love action for Peter Pawlett, baby.

With any rule or set of rules there can be exceptions or anomalies.

A social media manager recently presented conclusive proof to us that Facebook sells product.

Sales data over a four week period on a particular item had remained steady until the item was a featured post on the brands Facebook page, then et voila a 30% spike in sales occurred.

Conclusive proof, right?

Not really. We all know now that a brand's Facebook following is made up of mostly its heaviest and most 'loyal' buyers, albeit a tiny fraction of its total customer base.

In all likelihood the vast majority of these 'extra sales' were merely sales 'brought forward', that would have happened anyway. The measure and value of Facebook pages being their ability (or not) to spread a message and bring in new or lighter customers and increasing penetration.

Historically Facebook has never been very good at that, and by all accounts the algorithm changes (much reported by geeky types elsewhere, so no need for my ham-fisted interpretation) now mean a significant acceleration of its transformation from a social network into an ad network as organic reach becomes less and less likely for most brands.

However, one should always expect the unexpected.

While fans of a brand page are among its heaviest and most loyal buyers, what happens when that group generates momentum around the product of another brand, in a completely different category, where there is very little cross pollination of customers?

80's synth weirdos turned popsters, The Human League, woke up this week to find that their 1981 chart topper 'Don't You Want Me' has had a mysterious revival in interest and (at the time of writing) is sitting pretty at number 13 in the iTunes chart having not troubled said charts for 35 years or so.

The principal driver of the revival has been a collective campaign to 'bum rush the charts' (yep, it never gets old) by football supporters on Facebook, to push the song to number one.

Why is this so?

An interpretation of the song has been adopted and sung by the fans of (my beloved) Aberdeen Football Club throughout this season.

The latest highpoint of said season was the League (no pun intended) Cup triumph last weekend, when Aberdeen edged it on penalties in a semi-local derby against Inverness Thistle at Parkhead (renamed for the day as ParkRed, again a fan-driven modification in recognition of the fact that 90% of the 50k match tickets were held by Aberdeen supporters).

The phone video clip below will reveal all.



The latest in a long tradition of pop songs adapted with football lyrics, Dont You Want Me is replaced with the name of star Aberdeen attacking midfielder Peter Pawlett. Hence 'Peter Pawlett, Baby'.

(As another aside, one of my favourites of this nature is sung by Chelsea fans to visiting Liverpool fans. To the tune of the famous 'Do They Know it's Christmas' charity song, Chelsea's version goes 'Feed the Scousers...'. Also worth noting that Aberdeen have some form in this terrace meme department having invented the 'ten men went to mow' thing, later adopted - with somewhat less gusto - by Chelsea)

What examples like you see in the clip also clearly demonstrate is that social influence is less the 'hub-and-spoke' model as the common Gladwellian 'influentials' notion suggests - ie a small group of influencers directing the many - but much a more fluid and mutual influence, all happening at once. It's much more akin to what Mark Earls describes as the behaviour of the 'influenced' (and their perspective) counting for more than that of the 'influencer'.

For those in the crowd who may have not known what was going on they could quite easily get it because of what they see ordinary others around them doing, in the moment.

Then following that mutual influence there's a further action available, Buy the song.

So, yes, Facebook can sell.

Just not in the way we think (or perhaps would prefer).

And what we, as marketers, can learn and apply is probably something like this.

Understand that it is impossible to try to predict random events. Instead, it is essential to make peace with uncertainty, randomness and volatility (as Taleb would say).

This is, in effect, the essence of the 'real-time marketing' opportunity.

Not the one where every brand in the world huddles round the Oscars or such-like waiting for the thing to comment on.

The one that, when it comes along, the smart brand takes it.

Certainly for The Human League a chance to capitalise on some unexpected newsworthy-ness among a public (many of whom will never have heard of Phil Oakey and gang, and many who had forgotten) getting acquainted and reacquainted with the brand - it's all about those associated memory structures, after all.

And for Aberdeen FC a fan driven vehicle to further attract the 'light users' that are critical to brand growth.

40,000 supporters made the trek to Glasgow for the cup final, whereas the average attendance at home matches is closer to 10 or 12,000.

There's a huge market of lapsed or infrequent customers who can, and should be nudged to buying a little bit more.

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I'll see you in the sewer

A couple of news items this week reminded us of a story concerning a rat infestation in Hanoi during the 19thC time of French colonial rule.

To combat the rat problem the French authorities swiftly acted with an incentive for Hanoi citizens.

For every dead rat delivered to the appointed rat repository, the good citizen would receive a reward.

Of course it was not long until the residents began specifically breeding their own rat colonies for the exact purpose of cashing in.

Now, against my advice, a former client was determined to launch a Facebook page - the nature of their business meant that other tactics were likely to bear much more fruit - however they were adamant so we decided to do our best for them.

Initially the page gained a small group of fans, mostly friends and family of employees and some partners etc.

Upon running a recruitment ad campaign we gained several thousand new fans over a period of a week or so.

What seemed astonishing was the the apparent popularity of this Australian industrial manufacturing firm in places like Indonesia and the Phillipines.

Particularly because their products and services were not even distributed in those regions.

Clearly something was not quite right.

On realising what was going on, I next suggested to the client that if we adjust our strategy and make our objective to simply appear to be popular then perhaps it would be cheaper and less effort to simply buy a ton of fake likes from some dodgy vendor or other and leave it at that.

In this way we use the page as a simple peripheral 'popularity' point, invest no further effort other than the odd post now and the,n and focus our limited marketing dollars on the tactics that might actually deliver leads and sales.

This idea was met with horror.

How inauthentic.

In this clip by Veritasium the science video blog, who went slightly off topic temporarily, but give a nice simple explanation of the mechanics of this Facebook 'likes' click-farm phenomenon, and implicating Facebook themselevs somewhat.

While, of course, we have probably all known this to be true for some time its interesting to see specific data.

On a similar note, Warc reports that Vivek Shah, the in-coming chair of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, told delegates at the organisation's annual conference, being held in Palm Springs, California that 'online traffic fraud has reached crisis proportions'.

He quoted figures from comScore research that suggest something in the region of 36% of online traffic is now generated by machines ie bots, not by humans. Ouch.



People say you shouldn't stay down here too long,
Lose your sense of light and dark,
Lose your sense of smell,
I'll see you in the sewer, the sewer, the sewer...

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f-like

Perhaps the Facebook like button redesign may result in what might be described as 'off-strategy' consumption in some parts of the world.

Readers familiar with the Doric dialect from my native north-east of Scotland will know that the greeting 'fit like?' is how the natives address each other. Often preceded with something like 'aye aye min'.

Loosely translated into English this phrase means 'how are you?'.

In common conversation the 'fit' is often shortened to 'f' and the greeting therefore becomes 'f'like'.

So I'll now be using the F-Like button as a simple greeting, and not necessarily an endorsement.

Social media experts please now factor this in to your important deep engagement/conversation metrics.

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the spectacular moments of commodity society

The Hungarian Postmodernist-Marxist philosopher György Lukács is credited as the author of the idea of reification.

For Lukács reification literally translates as the 'objectification' - of social life or social relationships and their subsequently re-expression as relationships between objects rather than people - as characterised by many aspects of what we would describe as 'consumer' culture.

'Objectification' has become a bit of a skunk word, the gobbledygook end of postmodernism have ran with it.

But, in simple terms, Lukács is describing a process by which the previously 'authentic' experience is transformed and then rendered 'inauthentic' by its incorporation into the totality (the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts) resulting in alienation.

One of the most quoted descriptions of contemporary consumer-culture alienation is in this passage from Don Delillo’s 1985 novel White Noise.

White Noise* is widely regarded as a case-in-point post-modern work, however we shall not hold that against it.

*In a detournement footnote, apparently DeLillo originally wanted to title the book Panasonic, but the Panasonic Corporation injuncted. Fact fans.

The characters, Jack and Babette Gladney return home from a trip to the supermarket:

'It seemed to me that Babette and I, in the mass and variety of our purchases, in the sheer plenitude those crowded bags suggested, the weight and size and number, the familiar designs and vivid lettering, the giant sizes, the family bargain packs with Day-Glo sale stickers, in the sense of replenishment we felt, the sense of well-being, the security and contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls – it seemed we had achieved a fullness of being that is not known to people who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the evening.'

The most striking contemporary example of this kind of reification is, of course, Facebook.
And in particular the the notion of Facebook 'friends'.

In which the idea of 'friendship' - an aspect of authentic social life and social relationships - that has, in effect, been 'objectified' and indeed commodified by Facebook.

Indeed, within Facebook we even refer of ourselves in the third person. Eaon shared person x's photo and so on.

The 'friend' product is, of course, core to Facebook's business model and monetisation strategy.

We will all be familiar by now with the point that, in the Facebook environment it is the user (or 'friend') that is the product for sale.

Facebook sells the product (and its data by-products) to advertisers, and then re-packages it up and then sells it back to us as the social experience.

The cycle is complete - and gets completely spectacular - when we understand that this idea of the Facebook friend is not only reduced to reified commodity but is also now increasingly becoming the way we understand the nature of authentic friendship, to a degree.

Where that fact might have been spectacular enough in 2011, today we can see other 'possibilities' around further objectification afforded by the next wave of mass media technologies.

In particular the likes of virtual and augmented reality technologies.

I've semi-referenced Debord's Society of The Spectacle in this note.

Among the many descriptions of the Spectacle the following is perhaps the most key to this discussion.

'The spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification.
As a part of society, it is that sector where all attention, all consciousness, converges.
Being isolated and precisely for that reason this sector is the locus of illusion and false consciousness; the unity it imposes is merely the official language of generalized separation'

The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.'

Obviously my novelty pseudo-academic intellectualism finds the synonym connecting The Spec-tacle and then Google Glass, the almost uber-mediator of social relationship by images, ironic and funny.

Let's read that again.

'The spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification'.'

That Facebook/Spectacle analogy is developed further by journalist John Harris who also notes:

'[Debord] is talking about alienation, the commodification of almost every aspect of life and the profound social sea-change whereby any notion of the authentic becomes almost impossible'.

To end this note, perhaps the inevitability of Virtual and Augmented reality technologies as a mass media proposition (ie spectacle) - is one in which it usurps (or indeed incorporates) Facebook as 'the invasive force of the 'spectacle'.

There is the possibility that Google Glass actually takes the idea of the Spectacle as 'social relation between people mediated by images' to new levels of alienation in the guise of authentic social life.

Both Lukács and Debord would possibly note that these new social technologies that are presented and accepted as a social innovations that allow the users to better participate in the world, are just as easily described as reification mechanisms designed to reinforce the spectacle of pseudo-communication producing not connection but only further alienation.

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'like' if you love cheese

There's been some speculation and debate among the chattering classes about the implications of the new Facebook feed set up for brands on the platform and brand pages in particular.

There's plenty of material out there from the social media experts on the how-and-what so no need for me to add a lay view here.

What I will say is that the - let's face it - impending death of edgerank is no bad thing.

I received a report the other day from the community managers who run and monitor the Facebook presence of several fmcg type brands.

Included in the report - and I kid you not - was a statement to this effect.

Our best performing post this week with x-hundred 'likes' was...

'Like if you love cheese'

Aside from how the norm is to calculate best performing content in this manner when in reality 'likes' are a pure vanity metric - feels good but offers no value in terms of anything actionable as a consequence - one can't help but ponder the following fact.

Here we have (and have had for some time) mass social media platforms - perhaps the most potentially powerful set of tools ever available to the human race in its history, with the potential to connect billions people world wide, and inspire them to do just about anything - yet for marketers we are stuck in this mediocre space - 'like if you love cheese'.

Because over time brands on Facebook gradually figured out how to ‘game’ edgerank – you may have seen the sharp rise in inane like-baiting drivel from brands clogging up your feed. Tactics such us ‘like if you prefer pies, share if you prefer sausage rolls’ are deliberately designed to game Edgerank. They get the likes, for sure.

So i applaud Facebook for now effectively killing edge rank (that's not what they say but it's my interpretation) in a play to make it harder for this kind of branded cack to appear into the users feeds in an organic way.

Facebook want brands to pay for their reach. And they are entitled to want this.

The good news, however, is that in all likelyhood the fact that brands will now have to pay for reach means that the quality of brand content will have to improve.

Because it is no longer 'free' then Facebook content will have to come under the same strategic and creative consideration as any other paid-for advertising, therefore reaching beyond brand fans to touch as many potential buyers as possible is the imperative.

The perceived 'value' will now be greater, simply because there is a cost connected to distribution. On the downside it’s a straight-up ad platform now. More like tv or any other web based publishing platform like Yahoo or msn.

Brand content is the now in effect pre-roll to your friends updates.

And it is a boat that appears to be leaving the harbour as the next generation of potential Facebook users appear to be - perhaps not splitting from the program - but certainly spending more time with less 'public' verticals like Whatsapp, SnapChat and Instagram (albeit a Facebook owned property)for their instant gratification and dipping in and out of Facebook for their broadcast fix.

It's a bitter-sweet situation. Better brand content (advertising), designed to get shared and grow reach, for sure, but I sense that we may now look back say that Facebook was the great missed and misunderstood opportunity for advertising as an industry.

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more texas sharpshooter fallacy

A report from Ebay this week appears to confirm what we have suspected for some time.

That for well-known brands most of the buying up of search terms is largely a waste of time and money and has little effect on sales because the clickers would have found the brand anyway and purchased anyway.

The report, a hefty 25 pager (pdf available here) summises that "Advertising may appear like it is successfully attracting these consumers, when in reality they would have found other channels to the firm's website,".

In several experiments eBay tested removing paid-search keywords using its brand name from Yahoo and Microsoft search engines while maintaining them on Google.

[NB: There is, of course, the possibility that Ebay may take some arch enjoyment from having a pop at Google]

The authors of the report; Thomas Blake, Chris Nosko and Steven Tadelis offer three key take-outs.

'First, “brand” keyword advertising (where firms purchase advertisements on searches for their own brand name), a practice used by many companies, is ineffective because, absent paid search links,consumers simply substitute to (unpaid) organic search links. This implies that brand keyword advertising expenses have neither persuasive nor informative value to well known corporations, and arguably, for other companies as well.

Second, the effectiveness of SEM for non-branded keywords is small for a large and well-known brand like eBay and the channel has been ineffective on average.

Finally, we show that there is a small yet detectable positive impact of SEM on new user acquisition and on informing infrequent users about the value of using eBay.

This last finding supports the informative view of advertising and implies that targeting uninformed users is a critical factor for successful advertising.'

Upon understanding this last point then the shlock-headline baiting of articles such as this one from Business Insider from late last year (yet somehow on a second lease of life) is further testament to the grip that the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy has on marketers and the ROI question.

ComScore 'research' apparently determined that fans of Target on Facebook were 97 percent more likely to spend at Target, and friends of fans were 51 percent more likely than the average population to spend at the retailer (the brand has over 18 million “likes”).

Thus 'proving' 'A Perfect Example Of Why Retailers Should Be Investing In Social Media.'

Whom the 'average population' that are not on Facebook is unclear. As is how on earth those numbers can be quantified.

In short, they would have bought there anyway.

Similarly this week in AdNews comes the revelation from 'Facebook-centric' [natch] marketer Mike Watkins of Mudo Media who calims that every dollar spent on Facebook marketing by his client - teen fashion brand Supre - had delivered $192 in return, again 'proving' that 'Facebook will outperform TV advertising campaigns every time'.

Tellingly Watkins reveals that he is 'sick of Facebook being a marketing bolt-on and wants to be first to the table when it comes to budgets and campaigns.'

Of course he is ;)

There is no doubt that, correctly applied, paid search and Facebook will contribute to the overall effect.

But again the social media experts and prone to inferring the general from the particular and blind to the fact that marketing to existing customers and ergo measuring sales from who would have bought in any case doth not make any case for the replacemenet of this-with-that.

ROI is indirect and fuzzy. In all likelyhood we're no closer to figuring out which 50% of advertising is wasted than we've ever been, and the chances of ever fully figuring it out won't happen any time soon.

And I'm cool with that.

HT Sam

*UPDATE Friday March 15.

From the Wordstream blog, an alternative view.

Dear eBay, Your Ads Don't Work Because They Suck

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the facebook texas sharpshooter fallacy

Our current favourite cognitive bias is the 'Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy'.

Here's the often cited example of the fallacy in action.

If you were to shuffle a deck of cards and draw out 10 cards, the probability of that exact sequence you drew coming up are a squillion to one, no matter what the cards were.

If you drew out an fully ordered suit, it would be pretty remarkable - and 'clearly' contain some mystical properties - but statistically, of course, the chances of that sequence coming out are just the same as any other set of 10 cards.

So the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy describes the cowboy who fires his gun into the barn door and then paints a target around the holes, thus proving his accuracy.

It struck me that the announcement last week by Carolyn Everson – the VP of Global Marketing Solutions at Facebook - that Samsung made a 1200% ROI on a $10 million Facebook ad campaign which directly resulted $129 million worth of Galaxy S III smartphone sales was a tad on the Sharpshooter Fallacy side.

There was plenty of other marketing going on outside of Facebook, not least the sterling work of 72 and Sunny which will be appearing in many 'best-of' 2012 lists, not to mention some pretty serious demand from existing users upgrading whether Samsung had spent a dollar in Facebook or not.

I've no doubt there was some effect but the 1200% ROI statement is clearly a message to calm anxious Facebook investors - by painting the target around the bulletholes - and 'demonstrating' the supposed validity of Facebook as a game-changing advertising platform, along with it's likelihood to deliver a future big bucks return or other.

But the enthusiasm in which this statement 'proving' the effectiveness of Facebook has been received in the social media 'expert' fraternity and the social media tabloid-esque news sites is comical.

So before any of your hapless marketers, bamboozled by their social media expert advisors start spunking next years marketing budget in one Facebook basket, please remind them about Sturgeon's Revelation, as applied to the social media commentary echo chamber.

90% is total bollocks.

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chair man of the bored

Just a couple of points on the Facebook 90 second film released online yesterday. The ad has been broadly panned by the social media commentators for a variety of banal reasons I wont go into, however I liked the spot before I knew this and the criticism has only served to make me like it more.

It's worth stepping back for a second and remember what this advertising is for.

It's not about acquiring new customers or promoting trial.
It's not about brand awareness.
It's not even any sort of post-purchase rationalisation.

It's no accident that Facebook picked Wieden and Kennedy be agency of record, the next evolution of Facebook, the brand, will have to involve moving it out of the technology and social network categories - how they do that and where it goes will be interesting to watch - but from a comms point of view that's just the kind of emotional storytelling shift that is bread and butter for W&K.

See Nike, Levi's, P&G to name just a couple.

This spot didn't have to be made for any commercial reasons, but works as a kind of celebration of what's been achieved and a look-how-far-we've-come.

Facebook is one of those American dream success stories so perhaps a little hedonic boost is permissible and from a strategic point of view, starting to position Facebook in that same iconic Americana-brand-for-the-world, space like Nike and Levi's is the correct move.

One small note to the writers - it's aeroplane not airplane.

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situations

Here's something I've written for the Digital Pigeon newsletter. It comes out later this week but I thought I'd give a sneak preview here first....

_______________________________________________________

Facebook lessons from the Situationist international

In his 1967 work La Société du spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle) leading Situationist, Guy Debord documented his theory of The Spectacle.

In it, he argued, that through mass media, television, hollywood and emerging technologies, capitalism - perpetrator of The Spectacle - was controlling the conditions of human existence.

In effect, the world we see is not the real world but a world we have been conditioned to see, via an onslaught of images.

The Spectacle's audience simply observe the ‘show’ – ie life - as passive spectators, consumers if you like, without actually participating or experiencing it.

Debord saw the only outcome as Alienation.
The Spectacle made us all spectators. Manipulated into substituting material things for authentic experiences and separated from each other.
Passively consuming the image, the spectacle, together but ultimately isolated from everybody and everything.

Debord and his fellow Situationists felt that "if we can explain how the nightmare works, everyone will wake up!"

However, for the lumpen proletariat to wake up they would need to be active participants in the process.

To that end, a tactic of the Situationist International was the construction of situations.

A constructed situation being a ‘moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and game of events.’

Ironically, as marketers, as ones who in the past have actively perpetrated the Spectacle, through branding and advertising, there are some learnings from the construction of situations we can apply to marketing in the age of social technologies and connectedness.

As a footnote, Debord et al would doubtless be perplexed by the voluntary reification, or self-commoditisation afforded to individuals by Facebook, but that’s another discussion…

So
A situation is designed to be lived by its participants
It’s not just ambience, it’s an integrated ensemble of behavior.

In regard to Facebook fan pages or any type of community building effort it’s important to note that simply amassing vast numbers of fans or followers (ie buying likes) has little or no value.
It’s also important to remember that the destination in Facebook is not the page but the news feed. This is where content (or objects, to use Facebook parlance) is experienced.

An Object is more likely to show up in your News Feed if
you and people you know have been interacting with it or it’s creator, recently.

So social context and quality of interactions are the most important factors for Facebook engagement.

I repeat: social context and quality of interactions.

To describe our lesson in achieving this comes I’m paraphrasing notes on the construction of situations first described in issue one of Situationist International from 1958.

Situations require:

1. A temporary director or orchestrator.
The orchestrator is responsible for coordinating the basic elements necessary in the construction of the situation, and for conducting certain interventions.

In Facebook these are the page admins.
The interventions are simple. Leave no comment unanswered, leave no contribution unthanked and use every opportunity to connect the participants, or constituents with each other.

2. Direct agents
The direct agents living the situation, who have taken part in creating the collective project and worked on the practical composition of the
ambience.

The reason that 90% of social media marketing efforts fail is down to one simple factor.

Marketers and their agencies are married to the notion of the Spectacle.
Otherwise known as launch-and-leave, the defining trait of advertising.

To grow a community, to grow participation the community needs to be constantly fed, prodded, poked, questioned, invited to participate.
There is nothing ingenuine or inauthentic in using direct agents to agitate.

In fact it’s the opposite.
Why should your customers want to get involved and support a situation that the brand and it’s agencies can’t be bothered to live in?

3. Passive spectators
Passive spectators who have not participated in the constructive work, BUT whom can/should be forced into action.

You should be familiar with Nielsen’s Law of Participation Inequality.
Also known as the 90-9-1 rule.

In any online community:
90% of the community will be passive. They will simply watch, spectate and will not contribute.
They are also known a ‘lurkers’.
In many cases they may not even be fans, particularly if you have employed some sort of bribery tactic to attract ‘likes’.

9% will comment, share and edit/remix/modify content.
Likewise these advocates should be welcomed as direct agents (2)

1% will be the power creators (they will create original content, blog posts, videos etc) – these creators should be developed to become orchestrators (1) wherever possible.

In reference to the earlier statement that simply amassing vast numbers of fans or followers (ie buying likes) has little or no value, the objective of amassing fans is to grow the 9% and the 1%. The bigger the pie then the bigger those slices will be.
We’re wired as humans to follow what looks like a good idea.
Good ideas are more often than not those which everyone seems to be doing.
In marketing terms this is the antithesis of spectacle.

There is no situationist art or situationist music or situationist marketing, but only a situationist use of these mediums.
In this case, can using social technologies as a platform for connectedness and value create situations?

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how do you like them apples?

I'm paraphrasing Winston Churchill in reference to the bad news for lazy marketers that Facebook recently issued.

Among the notes is one  to the effect that [brands] must not use Facebook features or functionality, such as the Like button, as a voting mechanism for a promotion.

This is good news for me, in my parallel role of Chief Prevention Officer, as it's one less gimmicky tactic that I have to chase round and try to stop.

'Gentlemen, we have run out of Like buttons.
Now we shall have to THINK'

Thanks to @iboy for the prompt

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brand facebook pages [ghost towns pt2]

'No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof.

If no-one turned around when we entered, answered when we spoke, or minded what we did, but if every person we met cut us dead, and acted as if we were non-existent thgings, a kind of rage and impotent despair would before long well up in us, from which the cruellest bodily torture would be a relief'

William James, The Principles of Psychology (Boston 1890)

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ghost town

'This town is coming like a ghost town'

So said the Specials in '79 and so it goes with the continued fascination with amassing hundreds of 'fans' to branded facebook pages where nothing ever happens.

The Facebook ghost towns.

Wikipedia's description of the ghost town goes along the lines of:

'Factors leading to abandonment of towns include depleted natural resources..roads bypassing or no longer accessing the town...economic activity shifting elsewhere, human intervention such as highway re-routing, and nuclear disasters (such as Chernobyl).'

Nuclear disasters aside all of the above apply to these desolate online spaces.

The avatars are there, for sure. A small glimmer of recognition that human life once inhabited these spaces for one brief 'like' moment.

In the absence of anything to DO, these settlers moved on.

What's the value of a Facebook fan?

Nothing, until you make it valuable.

Facebook fandom in an unactualised state is simply a low level permission asset, a bunch of people who don't particularly mind being spammed or opportunists happy to recieve free product.

Like most cases of shiny object syndrome, it's a case of technology for technologies sake.

Give it purpose, some meaning and a shared goal. Give those fans something to DO.
A reason to be connected to the brand, and to each other then theres the chance for all that potential fandom to be realised.

Better still, is find the community that already exists, that already has purpose and already has a goal. Find them and help them get to where they want to be by being useful.

So, how do we get people to engage with [our brand]?
How about, how does [our brand] engage with people?

'Do you remember the good old days before the ghost town?
We danced and sang as the music played inna de boomtown...'

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who killed bambi?

Poor X Factor winner Joe McElderry, robbed of his moment in the Christmas spotlight by a bunch of grungers from more than a decade past.

Gentle pretty thing
Who only had one spring
You bravely faced the world
Ready for anything

One cannot argue with the numbers:
X Factor with around 4 months of prime time telly pulling in 19million for the final show and uncalculable mainstream media coverage via daytime tv, newspapers etc rustled up 450,000 sales of Bambi’s ditty.

Versus

The Rage Against The Machine's 'fan' driven ‘campaign’ built up initially on Facebook with around 750,000 sign-ups where around 500,000 followed through with their 79p. In any marketing-speak; as a conversion rate it looks good.

What’s also interesting is that the X Factor itself had a sizeable social media backchannel through the duration, particularly real-time commentary on Twitter.

The idea to subvert the Christmas chart spread like wildfire because it adhered to some of the basic principles of ‘viral-ness’.

1 - It was easy to understand – buy the track within a certain time frame, if enough people do it, it will achieve it’s goal.

2 - It polarised opinion – You are eitheir ‘for’ or ‘against’ the idea.

3 - It was easy to participate – there was only a couple of things to do, pass on the idea and buy the song.

4 - It’s all about me – The participants have to WANT it to spread, participation makes a social statement about ME (I’m about proper music vs manufactured pop).

Meanwhile every Tom, Dick, Harry and Social Media Expert jumps on the Rage ‘victory’ as being vindication and proof of the corresponding ‘victory’ of social media over broadcast media ‘marketing’.

While it’s another case study in the continuing shift in control from broadcaster/brand to the users - and both wee Joe and RATM playing the role of social objects in a groundswell - from a music perspective it’s a bit depressing.

I made my peace with the X Factor some months ago once I realised it had nothing whatsoever to do with music.

As in life, in that for there to be good there must be corresponding evil, so also for there to be music there must be anti-music.

When I was a nipper we had a saying about Top of the Pops – ‘every Thursday until you die’. Tip of the Poops died out first, but the likes of X Factor are it’s natural replacement.

The Top 40 was the last bastion of the TOTP era, this latest subversion is surely one of the final nails in it’s coffin.

But If I were a Rage fan I’d be a bit miffed at ‘my band’ being reduced to mere spectacle, The biggest selling song of the year, yet any meaning reduced to it’s ‘symbolic’ interplay as a social device in a cod-situationist spoof.

The irony, of course, being that a 5th consecutive Christmas number one from the Cowell stable is not much of a story. This weeks events made sure that X Factor was still newsworthy.

So what happens next?

Bambi will surely be number one next week as – in another irony – the social media ‘campaign’ fireworks burst and go dark.

And we look forward to another 51 weeks of corporate hip hop, sanitised r’n'b, careerist pop and wishy-washy do-gooder rock at the top of the charts.

Which no proper music fan pays attention to anyway.



In 1977 when the Sex Pistols released their single ‘God Save the Queen’ it entered the UK chart at number one . That week the top 40 was the the Top 39 as the chart publishers refused to even list the song that had polarised a nation in the Queen’s Silver Jubilee week.

But then, you knew I was going to dig that one out...

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comments...

Heres the thing. Theres a few readers here - theres 40-odd in the facebook group, plus I know that about a hundred that come here on and off via blog-friends, twitter and facebook. Not exactly A-list numbers but a few none the less. I get the odd comment in this space but now the majority of comments are coming via email, facebook mail or DM tweets rather than on the blog. Its great to get feedback in any form but it does get a bit lonely round here with no actual comments, and makes it look a bit like I'm talking to myself, which is not actually the case. I'm pondering...

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'Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with the important matters'

Something about Facebook's social ads thing doesn't smell quite right to me.

Yes, a referral or recommendation from a trusted source/friend is worth a million ads, but the key word in there is trust. Its got to be genuine to have any meaning.

So I add myself as a 'fan' of a particular brand and give them permission to market to my friends on facebook via my updates in the news feed. i don't see much revolutionary thinking in this, it's the same old intrusive model except now the individual is the advertising channel.

Trusted sources? Listen, its probably the 3 strikes rule if you start spamming me.
After all, for me anyway, a decent percentage of my 'friends' on facebook are fairly vague acquaintances whom I've connected with via this blog, their blogs, twitter or met at social or business events etc. I can just about tolerate the majority of zombie bites or sheep being thrown but I 'll draw the line at flogging stuff.
And to think, we all had a good laugh at get paid to twitter.

Its not the same as genuine referral because it's the advertiser controlling,
we trust our friends precisely because they do not spam us like this (and if they start they won't be 'friends' for too much longer methinks)

For a start, the early adopters where this is initially targeted at
will more than likely utilise the blocking mechanism ie opting out of social ads.

How will these brands sign up fans anyway? banners? ads? bribery?

Here's an idea. What if brands spent more time trying to make their products, services and (yikes) even their ADVERTISING so good and so cool that people genuinely want to rave about them?

And for Facebook theres the trust question too. Beware the fickle users of social platforms...

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Facebook group

Theres now a facebook group for this blog.
Feel free to join if you like and meet/share etc with other readers
and, of course, pimp your own stuff.
See you over there.

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