Digitally Squared

My digital journey from traditional to connected

[misaac365]

Dancing monkeys, hippos and angry men

Apparently there is enough digital data in the world to fill a stack of DVDs that would reach from the Earth to the moon and back again five times!! Really…was my first reaction and then secondly what is being done with all this data.

Data is here for us to learn from but it all depends on interpretation. We are told by our tutors to take emotion out of the decision making process. Avinash Kaushik  talks about hippos being in the boardroom.  He says hippos are disconnected with reality and it’s the person with the highest salary that makes the decision. If they say you should have a dancing monkey that’s what happens, as no one can disagree with a hippo unless you prove it through testing.

I recently saw Twelve Angry Men at the theatre and a play which in my opinion illustrates beautifully the interpretation of data/evidence. Set in 1957 it concerns the deliberations of a jury in a homicide trial.

The preliminary vote shows they have a nearly unanimous decision of guilty with one dissenter who throughout the play sows a seed of reasonable doubt.  It is this one sole dissenter who skilfully interprets the evidence and events surrounding the murder to convince other jurors to doubt their original opinion. Why is he so skilful?  He creates hypothesises then tests them in the confinements of the deliberation room.  He sums up his fellow jurors presenting arguments that resonate for the unflappable, analytical stockbroker to the young man from a violent slum. He allows other to draw their conclusions first and then convince themselves that the suspect is not guilty. Eventually other jurors add weight to the argument of not guilty and a unanimous decision of not guilty is returned.

It is not about data it is about interpretation. Data can just sit on stacks of DVDs reaching the moon. Data needs people to set hypothesises to sift through data. It is people who test, learn and fail because of it. Avinash Kaushik says we need to embrace experimentation and the great companies on the internet learn to fail faster.  They are simply flawsome.

[misaac365]

Reflection: Galloping forward

Isn't it the case that at the start of every new year we reflect back on the last one and look forward to the new one with new aspirations and goals. The goals can be tangible like I'm going to run a marathon or have a feel good factor. I'm going to try and look at everything with the thought 'every cloud has a silver lining'!  This was the way that I looked forward into 2014. An example so far is when I've had a severe ear infection and lost all hearing in my left ear. Whilst it was painful the silver lining was I could not hear the yelling of my children, they actually had to come to me if they wanted something. The ear infection may now have gone but my tactical lack of hearing hasn't.

On the Squared course we are asked to reflect on each module and in Modules 2 & 3 we have also had to produce self and peer assessments. How do you be honest about someone when you are going to have to keep working with them?  Are the peer reviews actually just tactically written to 'keep the peace'. Well Squared have been quite clever here, you are entitled to say what you think about your peers. However you are also marked to ensure that your scores of your peers are inline with what everyone else thought of them. Why do I think this is clever? If you have had a particular beef with someone or a simple clash of personalities this method makes you put aside these personal annoyances and look at the individuals for the greater good of the group.

Going through the forming, storming and norming stages of group work. The peer review helps you get out of any 'storming' that may have occurred in module 2 and be a norming group in module 3. So what then happens when you are all perfectly happy with each others working techniques you know each others strengths and weaknesses....yes you are told you are changing groups back to the forming stage again.

This side of the Squared course has given me some really interesting learnings. I have been lucky enough to be in a group where everyone is engaging and have learnt almost as much from my peers as my tutors. This is not just in terms of models or strategists but formulating and articulating information to make it engaging to another.

[misaac365]

Bouncing balls

Disruption and change an aptly named class for the start of Module 2. Why is digital disruption happening in such abundance? We now clearly have the means to share, to test, to explore without a huge price tag. Or is simply what we we've been told at the beginning of the course, be flawsome. To not be afraid to fail. To build and not break. You have to hand it to the brains behind Angry Birds who were close to bankruptcy having made 51 other titles before the success of Angry Birds. That determination, self-belief and positive attitude deserves to be rewarded. 

The Heds clearly had a plethora of great ideas and entrepreneurial spirit but in this digital world where content is out dated within 2.5 hours how do you stay on top of your game. The Heds have shown patience is key. It took them 8 years to get to the number one stop and despite being knocked off by a 14 year old boy with Bubble Ball they seemed undeterred knowing already what they have in the pipeline.

Our assignment is 'We're going to make millions' but this is all within one month there's no time to sit back and bounce a ball around here. It is just about getting it done. 

[misaac365]

Hungry or thirsty?

The second film of the Hunger Games Trilogy – Catching Fire is just about to hit UK cinemas and the characters within it made me think about our world now and the impact that social media is having on it. 

Statistics show that 57% of people talk more online that in person. People are able to create a virtual image of themselves editing everything before they connect with others. Does this mean that they actually have no depth of character when communicating face to face. Is misinformation shaping the world that now the majority of people will believe the untruth?

How many people resembling the Citizens of the Capitol actually exist? The Citizens of the Capitol are portrayed as being preoccupied with extravagant fashion, parties and mass entertainment, is this Facebook and YouTube?  I cannot believe that the world’s population is so entrenched in a virtual world that they are just like the people of the Capitol. These fictitious characters who are vulnerable to sentimentality and melodrama but appear to be totally oblivious or unconcerned with the poverty and desperation that prevails elsewhere across Panem. We are not there surely, at least I hope not!

Or is it that we are becoming human browsers, our requirements are just turned into an algorithm containing filters that don’t embed any human ethics as according to Eli Pariser.

Does that make us akin to the Avoxes who are forced to have their tongues surgically removed and therefore can no longer speak?

Clearly our tongues are not actually surgically removed  as punishment but we don’t feel the need to use them and have any tangible/physical contact.  Is this where your life disappears and you are living vicariously through your smart phone.

That said, the world would be even bleaker if we were like the people from the Districts who cannot share expertise, help, encourage or engage with anyone outside of their District. It is those Tributes that do not team up and share their knowledge during the games that are the least likely to survive.

Social media has been revolutionary we are in the era of Socialnomics @ equalman. As Erik Qualman put it “The ROI of Social Media is Your Business Will Still Exist in 5 years.”  Hence why 93% of marketers use social media for business.

Brian Solis the Social Media Guru sums it up brilliantly in his post This So-Called Digital Life: Re-evaluating the Value of Social Media. we “seek not only balance, but significance and meaning to help us become something more than an accidental narcissist...The value we take away from this digital lifestyle must only be surpassed by what we invest in it. That’s for each of us to define. And define it we must”

Christmas is a just round the corner a classic time for excessive drinking. If social media was alcohol (because let’s face it, it is addictive!)  a couple of glasses a day can be considered healthy but binge drinking or excessive drinking so that you lose sight of civic responsibility and the fact that you are human and not a robot cannot be good for you, so everything in moderation. Just my opinion, cheers!

[misaac365]

The cat sat on the mat

When I first realised that to complete the Squared Online Digital Marketing Course I had to do a blog, I was totally freaked out! Me write something interesting that someone would want to read. What do I write about? How do I articulate what I want to say without rambling and sounding like an idiot? So here I am taking child-like steps. Hence, the title of this post 'The cat sat on the mat'. I thought it was only apt to use a first sentence that a child learns when they start to read to describe my digital journey.

When my two year old daughter first started to talk she always missed of the first phoneme of every word e.g. ‘at could be hat, mat, cat, rat. This did give rise to quite a bit of misunderstanding. One day whilst having a shoulder ride with her dad, she said “Me ‘it ‘air?” To which he replied “Yes.” Wrongly assuming she said “Me, Hit Hair?” So whilst he was waiting for her to gently pat his hair, she spat on his head! Revolting! Spit not hit! She obviously couldn’t understand why he then told her off. After all, she had asked if it was ok and needed to clear her throat? This story represents me in the digital world. I think I understand the language but actually am only getting half of the picture, which as a marketer could have devastating results. I find it all fascinating and intriguing that by marrying technology with psychology and sociology there is huge potential to create a meaningful relationship with customers and add value to their lives. But how does it all fit together?

Source: Gregweed http://goo.gl/ubH0P

In the old traditional marketing days, I would happily put my GRPs from my well thought-out TV spot campaign into an econometric model to tell me how many hits my website would receive. But you can’t do that with the new digital landscape, right? Isn’t that just for paid media that attracts volumes of strangers, whilst earned media attracts fans. How do you measure fans? Surely a fan is more likely to convince you to be a customer to push them to your owned properties? Or are they? Are less strangers and more fans better? Am I seeing the full picture?  What is it all about? Is my head about to explode just with this question alone? This is where I turned to Squared to get, according to quote Chris Perks, Lead Tutor “A deep understanding of how the digital disciplines integrate together”.

How do we live in this ageless society where we want everything on demand and we want it now. Forget the words kids want to see picture or is it all about a game? Over to you Squared!