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Audio:
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Slides: The Good, Bad & Ugly of Social Media
Transcript:
You may have noticed that my understanding from whatever was going behind me, you may have noticed that my parents who were big believers in social networking sent me off to public school, when i was about 13 my dad stopped on my first day of school by the side of the road to give me my first and last man-to-man, father-to-son talk and it was a very strange moment for both of us and there is almost no memory of embarrasment except for these two things, the first he told me that i should do my best to avoid pubic lice and the second thing he told me and i’ve no idea what was going through his mind at that time was that there was a particular wine of the sauternes called shoteracum and that the most important thing about that was it was franing expensive that i should never buy it was you dont pronounce the deal so sauternes, which seemed unmanaged to go all the way to the school without using either of these bits of information, astonishingly, but only a few years off while at school, i was entertaining ago and actually i ran out for dinner it was a very expensive dinner certainly represented several weeks worth of my then salary and there was a ofcourse a flogra course and i knew enough to know that i should order a glass of soturn and i need nothing else and i tried to talk to some alien who was very scared, of i said could we get a glass of soturn with the flogra and he said yes sir and we serve shatter again, which bit i rememberd bit what my father said and indeed i looked at the price and that was my cost per glass. I would still be shocked by this, but imagine young ad executive really this was no, i mean this was not but still a big part of my week’s wages and as i was watching her, drinking her glass but i was also seeing was there a 5 pound sip and i was thinking and i say actually ” i better get lucky” but she ofcourse didnt notice that at no point could i have said, by the way have you any idea what it costs to me if i hope i would get lucky because that would have treating everything as though according to what we call market norms, and infact what i should be looking at when i am being a nice person and taking someone for a date to a restuarant, this thing is called social norms and these two things are widely different and yeah for example if you are looking at market norms you will really be asked most times about ROI and market volumes and if you are talking about social norms, then we are talking about much more interesting much more deeper rooted very sort of powerful things which to a certain extent we’ve being trying to tap into reference, when we try to hit this kind of conflict between market norms and social norms like i did at that moment in that restaurant we enter some kind of crisis, its the crisis of values versus the values. So this is the question i think is coming up into all sorts of businesses at the moment and it is the crisis which faces any one who is engaged in social media or indeed not engaged in the social media and we cant avoid it. I asked the question about how do we begin preparation for this what is the brand and the answer that i got back would astonish anybody who grew up in advertising in the 80’s and 90’s, a brand is what is customly defined it as, this is good people by the way, they are not fools and players actually knew. This is all i think a bit about a bit passive if a brand is what people say about, then what the hell is the point in any of our jobs. We got to be out at doing something. We should be looking certainly at both the product and the perception of that product and we should be doing what ever we can to influence that perception. Its not simply lives in the audience no where else. And to give you a little bit of history, brands started off and this is from the most simple side of things as a.. you kind of guarantee the quality and situation here in 1848 just as gold was discovered in california there we 800 people living in sanfrancisco, the following year 1849, there were 50000 people living in sanfrancisco. Whole new market with no infrastructure and 10 years later when the railway came in, you had this fabulous new thing called mass transport open up to the massive audience with no infrastructure at the same times we had mass production in industrializaiton of the east coast or rather the north-east coast. You had a mass production, mass transport, massive audience and no infrastructure when there was this suddenly, this was the environment in which modern advertising kind of grew up and here is modern advertising. You will notice a few things about it, there were a couple of things which were making claims on quality and the rest of it, but i think what really is interesting is the moment being replaced here isnt just sort of we are not just making a guarantee of quality, there is this promise thats in its sort of makes childrens as fat as pigs, this is big early uprising. I think we have changed, but there is also this other thing where what we are also trying to replace is the relationship that had existed until then if they had been an infrastructure in sanfrancisco, then there would be a shopkeeper and you would be trusted the shopkeeper to give you what you want to know the retail relationship, that personal relationship is very important. But when there is no mass market products you may have to bypass that relationship very neatly. The guarantee of quality not comes from the brand, but also kellogs or jumani you see all these things are personalities whether they are real or not is the early brands coming through and replace presonal relationships or thats part of their original job. And its just what is a brand, brand is a product plus personality and the ads that i grew up with and now that i grew up, helping to make and all the rest of it and we are about taking big faceless national or privatized sort of organizations and giving them a personality, If you look at all the way that advertising changed in 80’s and into the 90’s, thats absolutely what i was saying is how do we get rid of personality which means that this isnt the product, this isnt the services somebody we want to take it into our home thats where advertising has been. So the big problem that we face in social media is that the promises we made about the personality which appear to act like they are social norms, appear to say “trust me, im your friend, im BT, im nice, im like your mother” those things were fine when we were starting to open up in TV, when we are starting to open up in social media, its a bloody night mare. Ultimately all we have with our customers is a business relationship, this is really a nice example i wish lovely add at this moment im sure you will see me with alexander hole of the meerkat who is the most cudley the sort of brand icon i think, but what he represents ultimately is a as see much floats on top of the financial servies and insurance business, and the financial services and the insurance business is not run by fluffy little merecuts, its run by people who have business relationships. This is the kind of what we see all over the web actually coz one of the things i have compared with merecuts with what market does is when you ask for a quote and give them your phone number, they immediately sell that if you dont actually take them up. They make money either way its fine, they are just an affiliates game. Can we continue pretending that we have a social relationship with our customers when really we are just having a business relationship.