Paul Isakson

It's Not What You Say That Matters

Being that one of the main tenets of social media is sharing, I thought it was only appropriate that I share part of how we've been talking about social media with various people.*

As I'm sure you have been reading and hearing, there is more and more chatter about looking at people's behaviors within social media, not just the tools and technology. That's the main point of this presentation—focusing on behaviors and what people are doing.

Anyway, for many of you, being as active in this area as you are, I'm sure most of this is just a review. Either way, I'd love to know what you think...

*This is generally the first 1/2 to 1/3 of what we present. The rest is custom/specific to the audience/client.

Fish Where The Fish Are... Or Not

Flickr // CaptPiper

Saturday, Matt Dickman wrote a post which triggered a comment from me, due to another person's comment in reaction to Matt's post. I thought that given the length of my comment, it was worth cleaning up a bit and posting here.

The comment that triggered this brought up the idea of "fishing where the fish are" as an appropriate excuse to jump into tactics before knowing your strategy. This saying has become fairly popular among social media fans thanks to Jeremiah Owyang and his brief presentation on "fishing where the fish are" as an analogy for approaching social media. (Of course the planners reading this will likely recall Jeff Goodby's ideas about planners being the equivalent of fishing guides in Jon Steel's Truth, Lies & Advertising.)

Now, to be fair, I think the point Jeremiah was trying to make was to get out and understand people's behaviors in social media before doing anything in the space, which I agree with. But, the so-called social media gurus have taken this in another direction. They love to make people think that EVERYONE is in social media these days. They work hard to convince clients that they just HAVE to be there. Thanks to Jeremiah's line, they now throw out the "you've got to fish where the fish are" idea in an attempt to convince them.

Well, maybe this is where the fish are, maybe it isn't. It really depends on what kind of fish you're looking for.

One of the biggest mistakes several of these social media experts make is assuming "everyone" is like them and spends all day and night in all the same places they do. You can see it in their blog posts and presentations. They draw up diagrams showing how people are using all of these various tools, making it look like everyone writes a blog, updates their Facebook status constantly, Tweets their life away, posts photos on Flickr, Facebook and Posterous simultaneously through their iPhone, keeps a Tumblr just for fun, makes a little YouTube video every now and then and bookmarks everything they like and then some on Delicious.

Hmmm. Something smells kind of fishy here, don't you think? Now let's look at Facebook as just an example...

Yes, there are over 250 million people on Facebook and some of them are doing a lot of posting and sharing. But what not many people talk about is that this also means there are about 6.5 billion people on this planet who are not on Facebook.

Further, let's say you're dealing with a client who is only looking to do something with their marketing in the United States. By Facebook's statistics, only about 30% of their users are from the U.S. That means there are roughly 230,000,000 people in the U.S. who again, are not on Facebook. To put it another way, there are just about as many people in the United States who are not on Facebook as there are people who are on Facebook throughout the entire world.

Given all of that, it's very likely that a majority of a lot of companies' fish aren't on Facebook, or any other social media platform for that matter. This is why, to the point of Matt's post, if you start planning your marketing around tactics based on where the fish aren't, it simply doesn't matter.

What Matt is trying to emphasize in his post is that we need to always remember to stay focused on the bigger picture before we start diving into tactics. Once we have the bigger picture figured out and the right strategies in place to connect what people are doing to our client's business objectives, then we can start figuring out the exact details—be they social media driven or not.

It's like a post by Seth Godin that another person pointed out in the comments to Matt's post - we have to stop building weak strategies around shiny tactics and then saying the strategy failed when really we didn't think too much about the strategy at all because we were too blinded by the bright shiny tactic.

To wrap this all up, I don't want people to think I am putting down doing things in social media. I think clients need to be paying attention to it and trying (appropriate) things for sure. I just also think we all need to use a bit of common sense when approaching the social media space and make sure that what we're doing is the right thing based on the behaviors of the people we're trying to connect with.

Anyway, I think that's probably enough now and it certainly covers what I was mostly saying over on Techno//Marketer...

Ideas Are Awesome

Some of you may have noticed that sometime last April, we (space150 – where I work) quietly launched ideas are awesome. Now that we've got some momentum behind it, I thought I'd share more about it here.

In February we were debating what to do with the agency blog. It was kind of just poking along as people didn't have a lot of time on their hands to contribute to it regularly. So we decided to start thinking about what else we could do that would fit well with our culture and allow us to share some of it with others.

In looking at a common behavior within the agency—people sending out agency-wide emails about something new, cool or interesting for discussion, often at the same time, if not before a lot of the leading trend blogs picked it up—a small group of us decided that a site that took advantage of this already existing behavior and documented it would be very worthwhile for us and our clients at a minimum.

Around that same time, I had been giving a presentation to various clients of ours on key themes for connecting with people to look at for 2009. Putting the presentation together took a decent amount of time, as you can imagine, and in going through it a few times, we realized that it could be used to guide this new agency blog's categories.

So far this seems to have worked out pretty well. By using Tumblr to power it, people are able to quickly put up a post with whatever it is they came across. In addition to the site, we've also created a Twitter account for it where we currently have the site feed to, but we'll be doing more with in the very near future (I'll announce that shortly here as well).

Anyway, wanted to share with you so you could check it out if you already haven't. Please let us know what you think—feel free to leave any comments or thoughts here. Also, here's the presentation I mentioned earlier in case you're curious as to what was behind the themes/categories...

Why The New CP+B Site Matters

There are plenty of opinions on the new Crispin Porter + Bogusky site. Not shocking really for an agency that prides itself on creating work that gets talked about. Now we can more easily see just how much it's getting talked about and by whom.

The opinions vary, of course. People who have been using social media tools and platforms for a while think it's "soooooo 6 months ago" or maybe even longer. Others like to say they got there first, or some other agency did. This isn't new. It's an old game. When Skittles created their new site, people said they copied Modernista! When Modernista! changed their site, people said they copied Zeus Jones. And so on, and so forth.

While all of that is true, it doesn't matter really.

What matters is that Crispin has now done it. Arguably the world's top creative agency, and one of significant size, has turned their site into a dashboard of what people say about them—and if you follow what people say about them, you'll know it's not nearly all kind words. The good, the bad and the ugly, all right there for the world to read. Why this matters further is that now, other big companies and agencies will consider it. Some will even tell their agencies they want it.

If everyone really wants to create the kind of change that we all keep talking about, we need big, well-known companies and agencies to start doing things like this. If it's only the small shops, consultants and the like, we'll never get there. Most big companies and agencies need to see other big companies and agencies doing new things before they are willing to give it a try. It's another game that never changes—a handful of companies lead the way for the rest of the world to follow.

No matter what you think of it, just be glad they did it. It's one step toward making a lot of what several of us have been pushing for a whole lot easer.

the interwebs, by Clay Parker Jones

The above presentation is a bit of smart thinking from Clay that I thought was worth passing along. You can get the back-story for the preso on his blog.

Nice work Clay, and thanks for the note in your post.