TED Talk: What Physics Can Teach You About Marketing

Google’s UK, Ireland, and Benelux Marketing Director Dan Cobley lectures at TED about the intersection between physics and marketing. Didn’t know they had something in common? Think again.

Here are Dan’s principles:

a) Newton’s Law: The more massive a brand, the more baggage it has and the more force it takes to change its position. The bigger a brand, the more difficult it is to reposition it.

b) Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: Observing consumers changes their behavior. For example, people aren’t honest in focus groups and surveys. However, with digital marketing, it’s much easier – we can measure what consumers actually do rather than what they say they do. This is why user testing is so important — we can measure actual behavior with digital marketing.

c) The Scientific Method – We cannot prove a hypothesis, we can only disprove it. One contrary data point can blow a theory out of the water. In marketing, you can invest in a brand but a single contrary observation or positioning can disprove a consumer’s belief. For example, BP spent millions positioning itself as environmentally friendly – but then the Deepwater Horizon oil spill happened. Toyota was seen as reliable, until millions of cars needed recalls. This is why marketing requires constant 24/7 attention. Even when things are going along, you still need a marketing team or a marketing agency and long-term commitments.

d) Entropy — Entropy will always increase. If we go back 20 years, one message controlled by one marketing messenger could control a brand. But today, with digital media, there is more chaos and it’s easier to lose control of your message. With digital comment creation and distribution tools, it is impossible to control your message. This is why digital marketing is more complex, digital marketing management may even be more costly, because it has higher risks – and more rewards. You can’t fight it, so embrace it!

The ROI of Social is "Will Your Business Be Around in 5 Years?"

I first blogged the latest edition of Socionomic’s now ubiquitous video about how the media landscape has changed to digital and its social implications back in December. Now, six months later, the world has changed again and Socionomics has come out with a new video called Social Media Revolution 2 (though not the second edition of their video, which has been around for over a year – an eternity in the age of the iPad).

A few facts, from Socionomics:

  1. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old
  2. 96% of them have joined a social network
  3. Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
  4. iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
  5. We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.
  6. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India
  7. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; % of these using LinkedIn 95%
  8. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
  9. 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
  10. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
  11. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
  12. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
  13. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
  14. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
  15. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
  16. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
  17. Only 14% trust advertisements
  18. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
  19. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
  20. Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas
  21. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation
  22. 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily
  23. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
  24. We will non longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media
  25. Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate
  26. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men Listening first, selling second
  27. The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years

How is your company reacting?

The Brand of Me – Or How Journalism Is Changing

I frequently say that digital media and digital marketing is not about the tool. It’s not about Twitter or Facebook or YouTube. It’s about the fact that communication — and how people get their information — are changing.

People don’t get their information from the daily newspaper, get their local paper — if you’re lucky and live in a big city you get the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times or Chicago Tribune — or go out to the local store and purchase a newspaper and read whatever’s in their paper. Rarely pay attention to who the journalist is that wrote the piece. Or are lucky to read papers like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal with an amazing array of editorial writers.

In today’s digital age, people don’t look for news. News comes at them and to them — at an amazing, rapid rate. Millions of people are getting their news from links on Twitter – whether retweets or posts from their friends or network, celebrities like Ashton Kutcher with 4.8 million followers, corporate accounts, or news sites like CNN with over 3 million followers. Twitter is a news source.

People find out about what’s happening in the because they see a link posted on Facebook or Twitter. A recent study by some Korean researchers argued that Twitter is less like a social network and more like a news source; Twitter is the new CNN.

This was also discussed at Israel’s Com.Vention, the country’s largest annual Internet convention. At one of the sessions, with Robert Scoble, and several high tech executives, about digital content creation, it was mentioned by one of the speakers that today, because we get our information at us — and not dependent on any media outlet — journalists are dependent on their own personal brand. Instead of getting our news from a print newspaper, we read journalist’s — people who have credibility and write quality, regardless of what degree they have or what outlets they write —  blogs – whose links we found on Twitter or were shared on Facebook.

I apologize that the sound is not very good, as I took this video from my cell phone. Start at 2:00 in particular, where it talks about how journalism and content consumption and creation is changing, and especially at 3:00 where the speaker talks about the “Brand of Me.”