Bryan Landers Blog - Latest Comments in bryan landers - Breaking Down Context

Re: bryan landers - Breaking Down Context

Bryan Landers — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 11:39:02 -0000

I blame Ethan! It's all good ;)

Re: bryan landers - Breaking Down Context

Taylor Davidson — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 10:49:58 -0000

so, is it "bad blog etiquette" to hijack a post with a different train of comments? (sorry Bryan)

I'm a bridge between two worlds, hearing the arguments from both sides, I don't drink either's kool-aid.

- reframing the $$ in terms of limited downside and large upside is a great way to re-frame the discussion away from being able to measure impact.

- while it's probably true that we are measuring failure more than success, not all companies and marketers will want to hear that.

- we quickly go back to "should I try to change people's minds" to "should I change my message into a frame they can understand"...

btw the "is that the best we can do?" line is great...

getting back to the issue of framing up context, if we can hack how we "measure" marketing impact, we can re-orient our efforts towards better addressing how context is created. we can't use traditional marketing measurement tools to measure social media: it just doesn't fit.

Re: bryan landers - Breaking Down Context

Ethan Bauley — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:49:05 -0000

okay so here's my thing about these thoughts you just said, which i suspect
are things you're hearing from your pals at Very Large Financial
Institution. i feel like if i/we can weave this together it will beg many
of the questions we already have answers for. Hopefully you can help me
hack this, this isn't fully baked:
"marketers are used to equating $$ spent 'talking' to impact on $$ in
profits."
- isn't it true that dollars spent talking *almost always* DON'T impact
profits? if so, what is the marginal risk of a marketing project that *may*
reach more people for a much smaller overall price? of course i guess
direct mail is different...but we're still talking about a 90+% failure rate
right? Shouldn't we aim higher? Who was the balls to imagine a marketing
solution that connects with consumers 70% of the time?

"to change: allocation of marketing budget towards (or away!) from things
they understood how to measure to things they don't..."
- aren't we measuring failure a lot of the time? is optimized direct mail
really the best we can do? are optimized banner ads really the best we can
do? Google ads? Where are we pushing into new communications channels that
we haven't investigated before? "The Internet" isn't one thing...it's a
million different things.

I got a very good "hey maybe I should think on this" response from a cynic
using the "is that the best we can do?" line. We were talking about
monetizing YouTube and Senior Manager at Online PR Agency was saying that
GOOG has to throw in interstitial ads even for a "father and son play catch"
video (for example) because "the bandwidth costs are so high." My response
was: "Is it reasonable to assume that Serg and Larry have considered this?
Is it also reasonable to assume that they don't have an alternative yet?
If so, why would they do something that sucks and piss people off in the
meantime? Aren't they looking for something bigger and grander?"

Devising and executing a service that serves a need enough for people to use
is hard...business models happen...eventually ;-)

And it doesn't have to be advertising that you can buy and measure in the
"traditional" way. As far as I'm concerned (and most young people already
feel this way), I refuse to put up with attention theft. So any services
that build a userbase and then pimp them out...will get burned in relatively
short order.

Re: bryan landers - Breaking Down Context

Taylor Davidson — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 21:10:25 -0000

it's the easiest to do, hardest to value? (meaning, hardest to attach a marginal value in $$ to expense in listening?)

marketers are used to equating $$ spent "talking" to impact on $$ in profits.

maybe that's the hardest thing for companies to change: allocation of marketing budget towards (or away!) from things they understood how to measure to things they don't...

related: http://marketingroi.wordpre...

Re: bryan landers - Breaking Down Context

Ethan Bauley — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 17:47:06 -0000

ya listening is the only thing that really matters...and it's the easiest to do and easiest to measure. also the easiest thing to "sell through" in many ways.

see my post from yesterday on usc annenberg & twitter...

Re: bryan landers - Breaking Down Context

Bryan Landers — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 21:12:17 -0000

Wow cool. Norman Bates makes an appearance on my tumblelog!

Word. I think of martial arts when I think of your point, "the sea of UG context renders traditional branding/advertising/communicating irrelevant..." Which is the one (tai chi?) where you use the other person's energy/momentum to your advantage? Or like when Joseph Campbell talks about the effects of being in accord (or not) with nature. If you look at UGContext as energy, companies can either direct that energy towards a decided purpose, or be hit in the gut with it!

It seems regardless of how a business chooses to react to this energy, the first step is setting up the capabilities to listen it to it. If they don't observe the input, they not acting in accord with it and risk having it work against their objectives.

Re: bryan landers - Breaking Down Context

norman bates — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 20:02:26 -0000

"...etiquette?"

lol

yes

re: context ...you make a lot of good, fundamental points here. one fun thing to think about is how the sea of UG context renders traditional branding/advertising/communicating irrelevant.

ad gurus have been saying for decades "a brand is what ur customers think of you, not what you want to be". marketing people have hidden behind the fact that it was impossible to discern with any accuracy what people actually thought (and even more impossible for people to see what their peers thought). but of course now whatever is on anyone's mind is broadcast all over the net for anyone to see/hear.

ultimately, any business's core operation is selling. you have to sell something to someone in the value chain you've designed. how you discover these people (i.e. listen to them) is probably the most crucial function of yer 21st cent organization.

Re: bryan landers - Breaking Down Context

Bryan Landers — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 03:49:44 -0000

Ok, I'm adding more to my own post...is that bad blog etiquette?

There are a lot of dynamics between the format information is created in and the format it's received in. Blog writer's posts are converted into RSS, which are then pulled into an aggregator which displays the information differently: ad content (banners, etc) is often stripped out, brand/look/feel are likely modified or abandoned, and new functionality is introduced (liking in FriendFeed) while functionality available in the original format is either integrated (via API) or left behind. This is a dance that happens between creator and recipient shaped by the tools and methods used to communicate messages.

I feel like there's a lot of innovation left to be discovered within this framework for context. This all applies to any kind of information, not simply the web and tech-related variety.