The cutting edge of social media is offline. Businesses have become increasingly lost in cyberspace. They have forgotten that users are still walking around in the real world.
In my consultancy I see a lot of people forgetting the two most important things about social media: 1. Digital experiences can still be part of the real world. 2. Social media doesn’t have to be digital.
Social Media is a naked communication medium. There is no ad agency making your adverts, no journalist writing an article about you. It’s just you and your customer, staring straight into each other’s eyes. If you are growing your own e-commerce website then everything you do will be focused on increasing conversion rates, basket sizes and margins.
There are lots of practical things that you can do to improve these metrics. Many of which are ordinarily covered on this blog. But what I want to discuss today is how people are attracted to your site in the first place.
We are in the middle of one the biggest economic shifts since the Industrial Revolution. The Information Age is rapidly being replaced by the Relationship Age a new era grounded in technology but focused on people. And it’s happening too fast for anyone to see.
I call this new era the Relationship Age because we will see businesses that nurture their relationships thrive and those that don’t die off. What look like changes in technology today are actually changes in human behaviour.
It took me a while to figure out the difference between a planner, strategist and consultant. I asked some friends for advice about what a strategist is and what makes a good strategist.
What does a strategist actually do?
A couple of interesting comments and additions have filtered in that add to the conversation from the last post on what is a strategist. I’ve included them below:
A strategist cuts through the ‘noise’ to realise true value.
– Dorenda Britten, Managing Director
A strategists develops “strategies”. Which implies taking both broader scope and longer time than most functional or operational decision-making and analysis does. A strategists identifies the gaps from the current situation to the desired long-term outcomes, and defines the key levers of change. They then recommend appropriate ‘settings’ for these levers, prioritising them. A key component of strategy is what is excluded, what doesn’t fit with the recommended approach.
– George Arnold, Programme Manager
A strategist is akin to acting as an internal management consultant – but in the real world.
– Simon Leitch, Head of Sales
A strategist sets the trajectory of an idea and puts a blueprint for its delivery is motion.
– Louis Gordon-Latty, Project Manager
A strategist is like a doctor, we need to understand your symptoms, which we then use to build a picture of what you need to do to get where you want to go. And like Doctors, we learn about the typical illnesses and how to troubleshoot unknown causes through experience & research.
– Ben Young, Marketing Director
What makes a good strategist?
A good strategist, like a good doctor, can often reach a conclusion very quickly, even with very little information.
– Ben Young, Marketing Director
A good strategist is fluent in the craft of envisioning, architecting and executing future outcomes, while simultaneously being able to deliver tangible demonstrative methods, interventions and way-finding systems that achieve the shaped intentionality.
– Nicolae Halmaghi, Creativity Curator
The word strategist almost always applied as an adjective to another role, as in Brand Strategist, Design Strategist, Social Media Strategist or Plumbing Strategist. I’ve always loved strategy so I’ve enjoyed several of these types of jobs in my career. Building great businesses may be a team sport. But at some point in the creative process, someone has to go away after the brainstorming is done and turn all the ideas into something real that can be communicated, tested and executed. That person is a strategist.
Recently I’ve been thinking about what makes a Strategist different to an Account Manager, a Copywriter or a Planner. I wanted to focus in on the role of a person who is referred to as a Strategist in a business, rather than the larger question of “What is strategy?”
There is too much waffle in social media consulting. As a result, B2B businesses aren’t taking enough responsibility for their own social media presences. B2B companies should be great at social media, but they’re not.
I’ve spotted five myths that have got to change if social media is going to become a credible part of B2B companies. It’s time to start treating social media with the same commercial discipline that every other part of your business faces.
This month we have a guest post from an advertising creative. He’s a Cannes Lion winning copywriter who has worked with Saatchi & Saatchi, Y&R, TBWA and Ogilvy. As you’ll surmise from the guest post, he’s a very angry ad man.
I don’t agree with everything in the post but I’ve decided to publish it as a coherent whole. The advertising industry is far too polite and it’s great to hear an honest account of how ads really get made…
Continue reading Confessions of an Angry Ad Man: Creativity is dying
Choosing a tagline looks easy, but choosing a tagline that works well for a technology startup is surprisingly hard. There are several common mistakes that new startup team make when choosing their tagline. These are easily avoidable if you know what to look out for.
I’ve been helping a software startup recently with their search for a new tagline. Like many bootstrapped startups, they don’t have enough cash for a full brand strategy project. Even so, to create a tagline that works you still need more strategic thinking than just jumping straight to the whiteboard by yourself to pull a tagline out of your a__.
In brand strategy we are always looking for real human insights to drive the creation of a real point of difference. The most powerful place to find a point of difference is in the audience’s own behaviour and sense of identity.
When was the last time that you spent more on something than you should have? The chances are it indirectly had something to do with your self image. Or the self image that you want to create.
As social media and digital communication accelerate, the impact is being felt beyond mass-consumer advertising and bursting into all part of the business world. From large B2B companies to your local cafe.
In a social media and digital space there is nowhere for bad service to hide. I’ve long argued for the business value of design and creativity, but what does this mean in the new digital context? The answer starts with the increasing volume of your customer’s voice.
