Business books are already being updated, with the Coca-Cola ‘New Coke’ catastrophe being replaced with the newer story of Microsoft Windows 8.  The lesson is the same – too much innovation can backfire.

Back in 1985, with Pepsi winning the hearts and mouth’s of the youth generation and a market share slipping from a post-War US high of 60% to 26%, Coke reformulated Coca-Cola with a new taste that won hands-down over the old flavour in blind taste tests.  Following the April 23 launch, a marketing disaster and consumer and media backlash ensued, including a much publicised complaint letter to CEO Roberto Goizueta, addressed Chief Dodo, The Coca-Cola Company.  Less than three months after launch, Coke pulled New Coke and reverted to the old flavour.

Fast forward to 2012, with iOS and Android devices winning the hearts and fingers of the new digital generation and a market share slipping from  97% in 2000 to 20%, Microsoft reformulated its Windows OS with a new interface  that won hands-down over the old version as the “People’s Choice Design” .  Following an October 26 launch, a marketing disaster and consumer and media backlash ensued, although there was no much publicised complaint letter to CEO Steve Ballmer, addressed Chief Dodo, Microsoft Corporation.  But less than six months after launch, in May 2013, Microsoft announced it would pull key elements of Windows 8 and “reverse course” with a back to old-style Windows – codenamed Blue.

So what can social commerce learn from Chief Dodo Ballmer’s experience?

• Compatibility: Windows 8 is struggling because it is not compatible with people’s existing habits; it forces people to unlearn what they already know and do: LESSON – Don’t try and change entrenched shopping habits, focus instead areas where there is no set way of doing things (mobile/tablet shopping)
• Complexity: Windows 8 fails by being too complex, with no simple architecture of design that makes for intuitive adoption: LESSON – Keep it simple – the social commerce of the future will have simplicity at its heart
• Relative Advantage: It’s not immediate how Windows 8 is an improvement over what’s already available (Android, OS, iOS – Windows Vista ?!): LESSON – Be better, not just different. Sure social commerce is a new way of selling, and for consumers a new way of shopping.  But unless it is blatantly clear why it is better, it won’t be adopted
• Observability: With slow take-up by PC manufacturers and little in the way of product placement, you don’t see much social proof of Windows 8 out there, especially of the opinion leading kind: LESSON – Product seeding and product placement are key – you may not get your product into the latest Psy hit like Candy Crush, but do whatever it takes to get your product or service into TV, movies or clips – as a character not an ad
• Trialability: Windows 8 creates prisoners not passionistas by forcing a big risky jump into a new start-button-less world of charms, sliding panels and hiding functionality: LESSON – Offer bite-sized trials for people to try risk free, and then allow them to move frictionlessly away if they want.

So a guy is into you – whether you are a person or a brand – and then he isn’t. What’s going on?

Solomon Asch (1907-1996), one of the pioneers of social psychology ran some ground-breaking experiments into why men change their mind, and it’s very relevant to social media, and it’s all about conforming to group norms.

So on the back of insights last week from Kurt Lewin on the potential of discovery in unlocking the commercial potential of social media, today let’s turn to Polish psychologist Professor Solomon Asch.

Asch, with a PhD from Columbia University who worked at Swarthorne, MIT, Harvard and Penn, was famous for asking men to take a simple visual test; view pairs of cards, one showing three straight lines, and the other a single line – and identify which line on the first cards matched the length of the line on the second cards. Unlike similar visual tests, like those run by fellow psychologist Muzafer Sherif, the correct answers to Asch’s test were self-evident and blatantly clear. In 720 trials, only three mistakes were made. But then Asch re-ran the tests, this time putting 123 male test subjects into groups of 6-8 before asking them to identify matching lines. This time 75% of test subjects gave the wrong answer!

Why? Because Asch had manipulated the test, putting ‘stooges’ (‘confederates’) into the groups who were instructed to publicly give the same wrong answer before the real test subjects gave theirs. Either doubting their own judgement, or not wanting to be seen as wrong, test subjects conformed to the fake group view nearly a third of the time (32%).

So men, it would appear, change their minds to conform with a group majority or unanimity. But what was particularly interesting about Asch tests is that that some men, about one in four (24%) appear to be immune from the psychological pressure to conform, and that for most men the pressure to conform evaporates once there is dissent voice in the group. Men are influenced by group pressure when there is group unanimity, or at least a sizeable majority. Break the unanimity, then you break the pressure.

The commercial – and indeed political – implications for social media are clear; first think of people in terms of groups, not individuals – identify groups where conformity is already high and use social media to sell products that build on that conformity. Or, if conformity is standing in the way of selling what you have to sell, use social media to show a wide divergence of existing opinion and behaviour – and you’ll break the pressure to conform and open up the possibility of making the sale.

Oh and if you want to get your guy back, break the unanimity of dissent that exists about you among his friends.

Coming from the ‘get-real’ camp of Byron Sharp (How Brands Grow), Wieden + Kennedy suggest that the fastest way to fail in digital is to use the language of human relationships to frame what you do.  Terms like ’engagement’, ‘commitment’, ‘communities’, ‘love’, ‘fans’ are vanity terms and bad metaphors – reserved for self-deluded brands who think that consumers buying from them or clicking their like buttons means they actually care about them.  They don’t. Get over it.

Human relationships are complex and vital, brands are trivial and incidental. Which is why only 1 in 5 people (the desperate, lonely and compulsive) think they have ‘relationships’ with brands.  The digital challenge is not about creating ‘relationships’ – it’s about serving people.

We couldn’t agree more.

Pointless Digital

Here’s a speed summary of the just-published Financial Times 2013 special report on Digital & Social Media Marketing (PDF (FT subscribers only)).

It’s a long report, published in tandem with today’s FT Digital Media conference in London, but we’ve summarised it down to key bullet points for you.  And if that’s too long, here’s the one word summary.

Television.

From ‘second screen’ TV experiences on tablets that boost TV advertising effectiveness to ‘addressable advertising’ (personalised and hyper targeted TV ads delivered digitally) and the shrinking of TV ad slots to fit digital attention spans, the FT paints the future of Digital & Social Media Marketing with television, not instead of it.

So standing atop the $205bn TV advertising mountain is the smartest place to be in digital and social media marketing right now; this makes sense – the secret to success has always been, and always will be, to stand next to the money.

Advertisers look for ways to follow consumers Emily Steel

• The big change in digital marketing is not that marketers have shifted nearly a fifth of their budgets to digital outlets, but that the divide between digital and traditional media is so blurred it may soon disappear.
• Rather than threaten the $205bn television ad business, digital promises to grow it, by helping advertisers understand the messages that will best resonate with a target audience, target the right ad to the right person at the right time, and make it easy for people to share those messages with their social networks, catapulting the brand to the centre of digital chatter.
• Whilst social media has now found its place in the world of digitally enhanced marketing as a strategic insight and targeting tool, mobile media has yet to find its niche; mobile is expected to capture more than 20 per cent of media consumption in the next five years, yet it receives only a minuscule portion of total advertising revenues, and a glut of mobile advertising inventory is causing mobile ad rates to plummet

Media: Watching television no longer rates as passive pastime Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson

• The average American still spends about five hours a day glued to TV; the smart money in digital is being invested in making TV advertising better
• TV is not dead, it is just evolving into a two screen experience, the TV display and a tablet or smartphone.  “Lean-back” TV experiences, passively consumed from the comfort of the couch, are giving way to ”lean-in” TV experiences, where viewers multitask viewing and interacting on smartphones and tablets
•  A survey by Time Warner’s Medialab found that 65 per cent habitually multitask with a digital device while watching TV. Much of this activity is in social media discussions of TV shows (tripled in the last 12 months), stimulated by TV networks to sell TV advertising space by showing their content is more engaging
• “I have no interest, frankly, in just growing the successes of Twitter and Facebook,”  says Philip Bourchier O’Ferrall, senior vice-president of Viacom International Media Networks: “My number one role … is to drive TV ratings.” To this Nielsen’s SocialGuide found that an 8.4 per cent increase in Twitter volume correlated to a 1 per cent rise in ratings for new shows among viewers aged 18 to 34. But for 35- to 49-year-olds, however, it took a 14 per cent jump in tweets to produce the same 1 per cent ratings bump.
• The rise of second screening is spawning a new generation of specialist second-screen agencies, creating content, data and tools to support the new twin-screen TV advertising industry. Viggle offers loyalty rewards to fans who “check into” shows, GetGlue, a social TV app developer has 3m users who have checked into, rated or reviewed 500m shows, and Bluefin Labs and SocialGuide, purchased by Twitter and TV metrics giant Nielsen respectively, analyse social TV chatter.

Online video: Web of creativity means greater opportunities to boost sales Matthew Garrahan

• The big idea is “addressable advertising“, a fancy name for online ad targeting, and the big opportunity is to turn TV advertising into addressable advertising, using personal data to get the right ad in front of the right person. DirecTV and Dish Network, two satellite operators, and Hulu are already with online addressable TV advertising
• As TV and video consumption moves online, there has been an explosion of professional content to wrap advertising around.  Rapidly expanding audiences are only doing so much to ease the downward trend of advertising CPM (cost per thousand impressions) rates. Down 15% from 2011, eMarketer expects video CPMs to fall a further 30% from  $45 in 2010 to $31.20 in the next four years.
• With more much more content funded only by a little more advertising money (up from $4bn in 2013 to $8bn by 2016), the future will belong to content producers who can produce premium quality original content that consistently attract eyeballs

Networking apps: Agencies scramble to find the next big thing Tim Bradshaw

• Advertisers should focus on trends that lie behind technology, not the technology itself – whether geeky and gimmicky Google Glass or popular networking apps (video, image, chat and data sharing).
• It may be better for advertisers to use Instagram-style posters with comment-style tag-lines in traditional media than to run an Instagram campaign.  Likewise it may be better to shorten TV ads, from the 30-second sport to a 6-second Vine-length video than to run a campaign on Vine itself. “Five seconds is the right length” for a TV ad today say TV ad man Trevor Beattie
• The challenge is to make advertising fit new media expectations set by trends digital; this means becoming masters of short, snappy visual content.
• The opportunity to create trans-media advertising adapted to digital trends.  For example, advertising content from Starbucks, Nike, MTV and Forever 21 is created to be sharable on networking apps such as Instagram. Meanwhile, leave Google Glass to the geeks.

Privacy: Data industry scrutinised over profiling Emily Steel

• Global data brokers such as Acxiom and Datalogix are coming under scrutiny from authorities as they amass consumer data and use it to improve marketing ROI
• Axciom, that collects information about more than 700m people across the world and sells that information to more than 7,000 clients, uses credit card transaction data, primary research, geographic information and other demographic details to improve as targeting and can triple the return on investment of ad campaigns, and boost targeted consumer spending by 50%
• Facebook has integrated Datalogix data into its ad offer, allowing brands to buy ads targeted at people based on their spending habits, for example, people who spend three times more than the national average on children’s cereal. Advertisers can then can tap the Datalogix data to figure out whether or not people who saw the ad end up visiting the store and buying the advertised product.
• Although lawmakers may sympathise with consumer privacy advocates who fear a world where the tracking, collection and selling of personal information creates a so-called “database of ruin” of past financial, sexual, and medical follies/woes, they is a conflict of interests. Politicians deploy the same tracking, analytics, personalisation and targeting technologies as corporations in their election campaigns.

Future of search: Keyword-driven system requires refinement Richard Waters

• Although Google search remains the undisputed king of online advertising, traditional keyword-driven search advertising is set to evolve, with Facebook and Amazon poised to move in
• The future of search is hyper-targeted advertising based not only on search terms, but Amazon / credit card purchase data, Facebook personal data, and mobile location data.

Smartphones: Canny advertisers target your mobile phone Robert Cookson

• After a slow start, mobile advertising is taking off; in the UK, mobile advertising spend more than doubled in 2012 to more than £500m, and in the US, mobile ad spending has become the fastest growing among all media categories as smartphone ownership surged past 50%.
• Nevertheless mobile advertising only represents less than 3 per cent of total ad spend across all media, and currently there is more mobile ad space available than advertising to fill it, resulting in average ad rates (cost per thousand impressions) slumping to well below $1.
• One of the reasons for the slow ramping of mobile advertising is that it has been stuck in a search and display ad rut, serving canned text, static images or dumb videos.  The opportunity is to reinvent mobile advertising with immersive rich-media interactive features. Nuance, a US company that develops speech recognition technology, this month launched a product that allows advertisers to create ads that respond to a user’s voice. And Blismedia recently bought up ad space on smartphones near ad agency offices with an interactive ad that used the gesture control functionality of handsets
• The future potential of mobile advertising lies not only in getting the right message to the right person at the right place at the right time, but in improving the advertising experience.

Real-time marketing: Instant response requires cultural change by brand owners Rob Budden

• The future of marketing is agile marketing, responsive and reactive creative that responds in real time to events with interesting content.  This means creating creative in minutes, not months. Coca-cola has committed to doing doing 30 per cent of its marketing in an agile way.
• In agile marketing, time is everything; similar creative placed just hours apart can have vastly different results.  Mondelez (makers of Oreos cookies) and Motel 6 were both quick to create content around this year’s Super Bowl power cut, and both with similar content.  Mondelez took minutes, Motel 6 took hours.  Mondelez’ content was shared more than 15,000 times, Motel 6 less than 30 times.
• Agile marketing requires a mind-shift from brands, brands can no longer get away with telling consumers they are interesting when they want to tell them, they have to be interesting when consumers want to listen

People: Struggle to stay on top of a moveable feast April Dembosky

• A talent war is raging between advertising agencies and tech companies, both are looking for technical talent and marketing strategists – ideally in the same person.
• But what’s required in terms of technical talent and strategic planning is a fast-moving moveable feast, understanding the role of search in the marketing mix used to be key, then it was social media, then apps, and now user experience.
• The talent war is making recruitment difficult, especially for ad agencies who find the allure of the ad exec lifestyle waning. Young talent want to be part of the change, not the old guard, and have a mission to change the world, whilst working in a flat non-hierarchical organisation (with share options).
• Ad agencies are having to adapt and reposition themselves by abandoning the language and corporate paraphernalia of traditional advertising; Aegis media have gone so far as to jettison the terms ‘advertising’ and ‘consumers’

Social network: Facebook measures up for marketers Emily Steel

• Facebook has spent the last year reinventing itself to become more attractive to advertisers and to transform itself from “just being a social media conversation… to being an indispensable media partner”. Ads are now far more prominent in users’ newsfeeds, especially on mobile devices, targeting is better, and advertising metrics have been improved.
• And it looks like it is working; a year after announcing that it would stop announced it would stop buying Facebook ads because of questions over what returns the ads generated, General Motors is back testing Facebook’s new targeting and measurement offerings for a mobile ad campaign promoting its Chevrolet Sonic sedan.
• Developments in Facebook ads have helped Unilever understand how Facebook ads lift sales, spurring big promotions such as a recent campaign in Brazil for Seda hair products. Unilever designed a campaign with mobile ads featuring a soap opera actress. The company credits the campaign with boosting market share.
• Overall, advertisers are expected to spend more than $5.6bn on Facebook advertising this year, up more than 31 per cent from $4.3bn in 2012, according to eMarketer. On mobile alone, Facebook is expected to earn $1.5bn this year, more than three times the $471m it earned in 2012.

Q. How do you make social media work for your business?

A. Use classic insights from social psychology, the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another.

Without insight, the commercial use of social media (and more generally social technology) may be little more than a resource-depleting time-bandit or a mere symptom of shiny new object syndrome.

So here’s the first of ten quick posts on classic insights from social psychology that we believe are relevant to social media; today from one of the discipline’s founding fathers Kurt Lewin (1890-1947), German-American psychologist at Cornell, the University of Iowa and MIT.

As a founding father of social psychology, Lewin proposed perhaps the most famous formula in our field: B = f(P, E) – that simply states that behaviour is a function of the person and the situation (E stands for Environment; until Lewin, psychology had focused pretty much exclusively on the person – their personality, their past, their individual thoughts and predispositions).  For example, whether someone will shop using social technology has as much to do with the shopping situation itself as the individual. Are they with others? Are they thinking of others? Do they believe their behaviour will be rewarded or punished? Etc. Lewin’s situationist lesson for social media is that we need understand the situation, not just the user, and that we’ll succeed when we deploy social media to facilitate ‘demand characteristics’ (helpful and hindering forces) of the (shopping) situation.

Lewin’s ‘thing’ was that smart solutions lie at the intersection of theory and practice.  He maintained that ”there is nothing as practical as a good theory”, but also that you can only understand something by trying to break it. Perhaps the most relevant example here to social media is Lewin’s unfreeze-change-freeze model of changing behaviour. For instance, if you want to use social media to break the pattern of past purchases and get people to buy your product for the first time, you should use social media to help ‘unfreeze’ their existing beliefs and practices, by making them realise that change is necessary. This works best not by telling them, but by helping them to discover the need themselves. Then you have to manage the change, again not by instruction, but by letting people discover and accept the new behaviour for themselves. Finally, you have to freeze the behaviour (get them to buy again) by helping them discover that the new behaviour is rewarding and rewarded. Unfreeze-change-freeze.

So when the US Department of Agriculture asked Lewin to help them convince housewives to cook with offal during the second world war, he organised group discussions on the food shortage problem and helped the participants discover for themselves that the problem could eased if women like themselves could be convinced to take part in a programme of using secondary cuts of meat such as livers, kidneys, and hearts.  He benchmarked this against housewives who were simply ‘sold’ (lectured – repeatedly) the idea that eating offal was nutritionally beneficial to them and their families.  Those who felt they participated in the discovery of a solution were far more likely to ‘unfreeze’ their ideas and behaviours. Once unfrozen, Lewin provided the women with information they could read and discover for themselves about the good taste, nutritional value and social acceptability of offal. Then to freeze ‘in’ the new behaviour, Lewin suggested allowing the housewives discover for themselves via trial and error and feedback from their families about the wisdom of cooking with offal.

The practical implication for insight-led social media is elementary but profound; use social media to manage change – not by telling people but by empowering them – your customers, employees and investors – to discover with social media that what they are doing right now is not great, that there is a better solution available, and that is is rewarding.

Just some of the headline findings of ground-breaking research from the University of Cambridge published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study, Private Traits and Attributes are Predictable from Digital Records of Human Behavior (full download), authored by researchers Michal Kosinskia, David Stillwell and Thore Graepel is based on sample of 58,466 volunteers from the United States, obtained through the myPersonality Facebook application (www.mypersonality. org/wiki), which included their Facebook profile information, a list of their Likes (n = 170 Likes per person on average), psychometric test scores, and survey information.  Patterns between Likes and psychometric data were then correlated, patterns found, and predictive power was measured.

The University of Cambridge study, funded by Microsoft and Boeing, has spawned a free new online personality test, youarewhatyoulike.com, based on your Likes (see example profile below).

Welcome to the Brave New World of “Big Data” - massive, fast changing and diverse datasets characterized by the 3 V’s of Volume, Velocity and Variety.  If the privacy minefield can be negotiated, the opportunity for brands and retailers is clear – harness these datasets to deliver better customer experiences by delivering the right information, service or products to the right people at the right time.

For example, this study – whilst not focused on consumer behaviour – might tell the management of Sephora to target the intellectually-challenged, and avoid marketing, signage and store design that is too mentally taxing.  On the other hand  there are advertising opportunities for Curly Fries – buy up science spots and science site ad placements. Own a camping store or site? Then plan the layout and offers for neurotics.  Of course, this is reductio ad absurdum, but it is the future.

The immediate opportunity for tech companies, brands and retailers is clear – replicate this study with a shopping and media focus and find patterns in Like data predictive of shopper behaviour, values, lifestyles and personality.

Facebook, you just got useful.

Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D.J & Graepel, T. (2013) Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior. Proc. of the National Academy of Sciences

We show that easily accessible digital records of behavior, Facebook Likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental sepa- ration, age, and gender. The analysis presented is based on a dataset of over 58,000 volunteers who provided their Facebook Likes, detailed demographic profiles, and the results of several psychomet- ric tests. The proposed model uses dimensionality reduction for preprocessing the Likes data, which are then entered into logistic/ linear regression to predict individual psychodemographic profiles from Likes. The model correctly discriminates between homosexual and heterosexual men in 88% of cases, African Americans and Caucasian Americans in 95% of cases, and between Democrat and Republican in 85% of cases. For the personality trait “Openness,” prediction accuracy is close to the test–retest accuracy of a standard personality test. We give examples of associations between attri- butes and Likes and discuss implications for online personalization and privacy.