socialmediocrity

Launched in something of a fanfare (though admittedly it took this scathing, anonymous blogger a few days to have come across it originally), the UK Government’s much applauded efforts to engage the public in spending cuts has, essentially, faltered despite self-congratulatory release of (super-cool) video conference chats with the King of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, proudly released here. And summarized here:

DC: Basically, we’ve got a huge problem here…. thank you for “engaging”

MZ: We’re really delighted to be in this partnership with you guys….to help harness the ideas facebook users have to help the UK public save money…..it’s a really innovative thing you guys are doing…to try to create more social change.

DC: Thanks for doing this…..a lot of people say: people are not really interested in how to make government cost less, not really interested in politics….because it’s always been up to now top-down, take it or leave it…….there’s an enormous civic spirit in this country where people want to take control….people really want to take part. But thanks Mark, because we couldn’t have done it without you, and getting this public engagement for free is a good start.

MZ: Glad to help

DC: Well thanks. This web conference thing is great, is it new? And great to see you the other day. Next time you’re in town, drop by

Allow me to highlight some of those phrases and ideas: “enormous civil spirit” exists in the UK; engaging for free on Facebook is going to help plug the deficit; the UK Prime Minister has never before used web conferencing.

Launched on the 9th July, the Spending Challenge website was designed to encourage the public to contribute their ideas as to how and where our newly elected, more in-touch Government could, or should, consider cuts in public spending. Harnessing the power of that “enormous civil spirit”, you might say. Well that’s not quite how it worked out.

The unelected government that the UK public find themselves with clearly promised much ahead of the election which they simply had no idea about how they would deliver against it. Which means any commitments they gave as far as reducing the debt were concerned prior to the election were at best disingenuous. In short, they lied to us all to buy a few votes. I will resist the urge to rant more about the Lib Dem u-turn, trading policy and manifesto pledges for ministerial cars.

Perhaps more unforgivably (as it required no special access to the public accounts), it also demonstrates just how out of touch even this newly installed government actually are. The reason for the process failing is that is became subjected to a level of abuse that they simply had not prepared for, and presumably therefore had not anticipated. It does not take a Bullingdon graduate, let alone a Cabinet full of them (here and here), to work out that given the opportunity, the public will respond with profanity, attack the unelected government themselves, or indeed that they would vent their frustrations at social minorities first, and in spite of the many thousands of constructive ideas offered, the press would highlight the few that were deemed offensive.

So following a number of offensive suggestions that attacked, specifically those with disabilities, and having failed to have removed the offending items even after they had been highlighted, what does the government do? Does it put in place appropriate monitoring and moderation processes to ensure that items like that are picked up, thereby ensuring that they continue to embrace the “enormous civil spirit” that exists amongst the UK public as they shoul dhave done in the first place? Do they continue to let the public review each others ideas, refining them with comments and suggestions and rating them? Do they shoot the people that advised them, built the website and failed to put in place the appropriate controls? Do they heck.

Instead, they effectively pull up the drawbridge. You can keep sending those ideas, kids, but the Government and its’ cronies will be the sole adjudicators from now on. So there. We’ll tell you what we’ve decided in a few weeks time.

It’s just like the good old days, when politicians got on with the jobs they were elected to do, and we got on with ours. Apart from the allegedly “free” charade of public engagement. FOI request submitted for more details.

As for web conferencing. Yes, Prime Minister, it is indeed very good. You should try it without a script next time. Like a normal person would. And try speaking to your own people, and not the next-best-thing to Obama, just because he won’t come out to play any more.

Interesting  comment from the NMA’s feature writer on Social yesterday, Charlotte McEleny.

In response to the IAB UK SMC’s I.A.B. framework for measuring social, it seems the feedback they were expecting was, as McEleny describes it, “mixed”. She goes on to completely fail to express any substantial opinion of her own, but rather concentrates on criticising the very people participating in the social space (albeit in a scathingly anonymous way) by blogging their own opinion, and in their own way trying to agitate the discussion to a more meaningful and ultimately valuable end.

The only solution proffered by our erstwhile journo? A call to ending criticism is the answer, to end the #FAIL culture, rather than acknowledge the failings and shortcomings of the industry and demand better quality of output and leadership. What has the world come to when ineffective trade bodies are supported by lazy journalism of this kind?

Given the subject matter, it strikes me as ironic that any negativity expressed in these social environments itself becomes the focus of criticism, almost as if to not support the views of the party (the IAB UK) is not to be tolerated. Somehow the blogging proletariat have nothing useful to say, or that whatever they do say should only be judged through the lens of the governing party’s own opinion. Is this really the writing we have come to expect from NMA?

I find it at best disappointing and honestly couldn’t think of a better way to demonstrate, as a journalist, that you really have failed to grasp the very concept of the subject you are meant to be a leading commentator on.

The mixed feedback is surely something to be welcomed. Goodness knows, as all practitioners will understand, to get any substantial, though out, considered consumer feedback is an achievement in its’ own right. Absolutely it should not be casually and aggressively dismissed, and I sincerely hope that the IAB UK SMC had their listening strategy in place and will have collected all of this feedback, in all it’s forms, to help inform future development of the I.A.B. framework, and are not relying on feedback from the fully paid-up member base.

And just to be clear, rather than intending to attack any one journalist, this is aimed at the wider journalistic community who all too often provide ill-considered opinion on a subject they often know little about, yet still demand to be revered.

I for one refuse to be dragged down to the lowest common denominator in the Social space. As outlined in my own scathing and anonymous attack on the IAB UK SMC’s I.A.B. framework, and my opinion remains firm, “Social” is far more than advertising, far more than just a concern for digital marketers, and to be taken seriously we must, as an industry, resist the temptation to flirt with “standardisation” of metrics which would imply to some degree a standardisation of desired outcome. If we point our guns at that particular enemy, then we will end up with an industry incapable of innovation, one that turns out mediocre work at best, and more often and more likely, socially neutral or damaging results for brands.

The IAB UK, and more importantly the IAB Social Media Council (IAB SMC) have proudly announced their opinion on how all social media should be measured, ingeniously missing the point entirely, and demonstrating (to this author at least) their ever decreasing relevance to the wider industry.

In a show of complete lack of original thought, the framework adopts the acronym I.A.B. – Intent, Action/Awareness/Advocacy/Appreciation, Benchmark. So actually that’s IAAAAB, but then would have been somehow more ridiculous, right?

As an aside, imagine if everything an industry body issued borrowed it’s mnemonic from the organisation’s own acronym – the mnemonic itself becomes oxymoronic as a concept very quickly in this case.

So anyway, the announcement goes on to completely fail to deliver against it’s own declared mission to help advertisers and agencies better digest the complexities of social media measurement. Instead, the notion that anyone in an advertising or marketing capacity needs to be told how to do their job is patronising in the extreme. Their framework essentially reads thus:

• INTENT: it’s a good idea to know what you want to do before you start doing it. Set some KPI’s, kids!
• AAAA: It would be good if you think about what you expect to happen as a result, and how you might measure whether or not that has happened. For this foresight, IAB, we are eternally grateful.
• BENCHMARKING: Once you’ve observed the impact, try and find a direct competitor that didn’t do so well, so that you can show how much better than them you all did. (groundbreaking, huh?)

This framework is entirely bereft of any real value in it’s current form, and the IAB (and especially their social media council), must be somewhat embarrassed I would think. It is with no small degree of mirth I noted their expectation that they might receive feedback from the wider industry.

Richard Pentin, IAB SMC member and Group Planning Director at Tullow Marshall Warren: “The days of whimsical experimentation are over….to be taken seriously it’s imperative we start making it much more accountable, and the IAB social media measurement framework is designed to do just that”. I can assure you, Richard, it goes nowhere near doing that.

The IAB’s call for more case studies to be shared amongst the industry rings as a hollow cry of “we don’t know what to make of it either – has anyone else worked it out yet?”. Far from the days of experimentation being over, they have only just begun for social media, and it is a terrifying prospect to think that we stop innovating and creating from here on in – the way the IAB UK SMC evidently have.

I am personally troubled by the way in which the push to find the holy grail, the golden measurement by which all campaigns will be judged, gets in the way of the actual objective (the “i” in the framework, if you remember). And as Richard himself acknowledges here, social media is so versatile, diverse, complex and multi-faceted, spanning many disparate objectives and many different platforms - no wonder we’ve struggled to find a common methodology which works across everything.

What the industry actually lacks is any opinion-leaders of any great value. Firstly, perhaps the IAB SMC should define social media. It sounds obvious, but conceptually “social media” transcends so many other traditional activities, that it might actually need defining  so that we know what it is your referring to exactly. Is it viral? Is it word of mouth? Is it customer service? It is all of these things, and so much more.

Secondly, it needs to be acknowledged that social media is not a discreet, silo’d activity, and to treat it as such is any advertisers’ or agency’s first mistake – we’ve learnt this before with digital, let’s not repeat it, purrrlease. A strong industry body should be taking the lead on this. Integration is no longer confined to the marketing team and referring to the media mix but instead affects every aspect of a business. The very nature of social platforms needs to be understood from the lower echelons of the boardroom up to the decision makers in the post room. Your customer will tell you if you are getting right – by buying more things, or using your service more.

By definition, then, social media is much much more than advertising alone. It is more than “interactive”, and it is for these reasons we must all reject the myopic framework published by the SMC sub committee of the IAB UK, and it’s contributors.

Facebook recently appears to have introduced “simple” pricing options for it’s advertisers. If you’re familiar with the ads platform, you’ll find the change at the end of the setup page, where you would normally place your bid type and bid value.

Facebook Simple Pricing

Despite having until now always defaulted bidding to “CPC”, in favour of “CPM”, and always default-setting the bid price to the middle of the range suggested, apparently that’s not simple enough and we have this new presumably simpler option.

What appears to happen when selecting this option is that your bid type is set to CPC, and your bid value is set to the middle of the suggested range – in essence it simply accepts, but hides, the default values it had originally provided.

What is not clear is whether the bid will change with the estimate. As any long term advertisers will have found out by now, whilst CPC bidding can provide lower risk in terms of the cost of the traffic it generates, it can fluctuate wildly as far as volume is concerned – and this is certainly in part due to the optimisation of delivery based on effective-CPM rates, and in part due to quality scoring. Facebook’s own revenues increase substantially if they can increase the CPM rates of the inventory available, so anything that increases CPM rates makes great commercial sense

But I’m not convinced it will. I doubt that these “simple” bids will be automatically changed after setting – that would surely require a significant change in advertising terms, and something that a former advertiser would have to actively accept rather than by implication. If anything this makes the buying of advertising  even less daunting to the first-time advertiser, and theoretically may lead to a drop in the quality of the ads being ordered – this based on the blunt assumption that the professionals will normally produce better “quality” ads.

In fact, it may lead to a high turnover of poorly-performing ads as advertisers continue to try out the platform for themselves. How many CPC ads, with bids set to the default setting are still running and receiving substantial volume of impressions, say, 7 days after starting.

Perhaps the belief is that with CPCs effectively being set by Facebook (or at least by their suggestions), they will self-perpetuate an increase. After all, if lots of advertisers start targeting the same audience with an auction-based CPC inventory, and start competing aggressively for each click, there will be an enormous rise in revenues, vis-a-vis Google. Which is true when you have single-vertical advertisers competing for a finite resource, but there is nothing scarce about inventory on Facebook.

It is possible that with a larger number of advertisers, and provided enough get their advertising and targeting right, then eCPMs start to climb rapidly. As long as enough advertisers are getting above average CTRs from their ads, this will begin to raise the foor-rate for CPMs as this will be determined by an average CPC bid (Facebook’s default), but factored by an above average CTR, leading to much higher inventory rates. But I am not sure that the link to “simple” pricing options is any more simple than the default settings provided.

There is undoubtedly more to come from this initial link, and given the potential impact on FB’s revenues, it will be interesting to see what measures it takes that in turn support the sites CPM rates in future.

What James Dyson can think up, Network Rail can break.