A long post where I'll work my way to my point as I go along.
Was thinking about some of the things I heard and took in at a Design Meetup with Rachel Ashwell of Shabby Chic that happened in Soho, tonight. Rachel Ashwell spoke to her relation with Target stores and having her own showroom chain being beneficial to Target because it's the incubator for her customers to speak to her (so she gets the ideas that end up becoming part of the Shabby Chic product line at Target).
Rachel said there was a bit of experimentation involved to learn how to build furniture - build her product line, and while it was hard work, it was also enjoyable and necessary, and she shared that enthusiasm, joy, with her employees.
It occurred to me that Google, where many employees get to spend 20% of their time working at a project of their choice (connected in some way to the business, of course) as one of the secrets of it's success. But it's the same thing, in a way, that Rachel Ashwell does, and yet ..... when you try to do the same thing in normal business, including agencies, it falls flat.
No one wants to pay for experimentation, for the most part, they only want to pay for results, and they want to bill it by the hour, or half hour. Is it any wonder why analytics doesn't get done that well by agencies (or in house corporate ... we don't want to leave them out, either)? It's no surprise to me that 66% of Enterprise Clients would abandon Paid tools for Google Analtyics - according to Forrester Research.
Since most corporations aren't getting much out of their analytics, why would they want to pay for it (when they can get almost the same thing for free) and why would they want to pay anyone to play and experiment, in order to learn and come up with something creative, and perhaps, unforseen or expected? They don't.
I find that to be a big problem -that there's no room for play and experimentation - everyone just wants results - but we don't learn that well, that way.
For example, I learn a lot about Analytics and Social Media by writing about those things - often I don't know exactly what I'm going to write (though I have a notion of what I want to communicate, beforehand) - the insights comes to me as I'm writing (bet you can tell this post that was written like that) and my belief is the more we give (in ideas) the more that we get.
While writing about a Social Media Scorecard based on Digital Footprint Index I created one - just out of a sense of curiosity (had an idea I could build it using Radian6 and it, more or less, worked). Because I did that, I was prepared to show people a tangible scorecard that could be further extended. I would have never done that scorecard had I worried about doing only stuff I was paid for, and be billable by the hour, or every 15 minutes of time.
I understand where agencies are coming from, but also understand that we, as human beings, need to be able to play around with things until we find the right combinations that make any project work - and that takes time - perhaps it's best to just build that into the projects, much as Google does in giving time to employees to experiment.
Recently I was asked about campaign reporting - in several contexts, this always seems to take a lot of time - especially with Social Media - as the data you want to collect isn't structured, is all over the place, and has to usually be manually tabulated - scorecards are usually custom built for each client and each campaign, when they exist at all - and are extremely time consuming to construct. Sure, once you do the first couple of reports, the time it takes can be cut down by 50% or more, but at the end of the day ... a lot of reporting ends up becoming groping around for data to put into a report, and finding it take time, a lot of time.
Building a community around a business using Social Media is also extremely time consuming and Social Media Campaigns take time - 3 months - 1 year for results (though few businesses want to pay for people to experiment and learn what works - often, only a few forward thinking corporations do this now, or non-profits, that don't have much to lose by investing in Social Media).
Another of my playful ideas came from Noah Brier, was to take Noah's ideas from BrandTags and harness his concept to prove Social Media and Branding Campaigns work - no one could have paid me to come with that insight - Word Clouds could prove the success of campaigns - and BrandTags.net was sometimes used by Brand Managers to prove their branding worked, or not - but could it be used to prove Social Media worked?
Well ... I wrote a post about that tonight, about how showing progress with Social Media campaigns was similar to Art, and put up to advanced topic word clouds generated by Alterian, focusing on a specific campaign I'm tracking for a friend, and seeing if my notion (or experiment, works, or not).
Before Social Media Campaign Started ............
........ After Social Media Campaign has been underway for 2 months
The larger globes mean more conversations around a specific topic - the closer the globes are, the closer the topics are related, according to Alterian.
To my way of thinking, the second topic map shows progress in focusing the conversations and increasing the size of them - now ... a simple thing like a Word Map, properly done, can show the success of Social Media and Branding Campaigns (often, they're becoming the same thing, more and more) and yet, that insight, I came up with on my own, and no one would or could pay me for that - I did it because I wanted to .. it was the fun of experimenting and not knowing what you'll come up with.
The idea I had to use Noah Brier's Word Cloud concept and turn it into Social Media monitoring was reinforced by what I heard at the MIMA Summit last week, in Minneapolis, where I also spoke. Lee Odden mentioned, in his presentation about the intersection of SEO and Social Media (it's not posted yet on the MIMA Summit site or I'd link to it), that Word Clouds are the Keyword Analysis tools for Social Media. In fact, an earlier TopRankBlog post from SES San Jose last year (when I spoke there) mirrors the same things that I said in a panel I moderated (with TopRank covered).
The picture that emerges is one where the community of creativity is feeding off experimentation and sharing information with one another - and that, unfortunately, hasn't found it's way into corporate culture, and certainly, not in the agency world. Again, I understand why that is; but, still, we need to move past that and accept that people are going to be happier and far more productive, at the end of the day, if they are allowed to experiment and play on their own, for a portion of their paid time - and that corporations ought to encourage this.
Anyway, this is a long enough post that it's safe to say, if I haven't made my point by now, I probably will never be able to make it (in this post, anyway).
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