Most of what I was taught in high-school is lost on me (and the majority of Romanian adults older than 24–25). Because some of the math we did looks something like this:
Formula for integral (I knew this by heart, but understood nothing of it)
and some of the coding we learned had this interface (yes, I liked programming far better than Maths!):
Code that brought some algorithms to life
Do You See The Double Trouble Here?
With maths you learned different formulas by heart, with no real connection to their meaning and actual use in real life. In the best case scenario you did get the reasoning behind the formulas, but the sheer repetition of applying them over and over again made you a robot, a slave to endless tests in school that only asked you to apply the right formula. Get it wrong and lose all points.
Programming was a different world. It made sense back then. It was made of small little pieces of algorithms you needed to create just the right jigsaw puzzle. But it was still so disconnected from the real world. You wrote the algorithms and then the code on a piece of paper or a chalkboard. If you were lucky you got to compile and then run the code on a real PC. But that was about it. Code did not turn into reality, you could not touch the result.
We Were The Generation That Had Google And Facebook At Their Fingertips.
We were used to looking up the answers and collaborating online, we loved chatting and the feeling of discovery and empowerment the Internet brought us. We loved the speed, were addicted to it, its victims, we did not have the patience to memorize formulas we could look up online or code that did not turn into a living organism that could join the online network. School failed to keep up. Teachers were immune to us learning history from Wikipedia and YouTube, they resented our results driven approach to school projects, couldn’t understand our need for speed and our easy use of the humongous memory the Internet provided: there were so many fast interactive resources online that the ones in the classroom seemed obsolete.
They could have joined us. They could have used it to their advantage, used it to explain the reason and the beauty behind those disciplines, they could have engaged us in stories of how the integral came to exist and get us to use coding to tell our own stories. They did not. So we forgot the formulas and ignored unfruitful code.
Last week while working on a blog post I discovered Scratch (yes, I know, I am so late for this one!) and imagined using it in the classroom. Oh, the fun we would have had! Days later I learned about Kano-kit and how educators around the world use it to teach kids how hardware works – get this: you get to assemble your own PC! How about that instead of copying the lesson from a school book?
This is why I joined the Small Academy team here in Romania, a start-up that aims to do just that: get Romanian kids to befriend technology and gadgets and use them to learn about real life. And to prepare for real life jobs where there is no formula to passthe test, just questions that need resourceful minds.
You can read more about small.academy and drop us a line at hello@small.academy if you have any questions.
I am fascinated with consumer conversations about brands. Most of the times they do not really care about what brands say, they have their own chats around why and how they use their products and services. And brand key message is most of the times lost on them. Because they do not CARE about your message. They do not CARE about your brand.
Can you fulfill their need asap? Can you provide great product and service? Then they will talk about you, recommend you.
Otherwise your entire advertising plan for the upcoming quarter, year, is bound to fail. Key messages born in the creative laboratory of an agency that does not necesarily use your product will maybe (if you are lucky) get their attention and maybe (if you are even more lucky) get them to try your product. But they will forget your shiny messages and start their own conversation threads. And then your key messages blows up in pieces and research done on carefully selected audience samples loses relevance. They will post hundreds of messages on how to fix your product, they will seek help from other users and complain about customer service, they will mock your beloved ads that cannot answer their questions on product functionality and your lack of social care.
Brand managers have to stop focusing on reaching as many people as possible and start thinking about what customer experience they offer across touchpoints.
Maybe a shift from potential reach to customer personas, from counting down impressions to counting down potential leads, from just prompted research done in a small room on the outskirts of the city to listening to people’s organic conversation threads.
As a social media analyst I am a big believer in getting insight from those social media conversations. And I have a couple of reasons:
it’s organic – you know for a fact that users reactions are not prompted by any incentive or marred by intermediaries:
you can test it out on different digital touch-points and validate your hypothesis:
it can tell you a story you were not looking for, a story about your customers and their needs and message for the brand; 4) yes, you can also assess key message and USP.
Should Social Listening And Social Media Analysis Replace Traditional Research?
No, not always – this guy points out a couple of the shortcomings in this article (to mention a few – lack of scalability, organic – you cannot ask your own questions, sentiment analysis has higher costs).
Should you test it out? Yes! Do test, see what works for you and with what ROI and then decide. But please, oh please, do stop and LISTEN for other conversations around your industry. Maybe you will find insight that goes a step further than assessing campaign reach. Maybe you will find out what matters for your customers enough for them to take the time and write down what they think. Maybe you will find out what type of experience they would be willing to pay (more) for.
For the last 9 months I was Data Analyst in an advertising agency in Romania, trying to figure out what delivers results and what doesn’t in the Romanian online world. I was in charge of both social listening and analyzing online campaigns ROI for clients coming from different industries and backgrounds.
I’ve learned a lot and compiled my own list of dos and dons. Most important, I learned that getting lost in data is as easy as turning a flick. We forget what and how we communicate and focus on numbers in a spreadsheet. The message is lost among CTRs, TRPs, CPL, CPA, percentages and averages. But I will not bicker, but focus on the list I mentioned and point out some dos.
Set Goals From The Very Beginning And STICK TO THEM.
This is not easy — you need to have a campaign strategy from the very beginning (if you are a Data Analyst, do ask for this before the campaign starts or at least ask for the campaign brief), main KPIs (set in accordance to campaign brief) and media plan (this might be particularly hard if the media agency does not understand what a Data Analyst does and why it’s useful to collaborate).
Do make sure you, the client and the media agency (or any other party involved) are aware of the main KPIs. All of you should take responsibility for them and promise that neither of you will stray from them during the campaign. Because most likely clients will have more than one objective and more than one KPI in mind, media agencies will try to push on metrics that do not necessarily bring ROI to your campaign (impressions, empty clicks and interactions pop to mind).
Whenever any of you strays along and asks more of your campaign than it was designed to do, go back to the initial goals and reassess — was it included in the initial list of objectives? If it was not, decide together if it must be, if it is relevant for your campaign and your brand. But take into consideration that most of the times the same message does not trigger the same result and therefore you might have to change creatives/key messages as they were not created with that objective in mind and therefore cannot and will not deliver on the new KPI.
Pay Attention To What People Say Online. Do Social Listening Before, During And After The Campaign.
The ancestor of social listening was press monitoring and clipping — it was an easy way for agencies (mostly PR agencies) to prove they did their job. Today monitoring reactions after the campaign is simply not enough; you can do so much more. Finding out what people already say about your industry/product/brand can give you insights into what message can or cannot work. Monitoring consumers reactions during the campaign can help you react and optimize campaign (for example, tweak message if it’s not understood, shift media budgets to reach touch-points you had not taken into consideration). And, yes, looking at reactions post campaign can help you understand what went well, whether people understood your message and engaged with your brand in a relevant way.
Take Into Consideration The Context Of Your Message
Context determines message efficiency. It might sound crazy simple, but a lot of marketers forget this. If you’re not sensible to when and how your message reaches your audience you most likely will miss the mark. For instance, scheduling a campaign focused on sales 1–2 weeks before Black Friday or Christmas can prove extremely inefficient — people are waiting for sales and will not squander their budget if they can wait for massive sales.
Ads Do Not Sell On Their Own. Really, They Do Not.
However surprising this may be for brand managers who are still used to blasting brand message and then measuring sales, adverts cannot convince on their own anymore — you will most probably need to consider setting an entire ecosystem in place , from in-store/HORECA promotion to events and TV and online communication.
Set up an attribution model for your marketing strategies and involve all communication agencies in the process. And this one is extremely complicated as you need every person fully committed, willing to collaborate.
If you do manage to do this, give me a call/private message and tell me how you did this. Please.
284 stories. I saved 284 stories in the last couple of months of my online existence. And that is just on Facebook. Is it a lot, is it too much? I do not know, I only know that I have read 15 something fewer books than what I had planned to read, took 1000 fewer photos and approximately 10 fewer walks in the park. Instead, I have saved (and read/viewed) 209 links, 79 videos, 4 photos, 1 movie.
What I learned? A lot. What I’ve missed? A lot. I’ll take them one by one.
The Good: Memory On Save
Through social media (Facebook, blogs and Youtube) I have access to almost any type of information in whatever form I want to consume it. E-learning was never easier — I can read and learn from some of the worlds masterminds, listen to teachers from Stanford explain about mechanics, watch artists from the US perform poems on gender equality and identity or graffiti artists from Turkey paint Arabic verses on buildings around the world. It’s as if I have access to a collective memory, neatly stocked in pieces of information I can not only consume, but index, save, annotate, modify, reuse and save in this new form I give it.
I also get to choose whom I read and let influence me.
There was one theory I particularly resented in college — agenda setting. A millennial by birth and a child of the Revolution by ego, I found the idea outrageous: clearly, a person with access to all this information and credible key opinion leaders could figure out for himself what the truth was. And I stand by this: in this day and interconnected age you are the one responsible for your own beliefs, for how you research and validate your truth.
But I did find out I was wrong: there seldom is one truth out there that people live and act by. And sometimes your memories on one topic, your knowledge about it are nothing but just one piece of the puzzle. Getting stuck in your own curated memory of a reality could prove just as ineffective as letting others (media, governments, internet trolls) decide the public agenda.
The Bad: Life On Hold
With time I understood that the problem born out of this is that you create your own bubble and live inside it. You put other people’s lives and realities on hold until you somehow end up letting someone different into your feed or your life. And letting someone different is hard, it is much easier to push them away, dismiss them as uninformed or, even worse, stupid.
During the 2014 elections in Romania I burst my own bubble: I left the comfortable social media feed I had customized for myself and reached out to older members of my family and asked them what their thoughts on the presidential election were. I watched the most popular TV talk show (a left-wing partisan I used to despise) to try and make sense of how other people’s lives and truths sounded like, what their news feed was like and why they created/accepted it as such. And most of the times I found out that it was not due to lack of information or stupidity that they chose to customize their news input that way, but rather something I also did — comfort. Comfort in knowing that the information they consumed would not confront any of their previous beliefs or interests, comfort in the validation you find in hearing a public figure/a person you admire stand by your beliefs, your recollection of the truth.
The Ugly: Memory Becomes Scarce, Life Is Limited
What I’ve learned up until now from being almost addicted to online and what’s next:
My short and long term memory are affected
I almost always have to save a link, write about an experience, scribble to do lists to remember everything from a 3 item grocery list to the list of dreams I want to achieve by the time I’m thirty. I find it hard to concentrate on long form writing and forget I read books I didn’t review in writing. And unfortunately due to my job (I work in online advertising) most of the times my browser tabs include social media feeds that blink, get notifications, new posts etc.
What’s next: I am under intensive self applied treatment. I try to avoid Facebook and YouTube all-together when I’m working or reading (not fully there yet, but I will be), I put my phone on silent and forget it in another room when reading real live books or chatting with family members who are not on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram. I’ve started a calligraphy project to help me better concentrate on poems I love and find meaning in and, yes, I’ve started writing again. Somehow I want o create my own memory from scratch, aside from tapping into the online collective memory.
My (online) life will be put on hold from time to time
As I already mentioned this collective online memory can be overwhelming. There’s literally an infinity of resources to help you find your way in many aspects of your life: career, hobbies, relationships.
But sometimes you just have to put those on hold, power off and find inspiration somewhere else. I’ve learned more about leadership during 3 classes of tango than in 2 Business Insider articles and 3 Guy Vaynerchuk videos combined.
All in all, I have a long way to go. Yes, this interconnected online world gives me the power to turn agenda-setting theory on its head, it allows me access to information and people, but it also limits me to a bubble I create for myself. I think I will use it wisely but also pause it a little bit more often.
The headline might seem obvious to some. And it is. Ask anyone HOW they consume TV and how they consume Youtube and the stories are different, very, very different. Ask them WHAT they consume, WHEN and WHY and the differences are huge.
In spite of that someone somewhere, decided that Youtube pre-rolls could be sold as cheap TV to compensate for the good old TV not reaching as many people as the set KPI. It’s ok, we’ll deliver them the message on other medium, he thought. Is it ok, really?
I think not. Let me explain why.
First of all, the medium is the message, as one wise MacLuhan once told communication students. And Youtube changed how we see and consume video tremendously. Think about it: you can search for content and create content, you can have personal lists and your own private network by subscribing to v-loggers and channels that interest you. That alone means you most definitely are on Youtube with a specific goal: listen to music, watch tutorials, research a specific topic (photography, Microsoft Excel, beauty, cosmology, car issues, physics, you name it!) The message Youtube as a medium sends is: you, the user, are in control. And we love this.
But when this message is interrupted by the same ad running on the TV we ran from to fulfill that specific goal we rebel against the intruder. We hate him — what is he doing here? And it triggers a negative reaction to both Youtube sending me the deceptive ‘you are in charge’ message and the brand that acts as an intruder in my Youtube search. I cannot and will not give up on Youtube, but I can easily block out the message of the brand either by clicking the much-awaited skip button or, even worse, installing an ad-blocker.
In my country, 2.5 million of the 10 million with internet access have already installed an ad-blocker. I wonder how many of these were purchased/installed in order to not see Ariel/Pampers/Always ads while watching a short documentary because, of course, you fit one media target (women, 25–35, urban household) and therefore must be interested in the brand message.
To people selling Youtube pre-rolls as cheap TV: please don’t any more! You are already polluting an environment with different consumption behaviors and patterns than TV. You are turning brands into the intruder users resent and end up running away from.
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