has become part of our common visual language for representing the
web or the internet. Why this is so is completely understandable: the web is so
vast, complex and ever-growing, ever-changing that we can’t begin to represent it
concisely with any detail. but we don’t just represent the web as a cloud on technical
diagrams, we also think of it and our place in it in that way. if we manage a website
then the world beyond our server is opaque; unknown. We know that people show
up on our website – if we’re lucky – from our analytics. These can also tell us the sorts
of websites that link to us, and the words that visitors have typed into search engines
in order to receive a link to us. but beyond that we’re often a bit lost.
Combined Sitemap v001

The web is, however, a place.
JPMI L/P

We have a neighbourhood
Corporate Employee
around our website that is Individual
site H/P H/P
every bit as tangible as the H/P
neighbourhood outside the
Corporate SSMT
front door L/P our house or
of
C1 Who we C2 What we C3 Contact C4 JPMi in Education What we do
pages L/P Who we are Your account
are do Us the News L/P (INVEST)
H/P

C2.3
office. There are neighboursTo Advice
To
C2.1 Educate C2.2 Plan Education Corporate SSMT WWD
linking to us and people
Implement
(Investing (Investing
Knowledge) Time)
(Investing
Wisely)
modules pages T&C
22
linking to them in turn.
C2.1.2 What SSMT
for years now, people
C2.1.1 How Advice ISA SIPP
we Teach C2.3.1 ISA 1-6
we Educate
(subjects)

– ourselves pages
Employee intranet at iCrossing

included – have been finding
C2.3.1SIPP Ofﬂine Advice Online Advice
Generic Header/Footer pages Invest
Online
C2.3.3
Contact
ways to visualise the web
T & Cs Help
Retirement Investment
Income
Services
like google and other search options

C2.3.4 Privacy engines Glossary it, to catch
Accessibility see
Supporting
Ofﬂine
Investors Corporate site glimpses, draw maps of what SSS CSS

the online world actually looks
Sitemap

like. one of the pioneers in the field of networks, albert-laszlo barabasi, described
exploring the web as an almost magical thing, allowing people to see networks
and connections that were all around them for the very first time. he described a
combination of “cartography and anthropology” being required to map the landscape
of a web around any given subject.

We’re used to being served the top ten or top 100 websites on a given subject by
the search engine of our choice, but the reality of the topic we’re looking at, and the
network around it – the community of interest – are far more fascinating.

anyone – brand, media owner or individual – looking to thrive online would do well to
understand how networks work, where their own are and how they fit into them.
for networks are how the online world works and they are the essence of the
revolution that we are living through.


MApping netWOrkS
let’s get some terminology out of the way. When we are talking about networks
we are talking about items, things, people, brands, web pages, that are connected
to one another. The things are called “nodes” and the lines between them are
connections.

at iCrossing – as at several other
research firms, technology outfits and
university departments – we have
developed software for mapping
networks to help our analysts “see”
networks of websites, and how they
connect to others around a theme
– for example ‘online gaming’ or a
particular conversation. The maps
also help us to illustrate the networks
around topics to our colleagues and
clients, reinforcing the idea – the
truth – that our websites, our brand
presences online, exist in real places
and are connected to competitors

We sometimes call this the “networks
neighbourhood14” of a brand. in fact,
even the busiest of the maps is a simplified representation of what google “sees”. a 23
major brand’s website will have hundreds of thousands of links just from social media
websites. We have to filter the view down by a topic, or by the most relevant nodes in
the immediate network so that we can make sense of it.

you can take a look at some of your own personal and brand networks simply
enough. if you have a facebook profile and more than a couple of friends there,
try out the touchgraph application.


14 With apologies to Windows 95.

how to be successful in networks

So, big-picture thinking and theory are useful for setting
the context for marketing strategy in this age of networks.
but when it comes to developing a practical strategy, what
does it all mean? Where should a team looking after a brand
online start when it comes to putting together a plan?

it helps to ask some simple questions about networks.

WHAt dOeS SuCCeSS lOOk like?

success in
networks
is about being
prominent,
not dominating
or owning in the
a network. gung-ho language
of marketing in
channels, success
often looked like 24
domination; hegemony;
ownership. in almost
every case, this would
be a vain fantasy
for a brand.

there are no
monopolies
on the web.

success in networks
looks different.
in networks,
prominence is
success.


HOW dO yOu beCOMe (And StAy) prOMinent in A netWOrk?
Prominence in networks is achieved by earning attention.

other nodes earn their prominence in the network, the community of interest around
a given story, by being useful. They take the information to a broader audience, giving
it a summary of the story, or perhaps adding some analysis of their own, and linking
to the original source and the video on youtube.

for example, sites like the bbC, digg and engadget are prominent in the broader
network around technology-related stories. a google search for “technology blogs”
or “technology news” will show you who it sees as most prominent in those networks
at the moment. in search engine marketing, people will talk about “search equity”: the
relative scores each website has in google’s analysis of the network.

The better the google algorithm – the maths that makes it work – the closer this
search equity equates to reputation, or brand equity, on the web. if one of those news
sites were to cut down on the number of stories it runs, begin to run me-too stories,
or post news a day after everyone else, it would start to fall down the search
display rankings.

HOW dO yOu eArn AttentiOn?
attention is earned in networks by being useful in the networks.

in the channel media world, getting attention for a brand was straightforward.
expensive, perhaps, but straightforward. you employed an advertising agency and 25
the combination of their relative creativity and your spending power bought you space
in the channel: pages, portions of pages, back covers, seconds of airtime, multiple
mentions by a dJ. if your target audience was consuming its media of choice, it
would be hard for the people you were targeting to avoid hearing what you wanted to
tell them. They paid for their content, in part, with their attention to your
brand messages.

in networks, however, attention cannot be bought. at least, it is a bad strategy to
think that it can or to act accordingly.


tHe OppOSite OF uSeFul iS...
it has been said that censorship is treated as damage by the web15, and the network
routes around it. The network is not making a value judgment on the censorship, it
simply views it as a blockage to usefulness; a nuisance.

i recall attending a briefing for global brand managers at a major company a couple
of years ago. Waiting my turn to speak, the presenter before me was addressing the
room on the subject of pop-ups and “roll-over” adverts. he explained that while these
types of ad got a bad press they were still a valid approach. i raised an eyebrow at
that: i’d never heard anyone do anything but complain about the irritation of pop-up
ads getting in the way of the page you were trying to read.

The executive explained that if pop-up ads were creative enough and properly
targeted people welcomed them. he had an example of recent work for a client he
wanted to show us. Changing the image on the 50ft screen behind him from his
PowerPoint presentation to his browser, he went to a test page to demonstrate.
The page loaded fine, except there was no ad. he tried again: nothing. Checking
the settings, he seemed to blush suddenly and announced – i still can’t believe he
actually said it – “ah. i’ll just turn the pop-up blocker off.”

The pop-up ads that were definitely fine for his target audience were not fine for him.
he didn’t want them getting in his way when he was online.

These days, many web browsers come with pop-up blockers enabled as standard.
you turn them off if you want to allow a website to open a new window on your 26
machine.

Now people are beginning to use ad-blocking software that whites-out the banner
adverts on a web page. There is even a new plug-in for the popular firefox browser
called Add Art, which replaces the ads on a web page with works of art.

media owners have begun to attack this as a form of stealing - which it may be, but
users will make their own choices ultimately about whether they allow adverts onto
their screens.

When it comes to launching a viral video or creating a microsite with a game or
product promotion on it, the choice of whether to view or participate is a straight one
for any web user: is visiting this site going to be more rewarding than playing a game
on another site, watching any of the 150,000 videos uploaded to youTube in the last
24 hours, or reading a consumer or expert’s review of the brand or product being
promoted?


15 John gilmore, co-founder of the electronic frontier foundation is credited with being the originator of this phrase.

“ask not what your
network can do for you, 27

but what you can do
for your network”


the three fundamentals of brands in networks

The social media and strategy teams at iCrossing have
come to trust in using three fundamentals as their starting
points for developing a strategy for brands in networks.

underStAnd yOur netWOrkS
where are my networks? who is in them? how do they work?
We need to be clear about where our networks are. Not just who connects to our
brand or to our competitors, but where people are talking.

it’s not just a case of understanding where things are, either. once we see the
communities that are relevant to us we need to understand how they work, to
understand what people do there and what the rules are.

for instance, we might see that Wikipedia has an entry on our brand, and on other
issues that are important to us. We can also see that anyone can edit an entry there,
so why not add some of our own information and links? While we’re at it, why not
delete that blatantly biased criticism of our latest takeover attempt?

if we had taken the time to understand the community however, we would
understand that the community has its own written and unwritten rules of behaviour.
editing your own entry would be frowned upon, and the editing of things in which we 28

have a commercial interest would be perceived as biased and unhelpful.

understanding your networks should be undertaken with care, consideration
and diligence.

be uSeFul in yOur netWOrkS
what do people find useful? what would my content, engagement,
sponsorship or promotion add to the network?
We have talked already about the concept of being useful to your networks.
Sometimes we express this by saying:

“ask not what your networks can do for you, ask what you can do for your networks”

Crucially, to succeed in networks we sometimes need to move away from thinking
about promotion or selling as the key activity. a selling message pushed uninvited into
a social space is rarely useful, and rarely welcome. brands that do this are ignored if
they are lucky, and may find themselves on the sharp end of criticism from blogs and
forums if they aren’t.

once we have understood our networks we need to ask: “What is a valid role for us
here?” and: “how can we add value?”


Should we look at building a social network? Well, what we need to establish is
whether there is a genuine need for one. if we have seen people in our networks
using facebook groups or a forum dedicated to our sector, what would creating a
new social space add?

some ways we might think about being useful in our
networks include:
active listening: gatecrashing forum discussions or blog comments sections might
not be appropriate behaviour, but listening to what people are saying about our
products or services, and taking ideas and criticism on board and acting on them are
useful things to do.

courting critics: dell, lego and Starbucks have all introduced the social media
equivalent of the suggestions box: public websites where people can submit and
discuss ideas about new products and improvements to their service.

sponsorship: if there are enthusiast sites you might consider offering to fund
them openly.

co-creation: better than slapping your logo across the top of a few social spaces,
or footnoting with “brought to you by”, working on projects with community hosts or
communities themselves can be an effective way of engaging with your network. ted
rheingold, who runs the successful Catster and dogster social networks, says
he prefers to work with brands to create new features or content for the community
rather than just take their money for an ad.

content: it could well be that you are already producing a great deal of content that 29
would be useful to your networks, if only people could find it or access it easily. Re-
working content so that it is findable, portable and easily distributed can
work wonders.

blogging: blogging is worthy of an e-book of its own. There have been many poor
examples of corporate blogging, but there are now also many strong ones. Starting a
blog can be a powerful way of joining in the networks around your brand, and a great
way to remain live (see below) and to learn from your networks.

There are almost certainly many more ways to be genuinely useful – but like i said,
this isn’t a text book, nor am i even attempting to be exhaustive on this subject.

be liVe in yOur netWOrkS
how will i listen to my networks? will i be able to respond and
adapt when opportunities arise?
Networks move and change at an incredible pace. bloggers often talk about
memes – Richard dawkins’ term16 – travelling through the networks. Where people
are, what they are talking about and what kinds of content are popular all shift and
change so quickly that if you are not listening, not present, not live on the scene, your
understanding of what’s happening will soon be out of date.

if you are engaged with your networks and being useful in them then you’re live in
your networks. but make sure you are live and aware across all of the networks that
are important to your brand.


16 Wikipedia (at the time of writing) describes a meme as:

“any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. memes propagate
themselves and can move through a “culture” in a manner similar to the behaviour of a virus. as a unit of cultural evolution, a meme in some ways resembles
a gene.

re-engineering brand marketing

We are all involved in re-evaluating how marketing works in
order that it can adapt to the realities of the age of networks.
as i’ve already said, it’s best not to fool ourselves that a new
marketing textbook can now be written.

living through this media revolution, we need to focus on the core principles but keep
learning, and keep adapting our approach.

We sometimes like to think that in digital marketing we have developed a new
discipline, but coming to this sector from the outside two years ago it looked to me
like an awful lot of agencies had taken ad agency models and simply transplanted
them to the web. many laugh at the “brochure-ware” websites of the late 90s – where
people had literally taken the marketing literature formats of the print age and put
them online – but in many ways we have only progressed a small distance in terms of
understanding the way the web works.

The fundamentals are so completely different from those which preceded them.
We must acknowledge that, as this change (that Rupert murdoch credited with the
power to destroy countries) unfolds, we will need new ways of understanding what is
happening.
30

it is my contention that marketing needs to be rethought in almost every aspect.
even if there are things worth keeping, nothing should be exempt from the challenge:
“is this still relevant in networks?” So many accepted truths, models and ideas in
marketing come from a still-recent time of mass media that saw its peak in the
industrial age. This chapter holds some of them up for examination.

CHAllenging “CHAnnel tHinking”
our language gives us away. Think of the way we talk about the people we
are marketing to, and what we want to do in a channel media context. People,
individuals, are masked and herded into demographics that gloss over the complexity
of the situation.

We talk about consumers, audiences; passive terms. We talk about message
penetration, or buying eyeballs.

When you start to think about things from the perspective of networks, this language
jars. People don’t consume content: they read it or watch it, and then often do
things with it such as remixing, forwarding, or linking to it. These aren’t audiences or
eyeballs. These are individuals.


16 cont. Richard dawkins, in his book The Selfish gene recounts how and why he coined the term meme to describe how one might extend darwinian
principles to explain the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. he gave as examples tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothing-fashions, and the technology
of building arches.”

a lot of the language of
channel media marketing
sounds militaristic. We
monitor (from on high)
consumer behaviours.

we penetrate markets.
we dominate
mindshare. we execute
campaigns.

These aren’t social
words. They come from
the mass; the industrial
level – whereas in the
networks we must
operate (as we do in
our personal lives) at a
human level.

demien entrekin said that networks don’t have people, people have networks. it’s a
mantra we should repeat to ourselves so that we don’t start thinking of the web, of
our networks, like we’re looking at a machine. We’re not: we’re looking at a collection
of human relationships and interactions. Channel thinking or “channelthink” is the
term we use to challenge ourselves in the team at iCrossing, when we sense we’re 31
making assumptions based on our offline experiences or habits.

There’s no need to be embarrassed when this cultural bias reveals itself in our
language, but by pulling ourselves up short on it we encourage thinking that
acknowledges the shift that is happening right now...

tHe StrAtegiC gAp
a question an organisation can ask itself that can reveal how deeply channel-thinking
is ingrained within it is: “Who owns social media?”

obviously it is public relations, you might volunteer, depending on your attitude to
both social media and PR.

and that seems to make sense. but what about customer service? When there are
people discussing problems with your brand in forums, is it PR’s job to go in and
respond? maybe that’s fine when there are a handful of these instances a month – but
what happens when the numbers grow? a full time PR on it? Surely there would be a
case for customer service to get involved?

but not so fast. What about ecommerce? What about marketing? The social web
demands a response from all of these disciplines, and probably a few more besides.
falling back on a fantasy of integration is not enough, either. an advertising or PR-led
approach, for instance, would be likely to be overly biased towards channelthink –
creative-led approaches, media relations and so-on.


dealing with complexity: inspirations and models

With no reference points, no precedents for the emerging
models of media production and distribution on the web, we
should look outside of marketing for ways in which people
have dealt with complexity. by way of an introduction, here
are two areas we think about a lot at iCrossing.
AttentiOn MArketS
i’m certainly not the first person to note that, with content available in vast quantities
and at the whim of anyone who wants it, there isn’t necessarily a market for it any
longer. at least, what market there is is saturated. however, you could say that as a
consequence there is an interesting, vibrant market in people’s attention.

on the web and in networks, players vie for the attention of users. as i have outlined,
this attention can be seen in a number of ways. We are mainly interested in links and
traffic as evidence of, or clues to, the places that are winning attention.

brands, like media organisations and individual bloggers, compete in networks for
the same attention. They may complement each other, they may enhance the user
experience overall, but there is only so much attention to go round.

32
The image below is for me a powerful illustration of the shift to attention markets.

unless you are familiar with the
place, you might think that this
is a trading floor in some City
financial firm. in a way, of course,
you would be right: this is the
former trading floor for Saloman
brothers, once the largest in
london. however, just over a
year ago it got new owners:

Telegraph media group. it’s now
the Telegraph newsroom17.

i have seen many, and worked in
a few, newsrooms over the past
decade or so. This one looks
very different indeed. Note the open-plan design and the way that everything radiates
out from the news conference table at the centre of the room. in the past, this would
have typically been hidden away to one side.


17 i first read about the Telegraph newsroom on Jeff Jarvis’s buzzmachine blog. Take a look at the original post for a journalism
professor’s view of the place.

most striking is the “media wall”, the vast bank of screens that hangs over the
newsroom. The largest – four times the size of the others – is simply a live image of
the front page of the website. it serves as a kind of massive reminder to the journalists
that the game that they are in has changed: they write “web first” now. Whereas just a
couple of years ago news stories would appear on the website as the print edition hit
the streets, now stories go online first.

The reason for this is a recognition that the Telegraph no longer only competes for
attention with other papers at the newsagents: it competes globally, online, 24 hours
a day.

Next to the main screen is a smaller one that scrolls through data about the popularity
of articles on the Telegraph website. it lists the top articles for news, business, travel
and sport, alternating them with a summary of which ones are ‘winning’ this hour, this
week, this month or even this year.

The use of live attention data is highly innovative in a media organisation like the
Telegraph. it is utterly appropriate, reminding journalists that they compete for the
attention of readers even within the pages of their own website.

in the global attention markets, the Telegraph, like several of its uk news
counterparts, is winning big – aided no doubt by being in the english language, but
also by its high editorial standards. Some uk newspaper sites get up to 70% of their
traffic from overseas, the majority at present from the united States. 33

New traffic is delivered mainly by search engines and a handful of influential social
media sites, such as the infamous drudge report (which according to some
studies18 delivers traffic equal to google’s). if you open up the Top Stories section
on google News, the search engine’s news aggregator, you can see just how stiff
the competition is - some hot stories are covered by a couple of thousand sources,
ranging from uk news sites to China’s xinhua english-language news service.


18 Paid content strategies for news websites, Thurman 2007

The Telegraph, then, is
a media organisation
fighting for its place in
the age of networks.

34
what can marketers
take from its experience?
we should ask ourselves;
how good is our data about
our content – our press
releases, our promotions
pages, our branded
content? if we are getting
information in real time,
are the creative teams
aware of it? are they
responding suitably?


When we think about attention markets, we should ask; who are our competitors?
They may be different from the people we compete with in our primary commercial
marketplaces – they may include media, social media, or other brands.

Taking full account of the market means properly understanding our brands’
networks, how they operate as markets, and how we can be effective in them. That
means not just having a handful of insights and a great one-at-a-time creative idea. it
means being able to listen closely and respond. it means having several competing
strategies and waiting for one to stand out, then having the resource to back it
up quickly.

leArning FrOM netWOrk SuCCeSS StOrieS
if looking at how media organisations are adapting from the world of channels to one
of networks shows us how marketing must also adapt, then looking at players that
are already successful in online networks can give us further inspiration.

Community-driven sites, social media and social networks are media formats that
have emerged strongly in recent years. my favourite example of a success story is a
website called dogster, a social network for dogs (well, for their owners), which has
the sister site Catster.

dogster is stable, having been established in 2004, it’s profitable and together
with Catster it has 750,000 members. it is a website that has found a niche and
successfully occupied it.

35
most importantly for our purposes, its founder Ted Rheingold – still very hands-on
– has been very open about his experiences of building the website and how he has
made it a success. i caught Ted speaking at a conference in 2007 – here’s a summary
of some of the lessons he shared from half a decade of building a successful
social network.

stay close to your community: you have to listen closely to everything that
your community says. if you are paying attention, or ask the right questions, they will
tell you what they want.

customer service is everything: a community is nothing without its users,
and Ted was devoted to them all from the first. he took this to the extent of publishing
his phone number prominently on the website so users who were having issues could
contact him in person – very unusual for any website.

every community is different: you might reasonably expect that launching
dogster’s sister site, Catster, would be simple: it employs a similar format, and surely
people on the new site would like most of what was on the older one? Not at all, as
it turned out. The truisms about cat people and dog people held in a social network
setting: they want different things.


fail fast: a mantra of software development in web 2.0 firms, fail fast is the
companion phrase of “release early, release often”, the spirit of perpetual beta. in a
community context it means getting content, tools and services out there quickly and
letting users tell you or show you if it is going to work. if it is clear that it is not going to
work, no matter how good the idea seems, drop it fast.

one failure Ted mentioned was when they launched a sort of “hot or Not” for dogs,
where people could vote on how good-looking they thought each other’s animals
were. it sounded like a great idea, it may even have come from somewhere in the
community, but when it went live people were offended and made their feelings
known (“how dare anyone tell me my dog is a mere 8!”). The site pulled the feature.

impact horizons: When Ted started dogster he was developing new content and
features with project times – from spotting a need to getting something out there –
of about a month. as revenue began to come in from premium subscriptions and
sponsorship deals he began to invest in more ambitious projects with longer lead
times.

Suddenly, it seemed, the failure rate for projects began to increase. When a review
of projects that were failing was conducted, a common factor was quickly spotted:
almost all of the failing projects had taken six months or more from idea to public
release. They were failing because the community had moved on; was interested in
other things. Their needs had shifted.

Ted calls this effect: the impact horizon. ever since, he has been working on bringing 36
down the development time for new features to as close to a month as possible.

leAn MArketing: leArning FrOM MAnuFACturing
applying manufacturing models to online marketing and media sounds like a
contradiction of the exact case i’ve been outlining: aren’t we talking about moving
away from mass media models, away from easily-drawn parallels to mass production
and the industrial age?

beAr WitH Me: it’S An intereSting StOry.
informed by beinhocker’s tale of the economists who discovered that the world had
moved on since they had first appropriated models from mathematics and physics
a hundred years before, we would be foolish to think of modern manufacturing as
based on a ford-ist model.

The king of the manufacturing world is – and has been for so long – automotive.
almost nothing is more complex to produce, and yet produced on such a large scale,
as cars. They have thousands of components, intricate designs and engineering that
constantly evolves, and all the while the people who buy them expect to have their
precise choice available to them, and for it to be utterly reliable for many years.

ford-ism, and for that matter Ford itself, is no longer pre-eminent in the auto sector.
last year, a few years ahead of its own targets and projections, toyota became the
largest car-maker in the world. This Japanese corporation entered its domestic car
market in the post-war years with small models. it intentionally steered clear of direct
competition with what, at the time, seemed like unassailable american colossi: ford
and general motors.


out of necessity it developed an approach to the manufacturing process that made
more of less, and that was obsessed with driving out waste and delivering flawless
quality. based on a philosophy called kaizen – continuous improvement – Toyota’s
“lean manufacturing” approach has been admired and appropriated by other
companies for years.

There is plenty for marketers to admire in Toyota’s example. To reiterate: when we
look at the challenge for brands in networks, we are looking at learning to manage
massive complexity. Toyota’s lean manufacturing process does precisely this – in fact
its ability to do so is key to its epic success.

Toyota sits between the complexity of a supply chain and the complexity of the
market and manages both with a minimum of waste, delivering a high-quality product
based on pull; demand from the customer.

This is how we can think of lean marketing and media, then: with brand and media
owners in networks aware of their end users’ needs, and adapting to them as
they change.

These are the two main things i think lean manufacturing can teach media
and marketing:

being big, but agile: The company is so responsive to local – indeed individual –
customer demand that at any time it will have a dozen different versions of the same 37
model on sale around the world, each optimised to the demands of the local market.
its production lines are so lithe and adaptable that it can produce four or five different
models on the same track in the same day, each destined for a specific customer – a
customer whose order at a showroom hundreds of miles away prompted that specific
unit’s production.

The miracle of lean manufacturing means that all of this is possible while maintaining
only a few minutes’ inventory at the factory: that is, with no costly onsite warehouse
full of car parts. The supply chain – the manufacturers who make the parts that make
Toyota’s cars – are so aligned, so embedded in the system that the whole network
acts as a single organism to deliver the finished product.

principles-led: in one of Peter day’s brilliant bbC podcasts last year, the Ceo of
Toyota explained that the company has always been open with its methods. People
from competitors and business schools regularly tour its plants, and some ford-ist
competitors have tried, and failed, to copy them. The reason, he says, is that they try
to copy the process but don’t live the principles. he explains that you have to be truly
committed to driving out the waste everywhere in the organisation, and to working
with suppliers to make their systems better so that they can succeed and in turn
make you more successful.

*
disclosure: at the time of writing, iCrossing works with Toyota in the uS and uk. This analogy, this line of thinking,
was developed and discussed publicly before this relationship began.


WWgd (WHAt WOuld gOOgle dO)?
Jeff Jarvis (yes him again), has blogged extensively, and will early next year publish
a book called WWgd - what would google do? The conceit – to ask how google
would tackle this problem or radically disrupt that industry – is an excellent one.

i don’t think i will be stealing very much of Jeff’s thunder (he blogs regularly on the
topic on his buzzmachine blog) if i were to expand a little on some of the ways we
think about google from the point of view of re-engineering brands and marketing for
the age of networks19.

We’ve already talked about seeing the web’s networks from the perspective of a
search engine. but for our last source of inspiration, let’s talk about google itself –
not google the search engine, but the whole company that has grown up and out
from that first game-changing breakthrough, the PageRank-driven search engine.

it’s all about the user: from a brand marketer’s perspective, google is the anti-
brand. it was not designed or concocted, it was iterated: it emerged from a focus on
the end user. it tells marketers two things: the importance of listening, and the value
of incorporating feedback into the business to be marketed, particularly that gained
from the product development and customer service areas.

innovation by the numbers: The complexity of the web and the speed with
which it evolves is mirrored in the way that google works. innovating, and innovating
at a furious rate, is the only sane strategy for a company that wants to stay at the top
of as competitive a game as google’s. Stand still for a moment and the edge moves 38
away from you.

google doesn’t just talk innovation in the way that some businesses do, it
understands what innovation takes. huge numbers of ideas are soliticited, recorded
and ruthlessly whittled down. The ‘kill rate’ of ideas is massive, with very few making
it to the execution stage. of course, the commitment to allowing employees one
day a week to pursue their own projects is key to making sure that people aren’t
developing silos around their own business area or technical specialism, but instead
are connecting with others, trying to find ways to make their new ideas live.


19 umair haque uses google’s example in talking about new strategic thinking for business.

almost chaos: a fortune article called Chaos by design explains how google
works hard to avoid hierarchies, departmentalisation and all the things that diverge
people’s attention and energies away from seeking out new ways to serve the user or
customer. in 2003, the company hired Shona brown, author of a book on business
strategy and chaos as its vice president of operations. She was tasked with bringing
some management structure – but not too much – to the fast-growing company.

brown describes her sense of nervousness as her measure of whether there’s too
much structure and process in place for the company to stay close to the chaotic
state that gives it its verve. “if i ever come into the office and i feel comfortable, if i
don’t feel a little nervous about some crazy stuff going on, then we’ve taken it too far,”
she told the magazine.

speed above all else: innovation is mostly about execution; doing it. google
knows that its strength – even more so than its collective brains – is the strength of
its will to execute combined with its awesomely powerful technology infrastructure.
That’s why it’s happy to release services in beta, preferring to refine and develop a live
product with its early adopters, rather than hone a release candidate with an internal
testing team.

Measure everything: if google can’t measure something, it won’t do it. in
digital marketing there’s no excuse for not adhering to this rule. There is so much
data available on people’s use of websites you own, and what they think and do
elsewhere, that measurement should be part of every campaign from the outset.
39
at iCrossing we talk about “designed-in measurement” for creative and content.
Thinking about measurement begins at the discovery phase, and it should be
implemented and remain live throughout a given project. measurement gives us
insight and evidence for refining every aspect of a programme – from search terms to
page design – almost from day one. This is a departure from the ‘build it and leave it’
approach that online marketers often take to building beautiful microsites, and then
tacking on some weak analytics measurement at the end.

learning from failure: We touched on the importance of being prepared to fail in
the earlier section on dogster, but i make no apologies for revisiting it here.
So immune are we, especially in the uk, to truly embracing the opportunities
presented to us by failure that it’s best best said twice.

google celebrates failure as a learning opportunity, and as a necessary by-product
of its dynamism. in an article in The Washington Post, Richard holden, a google
product management director, was quoted as saying: “if you’re not failing enough,
you’re not trying hard enough. The stigma [for failure] is less because we staff projects
leanly and encourage them to just move, move, move. if it doesn’t work, move on.”


conclusion

So there it is, a view of the world, or at least of the media
and marketing corner of it, being changed utterly by
networks; some challenges defined, and some ideas on
how we might think about re-engineering, redesigning and
rethinking the way we do things.

one of the joys of publishing an e-book – free to download, re-usable by anyone
under a Creative Commons license – is that you don’t have to be right first time. it’s
not a definitive work and it doesn’t pretend to be. in a few weeks’ time i can add in
some more references, experiences, or a whole new chapter, and publish the result
as version 1.1, 2.0 or whatever.

That is a helpful, liberating fact. as any blogger will tell you, things are moving too fast,
the outcomes are too uncertain for anyone to wait to have all the answers, to have a
whole picture before they act or share their thoughts.

This time next year, i’m sure that thirteen whole months of the iphone App Store
will have helped accelerate the use of social media and the wider web on the move.
i expect the unexpected on that front: new ideas and uses of the web that haven’t
even occurred to us.
40

Web use will have grown even among the edgiest of innovators and earliest of early
adopters, while more and more people will be growing in the confidence and extent of
their use of broadband internet at home.

What will not have changed are the fundamentals of the revolution discussed herein:
the web is changing (in reverse importance) marketing, the media, commerce and
society. We are living through a revolution, and the best way to make the most of it is
to hold hands and have some fun as we feel our way through the fog.

i hope this e-book has been useful to you in some way: even if it just set off some
trains of thought that lead you somewhere interesting.

if so, please do let us know – we’d be keen to hear where you end up.

antony Mayfield
Monday 1st of september, 2008


about icrossing

iCrossing, formerly known as Spannerworks in the uk, is a
global digital marketing company that combines talent and
technology to help world-class brands find and connect
with their customers. The company blends best-in-class
marketing services - including paid and natural search
marketing, social media, content and media, display
advertising, user experience, web development and analytics
and insight - to create integrated digital marketing programs
that engage consumers and drive Roi.

iCrossing clients include world-class brands such as The
Coca Cola company, hboS, Tui and virgin. headquartered
in Scottsdale, arizona, the company has 620 employees in
15 offices in the uS and europe, including 120 employees in
the uk.

find out more at www.icrossing.co.uk or contact us on +44
(0)1273 828100 or results@icrossing.co.uk 41


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