Marketing and Communications in the Internetome

Marketing and Communications Opportunities and Challenges in the Internetome.
@sheldrake – 10th November 2010 – http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
The Internetome – the manifestations of the Internet of Things.
Philip Sheldrake
Founding Principal of Meanwhile
Main Board Director of Intellect
Director of 6UK
@sheldrake
www.philipsheldrake.com

What is marketing?
The process by which companies create value for customers and build strong customer relationships in order to capture value from customers in return.
Principles of Marketing (5th European ed.), Philip Kotler, Gary Armstrong, Veronica Wong, John Saunders, 2008, Pearson Education, ISBN 978-0273711568

What is communications / PR?
The focus on two-way communication and fostering of mutually beneficial relationships between an organization and its publics.
Excellent public relations and effective organizations: A Study of Communication Management in Three Countries, Routledge, ISBN-13: 978-0805818185

Typical customer flows
Information exchange
Products / Services
Money
Paid, earned and owned media. Face-to-face, email, phone, website. Explicit and tacit. CRM. Etc.

Data exchange
Information exchange
Products / Services
Money
Data exchange
From devices, sensors and other agents. Typical for today’s digital services, less common otherwise.

Stakeholders
• Customer
• Prospect
• Client
• Partner
• Citizen
• Employee / retiree / families
• Shareholder.

Influence
You have been influenced when you think in a way your wouldn’t otherwise have thought or do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done.

The Six Influence Flows
Us
Stakeholders
Competitors
Our influence with our stakeholders
Our stakeholders’ influence with each other in respect to us
Our stakeholders’ influence with us
Our competitors’ influence with our stakeholders
Our stakeholders’ influence with each other in respect to our competitors
Our stakeholders’ influence with our competition

Traditional emphases
Marketing and PR have focused predominantly on the 1st flow to date.
3rd flows include marketing research, feedback via customer service, circulation of newspaper clips, Tesco Clubcard and similar ‘loyalty’ schemes.

PR 2.0
Social media / networking has enabled the 2nd influence flow to flourish.
We have witnessed a disintermediation in the past decade. The ‘public’ has been put back into ‘public relations’, and organisations can converse directly with stakeholders.

Abstracting the flows – what are they?
Analogue – information exchange processed by human minds.
Digital – data moving between things on the network that are easily processed and archived for indexing, searching and statistical analysis – may ultimately form information also processed by human minds.

Emergence and the new stakeholder
“Internet-mediated” communication isn’t just a new media form – it has unprecedented emergent behaviour.
We have an individual who did not know herself that she was a stakeholder until… there, look, she just shared that link. Added a little comment too. Atoms of influence.

Emergence and the new stakeholder /2
She is the modern manifestation of the netizen – different to your “online publics”.
The netizen is a most complex being whose responses boil down to a synaptic-like mouse click, or not.

Emergence and another new ‘stakeholder’
The Internetome exerts influence.
Things at the edge detect, communicate and effect ‘real world’ variables.
If emergent behaviours stem from 2 billion humans, we can expect similar from the ‘real world’ interacting with 100 billion+ things.

Ownership
I consider data and information I create directly or indirectly through my use of products and services to be private and mine by default. I may choose to make any part of it accessible to specified others and maintain my ownership, or relinquish some ownership rights, or all rights.

Ownership /2
Should a contract entail some variation to this default, perhaps simply because delivery of the product or service is meaningless without such variation, the nature of this variation must be made explicitly clear to me in plain language, and it is then my choice whether or not to agree to those terms.

Ownership /3
This is not currently the default.
If anything, the opposite is.
http://on.wsj.com/itsmydata
http://blogs.wsj.com/wtk

This isn’t ‘Clubcard but bigger’
Linearly extrapolating from today to tomorrow falls so far short of the reality we’re considering here that it is not only useless but entirely misleading.
I believe a future where so much data is collected about me and owned by others to be nothing short of dystopian.

Authenticity
What will marketers do with this digital detritus? Will organisations / brands be authentic?
Authenticity – the quality of an emotionally appropriate, significant, purposive, and responsible mode of human life.
Where might we start…

A potential privacy framework for the influence professional /1
Four levels of data treatment:
1. Delete – delete at source without data collection where possible. If the data must be shared to enable service provision, I retain full ownership rights and I want you to delete the data permanently at the soonest opportunity permissible under data retention laws.

2. Sustain – I retain full ownership rights. Delete data as soon as possible whilst sustaining (ie, without deleteriously effecting) product or service performance and in compliance with data retention laws.

3. Stats – I retain full ownership rights. Delete data as soon as possible whilst sustaining product or service performance and in compliance with data retention laws, maintaining only summary statistical records thereafter.
(eg, average daily mileage travelled by car in August rather than the day by day mileage)

4. Archive – I retain full ownership rights. Keep the data in its most granular format for the longer of five years or that period required by data retention laws after which time I accept that you might delete the data on economic grounds on condition that summary statistic records are maintained.

Three privacy questions for the consumer / citizen
Which level?
Delete / Sustain / Stats / Archive
How might this data be shared?
No sharing / Anonymously / Named
Do you have a streams bank?

Streams bank
The service with the primary purpose of collecting all your digital detritus, all your so-called life streams of data, in one place on your behalf and giving you the power to analyse and visualise it all.

Streams bank /2
Customers empowered to debunk false claims made by marketers, and test adherence to service level agreements.
The broker of your attention should the so-called attention economy emerge in full.
Potential altruistic function.

The privacy framework
There are 8 options each of which may be banked: delete, sustain, stats-none, archive-none, stats-anon, archive-anon, stats-named, archive-named.

The Internetome Dial
One can now envisage every single or group of products and services having a (virtual) selector dial with 8 positions dictating how the customer wishes to treat the associated data.

The Internetome Dial – example
A dial for a service that needs access to data to function so the 1st position is ‘greyed out’. Summary information about the costs and benefits are listed next to each dial position.
Richard’s graphic
Dial design by Richard Wood (http://www.richard-wood.co.uk)

Buyer marketing
Streams banks give rise to buyer marketing – or what the VRM* initiative refers to as a personal RFP*.
This marks the point at which individuals can market their needs or desires, either directly or anonymously via a streams bank or other broker, to organisations interested in meeting that need or desire.
* VRM – vendor relationship management
RFP – request for proposal

Buyer marketing /2
With confidence in my ability to pull customised ‘tenders’ to me on demand for anything and everything I can imagine…
And given I chose the conversations I want to have…
Can’t I just block out all other marketing communications?

Buyer marketing /3
Buyer marketing reverses the normal marketing mechanism, but one thing does not necessarily get flipped – identity.

Buyer marketing /4
I earn credit from selling access to my streams, and invest credits in journalism, independent researchers and writers, to keep me informed and entertained, and to test tenders and brand claims.
‘Media’ is reinvigorated by fresh revenues, and the revenue source and audience are once again the one and the same.

Authentic leadership
Will your organisation take the lead in the Internetome?
Will your organisation empower its customers and other stakeholders?
Or will you follow your competitor’s lead?
Or wait for legislation?

What is marketing? What is PR?
They are terms describing approaches to particular aspects of influence flows defined from the historical perspective of 20th Century media.

Where does the Internetome take us?
There is influence in everything an organisation does, and in every ‘thing’ consumers and citizens interact with.
The ease with which we can manage and learn from influence flows is integral to the process by which consumers and citizens interact with organisations and governments to broker mutually valuable relationships.

Marketing and Communications Opportunities and Challenges in the Internetome.
My book, as yet untitled, will be published by Wiley, Spring 2011.
Philip Sheldrake
Founding Principal of Meanwhile
Main Board Director of Intellect
Director of 6UK
@sheldrake
www.philipsheldrake.com

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Marketing and Communications in the Internetome

by Philip Sheldrake

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