This application is an interesting, and dangerous, development although it shouldn’t be expected that it’s any more accurate than the plethora of ‘guess your age/nationality/star sign’ sites that trawl through Facebook pages.
Guessing your race is something clumsy and obvious but its clear that services like Google, LinkedIn and Facebook have a mass of data on each of their millions of users that enables them to crunch some big numbers and come up with all manner of conclusions.
Some of these will be useful to governments, marketers and businesses and in some cases it may lead to unforeseen consequences.
The truth may lie in the data but if we don’t understand the questions we’re asking, we risk creating a whole new range of problems.
It’s possible to see how a car manufacturer, steel maker or airline runs up a half billion dollars loss. But a social media company?
Twitter has lost its way and a complete change in management is needed. Maybe it’s time to time to turn the company into a user co-operative, at least the subscribers have an idea of how the products works.
Social media influencer campaigns are too focused on happy, positive messages and that is their fatal weakness.
“If you have anything negative to say, please don’t use the hashtag” implored the organiser to her stable of ‘influencers’ ahead of a recent social media campaign.
Like everyone in the PR, marketing and advertising industries, that organiser was desperately keeping a shiny patina on their clients’ brands at a time where they are one tweet away from disaster in today’s world of message obsessed management.
With influencer programs those risks are magnified as marketers co-opt amateurs to promote their clients in return for access and freebies*. Those unpaid posters on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook may be happy to give a positive view to everything but their fans may not be so kind.
Given their clients’ aversion to risk, it’s not unusual to see marketers setting out terms to ‘influencers’ demanding the brand has the right to vet posts – as one telco requested to this site last year – or outright prohibiting anything negative being said about their client.
Happy Shiny People
Perversely, selecting happy shiny people to promote brands on social media while suppressing critical thinking could actually create distrust of brands argues communications consultant Joanne Jacobs who states “this distrust is causedby campaigns of undifferentiated positivity and uncritical thinking.”
A good example of this potential damage is a recent influencer campaign by Chinese telecommunications Huawei where a group of influencers were flown to the 2016 Mobile World Congress to post about their experiences with the brand.
The Facebook post below shows the influencers enjoying the vendor’s hospitality but it also illustrates the lack of diversity in the group, something that was quickly called out in the comments.
For the Huawei influencers who had spent the previous week gushing about the vendor’s products and events this was an opportunity to provide leadership on the lack of diversity in the tech and telco industries..
Instead the critics – some of whom had more influential online audiences than the ‘influencers’ – were dismissed with the passive aggressive accusation of being ‘negative’, the cardinal sin of social media marketing.
For Huawei, there was a real risk their happy shiny influencers clumsy attempts to protect the brand would damage for the company and it was unsurprising the company’s professional PR managers stepped in to defuse the situation which in the hands of amateur ‘brand ambassadors’ threatened to become a self inflicted disaster.
Brittle brands of happiness
Huawei’s experience illustrates a key problem with the happy shiny influencer campaigns in their brittleness when faced with genuine criticism. The happy consumerist gleefully liking Instagram photos of shoes or hamburgers will quickly abandon the product should the brand be perceived as acting dishonestly or unethically.
For those influencers who’ve tied themselves too closely to brands, such a scandal could find their own names tarnished and their hard won audiences and reputation deserting them.
In an age of conversation where critical voices can be heard, the nice shiny facades can easily collapse. The days when the tobacco industry or brands like Coca-Cola could drown out critical voices simply by the weight of their advertising campaigns are long gone.
Struggles with a fragmented media
The struggles for the PR and marketing industries in dealing with today’s fragmented world are not to be underestimated – the old models of broadcast advertising and engaging with journalists and celebrities have lost their effectiveness and the industry is grappling with what works with the new channels.
In a building a brand that will last in today’s media landscape, pandering to shallow thinking consumerists is at best going to be a short term fix. To succeed, building a believable trustworthy name that tolerates dissent, allows complaints and acknowledges informed criticism is much more important and exponentially more valuable.
Shallow thinking and shiny people might have worked for Coca-Cola selling to young baby boomers in 1965 but fifty years later things the critics and deeper thinkers have a voice to. Co-opting those voices will only strengthen the brand.
*Disclaimer: This writer has been on a number of influencer programs and received various degrees of corporate largess including a Huawei smartphone.
Twitter could be condemned by the impossible expectations of investors, founders and shareholders
Poor Twitter. Today’s earnings report showed what everyone knew, its user growth has stalled with the number of active participants – Monthly Active Users as the company calls them – didn’t grow in the last quarter and are only up nine percent on the previous year.
The good news for shareholders is advertising revenue grew 48% with both US and international markets showing strong increases. Despite user growth flatlining the company still remains on track to becoming profitable.
As Farhad Manjoo argues at the New York Times, maybe the service needs to focus on more modest ambitions. The company’s dreams of competing with Facebook or growing like Google are never going to be achieved.
We’ve argued at this blog for a year that Twitter’s management and investors should accept the market’s expectations of the business were too lofty and while there’s no reason the company can’t be profitable, it’s not going to be a massive river of gold like Google.
There’s nothing wrong with being a healthy billion dollar business. The risk for Twitter is the greed and ego of investors, founders and shareholders could condemn the company in trying to meet impossible expectations.
How enthusiastic sports organisations will be in sharing their data and audiences with the social media service remains to be seen.
Sports have been a priority of the social media services in their quest to attract audiences, however unlike television broadcasters Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook have found their cosying up to contests and stars has been less than successful.
It may be statistics are what’s needed to attract fans and certainly Facebook is well placed to be a destination for fans however it is early days for social media and the model that works is yet to be found.
Twitter needs focused management that understands the service if it is to survive
Twitter is in trouble, its share price has fallen 70% in the past two years and the service is not gaining new users. To halt the stagnation, CEO Jack Dorsey is reportedly considering ditching the 140 character limit.
The one most desired feature by Twitter users is the ability to edit their posts, although the New York Times points out this may not be a good thing, another popular change would be for the service to crack down on abusive behaviour.
Stagnant management
It seems however that Twitter’s management can’t make those changes and this is understandable given the company’s executives not understanding how the service is used and their desperate obsession to justifying its stock valuation which, despite falling 70% over the past two years, is still $14 billion.
Justifying that stock valuation with no clear path to monetising the service is a paralysing problem which means other useful changes aren’t being made while the company still embarrassingly cosies up to sports, pop and movie stars in the hope their fame will bring advertiser dollars to the platform.
For Twitter the solution is to accept they aren’t a fourteen billion dollar company which would take the pressure off the executive team to find unsustainable ways to justify that valuation and instead focus management’s efforts on improving the user experience.
Making Twitter useful
To make the service more useful, management has to understand how Twitter is used which means finding experienced and capable leaders who also use the service.
Adding features that allow users to make some changes to tweets and lists would be a start and clamping down on the bullies, trolls and frauds to make it more friendly to new entrants would be a start. Creating an easy way for new users to find useful information would also help engagement and retention.
The most important task though is finding executives who actually use Twitter and have an understanding of social media instead of hiring from the tech, advertising and broadcasting industries without any regard of whether those individuals have ever used the service.
Twitter is a valuable service but it’s dying as management play games. If it is to survive, accepting it isn’t as big as it wants to be and finding leaders who understand why its users find it so useful is essential.
Amid layoffs and management disinterest, it is likely Twitter could be drifting into Google’s arms.
The turmoil at Twitter continues with the directionless service announcing they will lay off eight percent of its workforce – over 300 jobs.
At the same time, the company also announced Google’s Chief Business Officer,Omid Kordestani, would become Twitter’s Executive Chairman.
To compound Twitter’s problems payment system Square announced it will have a stock market IPO, given the two companies share the same CEO and co-founder it’s hard to think Twitter will get the management attention it desperately needs.
It’s hard not to think that Twitter is going to be absorbed by Google, certainly the search engine giant can afford it and they have struggled with social media – although it’s questionable how much Twitter’s star struck management understands its own users, let alone social media in general.
A combination of Twitter’s ineffectual management coupled with Google’s which has consistently shown it struggles with the concept of social media and has a horrible habit of neglecting then shutting down services it loses interest in would probably prove fatal for the service.
Should Twitter fall into Google’s arms and then die of neglect it will be the case of a good idea that was monetized too fast and a management that never quite understood what it was doing.
A constant with social media companies is their fascination with celebrities. This hurts their credibility.
A constant with social media companies is their fascination with celebrities. At the first opportunity they’ll trash their credibility and burn their credibility with users to curry favour with a b-list celebrity.
The most damaging example of this was Google making an exception of its ‘real names’ policy for celebrity Google+ accounts. In making an exception for pop stars, the company destroyed any argument it had for insisting users had to use their birth names in order to use their service.
In their quest to be relevant Twitter’s management has consistently made itself look like a simpering bunch of star struck groupies in pandering to celebrities. Which they’ve done one again with their Moments service as Josh Dickson point out.
One morning last week Iniesta found his Instagram account had been suspended for breaching the ‘terms of use.’
Iniesta was baffled and couldn’t find how he’s breached the terms, three times he tried to reach out to Instagram and was ignored. In the meantime his Instagram account started posting pictures of his namesake, a Spanish soccer star.
Only after posting his story on Medium did Iniesta get a response – and an apology – from Instagram’s PR people.
It turned out the only breach Iniesta had committed was to be born with the same name as a FC Barcelona star.
Despite having not actually breached Instagram’s terms and conditions, Iniesta had his account taken with no notice and certainly no process.
For the thousands of ‘social media influencers’ and the brands trying to use these service as channels to connect to a fragmented audience Instagram’s actions are a reminder that all their efforts are built on sand – years of work can be wiped out at the whim of a faceless and unaccountable bureaucrat.
Ultimately it’s the social media services who lose the most from their high handed treatment of their users, as it becomes apparent to both advertisers and ordinary account holders that everything they post is impermanent then the trust in the service is gone.
The greatest hypocrites in today’s business world are the social media services – Twitter, Facebook and a host of others which want you to share your intimate details with them for their own commercial use.
As Andrés Iniesta found, the social media service’s commitment to openness and transparency vanishes the moment a user has a problem.
For celebrities, or those well-connected, no such problems exist. One instant message or phone call to their contact within Facebook, Twitter or Google and the problem is fixed.
Ultimately though that insider game and obsession with celebrity will undo the social media services. For the moment though, all their pretences of being identity services or journals of records should be taken with a lot of scepticism.
The promise of internet advertising was that it could provide much more targeted audiences with far better, precision results.
It turns out the truth is different, with Bloomberg citing Heineken US who did a detailed analysis of their advertising returns to find, as the company’s Brand Director Ron Amram says, “giving money to the mob.”
While that news is bad, although not altogether surprising, for the digital media industry there’s even an even worse revelation from Heineken.
Digital’s return on investment was around 2 to 1, a $2 increase in revenue for every $1 of ad spending, compared with at least 6 to 1 for TV. The most startling finding: Only 20 percent of the campaign’s “ad impressions”—ads that appear on a computer or smartphone screen—were even seen by actual people.
That major brands are television is three times more effective than digital puts online advertisers in a bad position, although social media gurus have long argued companies can’t measure return on investment from their efforts.
Ultimately though the Bloomberg story shows we need a new model, applying broadcast advertising conventions to online services isn’t working. We’re still waiting for a new David Sarnoff to come along.
Social media influencer programs are challenging the ethics and pockets of PR and bloggers
So after five years about posting about food, travel, tech, fashion or reverse cycle widgets you’ve being listed by Forbes Magazine as one of the most influential voices in the field.
Now every morning in your inbox is another pitch from an agency offering you freebies and access in return for posting about their clients products, some are great while others are strange.
Welcome to the world of Influencer Programs, a strange hybrid bought about by rise of social media and the collapse of printed news. As overwhelmed salaried journalists at established media outlets have less time to deal with hundreds of PR people desperately trying to get their attention, those with decent social media followings start to look attractive.
The influencer theory
A key part of the PRs strategy in engaging with social media outlets are the influencer programs, where the agencies trawl Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and the other services to find those with large followings and then try to induce them into promoting their clients’ products.
These influencer programs are not anything new, while today we associate them with Kim Kardashian and Will.I.Am, in the 18th Century Josiah Wedgwood publicised his sales to the royal courts of Europe to generate sales for his earthenware and a hundred years later Mark Twain endorsed cigars in journals across America.
So congratulations on being the modern Mark Twain, now you have to decide if you want to play with Fat Fee Media and be part of their influencer programs.
The land of the free
Most of the time the initial approach from the nice folks at Fat Fee will try to get you to work for free in exchange for a shiny laptop, a free feed or even an overseas trip to The World Reverse Cycle Widgets conference.
That might work for you, if you have a full time job and the food blog or fashion Instagram feed is a hobby then this exactly what the influencer programs were originally designed around although there might be some quirks there
Should the blog be a business, or you take the distinctly unfashionable attitude that your time as a creative content creator is actually worth something that Fat Fee Media should pay for, then things get messy.
People die of exposure
The first response for payment from the nice folk at Fat Fee Media is that working with their client will be wonderful exposure for you.
In some respects this is probably true, however the reason Fat Fee Media has come to you is because their clients need exposure more than you do. Just the fact you’ve been listed as an ‘influencer’ shows you have credibility on the interwebs.
One of the traps many of us with consulting businesses on the side is the belief that doing a favour for BigCorp will open future paid opportunities. Sadly, the truth is somewhat different.
Pay the writer
“It’s the amateurs who make it tough for the professionals” says Harlen Ellison in his wonderful Pay The Writer rant. “By what logic do you call me and ask me to work for nothing.”
Ellison’s point is well made and those working for free are marked down as amateurs by the large agencies. Be under no illusion, when the paid consulting, speaking or writing gigs become available, the folks giving away stuff for free on the influencer programs won’t be getting them.
While Samsung’s behaviour was extreme, it’s by no means unusual. It’s common in these programs’ agreements to have ‘exclusivity’ or ‘no disparagement’ clauses.
The exclusivity clauses are particularly pernicious because they limit the scope of your writing and could even lock you out of future paid work in the industry you cover.
Controlling the copy
Another weird, but common, part of the PR control freakery in influencer programs is the determination to vet everything so only Nice Things are said about their clients.
This never ends well as the agency and its client spend the next six weeks rewriting your work. Inevitably the results look like something published in the Ministry of Public Works house newsletter.
Even if your blog or Instagram feed is just a hobby resist any request from agencies to pre-vet your copy. If they insist, send them your advertising rate card and tell them to hire a copywriter.
You can’t say bad things
The ‘non-disparagement’ clauses are equally pernicious. One of the curiosities of the social media world is that corporates are horribly risk averse.
As a consequence they don’t want the possibility of bloggers or the Twitterati saying nasty things about them and the non-disparagement clause becomes part of almost any agreement.
These clauses are usually far ranging, not only do they stipulate a blogger can’t say something less than glowing in a post but they also restrict any social media commentary on that business.
A recent agreement I was presented on behalf of one of the world’s biggest banks required me to say I wouldn’t say anything nasty about them. This is a curious way of shutting people up but one can’t blame them if it can be done cheaply for the cost of a meal or conference invite.
Happy shiny people
Ultimately the social media and digital media worlds are about happy and shiny. Given they are largely controlled by large corporations, this isn’t surprising and much of the attitude that you shouldn’t say bad things online comes down to how food, fashion and travel bloggers have regurgitated nice things rather than been genuine critics.
To be fair to the new breed of online writers, the dumbing down of travel and food writing was well underway in the mainstream media before the arrival of the internet. One could argue that mastheads devaluing their brand with puff pieces was one of the reasons alternative online media, particularly in food blogging, became so successful so fast.
A broken model
In truth, the whole social media engagement industry is broken, it depends on poor measurements and old school marketers applying 1960s Mad Men broadcasting methods to an industry that’s diffuse and diverse.
Over time, new more effective models will develop but the for the moment this is the way business is done as we wait for the new David Sarnoff.
Ultimately for influencers the question is whether you’ll keep your own respect and that of your audience. Just don’t expect the corporates and their agencies to respect you in the morning.
Hawk is particularly scathing about Google’s prospects of being trusted again by developers and the marketplace. “By quitting early, Google lost what little goodwill they might have to seed something in the future,” he says. “Who will ever take Google serious with social again?”
Once again we see the effects of Google’s corporate Attention Deficit Disorder and the message to developers and evangelists is clear – be very careful in devoting too many resources to any new product from the company.
Google Plus’ decline though signals something far more serious for the company however – it may well have missed some of the most serious shifts in its marketplace.
The SoLoMo opportunity
Four years ago when the service was launched with great fanfare SoLoMo was one of the key buzzwords and it was understandable for Google to want a slice of it. Unfortunately the company found that even an business as big as Google can’t force change by management diktat.
SoLoMo – Social, Local and Mobile – were seen as the big market growth areas and Google’s footprint in all of those spaces was poor. Although Google Places was leading the local search market at the time.
Google+ was intended to solve at least the social problem with the added advantage of overlaying personal information onto the already comprehensive ‘knowledge graph’ it’s gathered on users.
Four years later it’s clear Google Plus is a failure and much of that is due to the project being driven from the top down. From its launch the project was about meeting management imperatives and it’s notable in the company’s announcements about the service how little mention users get.
Google’s price of failure
The problem now for Google is they have wasted four years on the failed product at a time when Facebook have become the dominant social media platform and have successfully adapted the service to the mobile world.
Even in Local search, Facebook are making strong inroads into local business advertising, an area Google had the advantage by tying together maps and local search but lost because of inaction and bureaucracy.
A costly distraction
The Google+ distraction means the company has missed the entire SoLoMo opportunity and squandered the one area where they had a massive head start.
Google now face a future where their key advantage is stranded on the desktop without serious integration into social media. At the same time their ambitions to run a payments service seems stalled as well.
Whether Google+ turns out to be as strategic a mistake for the search engine giant as Windows Vista was for Microsoft remains to be seen but the similarity between the two companies stuck with declining desktop based business models in a world of mobile consumers is striking.
Facebook and Twitter are proving to be very different business model
This week showed the disparate
At the time of its IPO in February 2012, Facebook claimed to have 845 million active monthly users. Eighteen months later at the time of their stock market float, Twitter boasted a more modest 232 million.
This week Facebook reported 1.19 billion monthly active users while Twitter still languishes at 300 million, a number that disappointed the market and saw the smaller company’s shares drop 11% after their quarterly earnings announcement.
Even more worrying for Twitter, and competing networks like Google, is Facebook’s success in mobile services with 874 million people accessing the service through their smartphones every day last quarter.
So successful is Facebook in engaging roaming users that some pundits are predicting the company’s Instagram product may well overtake both Twitter and Google in mobile advertising revenues over the next few years.
More concerning for Twitter is the company is still not profitable – of the business’ $957 million gross profit, an astonishing $854 million was eaten up in administration and sales costs which indicates their overheads are in need of some dramatic pruning.
What is clear that Facebook and Twitter have very different user behaviour and, as a consequence, the revenue models are not the same. Twitter is never going to be Facebook.
So the question for Twitter is what does it want to be? Certainly the current quest to drive up revenues seems doomed. Perhaps it’s time to accept the company is a smaller operation and start to plan accordingly.
