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Antony Mayfield

2013: The Year 'the Stream' Crested - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • There are great reasons for why The Stream triumphed. In a world of infinite variety, it's difficult to categorize or even find, especially before a thing has been linked. So time, newness, began to stand in for many other things. And now the Internet's media landscape is like a never-ending store, where everything is free. No matter how hard you sprint for the horizon, it keeps receding. There is always something more.  Nowness also transmits this sense of presence, of other people, that you get in a city when you go to a highway overpass and look down at all the cars at any time of the day or night. Things are happening. I am not alone. Look at all this. 
  • Schonfeld cited Betaworks CEO John Borthwick's thinkpiece, "Distribution Now," which he wrote in April of 2009, just as all this was really getting going. Borthwick concludes his post on the rise of The Stream with two quotes from musician Brian Eno. The old (and better) one begins like this: "In a blinding flash of inspiration, the other day I realized that 'interactive' anything is the wrong word. Interactive makes you imagine people sitting with their hands on controls, some kind of gamelike thing. The right word is 'unfinished.' Think of cultural products, or art works, or the people who use them even, as being unfinished. Permanently unfinished. "
  • I am not joking when I say: it is easier to read Ulysses than it is to read the Internet. Because at least Ulysses has an end, an edge. Ulysses can be finished. The Internet is never finished. 
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  • Take Netflix's decision to release ALL of House of Cards at once. People were flabbergasted! How could they sacrifice the nowness?!  But they did and people loved it. In contrast to live "appointment viewing," of a weekly show, House of Cards felt different, substantial. It was a weighty object that could be watched however you wanted to. 
  • Or take Snapchat and the Snowden-NSA revelations. They highlight a pernicious aspect of this metaphor: while the stream flows quickly past you, it flows into the vast, searchable reservoirs of companies and intelligence agencies. This stream is archived and data mined! On the Internet stream, you cannot keep up with the stream, but the stream can keep up with you. The NSA took advantage of this. 
  • On the tiniest level, many people (myself included) have been launching little e-mail newsletters. I've been writing into the stream for seven years, and I haven't had this much fun in a long time. My newsletter is finite (always less than 600 words) and it comes once a day. It has edges. You can finish it. 
  • Snapchat says: If we can't disappear completely, let's leave as little of a trace as possible. Let's be water vapor, a passing fog, not the stream. 
  • Lastly, look at the huge viral successes of the year, Upworthy, ViralNova, TwentyTwoWords, FaithIt, and all the rest. They take advantage of the structure of the stream and the psychological problems it makes for people. These sites traffic in narrative porn. The whole point of their posts is that they are idealized stories with a beginning, middle, and end. They provide closure. They are rocks that you can stand on in the stream, just to catch your breath.
  • So the simple answer is that there's too much flow and not enough stock. The Internet could rebalance away from the flow (i.e. the stream) and start making more durable things. 
Maddy Wood

6 Senior-Level Steps To Digital Marketing Success - 1 views

  • Commit personally: Senior executives need to understand what they want from digital and social. Fortunately, the highest-level goals are generally quite clear. Companies have unprecedented opportunities to build steadily strengthening connections to customers, prospects, and partners. As a result, they can achieve higher margins, lower acquisition costs, and lower customer churn, thereby raising customer lifetime value. Clearly laying out these expectations is a great way to start.
  • 6 Senior-Level Steps To Digital Marketing Success
  • Understand customers.
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  • Map the pieces: This is perhaps the most challenging step. The overarching goal is to create an “ecosystem,” or community, of some sort–in short, a company’s own network that includes customers, prospects, and partners. This enables increased engagement with existing members, while promoting growth by adding new members. A place to start is understanding where the company stands across three distinct digital approaches–search engine marketing based on static Web sites and perhaps email marketing systems; permission-based inbound marketing based on attracting opt-in members and then building engagement through customer relationship management systems and content nurture streams; and social marketing and social sales based on understanding and leveraging social networks. One key question to ask is, “What should be at the center?”
  • the CRM system may take the central position rather than the Web site.
  • the real benefits come from achieving local leverage by encouraging a wide range of employees and partners to develop their own social presence, as well.
  • executives need to understand and articulate how the structure reflects the approach to growing customer lifetime value.
  • Assemble the components: Once the pieces are mapped based on the shape of the customer opportunities, the next challenge is to assemble a specific set of components with an eye toward flexibility and cost effectiveness. Given the remarkably rapid rate of innovation, leaders need to avoid being locked into expensive commitments that won’t be easy to continue to change. A series of principles can really help here.
  • build, test, and monitor prototypes until they work perfectly. Investing extra time and effort at this stage can make the step of expanding the system much quicker and less expensive, as well as making broad implementation much smoother.
  • Engage the organization around content, and marshal the resources to make it successful. Once a system is developed, it has to be used to full effect to capture the available benefits. And in today’s world, that requires a large, steady stream of content. Types of content include articles, blogs, white papers, contests, games, webinars, videos, posts to discussion groups, tweets, and infographics (to name a few). Increasingly, content generation is evolving into a companywide responsibility, rather than simply a marketing responsibility. Senior executives need to embrace and then encourage this. Although this is a relatively undeveloped area, management processes that reward the generation and dissemination of great content will undoubtedly lead to great value. And social management platforms that enable rapid and easy sharing of existing content, along with monitoring for compliance purposes, are already enjoying rapid growth.
  • Constantly measure and monitor in order to learn and improve:
  • margins should improve, acquisition costs should drop, and churn rates should decline
Antony Mayfield

Striding with ITV into the future of news | Made by Many - 0 views

  • Our product strategy for ITV News was simple, bold and probably as obvious in hindsight as any good idea should be. We set out to create a digitally native news service, something made for the web and mobile that left behind the Guttenberg-era baggage of ‘pages’, ‘articles’ and ‘editions’ that most news websites haven’t been able to shake off, as well as reworking some proto-web typologies like ‘navigation’, ‘liveblogging’ and ‘galleries’. 
  • We wanted to make a news service that answered the question: “What would news be like if we had networked digital media (and digital cameras and phones and laptops) but there had never been newspapers or broadcast TV news programmes?”.   
  • video - would be a massive culture shock. There was nervousness, especially about time and resources, offset by enthusiasm for change and a leadership determined to exploit the potential of real-time news delivered across multiple devices. We also had a strong conviction that opening up the news gathering process - rather than adding new work - would give us the content we needed for the stream. 
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    I love that MxM begins with a "product strategy" for ITN, over a "digital", "social" or what not....
Antony Mayfield

P&G CEO To Lay Off 1,600 After Discovering It's Free To Advertise On Facebook - 0 views

  • he would have to "moderate" his ad budget because Facebook and Google can be "more efficient" than the traditional media that usually eats the lion's share of P&G's ad budget.This is coming from the man who increased P&G's adspend by a staggering 24 percent over the two years through October 2011, even though sales rose only 6 percent in the same period.
  • Note that P&G's revenues were up 4 percent to $22 billion in the quarter but the company's costs for sales, general and administrative work were flat.
  • n the call, McDonald and his crew were asked about ad costs three different times. McDonald eventually said: As we've said historically, the 9% to 11% range [for advertising as a percentage of sales] has been what we have spent. Actually, I believe that over time, we will see the increase in the cost of advertising moderate. There are just so many different media available today and we're quickly moving more and more of our businesses into digital. And in that space, there are lots of different avenues available. In the digital space, with things like Facebook and Google and others, we find that the return on investment of the advertising, when properly designed, when the big idea is there, can be much more efficient. One example is our Old Spice campaign, where we had 1.8 billion free impressions and there are many other examples I can cite from all over the world. So while there may be pressure on advertising, particularly in the United States, for example, during the year of a presidential election, there are mitigating factors like the plethora of media available.
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  • P&G's Old Spice campaign is a textbook example of what the entire company should be doing. The problem is that the entire company isn't doing it. Check out Mr. Clean's Twitter stream, for instance. Oh, right—he doesn't have one.
Antony Mayfield

How Medium is building a new kind of company with no managers - 0 views

  • This emphasis on organic growth has a side benefit of distributing authority. In Holacratic systems, individuals operate without managers because many of them have decision-making power in a particular area.
  • Decision-making is further aided and hastened by airing ‘tensions’ in meetings. Stirman defines this use of tension broadly, calling it “any difference between what is and what could be.” In this sense, tensions can be negative (e.g. I don’t have time for that project, my chair isn’t ergonomic, etc.) or positive (e.g. I have a vision for a feature we should create).
  • “Once you identify what a tension is, you can feel it in your shoulders, in your ears. You know you’re worried about something. Now, when I identify a tension, I jot it down. If I can’t resolve it by myself, I bring it to my circle’s next tactical meeting. With these meetings, you’re always making things a little bit better.”
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  • To supplement this tactic on the positive end, the company also introduced a ‘High Five Machine’ – a dashboard where anyone can write in and praise a co-worker, streaming throughout the office. It’s an invention borne out of Holacracy, spun out of the unique needs this kind of system creates.
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