Are the big corporates taking advantage of Covid-19?

Image by Wordswag - words by

Michael de Groot

You see I think they are. I started noticing this a few months ago, I believe the phone company EE was the first one. Thanks to Denise Quinlan for reminding me.

But there are many of them now and whenever there’s an advert on the telly, I listen out for the subtle words suggesting that they understand, that they are here for us, now more than ever etc. etc.

Below are a number of them, where I’ve been able to search for the ad and I will highlight the word to listen out for.

First up EE a phone company. Most of us remember Kevin Bacon from the movies? Wrong! Nowadays he’s the face of EE. And this advert capitalised on the fact that the NHS was bearing the brunt of everything COVID. So give the NHS free data and the British public will think this is wonderful and support them too by moving there. And you think we’re stupid?

Second is Lloyds Bank, well who doesn’t love a mother horse and her foal? This is not a new advert but just new wording, towards the end they say, ‘now more that ever’. What the hell!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2JlKoYI6Ro

Third up is American Express with their slogan, ‘We’ve always had your back, we always will’. They show fake scenes of people coping with lockdown situations. Unbelievable!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A15gwTFoDXs

Fourth up is a UK food chain Sainsbury’s. They try drawing on our emotions, but publicly thanking their own workers through an advert. But surely that is better done in person, in paychecks and better working conditions? It is nice don’t get me wrong, but it suggests that they are a company who value their workers more than anyone else at this time and suggesting. On their YouTube channel under the video advert it says, ‘We’d like to thank every single one of our colleagues for stepping up and helping us feed the nation.’ There’s no doubt that they should be thanked, but pulling on our heart strings is not appropriate at all!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyU72XOD3d8

Fifth up is Vodafone. This one in particular grated on me. Using all these clips, are they real? Are they fake? Who bloody knows, I just believe this takes such advantage of these horrible times for people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjfxHRuEPuE

Sixth up is Lidl, one of the German discounters who have overtaken the U.K. with Aldi. We actually shop at Lidl, so I like them, but the advert again capitalises on COVID. The overused ‘now more than ever’.

https://youtu.be/DwKanQ88CBA

Seventh up is eBay, yes eBay!! Their slogan is ‘stronger as one’. Wow, not good. But will I stop buying from eBay, no I won’t but the feeling is not great.

https://youtu.be/B0KkMEdwkNM

There’s one more, which is Money Supermarket but I can’t seem to find their latest advert.

There is one advert that I thought was quite clever and although I don’t consume their product, I believe their approach was quite funny. They are not taking advantage of the COVID period, they are just trying to let people know that they are open again for business.

https://youtu.be/wZFp0qeYB6M

Anyway, that’s my report so far on the big brands taking advantage of COVID19 and pull on people’s heartstrings.

Michael out…

Michael de Groot

Do you enjoy the adverts?

Most Social Media feeds have become a feed littered with adverts and I’m not even talking about the paid adverts that appear there, although there are of course millions.

As Social Media Marketing World winds up it’s series of keynotes, its highfiving, the back slapping, littered with sound bites and good vibes towards everything Social, the objective of it all was really to learn about how to get more money out of consumers.

I feel like being sick in my porridge. Denial is the key word here, every Social Media Marketer is in denial of the damage Social Media is doing to humankind, the exploitation of our democracy and our choice to choose our own consumerism.

Not only will they be coming back to their communities with new ideas on how to con their connections, they will be delivering their workshops to teach others how to do the same and charge handsomely for the privilege.

I used to be a huge proponent of Social Media when it all appeared dubbed as Web 2.0. I spent many hours learning this skill and teaching others too. I’m totally guilty and was taken in by it all. However little did they know how they were going to use it to grow their gold reserves. It took a while for them to realise where they were heading towards themselves and then they discovered that our desire to be able to communicate with friends and loved ones via a digital medium meant that we were very very happy to share our most intimate details, thoughts and desires, including our anger and frustrations.

Global mental health is a rising epidemic and we already know that Social Media has a massive part to play in this rise. I first wrote about this in 2013 in the non-significant journal of psychology, an article titled ‘Do Social Networks Sell Drugs?’.

We also know that Social Media has been used to manipulate voters to elect Donald Trump as president, possibly the biggest abuser of democracy the free world has ever seen. It has also been used to deliver ‘Brexit’, the Social Media mastermind that came up with the slogan ‘Take back control’, Dominic Cummings, portrayed by the brilliant Benedict Cumberbatch in ‘Brexit: The Uncivil War’.

Molly Russell’s father Ian says he believes Instagram is partly responsible for his daughter’s death. Molly Russell committed suicide whilst being active on Instagram and she is just one of the reported cases we know of.

[embed]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-46966009/instagram-helped-kill-my-daughter[/embed]

Whilst I appreciate that Social Media has also been responsible for much good in the world. The Ice Bucket challenge, that went viral on Social Media to raise awareness for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS (commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease). It raised a lot of money for the charity, which supports the sufferers of this disease. There are I am sure thousands of examples where Social Media has been beneficial for many.

However, there is a huge underlying motive for the owners of these platforms and that is to make money for it’s shareholders.

Printing money from your content, your discussions, your fears, your mental health. If you knew the extent of the exploitation that’s taking place you would leave these platforms overnight. But you don’t, even though you realise at some level that this is happening, we are in fear of missing out (FOMO) and the platform owners know this all too well. They’ve built their technology to ensure that this is the case constantly.

As a result most business owners now believe that Social Media is the ONLY way now to promote their products and services and they are spending billions in doing so.

But not everyone has millions to spend on advertising and they are using the newsfeed to post their adverts for free and that’s why the newsfeed has become the advertfeed.

In years to come the newsfeed will disappear completely, it doesn’t have the value it once had. Community discussions will grow and replace it, I call it the ‘Group Chat’. These aren’t that new, they have been emerging on messaging apps, like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Snapchat and Instagram.

But we don’t need to be beholden to these platforms, you can look to create your own community chat forums, just like the ones we used to have in the good old days. We may have to pay a small amount for them, but I promise it will be worth it in the long run.

Happy advertising!

Michael de Groot

The Season’s adverts have started!

Hugh MacLeod

It’s barely the 1st November and I saw my very first Christmas advert on TV. I was having some lunch in the kitchen, whilst ‘Loose Women’ was playing on the TV. As this was on a commercial station, I saw and heard my first 2018 Christmas advert.

It’s only the 1st of November!!

This means we nearly have 2 months of Christmas adverts ahead of us. And that’s why I try to avoid any commercial TV or radio stations, because the adverts drive me insane.

The trouble is with the digital world we live in, it’s going to be almost impossible for me to avoid seeing and hearing adverts, especially the Christmas ones. Whenever I deliver any kind of talk or presentation about storytelling I ask the audience if they like the adverts. Usually I have just a few hands that go up and that’s because they work in the marketing industry, most of the room keep their hands down. 99.9% of everyone dislikes the adverts.

I work in the industry too and I can’t bear (or is it bare?) them.

Why?

Imagine a large rock and think of that rock as your brain. Now take a hammer, doesn’t matter what size, think of that hammer being the advert. Pound the hammer on the rock multiple times, what do you get?

A dent on the rock, that will stay there forever. And that’s what’s happening in your brain when the advertising industry continually repeat their adverts on all the possible channels and networks they can think of. You know the ones I’m talking about right?

Whether you’re browsing on the web or walking through the high street or shopping mall, notice what you are looking at. Might some of those items be the exact items that were being advertised?

Did you ever experience a phenomenon called ‘Amazon Amnesia’? Made up word of course, it’s not real but it has a nice ring to it doesn’t it? It’s when you receive a parcel in the post and you can’t even remember what it was that you ordered! Well you can thank the advertisers for that. You may even have experienced bringing home a product from the shopping mall or high street and wondered why you bought it. Yep, exact same reason. The hammer (advert) created a gorgeous neural pathway for that product in your brain. When you saw it you may have been compelled to buy it, without realising why.

99.9% of the junk we buy we do not need.

There are children going hungry, there are people living on the streets and all because society is too obsessed with wanting the next iPhone in their hands, when the current on is working absolutely fine. Nobody wants to connect the dots between buying stuff and the state of the world, whether it’s hunger, homelessness or climate change.

We’re all so totally self-obsessed with our own wants and needs that we dig our heads in the sand and just think of number one, yourself.

Happy shopping this Season!

Michael de Groot

Have you actually compared storytelling with marketing?

Hugh MacLeod

I wouldn’t wish to presume of course, I can only go by the fact that I’ve never heard anyone talk about it or even hear anyone consider assessing it.

Picture the scene.

Marketing lay out their stall for the forthcoming year. They present their plan to the board of directors and show them a multi-million dollar spend on advertising, inbound marketing, posters, flyers, influencers, social media ads, SEO, PPC etc, etc.

Queue script writer/storyteller and video director. They present their video episodes, which includes a story about the founders of the business, the early pioneer clients, their current clients, their staff and their own individual stories in life and work and best of all an episode about why the organisation exists, their passion, value proposition and their why.

Which one sounds more interesting to you? And which one will have longevity in the minds of viewers, investors, customers, brand fans and kids?

Yeah, I thought so. Why isn’t everyone doing it then? Why does everyone on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn promote their crap and I’m only calling it crap because as we all know adverts suck!

Happy advertising!

Michael de Groot

Storytelling should be simple right?

Hugh MacLeod

When it comes to storytelling, we make it too complicated. We hear stories, narratives and anecdotes all the time, but we don’t turn around and say, ‘ah, that’s a story I am listening to or oh no, that’s a narrative or anecdote.

We just are engaged by what we’re listening to and we connect the dots in our brains in relation to what we have experienced previously. It’s almost impossible to create new neural pathways without referencing older neurological pathways that already exist.

For example whilst you are reading this, you in theory are creating a new neural pathway just with this short article. However the article can not exist on it’s own because you would not have any way of bringing it up from your memory. It has to be connected to something else that exists in your brain. You already have a neural pathway established which knows something about storytelling. For example when your mother or father told you a story, it’s likely that you will be able to recall what one of those stories were. Therefore you have some beliefs and opinions about stories already established. The neural pathways may be a pit rusty, but because you are receiving potentially new information about storytelling, you brain will attach the new information, the new neural pathway, to the old rusty pathway and refresh that part as well.

So now you have created more relationships to do with storytelling in your brain, which means whenever you hear, read or see something that mentioned storytelling you will be able to recall the whole lot in one go.

Clever or what?

But it’s the job of the speaker, writer, presenter to invoke this inside of you.

Without either a story, narrative or anecdote, which for me are all the same, you don’t have a chance to make the connections and therefore it will be totally forgettable.

Happy storytelling!

Michael de Groot

Marketing is a failing practice?

Hugh MacLeod

Whenever I hear the word ‘marketing’, I hear ‘advertising’. And we all know that advertising sucks. Well it does in my world, nobody truly love the adverts, they are an interruption to your browsing or watching experience and possibly 99% of them are not interesting, they are brainwashing of the highest order.

Ever found yourself buying something you then realise you didn’t actually need after all? We’re exposed to maybe 5000 ads every single day, whether it be on TV, Radio, Web, Podcasts, Billboards, Posters, Bags, Product Placement and many many other methods that we may not even realise are there. They all effect our subconscious mind!

Unfortunately advertising works, because otherwise they would have stopped it a long time ago. Further bad news for the marketers is that the discerning browser and watcher is now switching off from the constant bombardment of ads and switching to places where there are no adverts, Netflix may spring to mind. We’d rather pay for a service we can enjoy instead of getting a free service we don’t enjoy.

In our house if we’re interested in watching a show on TV channel that has adverts, we record it. When we watch it back, our remote allows us to hit the speed play button three times and it skips the 3 minute ads interlude. I can tell you we were overjoyed when we found that button!

So why do marketers continue with the ads instead of sharing stories. The temptation is there I know, everyone is doing it so you have to join the bandwagon for fear of missing out.

Truth is, stories work even better, just look at the movies. They are all stories and we love them. When they write the script they don’t think, where can I fit in an advert or product placement just so the viewer can get distracted.

You can still feature your product or service in your story, but a word of warning, don’t be tempted to explain every single detail, your story is there to make someone curious. Curiosity is so much more effective then telling the viewer or reader everything that you want them to know. They won’t remember anyway, just share a story that is relatable and will make them think a bit further. Leave it up to their own imagination, let them feel and imagine like they are featuring in your story.

Happy storytelling!

Michael de Groot

Expelliarmus

This is the spell that Harry Potter uses when he’s in a duel.

This how I feel sometimes when I’m duelling against the manipulation of the internet, email marketing and advertising.

No matter what I do I’m bombarded with these messages every day. They suggest that we are exposed daily to 5000 marketing messages. We don’t even know it’s happening to us.

A connection of mine Nolan Clemmons posted this fabulous graphic (see below) illustrating the routes that corporations use to manipulate us using email and the internet. Once they have us in their sales funnel they will bombard us with adverts wherever we browse, in our email inboxes and then eventually by phone.

Nolan Clemmons — clemmons.io

Don’t get me wrong, I believe the Internet is a great invention, I’m an advocate a believer and yet I also believe that tech companies have carefully examined us humans as targets and data sets to be manipulated and controlled.

Governments actually love Facebook, they may suggest all sorts of action for data leaks, privacy hacks etc., but they themselves are the biggest users of searching for individuals using these technologies. I’ve sat in front of cyber security experts that have shown me a whole host of hacks they use to get the intel that governments, security firms, the police, MI5, the FBI, NSA, GCHQ and the CIA need in order to locate criminals. Well they can adopt these techniques for all of us too, for any of us. On the day of publishing this, I received this email.

By: Sarah Miller — Citizens Against Monopoly

Facebook Inc. is inviting Capitol Hill staffers to Washington DC’s “newest, most exclusive event venue” for free food and drinks. Events like this enable Facebook to peddle influence in the halls of power, and keep lawmakers from cracking down on its abuse of our democracy. In the first quarter of 2018, Facebook spent $3.3 million lobbying the U.S. government, more than ever before. That’s a key part of how it builds power and evades accountability, and events like this one are part of the process. At “A Place to Connect,” Facebook’s executive and top lobbyists will be schmoozing the people who are supposed to represent us, and trying to bamboozle Congress into believing that the company’s reforms are for real. For instance, a former corporate lawyer who is now Facebook’s deputy chief privacy officer will try to argue that Facebook is stepping it up on privacy — all actual evidence to the contrary.

Sign the Freedom From Facebook petition. Tell the Federal Trade Commission to break up Facebook’s monopoly: https://freedomfromfb.com

You know when you get that sinking feeling, that what you’ve been doing on the Internet for over a decade in order to be noticed, get found and help your own small business is now catching up with you and the realisation that corporations are using all your data to make millions, no sorry, billions.

Today I sat through a presentation by the UK CEO of Cisco and he told us that in 2018, that’s right now, there are 18 billion devices connected to the internet, by 2020 it will be 50 billion and by 2030 it will be 500 billion, that’s ½ trillion devices connected to the internet. And that’s not just mobile phones by the way, of course it couldn’t be.

He also said there are more mobile phones in the world compared to toothbrushes. What a ridiculous statistic that is, but it’s true!!

Happy brushing!

Michael de Groot

Just saw this interview with Jaron Lanier on Channel 4 news in the UK. He confirms the manipulation point.

Adverts

When I first saw adverts on TV, when I was a young boy in Amsterdam, I thought they were magical. Those short stories advertising usually food and stuff you’d like to own were mesmerising and actually very memorable. Well they repeated them over and over, day after day, many times during an evening and therefore they just stuck in your mind, potentially, forever.

I still remember that in between each advert they presented a lion character and he did strange things in between each advert. I was also very interested in seeing what he would do in between the adverts as well as the adverts themselves. Here is an example of a Dutch advert, advertising Dutch Peanut Butter. Notice the Lion’s antics before and after. I now realise that the Lion, played a massive part in getting you to stay watching and locking in a massive hook into your brain.

[embed]https://youtu.be/iy6AhWkSKo8[/embed]

After all, adverts are short interventions in your brain, they get lodged into your memory banks for recall at a later date. Have you ever found yourself walking around a shop and noticing a product that you actually didn’t need, but you still bought it? You may not have been able to make the association in that moment, you may not make any association to the advert ever, but the signal was still there without you even noticing, the signal to buy something you actually didn’t need.

Happy shopping!

Michael de Groot

Journalism

Can we still trust our journalists? We’re all exposed to news, whether on TV, the web, social media, newspapers and digital news. But how do we know that anyone is actually telling the truth?

Everyone is desperate to get more eyes on their publications and in the main this is for one single reason. Advertisers revenue. Advertisers revenue is how news channels survive. Sure the BBC may be an exception to that rule and after all everyone with a TV, probably most these days has to be a licence for the privilege to watch the BBC.

So apart from them (BBC) everyone else needs to earn a revenue in order to pay their workers and keep them in jobs. So desperate are news channels these days that they are probably willing to risk a few bad stories in order to pull in the punters.

Dr. Jamie Whyte is a Director of Research at The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a free market think tank, based in London and his TEDxWarwick 2018 talk was very revealing. A news channel in Germany have already been fined for their fake news.

Mind Map created by me after attending TEDx Warwick 2018

They need to prove to their advertisers that their site or publication is the most active or popular in terms of eyeballs and as such they will need to get those punters (us) into their world.

There’s nothing better than a well thought out and sensational headline to grab our attention. We think we’re just clicking through to an innocent and factual story but in fact we’re all pulled into an advertising multi billion industry that pays many workers to keep spewing out garbage every single day.

The total global advertising spend in 2018 is forecasted to be $558 billion, that’s half a trillion!

Chart by Statista.com — Global advertising spend from 2010 to 2018 (in billion US dollars)

Happy advertising!

Michael de Groot

Manipulation

The world is angry with Facebook and rightly so. It may not happen straight away, but we may have seen the gradual and ultimate demise of Facebook over the next few years. It’s not just the Cambridge Analytica story that’s causing it.

Most people are realising that Facebook is a total time-suck. You lose yourself in the Rabbit Hole, never to come out. You stop speaking to people and avoid having real conversations that matter.

I stopped on Facebook, I haven’t deleted my profile, but maybe one day I will. My mind is so much better off as a result.

Down the Rabbithole — Michael & Josh

What gets to me now is not only the manipulation of the social media platforms, also the manipulation of marketers using those platforms.

I can now see the wording, the language, the videos, the NLP, basically the brainwash that’s taking place across the board. I’m worried for us all. Capitalism, consumerism, growth, GDP’s, nationalism, plastics, money, all of it is making us greedy, corrupt and wish to take rather then give.

A human wants to help her fellow human, but not at any cost, not telling her that I’m better than anyone else, surely?

That is what’s happening at the moment. When I read LinkedIn profiles I am astounded how people promote themselves as the biggest this the best at that, showing off awards, so-called corporates to have worked with, testimonials and also sorts of gimmicks, tricks and magic. It’s making me feel quite nauseous when I read them.

Happy promoting!

Michael de Groot

Facebook

So Facebook have changed their algorithm again and the world is up in arms. Regular users are raising their arms in celebration and those with business pages are raising their arms in anger.

All of us who have business pages were promised a free business page to promote our business to followers for free.

And then things slowly changed for the worst.

Slowly our business posts stopped appearing on our followers newsfeeds. But all the trainers out there suggested that as followers rarely will go back to the business page, we must keep active and post at least once per day.

What a crock of s..t, that turned out to be.

My motto with Social Media is ‘expect the unexpected’, the fake news debate has given Facebook the best excuse ever.

Right, they said, let’s reduce the amount of business page posts to newsfeeds in case it contains fake news and that way we can tell owners of business pages that the only way they can have visibility is to pay for our bargain basement adverts.

Let’s change the forecast for Facebook ad revenue by 2020, which was $60 billion, just mobile ads by the way, to $90 billion.

The only winner for this change of algorithm is Facebook.

DUH, who else did you think was going to benefit, you?

Happy Facebooking!

Michael de Groot

Algorithm

If I see one more post on Facebook that says ‘I’ve just found out that Facebook has yet another algorithm’, I swear that I’m going to rage quit Facebook. Just kidding of course I won’t, but these messages are definitely causing me some rage!

The fact is all the Social Networks are changing things every single week. Have you ever noticed Facebook’s weekly app update with the following words:

‘Thanks for using Facebook. To make our app better for you we bring updates to the App Store regularly. Every update of our Facebook includes improvements for speed and reliability. As new features become available, we’ll highlight those for you in the app.’

What is missing from that statement?

‘And we will also adjust our algorithm every week to ensure that we continue to maximise adverts for you and benefit our advertisers and also ensure that you will see more of those in your newsfeed compared with posts and updates from your friends, family and the brands that you adore.’

You haven’t been seeing relevant stuff in your newsfeed for years and now you’re jumping on the bandwagon of tricking your friends and family by asking them to leave a message on your post and you are also asking them to send that ridiculous message to their own newsfeeds. The crazy thing is that many are actually reacting to the request and guess what they’ve all seen your message! By asking those mugs to react to your post, it won’t mean that you will see more of their posts, it just means they will see more of yours, but then again that’s the whole purpose of this magic trick and you knew that!

Do you really know what has happened to you and why you are copying others on FB? Is there a slight possibility that you’re addicted to the network and that you are believing all the rubbish that’s being posted on there?

Get a life!

Michael de Groot

ps. Below is the real text of a real Facebook post that I see being posted on a daily basis. I only deleted the emojis that were interpsersed after each para/sentence. #OMG!

My apologies but it seems Ive missed births, marriages, birthdays and also really important stuff recently !!!

I was wondering why my newsfeed looked so different lately well It seems like I keep seeing the same 25 people!I’ve Just found out that Facebook has yet another new algorithm. So I’m doing a simple check, with your help.

Can everybody do me a quick favour?? If you’re seeing this, leave me a comment — just a quick “Hey” or your favourite emoji or gif would be great. The more interaction you have with people, the more friends will show up on your feed. Otherwise Facebook CHOOSES who you see!

Feel free to copy and paste to your own wall so you can have more interaction as well!
Technology!!

Thanks everyone and happy new year

How many leads are you really converting?

Current reality is likely to be fantasy. The fact is that the four horsemen, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google are the winners. [Scott Galloway's book The Four Horsemen: http://amzn.to/2CWn5jv]

Their engines are huge, their pockets are even deeper and you have very likely spent a big junk of your earnings with these 4 mammoth organisations.

They are buying up all their competition whenever they pose a threat and will own the internet space for many a year to come, you might as well get used to it.

The only way you are competing on the internet is by spending on ads with Google and Facebook and at this time Facebook is the winner.

Facebook will make $60 billion at least from mobile ads by 2020, that's just in a couple of years time.

You are hoping that AI and automation will save the day and actually it probably won't. The only way you have a chance is to become super personal with your customers and potential buyers. This means spending more on the front end with training your employees to become outstanding communicators and making sure you retain them for longer.

Millennials will rage quit at the drop of a hat, so you better know what they value about your company and make sure you deliver this to them daily.

Lead generation is going to be a much hotter topic in years to come and you will be experimenting with many snake oil providers before settling down with something that you feel happy with.

Remember the customer knows when she's being sold to. 

The best organisations are becoming better at storytelling and linking al their teams together and sharing the same message.

Here on LinkedIn in by the way is where this can be most effective. The trouble is most organisations ignore this potential and their employees LinkedIn profiles are a mess. Sorry to be so direct, but it's true.

When your employees have to become better communicators they actually have to become better storytellers. Their own story and that of the company they work for. A perfect blend of the two will create trust and loyalty.

Better get started...

Purgatory: the place to which Roman Catholics believe that the spirits of dead people go and suffer for the evil acts that they did while they were alive, before they are able to go to heaven. Humorous: an extremely unpleasant experience that causes suffering.

Do you seek attention?

Generally speaking most of us do seek attention, we’ve been seeking attention ever since we were a pregnancy test. 

And as luck would have it you have probably been receiving unsolicited attention through all your baby, toddler and teenager lives until you reach so-called adulthood. I say so-called because young people believe it’s when they reach 18, parents believe it’s not until you’re 21 and science says your brain doesn’t fully develop until you’re 25. I’m with the science community. I have first hand evidence of living with a 19-year old. 

So when you’ve been receiving attention for at least a quarter of your life, it’s not that easy then to make the transition to start giving attention to others. Maybe that’s why 50% of all marriages fail? #justsaying

Anyway let’s apply this to business and brand development. When you advertise you’re basically asking for attention aren’t you?

And these days that’s what everyone is doing or planning to do. Mark Zuckerberg is very happy about this and definitely his employees, because job security is important to them of course it is. Facebook is probably going to be the largest benefactor of your need to get attention. It’s a very clever choreographed process to make you feel that if you don’t advertise, nobody will give you attention. In fact the algorithm has been changed on Facebook business pages to ensure this is the case. If you have a company page, have you ever noticed how any time you post an update Facebook follows this up at least the next day with a notification? It says that ‘when you’ve finished boosting your post X up to X number of people will see it in their newsfeed for just a couple of bucks.’ (See image example below).

Generally speaking most of us do seek attention, we’ve been seeking attention ever since we were a pregnancy test. 

And as luck would have it you have probably been receiving unsolicited attention through all your baby, toddler and teenager lives until you reach so-called adulthood. I say so-called because young people believe it’s when they reach 18, parents believe it’s not until you’re 21 and science says your brain doesn’t fully develop until you’re 25. I’m with the science community. I have first hand evidence of living with a 19-year old. 

So when you’ve been receiving attention for at least a quarter of your life, it’s not that easy then to make the transition to start giving attention to others. Maybe that’s why 50% of all marriages fail? #justsaying

Anyway let’s apply this to business and brand development. When you advertise you’re basically asking for attention aren’t you?

And these days that’s what everyone is doing or planning to do. Mark Zuckerberg is very happy about this and definitely his employees, because job security is important to them of course it is. Facebook is probably going to be the largest benefactor of your need to get attention. It’s a very clever choreographed process to make you feel that if you don’t advertise, nobody will give you attention. In fact the algorithm has been changed on Facebook business pages to ensure this is the case. If you have a company page, have you ever noticed how any time you post an update Facebook follows this up at least the next day with a notification? It says that ‘when you’ve finished boosting your post X up to X number of people will see it in their newsfeed for just a couple of bucks.’ (See image example below).

I appreciate totally that if you’re in business and you have a message or a mission you need to get people to pay attention. Advertisements are not always a great way to do this though. There are many other routes to market but here lies the problem, there are far too many routes these days and to test them all, you need a serious bag of cash to do so.

So let’s just say that someone is paying attention to you, your process, whatever that may be, actually worked. They actually clicked through an advert and you got an order. Because it worked you will repeat the process again and again, continuing the advertising paradigm and many of you will even be advocating this to others, some of you might even be making a living out of training others to advertise as well. And so it grows and the advertising barons will be raking in the cash, buckets full of them. 

Every social network depends on advertising for its survival. You can see that the vast majority of their innovation and creativity is directed towards how to leverage their advertising engine even further. More development, updates and improvements are seen in their advertising platforms compared to the social networks themselves. The updates on those are far and few between. In fact they don’t even have great customer service, it is impossible to communicate one on one with a customer service representative, you are cornered into reading pages and pages of manuals and forums before giving up in despair.

They are amongst the worst companies on the planet for their customer service, not to speak of their failures in dealing with abuse of all kinds on their sites.

I’m not trying to bash social networks by the way, I know it sounds like it, I’m just highlighting that we’ve all fallen victim to them, whether it’s the addiction to them and their consistent exploitation of companies that are seeking more and more attention for their product or service.

So what’s the solution? Well if I knew I’d probably be a billionaire by now, but one thing’s for sure paying social networks to advertise on your behalf for me is not the right way.

Instead of seeking attention, maybe we should be inviting audiences to articulate what great would look like for them. Inviting them to share in a journey, become part of the story to greatness instead of just adding their funds to ours. Minimalism is on the rise and companies will need to become even more innovative if they wish to survive the path towards all of us needing less instead of more in our lives.

I would love to hear your perspective on this. Share your comments or tweet me using the hashtag. #attentionseeker

@stayingaliveuk

Is Your Buyer's Brain Overloaded?

Possibly, but it depends...

Recently I read that 90% of all the data that's been created on the planet was created in the past 2 years! That's an astounding statistic don't you think? The amount of data we’re consuming is growing exponentially every single second and I've just added to it by publishing this post.

Just think about the amount of social media content and blog posts you’re reading these days considering they didn't even exist just a few small years ago.

In fact YouTube didn't exist 10 years ago and now 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute. 300 hours! That's about 20 days worth in a minute, (based on let's say a 15 hour awake day). And I understand that Facebook is well on its way to by-passing YouTube’s activity. 

When you consider how many users there are on social media channels and the data they’re all creating, one just can't comprehend how big those data figures are. The size of data is so large that it’s now being described in the form of zettabytes. By 2019 Cisco predicts that the Internet will carry 2 zettabytes of data, that's three times more than last year (2014). Video sharing is expected to increase to 80% from 67% currently over the same period.

So what's a ’zettabyte’? I'm sure you want to know, so I looked it up on Wikipedia for you.

The zettabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix zetta indicates multiplication by the seventh power of 1000 or 1021 in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore one zettabyte is one sextillion (one long scale trilliard) bytes. The unit symbol is ZB.

1 ZB = 10007bytes = 1021bytes = 1000000000000000000000bytes = 1000exabytes = 1billionterabytes = 1trilliongigabytes.

Silicon Valley already has problems finding data scientists to cope with figuring out the ’data revolution’ that's upon us right now!

’Customer experience enhancement’ is expected to be the largest big data business category and the one with the most growth, with forecasts saying this sector will grow from $0.75 billion in 2015 to $3.57 billion in 2020.

The biggest challenge for all marketers is how to get noticed and deliver that expected ’customer experience enhancement’, whilst everyone is sharing multiple amounts of content (data). Your messages are literally drowning in all the noise, which in the main is content (data) we don’t really need anyway! Buyers are being bombarded by millions of bytes of information every single hour. And then there's the question of demographics. Who’s more active on which platform, do I target Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn or the others? Managing this social media soup is also becoming a major headache for many marketers? Micro Enterprises are totally confused by it all.

And then we are developing love-hate relationships with all these channels too.

Why? Because they keep changing the format, the user interface (UI) and what you expected from it one day, can be gone the next. And we are still loyal to them, well most of the time anyway. That's why when a new channel comes along everyone rushes to it to see if they will get a better experience.

Advertising is losing its credibility too with the buyer as more and more of us loath being sold to.  

So what's the answer for getting noticed?

It's a tough one and I'm not sure there's one single solution to the question. But what I’m 100% sure about is that buyers want to be WOWED, they want to feel SPECIAL, they want to believe they've had the BEST DEAL ever and know that the follow up customer service will make them feel like they're the ONLY customer.

Your buyer’s brain is literally maxed out with data and there's no reprieve anytime soon.

We all need new and innovative ideas and above all we need to examine our own brains to decide what will be the most memorable way for our buyers to absorb content (data). Put yourself in the driving seat and examine the buyer’s journey through her eyes or rather her brain.

As humans we've always been fantastically curious. Curious about other people in particular, after all that's what makes us human. We have a natural empathy for others.  The only way we can develop any kind of empathy is to learn something about the other person or situation first. Without that information we can't connect with our inner self (emotional part of our brain) and develop any kind of connection at all.

So how do we currently learn about others or situations?

Through stories...

Storytelling is ancient and it evokes an emotion inside of us that leaves meaningful footsteps inside of our brains that potentially stay there forever. Well in fact they do, it just depends on how good we are in being able to recall those stories. Definitely what's true is that if there’s more emotion and feeling about those stories, we will remember it for longer.

Why is it then that most marketers are still stuck in a pattern of ’This is my Product - Buy me’?

With the amount of zeta-data spinning around the planet there's no hope for any of the old style marketing to stick with anyone, it just isn't appropriate any longer.

If we know that stories do stick, why are marketers not using this formula more often? And yes, stories do need to be targeted to each demographic, because they need to feel like you're talking directly to them. There's no point telling a story to a 60-year old expecting it to be relevant to an 18-year old.

Now over to you.

I'd love to hear whether you’re a storyteller and what success you've had  or otherwise. How are you getting or expecting to be noticed by your current and future buyers?

@stayingaliveuk - ’Share Your Story’

Image: @gapingvoid

Why Did You Endorse Me?

By far the most frequent asked question I get from my LinkedIn students is around the Skills and Expertise section.

The question usually is around why connections endorse them for skills that they haven't actually experienced, i.e. someone endorses you for one of your skills but you have never demonstrated to them that you have that skill. 

So why are they endorsing you? There are 2 reasons for this.

1. Because they can.
2. LinkedIn prompts them to do so, regularly.

Let me explain further. The skills section is something LinkedIn developed out of something that was called ’specialities’, which sat at the end of your summary. When they upgraded this to the Skills and Expertise section it morphed into a brand new and clever system to develop LinkedIn’s objectives to a) get more traffic to their website and b) assist advertisers to target their adverts more accurately towards members who will be interested in those ads.

Every social media website is competing for views. When there’s more traffic to a website, it becomes a more attractive proposition for advertisers. LinkedIn’s advertising real estate is actually very small. See the images below. You can see that there are just 3 areas on their website for adverts.

1. A sentence right at the very top of the page with a hyperlink.
2. A banner ad usually a full colour image, which sometimes is animated.
3. Small ads that appear bottom right, depending on what page you are browsing.

The advertiser has a number of different criteria they can choose from when constructing their advert. And as you are probably guessing by now, skills is one of those criteria, which they can select and is extremely powerful to narrow down your target audience. In the example below it took my target audience from 347 million, the full approximate membership number on LinkedIn down to just 12k, a select audience in Birmingham UK with some specific skills on their profile.

Pretty powerful stuff for the advertiser, which makes it very attractive to advertise on LinkedIn and of course at a lower cost too, because you're targeting a smaller audience. 

Then we have the ecosystem that LinkedIn has created whenever you visit your profile, a connection’s profile or browse the mobile app. Regularly you will see alerts for you to endorse your connections for certain skills. You have no idea whether these skills do actually exist on your connections’ profile. 

The only sure way of making sure that these skills are indeed on their profile is to go there and make sure they are. Sounds like a lot of work, perhaps. However if you don't, LinkedIn will continue to suggest new skills for your connections’ profiles because LinkedIn knows that their skill list is not yet up to maximum 50. It appears that LinkedIn’s primary goal is to make sure that as many of its members has a full list of skills on their profiles. More skills, more targeted advertising and more $$$ for LinkedIn’s shareholders. Got it?

I have a few tips for you to ensure that you are both maximising the skills section for your benefit and as such assist you to be found on LinkedIn.

I decided that making use of this nice infographic on your profile means that the viewers of your profile will get a quick overview of what you are all about.

1. Have a maximum of 12 skills, you will find that most won't bother to endorse you for more than 3 anyway.
2. Decide that the key skills you've identified become your keywords for your profile.
3. Ensure you intelligently spread those keywords (skills) throughout your profile to assist you being found on LinkedIn whenever someone is searching for people who have certain skills. 
4. Whenever someone endorses you for a skill that does indeed exist on your profile and it’s one you've decided to display there, then the best way to thank them is to endorse them back. You will know from an email sent by LinkedIn, what someone has endorsed you for. (See image below).
5. If someone has endorsed you for a skill that doesn't appear on your profile, again you will receive an email but this time LinkedIn will prompt you to add it to your profile. If you're not happy to accept this skill, then delete it from the top of your profile, where it will appear as an outstanding action.
6. If at any time you wish to remove a skill, go into edit profile mode and move to the skills section where you can edit skills by clicking on ’add skill’. Delete and move a skill when you're in edit mode.

You will receive this email, when your connections have endorsed you for skills that are already on your profile. You can return the favour by visiting their profiles and endorsing them for their skills. There is no further action required.

When you receive this email, LinkedIn has prompted one of your connections either when they visited your profile or when they were browsing on their mobile app to endorse you. It's very rare that they have decided to endorse you for that skill, LinkedIn prompts them to do so. When it says 'add to profile', you will know it's a skill that you don't have listed. If you click through that skills will be added. Watch the video below to learn how to dismiss any new skills.

If you are unhappy with the Skills & Expertise section on LinkedIn, I recommend you give LinkedIn some feedback, either via a ’feedback’ link on the site or send a support ticket to LinkedIn help.

Now you know how the Skills & Expertise section works, you may decide to review the skills listed, decide on just a dozen or so and include them throughout your LinkedIn copy.

Feel free to share any questions you may still have about this section on LinkedIn.

@stayingaliveuk