The Digital Customer exposes the need for value in all interactions

We already have digital versions of ourselves populating our increasingly digital world: Your Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter profiles, your Amazon and Google footprints are all examples.
For the most part they are not yet autonomous. But it cannot be long before the 'MeBot' - an autonomous and intelligent you - becomes a ubiquitous part of our daily interaction with people, things and data.
All of which strongly suggests that brands and organisations must start developing strategies that place the digital customer at their heart.
Let me be clear, that digital version of you will always be informed by and learning from the real you. But increasingly it will be the digital rather than analogue version of you who will be making the transactions (tilting, as these thing are, to online more heavily by the day).
And if Digital You has got the spends - Digital You is going to be the target.
So what does advertising/targeting/relationship-building/comms/PR/you-name-it look like when it is aimed at our MeBot?
Well - I suspect MeBot's will rapidly learn which lies to ignore, which content sources to trust, which deals are for-real. They may even be less swayed by the Herd mentality humans find it so hard to resist (think of the impact on the Stock Markets...).
This is likely to starkly expose some of the realities and truths of relationships of trust - such as...

1. Customers are not inhabitants of your omnichannels waiting to be managed from one to the next. They live in a 4D world with limitless touchpoints. The analogue digital combination will evidence that by the truck-load. Map that!
2. Customers are not waiting to be engaged, made your friend, or have anything else 'done' to them. They need a reason to interact with you... which leads us to point 3.
3. Customers are not loyal. Forget loyalty - focus on proof of value. Unless you are offering a good enough value proposition your wheels will just keep on spinning.

Clay Shirky on humanising brands

Today I'm pleased to share part III of my interview with Here Comes Everybody author Clay Shirky (recorded in London on September 30 at the offices of Incisive Media).
It is part of a 35min interview.

Parts one: 'How algorithms caused the credit crunch'
and two: 'Why email trumps facebook et al'
can already be found on this blog (dated Oct 1 and 2, 2008).

In part three Clay discusses the different qualities of interaction required to humanise brands - and how creatives can welcome collaboration rather than seal it out.
As Clay puts it: "Brands aren't people. They don't interact. People do."
And he warns creatives who seek perfection in their campaigns: "Something cleaned up right to the edges has no room for me. Perfection says, you don't belong here."
Clay's contention is messiness is human and acts as a welcome matt for interaction.

Watch the video below:
See him in person here. Buy his book, here.

P2PR : The real online public relations

Had a brief chat with an interesting chap in online PR yesterday. He reckons the industry needs some good PR of its own - and that could be aided by the right language.
How do you distinguish between people doing traditional PR using digital means (ie sucking up to bloggers rather than print or digital journalists) and those who get the disruptive fundamentals of the power of network and understand how messages spread now.

Why Traditional Ad Models will not work in social networks (and what will...)

view presentation (tags: advertising networks social marketing)

I have a thought: Instead of sitting in the Online PR silo, perhaps the new kids need to distinguish themselves with the descriptor P2PR.
I can't be the first to put those letters and numbers in that order, surely?

Whatever the case...

What does P2PR stand for? What would the group you are reaching out to like it to mean?
Peer-to-Peer Relations(hips),
Person-to-Person Relations(hips),
Publisher-to-Publisher Relations(hips). (We are all publishers now!)

The Online bit is way less important than the P2P bit of PR anyway. It's all about the people and what they do to each other.
Marketing (of whatever form) is not a process of doing things to people. It is what they do to each other.

So, for me, P2PR is the right approach for the networked world.

We are the connections. We are also how the connections are made.


Don't bother trying to register the url. It's already rather tediously taken... but I have squatted on the blogspot address!

How we are made great - part II

 

The graph above is from Louis Gray, via Stowe Boyd.

In part I of How We Are Made Great I argue it is other people that make us or an idea great - other people and their mass behaviour.
Louis argues that bloggers' interactions with their communities and their reaching out to other communities reduces as they become more established.

He's on the money, for me, of course. I discussed similar themes in It's Not How Famous You Are, It's How Relevant
And detailed more risks for those with an abundance of attention, here.

Here's Louis' list of interaction types (together with my use of them).

• Allowing blog comments (yep)
  
• Responding to blog comments (oh yes)
  
• Commenting on FriendFeed about your blog (er sorry,... more laziness than attitude)
  
• Tweeting links to your blog posts (yes)
  
• Digging your blog (again, I'm a little lazy when it comes to self promotion)
  
• Stumbling your blog (see above)
  
• Pimping your blog on others' blogs (yes, in as much as I comment on other blogs and invite bloggers to come by mine to join in conversations here).

In general I try to focus on the ones that are less directly promotional in the traditional sense (digg, stumbleupon) and more on a meeting of minds - where I believe the real promotion happens anyway - comments, responding, reaching out to individuals.

Those who roll back on this are actually putting their fame and status at risk, in my view. They're certainly putting the brakes on its growth.

And when they do this they reduce both their value to their community and the communities value to themselves (I am made greater by my connections, so are my connections, Stowe Boyd)

There's no idea that doesn't get better from sharing.

So I think there's one key interaction missing from Louis' list:

• Tracking who is writing about what you've blogged and commenting on their take on it, on their blogs.

Which is kind of why this is How We Are Made Great Part II and not just a comment on Louis' blog. Hope he'll discover us and join in?

So, to summarize parts I and II:

We are made great by other people. And in order to be selected for greatness we must interact with other people.

Type 4 bloggers would do well to remember how and why they got to be raised upon our shoulders.

As I concluded on /Message in Part I:

"Go careful when you claim responsibility. Remember all those times you tried to turn the flock and nothing happened - or it turned in the opposite direction?

"You were just as responsible then.We make us great."