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The Shift Back to a Decentralized Social Web Has Begun

In 2018, I wrote this post about how I felt we were a year or two away from beginning to shift back to a decentralized social web experience. At the time, the primary reason I cited was a severe degradation of the overall user experience on centralized social sites like Twitter and Facebook.

When trying to understand the difference between a centralized and decentralized social web experience, look at it this way:

Centralized: Twitter and Facebook. A lot of people, talking about everything. Control rests with the platform, not the content creator.

Decentralized: Blogs. Far fewer people, talking about just a few topics. Control rests with the content creator since it is their blog.

 

So in 2018 when I wrote the above post, the ‘control’ issue hadn’t yet raised it’s ugly head like I knew it would eventually. As we are now all aware, Twitter and Facebook have gone to great lengths to remove content it feels is objectionable on its platforms over the last few months. Some people feel what Twitter and Facebook has done in removing content is completely just and acceptable, others feel it is outright censorship that must be addressed. My view has always been that once a platform starts making judgement calls on what content is or is not acceptable for its community, then we have started down a very slippery slope. And the angle of that slope is completely dependent on the objectivity of the humans that moderate the content on their platforms.

But more than anything else, it has long worried me that platforms like Twitter and Facebook are acting like publishers and exerting increasing amounts of control over the content that can be published on its platforms. This concerns me not only as a content creator, but also as a consultant who works with companies on building and executing digital strategies. My advice is simple:

I recently discovered that former Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger shares some of those concerns, and is working to address them, in his own way:

What Larry has done, in essence, is take back control of his tweets. He’s built a way on his blog to ‘tweet’ from his blog, then send the content to Twitter. So if Twitter decides to remove his content, that just removes it from Twitter, the content will still exist on his blog. Here’s an example of a ‘tweet’ he created on his blog, then sent to Twitter.

To be fair, this attempt is painfully crude. But it does work. What this could lead to eventually could be a scenario where content creators post short 140/280 character thoughts on their blogs, which are then sent to Twitter in the form of a tweet. Over time, a sort of ‘reader’ could be developed similar to the blog readers that pull in a blog’s RSS feed, so that we could subscribe to the ‘microblog’ feed from our favorite bloggers and viola…you could subscribe to the ‘tweets’ from your favorite content creators and bypass Twitter altogether!

The momentum toward a decentralized social web where the individual content creator has more control over their content is growing. And in an evil scientist sort of way, guess who is jumping in and trying to get in front of the decentralization parade?  Twitter.

 

Twitter can sense that a lot of its users are upset with its recent censoring of content, and are moving to other content creation tools. So the company tries to get in front of that rush, and secure the tools and functionality that it feels users will move to, such as newsletters.

The tug-of-war over a decentralized vs centralized social web is also one of control vs convenience. Right now, the pendulum is swinging back toward control for content creators, especially businesses that create content. When you are building your content team, focus on hiring managers that have a proven track record of developing engagement and community around content. This will make the process of detaching from social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook far easier for your business.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Personalization Drives Revenue, Nike’s Founding Marketing Principles, WOM is Still King

Happy Columbus Day and Happy Monday! I hope everyone has a fantabulous week! I wanted to share a few marketing and business stories that caught my eye over the last few days:

My goodness, but my friend Kelly Hungerford finds so many great business and marketing articles. She’s a must-follow on Twitter. This study she shares found that businesses that personalize the marketing communications they deliver to customers see increased revenue from those customers. The study also found that the more customized the personalization, the higher the percentage of companies that realized increased revenue. So a more robust and customized personalization strategy works better, but of course will cost more. So there’s the fine line to walk between cost and benefit.

 

I love this list of the marketing principles from the first head of marketing for Nike, circa 1980. In particular, I love the first two rules:

1 – Our business is change

2 – We’re on offense. All the time.

This speaks to a leaders’ mindset. Nike is saying upfront that its marketing will be proactive, not reactive. It will set market trends rather than respond to them. I love that.

 

Word of mouth is still the King when it comes to recommendations. A recent study from Bluecore found that Word of Month, Online Ads and Influencers were the top three drivers of recommendations. I did think this quote from the article was interesting: “However, when sorting by age, the results indicate that younger consumers are notably more impacted by the top three channels than older consumers. Comparing those younger than age 45 to those who are older, differences can be seen in the influence attributed to online ads (55% vs 30%), email (47% vs. 40%) and word of mouth (71% vs 59%).”  This suggests that as customers age, they are perhaps less receptive to recommendations from digital or younger sources, and more open to sources that they have had a longer exposure to?  Maybe, it’s interesting to ponder.

 

That’s it for this week, I hope yours is wonderful! Thanks for reading, see you back here in 24 hours!

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The Secret to Getting People to Listen to Your Idea

We are neck-deep in political season here in the US, and that means there are a LOT of political arguments happening on social media right now. I honestly haven’t checked Facebook in over a week and have no desire to do so. These arguments often follow a pattern, they focus almost exclusively on both sides talking about what they dislike about the other party or candidate. When an exchange centers on areas of disagreement, it should be no surprise that…a disagreement breaks out.

If you want someone to listen to and consider your idea, then you focus on what that person is passionate about, and then explain how your idea relates to their passions. Notice whenever I talk about the Buyer’s Journey, it always starts at the initial stage where the buyer is Unaware and I Don’t Care when it comes to your company. This is the stage at which you are building awareness.

As I always say, the key to building awareness with an audience that has no idea who you are, is to focus exclusively on that audience. If you are wanting to sell to customers, then you talk about the customers.  You talk about what’s important to the customers, what their passions are. That gets their attention, when they start to listen to what you have to say, then you talk to them about how your idea links to their passions. If someone can see how their passions are rooted in your idea, then transference happens. They will then become passionate about YOUR IDEA.

Let’s go back to political debates for a second. Most exchanges on social media don’t focus on finding a common passion, they focus on hate.  Here’s what I hate about your guy, here’s what you hate about my guy. If the exchange is focused on what both parties dislike about the other candidate, then that dislike will also transfer to the person they are talking to. I don’t like what you are talking about so as a result I don’t like you.

So in simple terms; If you focus on the things I like and am passionate about, I will like talking to you.  If instead you focus on the things I dislike, then in turn I will dislike talking to you.

If you want someone to listen to you, first listen to that person and learn what’s important to them, what their passions are, then tie your idea to those passions.