Month: March 2010

The difference between “hot” and “cool” media [tweetmeme source=”Marcio_saito” only_single=false]

Picture yourself presenting at that very important customer meeting. You have rehearsed it, you know the subject, and the PowerPoint slides are polished, colorful and have no more than 7 words per bullet. Your delivery is impeccable. The audience is mesmerized.

You rock. You are hot!

The bad news: there are situations where being too hot is not what you want. You might want having your performance described as a cool presentation instead. Let me explain why.

Marshall McLuhan was a media expert who produced most of his work in the 1960’s and 1970’s. He became popular and is probably better known by the general public for analyzing presidential debates on broadcast TV.

Marketers think of media as being magazines, newspapers, TV, and, more recently, social web sites. McLuhan had a broader definition of medium. He described medium as technology, extensions of humanity.

In Understanding Media he explains that media invite or demand different degrees of participation from the audience. McLuhan defines as “cool” medium the type that is open to participation and “hot” medium the type that is not.

So, for example, one can admire a realistic painting for its beauty or photographic-qualities, but the viewer does not need to make much effort filling in the details. The painting is complete; it calls for passive absorption. It is “hot”.

An impressionist painting attempts to capture the transient effects of sunlight (which cannot be done literally). Perceiving the mood of the scene requires the viewer to interprete the broken brushstrokes to capture the intention of the painter. Compared to realists, impressionists are “cooler”.

In a modern abstract painting, the picture does not say much literally (we have all been to the MOMA staring at a splosh of paint and thinking “I could have done that”). The viewer needs to actively participate, and often co-create the meaning of the art piece. Abstract art is incomplete, open ended. It is “cool”.

So, according to that definition, books are hot compared to verbal communication. A PowerPoint-driven meeting is hot compared to a round-table. A film is immersive, requires passive concentration, it is hot; a videogame is interactive, cool it is. Brittanica is hot. Wikipedia is cool.

McLuhan said: “The Medium is the Message”. It is difficult, to create a cool movie or power point slide deck. You can try, but is is almost impossible to convey structured and well formed ideas on Facebook. Content is important, but the medium defines the character of engagement. In order to change the communication dynamics, one must consider changing the medium itself.

You have probably noticed that every content item in this website keeps track of the number of views, the number of comments and a “cool factor” (the ratio between comments and views). The idea is that if people reading a piece feels compelled to comment, the content is cool.

Why is it important for people in business to think about hot and cool media?

First, it helps us to select the medium we use in our interactions depending on their goals. If you are at the first stages of a sales engagement with a prospect and want to qualify the opportunity and discover requirements, you want the customer to talk. You want to use cool media. If you consciously want to control the agenda and keep the audience in passive mode, you want to be hot.

Second, the generation born in the 1980’s and later is heavily influenced by the digital medium. For the next couple of decades, there will be a trend towards cool, participative communication. If we believe that, social media will gain priority over print and newspaper ads. Presentations will be less effective than interactive conversations. A seminar or round table may be preferred over a lecture. Facebook and Twitter become marketer’s media.

Am I cool or what?

Can Marketing People do it?[tweetmeme source=”Marcio_saito” only_single=false]

From the spirited and visionary Cluetrain Manifesto, first published in print in 2000:

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.

These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.

More than 10 years later, reality catches on with vision and markets have turned into conversations outside the control of companies, enabled by social media (PR expert Brian Solis has declared “Ladies and Gentlemen, the conversation has left the building”).

Empowered customers, both consumers and businesses, are well informed and connected. They are not dependent on marketers to obtain product information and often know about the product and the competitive landscape better than the vendor itself.

Customers cannot be easily manipulated. Marketing-speak doesn’t move us anymore. Consumers can see through it and understand the intention and motivations of corporate marketing. Besides knowing Marlboros won’t turn us into rugged cowboys, we understand why marketers tried to make that association. Further, consumers don’t even care to pay attention anymore.

The paper-printed word creates formality.  Its unidirectional nature implies communication from an expert to a broader audience receiving information without the opportunity to interact. It is natural to use language distinction as a symbol of that separation.

In the digital medium, the conversation focus shifts towards interactive peer-to-peer communication and collaboration. The marketer no longer has control over the ears and eyeballs. To engage in that conversation, the marketer needs to listen first, then dispense messages that resonate with the community.

In this new environment, listening and speaking like a person to talk to people becomes essential to marketers who want to connect and be heard. (if I was not thinking about marketing-speak, I might have written this last sentence as “using a human voice to interact with and influence the prospect”)

Being able to handle both positive and negative feedback with honesty, integrity and transparency (this last one being the hardest), to react to customer feedback in real-time. Those are new challenges.

A few days ago I saw an advertisement from Oracle/Sun. It was a “product comparison” ad, with pictures of a server from Sun compared to an IBM followed by a checklist and specs table. The copy read: “our goal is to design really fast computers, their goal is to create intelligent planets”.

I had a good laugh seeing Oracle poke fun at IBM’s “Building a Smarter World” tagline. But Oracle was also using the technique of comparing apples to oranges (the still-to-be-released Sun server was being compared with a 3-year old IBM server). Does Oracle think disclaiming it in very small font keeps users from noticing the manipulation?

Look at this paragraph taken from the website of a random IT vendor.

What sets the successful IT operations apart from the rest is how they manage a fluctuating environment. How they bring control to the chaos. How they ensure they’re an indispensable contributor, rather than an annoying hurdle, to helping their organization achieve business goals.

Now, look at the website of any IT vendor. You will find very similar scramble of words (complexity, need to take control, achieve business goals). Do buyers actually read that or do their eyes glaze and relegate the message to noise?

Marketers are faced with a complex dilemma: use marketing-speak or talk like a person? Leverage overcooked industry language to describe their products or just say what it is? Do you sell based on what it is or try to create the perception of a bigger problem?

They need to participate in the conversation, engage and connect. They are after a new generation of consumers and buyers who grew up under the influence of the digital medium. But they still face the pre-conceptions of the past, where the “corporate voice” is not like regular people’s voice.

Can Marketing People do it?

Can Sales People do it?[tweetmeme source=”Marcio_saito” only_single=false]

Being Strategic means considering whether or not our current actions move us towards a desired scenario in the future. It is an important factor in many of our achievements at work and in our personal lives.

But something strange happened when that discipline was applied to commercial organizations. Mission statements (devised in a half-day meeting between executives and a consultant) are posted into every meeting room and we are given a list of personal objectives supposedly aligned with the grand strategy.

We are told of the need to be strategic but because we also need to deliver the next quarterly earnings, most people (including sales and product marketing) must be tactical and focus on immediate results. A smaller, strategic group (typically named “business development”, “innovation department”) is in charge of driving change towards a distant set of strategic goals.

Authors like Harvard’s Robert S. Kaplan anticipated some of the problems of segmentation and proposed the use of communication tools such as Strategy Maps to provide unified visibility and create alignment and Balanced Scorecards as metrics to help to trade-off the tactical financial metrics with more “strategic” non-financial parameters. But implementations of classical strategy often fall in the tactical/strategic segmentation trap, which makes organic growth very difficult to achieve.

The reasons why leaders set on that artificial segmentation has to do with efficiently coping with communication challenges imposed by linear and hierarchical character of classical organizations under the influence of the print medium (See more on that in our “The Click Company” booklet).

In an environment where information flows to people who need it when they need it, and where there is multi-peer, interactive communication and collaboration, it is possible to empower people to loop through the strategic process at the edges of the organization. People who know the parameters for decision can decide. Leaders of a flatter organization, rather than decomposing a great vision, can focus on synthesizing collective goals and projecting alignment.

The adoption of social computing can create a collaborative environment. Why people use social media tools like Facebook, Yelp, Twitter? Because those tools, for the first time, make it easy for ordinary people to post their views and opinions to the web and learn about the views and oppinions of others. The digital medium can create a new strategic dynamic for organizations.

At the personal level, the difference between being strategic or not doesn’t depend on how far you are looking, but on having the information and the tools that prepares you in real-time to make deliberate decisions.

So, what defines “being strategic” is the thoughtfulness of every step. It is the difference between looking at your e-mail inbox in search of the next action and opening your e-mail with a mental plan that takes e-mail as input.

Sales people think about here and now, without regard for strategy, right? If that is the case, it is only because organizations don’t arm them with the real-time knowledge needed to be strategic (which customers have open tickets? What is the competition doing right now? How are the top sales people winning their deals? Who can help me overcome sales objections?).

Contrary to prevailing thinking, maximizing results today is not only compatible with, but requires strategy. Not only if you are in charge of “strategic accounts”, not only during the annual sales conference. Every one. Every day.

So, can Sales People do it? What do you think?