I won the Oscar for Least Surprising use of Header Image.
So, I've been mucking around with online finance recently, which has been making me think about the world of finance at large, and recent developments that might be signposting the way for an industry that seems to be - finally - waking up to the fact it's the 21st Century.
It took long enough for banks to get their act together and offer proper, robust online banking. It's taken an equally long time to get apps onto the market. Most of them are... okay, I guess, letting you check your balances and whatnot. But they're all blown out of the water by Mint, a fantastic product out in the US and Canada. Mint doesn't just show you one account, like official bank apps do. Instead, it pulls your data - encrypted, certified and read-only - from all your financial operations and combines them in an easily digestible format. This not only helps you understand, well, just how much money you have collectively and where it is, but also keeps you up to date on the minutae most of us don't quite get around to managing: interest payments, budgeting, and breakdown of spend on activities. When you're then able to aggregate that all on a mobile app, it's a great tool for spot-checking whether you can afford that new desirable shiny.
In an age of being fucking broke austerity, I think it's a pretty good value offer to allow your customers more control and transparency over their cash. Even though people might be feeling helpless, that probably means that they're looking for better ways to live within their means. We live in a world of data and representations of data. The smart money is, well... smart. Putting this kind of intelligent power in consumer's hands, and taking advantage of new channels (especially mobile) in order to do it, is going to be super-important in an age of wavering customer loyalty. Give people a reason to stick around, y'know? Or, like me, you'll miss out on getting that sort of information to other people, like LoveMoney, which is sort of like Mint for the UK, but lacking (at least for now) a mobile app. I can't tell you how useful LoveMoney's MoneyTrack service has already proven in getting a better grip on where I'm spending.
(That deficit is planned and well under control, by the way, thank you very much.)
Now obviously, most banks that are single institutions can't just dip into other competing banks' records like Mint or LoveMoney does. However, we're finally seeing some innovation from Barclays in the form of PingIt. This is a pretty interesting development, because it dips its toe into the rapidly-developing market of mobile payments - something that is set to explode very soon with the rise of NFC and services like Square. The UK's ultra-conservative finance industry has predictably lagged well behind not only the pioneers of tech in California, but also the pioneers of necessity in Africa and South Asia.
It's a fascinating little thing: its premise is allowing you to send money to phone numbers, rather than accounts. Of course, it only works if the recipient also has the app, and currently only if they are also Barclays customers. But it's stolen a hell of a march on the competition - and once it opens up to being able to connect to any UK account, it'll be a service with significant clout. Of course, I wouldn't be me if I wasn't getting geekishly excited about all the data analysis you could do here, geolocation and check-in based in particular. For illustration, please consider how much money is invested in supermarket aisle layout. Now imagine understanding not only the immediate data points, such as times of repayment and your social graph, but also where those payments are coming from and how that might dovetail in to broader media strategies. Looking at the permissions requested from the app, I reckon Barclays are probably thinking along the same lines.
As well as the trend toward management of finances and mobile payments, the recent launch of Virgin Finance showed us how the future of banking - and perhaps retail in general - might look. This is their flagship 'bank', in Manchester:
It's pretty apparent that, like Square, the approach from Virgin is that digital conduits mean less clutter. Branson apparently smashed the glass screen separating teller from customer in the launch with a sledgehammer. A PR stunt, of course, but nonetheless carrying a message: that the days of a binary customer relationship are numbered. It's not 'us and them', it's 'we'. Sounds fluffy? Well, I suppose so. But there's a serious point underneath it, which is that the consumer experience is going to evolve to become precisely that: an experience.
The coupling of more demanding customers - see coffee shops in Waterstones - and technological presets that can disrupt the clone-like formats of current shops are leading to a thought process that centres far more around the consumer, like the outlets of old. The more pleasant a premises is and the longer people stay in it, the more likely they are to buy something and the greater loyalty you foster against ferocious competition. It's only with wireless technology and digital advancements that this particular breed of shop is becoming viable - but just watch this space. I expect tech to lead the way; you could argue Apple's stores are halfway there, but finance is an ideal sector for this as well. Banks that don't look or act like banks are a far more appealing prospect than waiting in line to be served by someone behind glass who you can't particularly hear because the mic is on the blink. Expect to see more walk-in-and-sit-down stores, with staff trained as much in hospitality as sales. Expect to be beguiled and made to feel at home. Expect to see shelves and racks and tills disappear as assistants wander the floor with wireless payment services. Not tomorrow, perhaps, but not too far in the future either.
Lastly, it's weird that we live in a world where I can't easily send money to someone in America despite being able to video chat with them in real time. Someone should probably fix that.
Well, not really new. Anyone with an eye on the right sites will know about Pinterest, which has been knocking around since mid-2010. However, it stuck itself seewhatIdidthere into the market late last year. And now - well, now it has 10 million unique users, apparently the quickest ever site to do so.
How did it manage this? In my opinion, because it had superb timing. Facebook Timeline, and the recent deluge of apps and API-created edges that are based around 'self-expression', as Pinterest calls it, are getting a certain group of people pretty used to frictionless hyper-sharing. It's no small group, either. However, none of these apps had really been quite so effective in the way that Pinterest is. Half because they were either focusing on other or too many things, and half because Pinterest really nailed the central conceit, right down to the metaphysical name.
You'll find plenty of people to talk about how great Pinterest is, but what's initially fascinating is its ability to audience profile. Take a look at this:
Image credit: Techcrunch
That's an awfully specific geo-demographic in areas not traditionally considered tech hubs. It's also well-documented that the biggest adopters are women aged 25-44. Pinterest can take well-defined audiences like this and package them whole to advertisers, who in turn can reach those people via channels they may often be blind to, and with all the opportunities that go with digital-specific delivery. That alone wouldn't make it special, though, nor even would the viral element that clever brands may be able to tap in to (depending on what products Pinterest is developing).
No, what I really, really like is the underlying associative patterns. Pinterest might call it self-expression, I (and many others) call it an interest graph. ReadWriteWeb had an interesting article that captured it quite well:
A social graph is a digital map that says, "This is who I know." It may reflect people who the user knows in various ways: as family members, work colleagues, peers met at a conference, high school classmates, fellow cycling club members, friend of a friend, etc. Users send reciprocal invites to those they know, in order to map out and maintain their social ties.
An interest graph is a digital map that says, "This is what I like." As Twitter's CEO has remarked, if you see that I follow the San Francisco Giants on Twitter, that doesn't tell you if I know the team's players, but it does tell you a lot about my interest in baseball.
There are plenty of services that can tell you what their customers are interested in on their own site, such as Amazon. What is more difficult is to deliver that at scale and beyond the confines of your own digital properties. Ad networks do it by embedding cookies, which is good but imperfect. As for social networks, it's a great unfulfilled promise. Facebook, for example, can tell you oodles about the social graph, but interests are rocky at best. Practices such as incentivized ads rapidly make user pools homogenous as everyone Likes the same things in exchange for Facebook Credits. Add to this the problems inherent in categorizing fan-made likes, having certain popular items making rankings top-heavy, and the throwaway nature of Likes in general, and soon it can become difficult to filter interests in a meaningful way. Overindexing can help, but it's limited.
However, the Open Graph (more graphs!) may change that, as apps gain the ability to read other public app activity. One would start with Social Graph data on your customer base, gathered through Facebook Connect, and then twin it with Interest Graph data from an app that itself connects to Facebook. And there's nothing to say that Pinterest will be the only one worth turning to: if you were a travel company, you could access public content from all those 'where I've been' apps. The self-curation element of 'Interest Apps', coupled with the right level of specificity, trumps Likes any day. Essentially, Facebook becomes an open information resource, fuelled by APIs and semi-automated profiling.
The question remains, of course, so what? Well, the promise of the interest graph - which is still yet to be delivered to a market that is more than ready for it - is being able to pre-emptively ascertain associative interests without any testing whatsoever. In other words, you know that x indicates a strong preference for y and z. Sure, stuff like this exists in research agencies already, but not particularly granulated and certainly not automated. It's also siloed: analysts might pick through dozens of, say, holiday destinations, but the framework just doesn't exist to link that information to information about, for example, clothing. It's all inferrance and I bet it misses a hell of a lot of detail.
Couple that sort of knowledge with the Social Graph, which helps you figure out interrelationships, attribution and influences, and suddenly you're looking at something that lets you pick any individual demographic profile and flesh it out in any direction, even the counterintuitive or improbable. This combined understanding could then be used to define media homes, comms strategies and niche demographics. And when it came to delivery, cross-referencing this knowledge with Social Graph connections and live multivariate testing would allow you to deliver content for maximum footprint across both digital and traditional channels.
Behold, Diet Coke’s limited edition can design for September. Clean, sharp, but with a lovely weighting of the text. Check out the bowl curve on the inner line of the D, and the sleekness of the descending swash – especially contrasted to the apex curve of the K. Quite lovely.
Marketers, stop this at once. If you keep insisting that food is our best mate then you will be to blame when we all turn to the logical conclusion of cannibalism.
Who else is fed up (aha!) of this stuff? Isn’t it faintly ridiculous that we have a fruit malt loaf insinuating itself up against us, rubbing its sultanas in our face? The Soreen example features particularly bad copy – cringeingly effusive – but it’s hardly the only offender. These days you can’t move for gormlessly enthusiastic text making liberal use of the first person pronoun. TRY ME AS A SNACK, my Minibix screams. What if I don’t want to eat something that is capable of cogito ergo sum?
I expect that the next stage will be a sharp ricochet back into premium positioning. The situation as it is untenable, and with sales of accessible premium food soaring it’s only going to be a matter of time until brands of all creeds start to look for the new way to stand out, which I suspect may involve a lot of Futura, tilt shift and block colours.
In the meantime, Innocent smoothies have a lot to answer for.
At about 10:15am Tuesday morning, I swear I noticed a mysterious black bar spanning the top of my Google search results. It vanished on my next, half-automatic click, and was lost and gone. Now, we know what that was. Google is on the social warpath again.
It’s called Google+, and I don’t want to dedicate excessive words to how it works: there are lots of goodsources for that. I want to look at the stuff going on behind the scenes.
Google+ is made up of Circles, Huddle, Sparks, Hangouts, Upload and Mobile. To describe things loosely:
Circles is probably the most immediately interesting part of G+. It’s a drag-and-drop group creation tool that ultimately forms, let’s be candid, a potential Facebook competitor (video). It’s obviously a way more streamlined – the Chrome to Facebook’s Firefox, if you like. It also addresses one of the key problems Facebook has, which is content overdose.
Once you start going over a certain number of friends, checking your status feed can be kind of a chore. To its credit, Facebook has tried to counter this by adding both manual and automatic filters. Trouble is, manual ones are unbelievably arduous to set, even to someone like me who doesn’t recoil at submenus. As for the automatic ones, well, they’re under fire for that as well.
Circles appears to make this a pretty painless experience at both ends.The other nice thing about Circles is that, because of its ability to tightly curate your own audiences, it has more flexibility than Facebook’s occasionally all-or-nothing approach (or manually adjusting settings for each new friend) – meaning that people might be a little more open. If I can easily assign someone to content-limited feeds – a new colleague, or promising date (or both, amirite) – without yet exposing my obsessive love of [whatever], then I may be more inclined to do that.
Huddle is basically focused, ad-hoc group chat (video). It’s not a new idea, but fulfils an essential role within social communications. You only need to look at the success of BlackBerry’s BBM service, which is a chief driver of adoption, to know that this functionality is in high demand. In fact, RIM are probably going to be pretty pissed off, as their struggle to survive will not be helped by cheap Android phones taking away one of its key USPs. More on Android in a bit…
Sparks is a content discovery engine. Essentially, it learns what you like and delivers it to you (video). The main purpose of this for Google is to get people using the service – something they have previously struggled with a lot in social. It’s telling that they have a second video to demonstrate how.
Hangouts (video!) is a multi-user chat room. It’s basically Huddle with webcams. The important difference with Hangouts is that people can flag themselves as passively, uh, hanging out, and ready to chat at any point. Like being logged in to a messaging service.
Upload and mobile I want to deal with together (video and video). In a nutshell, Google is providing a full, cloud-based communications suite straight out of the box. Use Huddle to get group together, take pictures, upload them to cloud, and have them distributed on Circles. It’s a compelling sell, but then, so were Wave and Buzz. And this is where I want to talk about what Google is doing differently.
King Chrome
It’s all about this guy. You’ve seen the Chromebook, right? Google is making a serious play for the OS market – one that’s never quite seemed to hang together. Until now. Google+ makes sense of the cloud-based, app-driven strategy: it’s about linking up with Android devices, and Google+ is the missing piece of the puzzle.
Google is looking to build a Chrome ecosystem just as Apple built their own iOS ecosystem. You had an iMac, so you get an iPod, and then it just makes sense to get an iPhone when the decision comes, because they’re designed to work together. Thing is, Chrome has a ridiculous rate of growth in mobile: today they announced they activate 500,000 Android devices every day. That’s half a million. Every day. That’s a whole lot of Google-friendly devices, and the company is really starting to plough resource into bolstering Honeycomb for tablets and next-gen mobiles.
On the more technical side of things, Google also today rolled out a Flash-to-HTML5 converter and new webfonts and design layout. Any one of these announcements would be pretty big news; together, they signpost a glaringly obvious power play. The emphasis on clean usability takes a lot of cues from Apple (indeed, Google have an ex-Apple designer anchoring the team), and it’s clear that Google are keen to solve the problem they’ve always had with social: getting people to actually use the damn thing.
It’s worth remembering here that Google’s Eric Schmidt just got back from Cannes, where he said that results from the company’s tearjerking Superbowl ad ‘shocked’ them. Seriously? Anyway, it’s become clear that Google is now slinging a lot of investment into marketing. I mean, check out how many videos they’ve made just for this release, big though it is. Indeed, check out their second, equally something-in-my-eye advert from earlier this year, along with all the other (more offbeat) stuff they’ve been producing.
But it’s not just straight marketing. Google are clearly taking pains to actively involve their users in the product. When Wave came out, it was amazing. It still is, and it’s still way ahead of its time. But it never made sense to actually use the product; it wasn’t integrated into existing operations in any meaningful way. Google could have started off by targeting businesses, who are crying out for solid, stable multi-editing software – but they didn’t. They kicked it around halfheartedly and never put the drive behind it, assuming people like me who found it awesome would naturally pick it up. Well, I’m a person like me and I haven’t used Wave more than twice ever. With Google+, I’m already seeing how it fits in with my life.
The Life Googlyic
This is the last point I want to make. Google is positioning Google as a lifestyle. Preposterous? Not when you feature vegan baking in one of your promotional videos. Not in red-meat America. Look at those videos again: biking, ‘epic bros’, nerding out, ‘gastronauts’. There’s a guy who uses ‘like’ as, like, punctuation? And the videos link to the Arcade Fire after they finish.
Google are plucking at the strings of a relatively new social demographic: the aspirant geek. Tech-savvy, young, beautiful and hip (not to mention ripe for parody), these people are super-connected, well educated, and not overly careful with money. They’re also into fitness, clean living, doing good and trying to have the quirkiest fun under the sun. Oh, and they hate what everyone else is doing, because they were doing it years ago and it’s so orthodox now. Like San Francisco above, they mix the metropolitan with the bucolic, and to hell with the dissonance. Anyway, dissonance is cool.
Google has made the effort to reject the current framework set by Facebook. In an early Google+ posting, Zee Kane of The Next Web asks,
Interesting that Google decided to replace @ with + when you want to mention someone. e.g +Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten . Anyone know why? (specific post here)
I think I do. To use @ (even though Twitter invented it), like, or even a thumbs-up symbol, would be a tacit submission to Facebook’s reality. And that’s not what Google wants to create. It wants its own ecosystem, with its own rules, populated by Android users on Android devices using Google apps to co-ordinate their lives. It wants to be cooler than Facebook. It wants to do social in the same way that Apple wants to do… well, anything. That is to say, better. And with this more holistic, integrated approach, Google+ is already making a lot more sense than Buzz or Wave ever did.
So look out, world. Google have the talent, the team, enough money to buy a small planet, and – for the first time – the direction.
Digital marketers, we need to talk about this. Participation is not always a good idea – indeed, unless it’s one of those magical concepts that simply works, most of the time it’s downright bad (seriously, Amoy?).
Participation is supposed to tick the ‘brand engagement’ box, one of the nebulous-at-best marketing metrics that’s very much in vogue in the digital era, and which can mean anything from clicking a static banner ad to playing a game on Facebook. It’s supposed to associate your brand with fun, interactivity, modernity. It’s supposed to encourage loyalty and advocacy.
But it almost always doesn’t.
See, the thing is that people are not very good at this stuff. That’s why there are super-competitive agencies stacked full of paid professionals to do it instead. You wouldn’t crowdsource advice for your tax returns.
The other thing is that there are always ingenious bastards ready to eviscerate even the most well-intentioned and most-controlled iterations. I’m talking the people who will always find ways to draw a giant penis – or, as EasyJet found out today, find even more inventive ways to cause grief.
In some ways, though, marketers who are guilty of oversharing just save the rest of us the trouble of knowing who is getting a bit too carried away with social.
This video is doing the rounds at the minute, showing someone squeezing far more out of the iPad’s Garage Band app than most people would anticipate possible. But this won’t really be surprising to anyone who spends a certain amount of time on the internet.
Given the right tools – even really basic ones – users will always, eventually, outperform developers’ wildest expectations. Whether it’s a game like Minecraft, a technology like the X-Box Kinect, a real-life activity like parkour or software like Garage Band, someone will come along who blows everyone else out of the water. All developers and marketers have to do is bridge all the gaps that get between creating and sharing content. The rest will promote itself.
The title of this post would probably fetch me some very dubious looks from most people. And it deserves it. Measuring social media is hard, bro. Measuring social is particularly hard when you’ve not got some sort of KPI (that’s Key Performance Indicator to the uninitiated) to achieve. There is, after all, a lot of ignorance about social.
I mean this in the nicest possible way. It’s the same way I’m ignorant about fax machines: it’s simply not something I have ever had inclination nor reason to try to understand (apologies if I am making anyone feel old). Social media is, at best, on the periphery of many people’s awareness. It’s something that happens to other people, which of course can make it a complete nightmare when all of a sudden you get a brief from a client who knows almost nothing about it.
