Digital Insanity Magazine by Bruno Amaral

Winning in Times of Google Apple Facebook and Amazon (GAFA)

Wed, 14 Nov 2018 09:09:27 +0100

Today the world is dominated by platforms: GAFA. Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon.

European companies are in a difficult situation because the eastern and western companies are succeeding while they struggle to keep up.

https://twitter.com/rankenberg/status/1062652901921865729

.@Westermeyer showing the room a simplified version of the value of Chinese, European and American internet :) An idea to spark off his talk #spark pic.twitter.com/Jp9Z79chte
— Susanna Rankenberg (@rankenberg) November 14, 2018

One solution is to travel to broaden our horizons. Digital thinkers tend to travel to silicon valley to learn from the companies there.

https://twitter.com/marcus_stoltze/status/1062653257963716608

Every year 75000 Germans marketeers requests meetings with Facebook. And all they get is a lousy selfie 😉 #Spark #smdk pic.twitter.com/XPTGS8gSqH
— Marcus Stoltze (@marcus_stoltze) November 14, 2018

Their main takeaways do not change much more than what’s at the surface. The real learning is that what makes them different is the customer access. These 4 platforms are controlling customer access.

Then what can we do? Five ways to beat them

1. Go Horizontal

Zalando, 8Bn valuation.

They have been expanding their offer to include other areas, not just shoes anymore, also fashion, beauty and more. It’s a way for them to pay back the customer acquisition cost.

Uber expanded in the same logic with Uber Black, Uber Pop, Uber eats.

2. Retain your customer

It’s a logic step after we paid so much to acquire a customer to try to retain him/her as best as possible. A simple way to do this is a subscription model, like Dollar Shave Club and gym memberships.

It’s simple CRM but there are few examples of good CRM.

https://twitter.com/aikazikibay/status/1062655435256332289

How to be a rockstar in the age of #GAFA? One of @Westermeyer’s tip is to retain customers via CRM systems #Spark #digitalmarketing @FalconIO pic.twitter.com/XeXtnE23RO
— Aika Zikibayeva (@aikazikibay) November 14, 2018

3. Stand Out

Look for creative ways to make your brand stand out.

Naketano, they are building a world class brand on the back of sexual innuendo product naming.

Products
CEO as a brand

https://twitter.com/delay1/status/1062658013373349894

The CEO has to become a visible leader @westermeyer #spark @FalconIO pic.twitter.com/yrvze7m46F
— Matthias «Delay» Göbel (@delay1) November 14, 2018

https://twitter.com/sabrodriguez1/status/1062657519871553536

How to beat #GAFA? You need to stand out. And your CEO needs to be your brand. Icons create value and build trust. #Spark @FalconIO pic.twitter.com/S9slM1Ntc0
— Sabrina Rodriguez (@sabrodriguez1) November 14, 2018

4. Digital PR

We have to do PR in a whole different way. An example was the Tesla car put on a rocket and sent to mars. It produced a lot of traffic and earned media for Tesla.

This is a way to drive attention in this day and age.

Decoding Elon Musk

Frequency of tweets, 3 a day.
Absurdity
Agenda setting, he talks about the hot topics that are strategic for him.
Authenticity

https://twitter.com/rankenberg/status/1062659940802805760

.@Westermeyer is delighting the whole room by analyzing Elon Musk’s PR strategy, and adding “Look at his mom!” 👌😊 Talking about authenticity and _being_ authentic at the same time, is a-okay! #spark pic.twitter.com/ujUB6LQTfr
— Susanna Rankenberg (@rankenberg) November 14, 2018

The result, Tesla is mentioned 6th as one of most innovative companies by German managers. VW was not mentioned at all.

VW is the fifth company spending more in R&D, while Tesla is at 171. The PR stunts and communication skewed our perception of reality.

Events

Apple is clearly the most effective company in running events and having people talk about them during the following weeks.

https://twitter.com/rikardandree/status/1062662206234464257

Interesting presentation by @Westermeyer about pr and marketing on social media #spark #abepartners pic.twitter.com/a2VkYqFgDF
— R Andrey (@rikardandree) November 14, 2018

5. Be agile on all platforms

Google shopping

A company was able to get a better CTR with their photo for white sneakers.

Agile on mobile

Selling a shirt on amazon or instagram means a CPO of 8€. But on instagram you are able to ask for twice as much in price.

https://twitter.com/Lemberg/status/1062661916378701824

CPO on Instagram and Amazon are equally expensive. But people on IG will pay twice as much for your products. 🤔😲 #spark @FalconIO pic.twitter.com/PZAIyzCfuG

— @Lemberg on twitter

Agile on facebook

Groups. True fans create groups for you and there is room to leverage them.

Agile on brick and mortar shops

A champagne bar used a street art graffiti that draws in customers to take instagram photos.

How We Need to Remake the Internet

Sun, 06 May 2018 18:14:00 +0100

Since I read “You are Not a Gadget” that Jaron became a sort of thorn in my side. The good kind of thorn, the kind that challenges our opinion.

The views he expresses in the book are opposite to my sort of technocratic vision. In other settings, he stays true to those views about our lock in to formats, about how technology can impact how we relate with each other.

And he is right.

The NY Times has a good summary of the book “You Are Not a Gadget”.

In this TED Talk he does it again. Jaron presents his view on how corporations act as behaviour modification empires, and suggests an alternative to the advertising revenue model.

On filters, Facebook and the lack of critical thinking

Mon, 21 May 2012 08:37:12 +0000

Foto por Ricardo Bernardo

“When we change the way we communicate we change society.” — Clay Shirky

I have always liked this quote and saw it as being true and positive. After all, our way to communicate can only get better, right? Wrong.

Just because we find new ways to communicate, it does not mean they are better or more effective.

But lets clarify. We are talking about new channels of communication and not just the improvement of existing ones. The Internet is a platform for a wide range of communication channels of this sort and they have changed society: The Web holds information that we can access in real time and thus guide our decisions, email changed the way we work and do business, twitter altered the way we coordinate small and large groups and the way we broadcast information.

Facebook changed the way we communicate with friends, family and co-workers.

What Clay Shirky fails to mention is that there are two types of filters at work in the web. Filters we control and filters we do not control and have no knowledge on how they work. Lets call them visible and invisible filters.

More so, from the little I know on usability and user experience, it is clear that the way in which we structure a website and its features conditions the way it is used. Think craigslist versus ebay for example.

Lets take this step by step starting with filters.

Whenever we search Twitter we are building a filter that will show us the most up to date tweets which include certain words and characteristics. It is a visible filter and you know you are applying that filter to the toatlity of tweets.

A Google search is another way by which we filter information. Only this time, we know Google will rank the information based on what it thinks we are looking for. Google’s search algorithm is an invisible filter, but one I can live with given the fact that as far as I know it will not keep information from me, allowing my search query to be adjusted until I find what I am looking for.

In both cases, it is up to me to decide how much or how little I trust the information I find. For every link or piece of information from a Tweet, or every search result I get from Google, I am forced to stop and think on how reliable that information is. This is an old discussion, so we won’t get into that. It is suficient to say that our own judgement plays an important role in these two examples.

Lets jump to Facebook. This is a communication channel which is closed by nature, as a means to protect your privacy and allow you to communicate freely with your social circles. (How much we agree or disagree on how this is accomplished and to what extent is not the question. Stallman has a very long post about this issue, some of which I don’t agree with.)

Everytime I login to Facebook it will show me the “Top Stories” and there is no way to ascertain how it selects these items. It is safe to say that the number of interactions in each post plays a big part in the way it selects the top stories. So everytime I login, I make sure that I only see the most recent posts from my network.

But what is bad is the way Facebook facilitates meaningful interactions while at the same time removing any judgement from the user. In a macabre example, I have seen posts on Facebook mentioning the passing of common friends with others clicking the “like” button. Of course they do not “like” it. Had a millisecond been given to thought and instead they would comment “that is terrible, my condolences”.

The same irreflected act is seen when people find a piece of information. It is normal and expected to see people sharing infographics or photos just because they thought it was interesting. But Facebook as a communication channel removes a great number of clues for us to ascertain how reliable and trustworthy that information is. Those images or posts rarely contain links or lists of sources, and sometimes the origin of a photo is completely lost in the numberos shares, thus being stripped of context and judge with little or no research on the subject.

Facebook is a channel that changed the way we communicate and is thus changing society. The way this channel works seems to favor quick reactions and little thought, not to mention that less savy users will be blind to the “Top Stories” and privacy filters.

I don’t mean to say Facebook is evil and should be erradicated, merely to state that we need to nurture and reward critical thinking when using any communication channel. That effort must be kept as an aim by a wide number of people. From developers to designers, including of course Public Relations and other communication professionals.

Because in the long run, we all want to build a society of new ideas and cooperation and not one that merely reacts to problems without offering any shred of insight or acting towards a solution.

Strangely enough, moments after writing this last paragraph I came across a post on my to-read list. It is written by Lucy Pepper and talks about this exact problem from a more human and social perspective.

The future of communication platforms

Sat, 08 May 2010 23:31:58 +0000

My last post was about how I see the web, as being made of platforms, channels/instruments, contexts and content. A few days after I pressed publish, Steve Jobs sent out an announcement stating that Apple would not be supporting Flash on the iPad or the iPhone.

First, what is Flash?

It’s Adobe’s answer to our need for rich and interactive websites that, however, poses a number of obstacles. When we use a computer as a platform and access a website built using flash we are asked to install a plugin that simply put downloads the flash file and presents it on the browser. Sounds simple enough and there are several examples of good websites built on Flash.

But it is not so simple. Google as problems indexing flash websites, even though they have put a great deal of effort into it. And if you want to use a mobile phone, chances are that you will find that the website does not fit a tiny screen or worse, does not show up at all. When at work you may not be able to access the website if the IT department did not install the flash plugin on Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome, and if you are visually impaired the text browser and your screen reader won’t find a trace of information 90% of the time, unless there is a text version of the website.

This means that if a flash website is not built properly it can prove itself to be a huge communication obstacle. Apple’s response to this was to clearly state that it will not support Adobe’s effort to use Flash on mobile devices.

Adobe and Apple

Faced with Steve Job’s announcement, Adobe replied as soon as it could. To sum it up, the response states that Adobe was already looking into other mobile platforms and that they look forward to show Flash 10.1 in Google’s Android Smartphones.

During this time, Google posted on the Google Code Blog, directing developers to HTML5 as part of a New Era for Mobile Phones.

What we have here is a company that provides users with platforms (Apple) and another that provides developers with a tool to build communication channels/instruments (Adobe) together with a clear miss match of intentions and strategy. Google’s post on how HTML5 is important to mobile phones goes together with Apple’s intent to abandon Flash, thus weakening Adobe’s position even further.

What this means for Public Relations

There are several variables that come into play when building a corporate website of any sort. Usability, accessibility and user experience are just three of them. Even though a flash website can score very high on user experience, it scores very low on access through different platforms and, sometimes, even on ease of use.

For a corporate website to be a true investment, it must be built with a clear strategy in mind where we take into account what information we wish to make available, in what contexts and keeping in mind which platforms our visitors use. As far as technology is concerned, it does not matter if it is closed or open source as long as it is secure and stable while at the same time allowing us to adapt to current trends.

With Apple’s announcement it became obvious that websites built using flash in the last two years are obsolete when faced with the iPad’s launch, and thus a great deal of the communication budget may have to be directed into moving towards HTML5 or mobile apps.