My #SalesforceCeBIT Conference Highlights

CeBit Australia really got its teeth into the subject of Social this year through a partnership with my former employer, Salesforce.com – a company doing more than most I think to equip business with the right tools for their Social campaigns.  The program was excellent and while I couldn’t get to everything I wanted to, I did make it to enough sessions to provide me with plenty of memorable highlights (not the least of which was the Salesforce-in-Australia 10th Anniversary party!)

“Big Data is Bullshit”.  Following on from last week’s lecture from the two Social Whiz kids of the Obama for America 2012 team  – Joe Rospars and Stephen Muller – (which I wrote about earlier this week) I was this week treated thanks to the guys at CeBit to that campaign’s CTO, @Harper Reed (pictured, credit CeBIT Australia).  Widely regarded as one of the key components to the Obama win, Harper’s contribution to the campaign – which I’ve talked about here on my personal blog – was a bleeding edge cloud-Social-mobile strategy which left the Republicans for dust.  Arresting everyone with his insightful common sense, “Big Data is Bullshit” was the headline to a general point about how the big data challenge that he is familiar with was a storage problem and is now merely vendor marketing.  The real challenge now for business is Smart Data – not “how do I manage it?” but rather instead “what does it mean?”

“Marketing is about Listening”. Amid the Salesforce Keynote by – to continue a theme – President Obama’s first US CIO, @VivekKundra, was a very inspiring video from Aussie retailer Lorna Jane (@LornaJaneActive)  who talked on stage about how social media “turbo boosted” their business because of the way that customer feedback helped them more effectively market and sell to their customers.  “Marketing is now about listening” said the CEO Bill Clarkson. It resonated with me strongly because I often feel the main focus on Social is about what you can say, but like any true conversation, it is far more rewarding when there’s as much listening as talking.  Lorna Jane have experienced exponential growth in the US using only Social Media platforms without any traditional advertising at all.  They are an excellent demonstration of how Social Media can be a significant competitive game-changer and how the power of listening can help you connect with customers far more profoundly than by just blasting them with marketing messages.

Keynote videos can usually be very tedious and motherhood-laden but the videos shown yesterday were really quite informative, such as this one by about Trip A Deal’s use of Cloud and Social to improve customer service.  Taking it to another level this new video from Salesforce about becoming a “Customer Company”, which makes the excellent point about how businesses must “earn” the trust of customers and on equal terms because as the narrator says, the new connected customers “understand that they have power and they have choices.”

“Live in the Data”.  A ever-present theme in so much of the content was about the dryer, less sexy aspects of Social – analysis, reporting and measurement are nonetheless crucial to success.   @WillScullyPower from Marketo partner, Datarati – described how the boardroom walls of today’s San Francisco Social start-ups are covered in LCD screens displaying all manor of real-time customer data as he urged his audience to “live in the data”.  CBA’s Social lead, @NikiEpstein was clear about this when she said “data analysis drives decisions” relating to how analysis defines direction in a constant do-review-do-better innovation cycle.  She was also clear about the point that having tools that are able to track, audit and report Social conversations made her Risk Management teams far more relaxed about compliance issues.

Facebook Helen Crossley made an excellent point in her presentation with Niki (hosted by Charlie @snoutley Wood who leads the Salesforce Marketing Cloud APAC team) in comments about measurement.   Don’t just measure the last click to sale, she urged the audience.   In addition, it is important to understand every element of the customer’s journey through the funnel.  She recommended A/B testing (such as comparisons of different geographies) as an example of  better ROI measurement and shared Facebook’s own ROI framework of Reach, Brand resonance, reaction. Track all but focus on the one that suits your objectives.

More generally, I was impressed throughout the day with the maturity of the marketplace in Social tools.  Automation and scale is always going to be the challenge for large businesses as they execute Social strategies.  Salesforce has been at the forefront of this since their acquisition of Radian6.  A demo of the Marketing Cloud and how it can integrate CRM with the main Social channels like Facebook and Twitter in a way that uses APIs well to both analyze social data as well as draw from the customer database to automatically craft highly targeted campaigns.  (Other tools also, such as this compliance and audit tool from System Partners, are also of note.)

But finally, last but not least, this Infographic makes an excellent point I have been making regularly – that Social SEO is part art, part science.  The artistic side of a Social Marketer focusses on the content creation skills while SEO and data analysis play toa more scientific potential.  This is the key to effective team recruitment for Social – if not individuals with both sides of the coin, then at least teams with both abilities well and equally represented.

 

Six lessons from the guys who #Social-ed Obama into Office

Thanks to the generosity of a good friend I had the privilege last week of hearing from two of the real pioneers in the use of Social Media to get a message across.  Described by their host, ABC journalist Michael (@M-Brisso) Brissenden, as the Led Zeppelin of Nerdsville; Joe (@Rospars) Rospars and Stephen (@mullerstephen) Muller of Blue State Digital can genuinely claim to have played a huge part in getting and keeping Barack Obama elected.  The two were visiting Sydney as the guests of the Sydney Writers Festival.

I’ve written before (on my personal blog) about the excellence of the 2012 election campaign.  So many aspects of the Democrats’ campaign were streets ahead of what the Republicans were doing, but they seemed to take the 2008 revolution in campaigning to a new level.  In particular it was worth noting the brilliant #stayinline campaign to make sure that those still in line when the polls closed were still able to vote.  Where margins are as  tight as they were in this election, it is this kind of micro-targeted message around a #hashtag that makes Social Media so powerful.

It is well known that the roots of the 2008 Social Media campaign lay in the pre-Social pioneering use of internet crowd-funding by the Howard Dean Campaign in 2004.  Joe Rospars was the DNA that transitioned those lessons from Howard Dean to Barack Obama.  In an interesting show-and-tell presentation, Joe and Stephen told the story of the challenges, the successes and star-struck moments with Mr President from both the 2008 and 2012 campaigns.

The bulk of what they had to share was You Tube videos that demonstrated how to press people’s buttons on Social Media, like this one about one of the older volunteers on the campaign, Charles Alexander; or this one about Ian’s letter to Obama thanking him for  bringing his Father home from Iraq.  While a little sentimental I think for the Australian audience, they are powerful examples of how to use Social media to inspire, motivate and engage your audience.

It was not lost on anyone in the audience however how much the Australian Labor Party needed this kind of campaign strategy and this very point arose as soon as questions went to the floor, “are you available from now until September?” asked one lady, almost pleadingly.  I wonder if Joe and Stephen did catch a moment to bring Julia’s team up to speed, but if not here are some lessons I collected from their talk:

1. Relationships – A grass roots Social campaign is about building relationships with people at scale, fast and engaging them in two-way conversations.  Joe and Stephen talked briefly about the challenge of beating Hilary Clinton, a seasoned Washington veteran with a rich tapestry of relationships.  They talked about how they were able to use Social to quickly build a network in a timescale no other medium could achieve.
2. Telling stories – This is not news, it is wel established that telling stories is the key to content creation for the Social web.  But these guys seem to have it nailed.  The videos they showed told powerful and compelling stories very succinctly and evocatively and in a way that would inspire action.  The political campaign ad has evolved to suit the new medium.
3. Grass Roots Organisation – I’ve written before on this blog about lessons that Todd Wheatland drew from the 2012 campaign about how to use Social to appeal to the base, motivating them to carry your message.  Joe and Stephen reiterated that the campaign was very much focussed on producing content that the base would retweet and amplify on the campaign’s behalf.
4. Let others tell your story – A common facet of the videos Joe and Stephen showed us was that, as Joe said, “the candidate wasn’t in them”.  Particularly in the two examples I’ve embedded above, Obama plays only a very brief cameo in either.  This is fundamental to a good Social Media campaign – don’t make it about you, make it about those you are trying to reach.
5. Honesty and Belief – Perhaps more relevant to community activism than corporate marketing, but the point remains strong that Social Media shines a penetrating light on your work and has a nose for insincerity.  Joe in particular was ernest on the point that you need to believe in what you are doing and you need to be honest about what you are creating because only that will make for an effective message.
6. Put Social at the top table – Last but not at all least, Joe made the important point in response to a question that the reason he was able to be so successful within the Obama campaign is that Digital was given a seat at the top table.  He was included in every discussion across the campaign and urged to consider the Digital and Social implications.

I think this last point is perhaps the most important lesson he brought with him and one all organisations should embrace.  Until Social is integrated across the organisation and as long as Social remains a neglected silo; the real power of Social, the kind of power that can elect a President, cannot be truly realised.

Twenty Years on: The Web Links Words not Pages

You have to have been hiding under a rock to miss that CERN – the organisation behind the first web site – have re-launched the original Web site.  It’s terribly hard to believe that the World Wide Web is no longer a teenager and is a full twenty years old this week.  I entered the workforce around that time, and I can barely remember a time when the web did not play a fundamental role in my working life.

However, I can remember that brief time.  I also remember all the various developments that have made the web what it is today.  The Browser wars.  The first Advertising.  The arrival of Flash.  The dawn of Java.  The advent of eCommerce and the debate about its security.  At least two jobs were with web-only companies – America Online and Salesforce.com – and the web has made so much of the rest of my life possible too, from Hotmail.com to Friends Reunited, Facebook and Tripadvisor.

Something struck me when I looked at the original site and thought about the evolution of the medium since then.  When you look at the original site you remember that the web then was all about linking pages together.  Everything was about “The Hyperlink” and your strategy around the web was to link to and be linked from other sites as the web became labyrinth of links.

By 2003 Tim O’Reilly had renamed the web Web 2.0.  Before long, by the time I had digested that re-birth, it was re-named again: Web 3.0.  Now a strong argument is made by the coiner of Web 2.0 that web 3.0 is hot air.  But the fact remains the evolution of the web is ever constant.  What O’Reilly calls out as Stowe Boyd’s definition of “a web without browsers” seems to be the most exciting commentary, given the advent of new mobile devices and intelligent apps.

However, I remember a PR conference here in Sydney in 2011 – PR 3.0 – on the future of Social Media where Servant Of Chaos founder, Gavin Heaton, described the chronology as one of links.  Web 1.0 linked pages, he said, while web 2.0 linked people and web 3.0 linked words.  This informed my understanding of The Semantic Web, and has driven my view of it ever since.

Of course the debate is furious and complex as it always is where computer scientists meet marketeers and PR people!  But when I look at that first page I see the links and realise that now when we look a web page we see words.  Or at least Google does!  Therefore, we should all see words because SEO is what powers the web today and while we use the web to speak to people, people navigate it using search.

This is why when I think about writing for the web, I think about the science and the art:

• Science: The science of “Social SEO” pertains to the search mechanics of Google and other search engines like Bing.  By focussing the main thrust of a Content Marketing campaign on certain strategically-chosen keywords and remaining consistent on those words in a regular content contriutions, you can begin to rank much higher on the search engines because of a steady stream of relevancy triggers sent out into the Social Web.
• Art: The art of Social SEO pertains to the dual advantages of not only carrying a succinct and relevant message to strategic audiences in a direct and targeted way via Social networks; but also of “gaming” the above search dynamics by attaching popularity meta data to certain keywords linking back to your online properties.

 Twenty years on the other things missing from that first page are also significant of course.  There is not one image.  There are no ads. There are no Social shares tools.  But in all the evolution of the web, there hasn’t been one single development as radical as that first one.  So Happy Birthday WWW!  Many happy returns!