Smlxl On Engagement

SMLXL : on Engagement
Creating customer and shareholder value in the digital age

“What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of
its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention ...
The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.”
Herbert Simon – Economist

www.smlxtralarge.com | info@smlxtralarge.com

3
You can’t deviate.
A linear process does
not allow it

2
Our industrial mass media world is also
linear, straight, ﬁxed with its own rules,
logic, philosophy and business models.
1
the only straight lines made in nature are made by man

Yet nature is not like that. Its more nuanced, more complex, more interconnected and
networked, perhaps even more beautiful - As John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty in 1859

“Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work
prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according
to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”

The network is a pattern that is common to all life - but why is that important?


Because we live increasingly in a digitally interconnected and
networked world. This is an image of what multiple social
networks look like. And it has been created by the hundreds
and thousands and millions and billions of social interactions
created and made by individuals, within their overlapping
communities everyday of their lives.

We are rapidly moving to a world where everyone can be con-
nected and by 2015 five billion people will be connected - that is
a 100 fold increase in networked traffic. Networks Economic,
Cultural and Media are becoming the nervous system of society.

This suggests that our: society, media and communications is
evolving from the straight road of an industrial era to the more
complex and networked world that mimics nature. Our new
media world isn't about content and distribution. It is about
people, connections and social networks.

If we accept that as a truth then that truth changes what we
make, how we make it and how in fact we market and
communicate with our customers.

1). The change is structural
2). It requires a new logic



But what underpins all this networked
conversation and information production?
What is the fundamental driver to this
epochal change? Is it technology?
Well in a word
– No –
Human beings are a We species, we have an
innate need to connect and communicate,
and today we have been given the tools to
take back control of that
fundamental need.

People are happier when they commune together

It is proven that people are much happier when they commune together. It is why we see the rise of the festival in the post-
modern era. People wishing to commune together for a common purpose. And it is something that modern media and
communications has often overlooked. Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Dancing in the Streets writes...
At some point, in town after town throughout the northern Christian world, the music stops. Carnival
customes are put away or sold; dramas that once engaged a town's entire population are cancelled; festive
rituals are forgotten or preserved only in tame and truncated form, the ecstatic possibility, which had first been
driven from the sacred precincts of the church, was now harried from the streets and public squares. The loss,
to ordinary people, of so many recreations and festivals is incalculable, and we, who live in a culture almost
devoid of opportunities either to “lose ourselves” in communal festivities or to distinguish ourselves in any arena
outside of work, are in no position to fathom it. We just get drunk instead

Community & Identity
We have always had community. Pre-industrialisation,
Me we were tied to our communities by geography and

?
external forces shaped our identity. I live in an old
agricultural village called Over about 15Kms from
Cambridge. 200 years ago I would have grown up in the
Self village, worked on the land and probably never travelled
the 15Kms to Cambridge. My identity would have been
Single Many
completely shaped by the immediate external forces
around to me.
Extensive research tells us that as economies become
more affluent, more mobile and more urbanised - the
Family
values of society change and we start to de-couple from
Community
those external forces that had shaped our identities for
Other
millennia.


Challenging the architecture of authority

So from the late 50’s we get a creative explosion:
Rock‘n’Roll, experimentation with religions, with drugs,
we get the civil rights movement, the Paris riots of ‘68.
We are challenging the fixed orthodoxies of control


Identity in a post-modern world

An oft overlooked fact when people bang on about social networking, mass collaboration is the core and central
driver as to why its happening at all. We know that we are a WE SPECIES - But In a post-modern world where our
identities are not constructed and deﬁned by, tradition, geography, and economics. We can have many selves, as
we undertake a quest for self identity.

This is described as Psychological Self-Determination the ability to exert control over the most important aspects
of ones life, especially personal identity, which has become the source of meaning and purpose in a life no longer
dictated by geography or tradition. As a consequence of this people seek out those things that mean the most to
them. In a digitally connected world we go where ever we want to to find those things that enable us to construct
our identities. This is the central underpinning and driving force of social networking,
mass collaboration, participatory media, culture etc.


Communities of afﬁnity form around issues that are highly motivating to each
individual, it has its own theory called Group Forming Networks and it has some
important implications.
1. How brands and businesses will be built in the future
2. How we attract, deﬁne and measure the audience
3. How knowledge and information will be created and shared in
a world that has no barriers to time or space Food

Green concerns
Ethics

Values
Passions
Group Forming Network Theory Desires Health
Developed by David Reed
outperforms the law of the mass
media and the law of networked
computing
Sustainability
Organics

*

Nobody is as clever as everybody
in the world of Generation “C”
- the Community Generation
communities dominate brands 2005
Professor Henry Jenkins of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT articulates a world in which young people have a very

* different relationship with media consumption. This is the migration from consumption as an individual practice to
consumption as a networked practice – When people consume and produce media together, when they pool their insights and
information, mobilise to promote common interests, and function as grassroots intermediaries – rather than talking about
personal media, perhaps we should be talking about communal media or social commerce that becomes part of our lives as
members of communities – If we accept Jenkins world view, this has profound implications on how we reach out and attract our
customers, talk to our suppliers and how we create value. It was Jonathan Schwartz that said our 1000 bloggers at Sun have done
more for this company than a $1bn ad campaign could have ever done. This is participatory culture at the coalface. Or we could
reference wikipedia, SIPHS in academia, World of Warcraft, Pop Idol, the Matrix, Citizen Journalism or social
commerce platforms like Zopa, ebay, or Spreadshirt.

Manuel Castells argues that the central technology of our time, communication
technology, relates directly to the heart of the human species: conscious,
meaningful communication.

It’s a We Media for a We Species

Companies are from Mars & Customers are from Venus
“ If you had described today’s world to any five reasonable people sitting around a table in the year 1910 –
before the real consolidation and diffusion of the then revolutionary new enterprise logic called managerial
capitalism – they would have dismissed that description as utopian. The levels of education, health, recreational
activity, living conditions and affordable goods that a majority of people in the developed world enjoy today
would have seemed truly outlandish. Similarly in today’s world, a support economy seems too good to be true
because it is interpreted through the lens of the now outdated enterprise logic of managerial capitalism.
People have learned to expect adversarialism from corporations, and corporations have
learned that they can get away with indifference, neglect, and exploitation of their end
consumers”.
SOSHANA ZUBHOFF - THE SUPPORT ECONOMY


Storming the Bastille
Once you have stormed the Bastille, you don’t really want to go back to your boring
day job. In this instance, the day job is the consumer as an; uninformed, unconnected,
passive, ignorant, non-participative, controlled individual that will happily consume
what is put in front of them. It is in fact an evolving historic act of liberation.

Social networking is bigger than
the Industrial Revolution
Business week – 2006

If we accept that as a truth, then that truth changes;
what we make, how we make it, who we make it with
and how in fact we market and communicate with each
other. This has signiﬁcant effects on our society, culture
and economics. Gartner says for example that our current
banking system will look nothing like it is today within
ten years, this also goes for all media, organisations
and institutions. Price Waterhouse Coopers report that
consumer conversations will fundamentally transform
business.
It requires a new logic, a new language and a new philosophy -
which is what we call Engagement.

POWER PLAY

The greatest shift of economic power for 150 years underpinned by 5 seismic shifts. This is
not just about outsourcing or cheap imports, it is about an awareness of a different world*
1). Demography – how do we reach the “new old”?
2). The environment – we all want to be greener
3). Globalisation – power shifts to Asia
4). Technology – towards a global level playing field
5). Government – spend less regulate more

* Hamish McCrae: Economics Editor - The Independent Newspaper

t h e im plic ation s
1
The fight for economic survival
11
The fight for resources
111
The fight for talent – and for the best educated young
1v
The fight for the space of mind
of consumers


the era of
set-piece competition is over

The change is transformational for organi-
sational structures as well as it is to how
companies interact with their audiences,
customers, and stakeholders and as Darwin
said “it is not the strongest or the most intelligent
that survive but those most adaptive to change.”

So - What else drives our society ?

- The rise of the professional amateur
- The fundamental need for story
telling eg. You Tube
- & being part of history
- Transparency
- & Trust


25% of all entertainment will
be made by us in 2012 - Every
minute 7 hours of audio-
visual content is uploaded to
YouTube. The implications
of this are profound


There are twice as many mobile phones in the
world as there are tv sets. It is defacto a Mass
Media - it allows us to deliver information and
communications that is:
1). Timely
2). Relevant
3). Contextual

Mobile : the 7th Mass Media

Recounting the audience through digital footprints

Today we leave digital footprints - and therefore we recount the audience to a degree of accuracy
never before thought possible this is called Social Marketing Intelligence. And we need to rethink
and create a new set of metrics. Based upon not cpm’s or cost per thousands but
Cost Per Relevant Audience - CPRA.


Social Marketing Intelligence :
The ability to take large, raw and multiple data flows - refine those data flows to enable
organisations to recognise the patterns of social interactions, social network structure, and
each individual’s role therein – such granularity is critical for delivering the appropriate
communication to the appropriate audience at the right time.

The black gold of the 21st Century


Social Marketing Intelligence results :
The black gold of the 21st Century
- 82% increase of the average ad income (from 11 cents to 20 cents)
Higher premium for highly valuable audiences in Internet community.
Personalised communications to engage your targeted audience.
- 90% increase in sales by using Social Marketing Intelligence and Alpha Scoring
- Estimated annual gain of £7.5 Million. +21% better accuracy in predicting churn

- New customer acquisition grew by 25% compared to 4% with using previous marketing methods

- 30% better response than previous similar mobile campaigns
Increase mobile advertising response rates from an average of 3-6% to 29%

But what gives SMLXL the right
to make such statements? Well
we wrote a book way back in
2005 the culmination of five
years of research.
“Communities Dominate Brands “Books on business and market-
offers a front line perspective on ing are launched weekly. Most are
the ways that media change is weak adaptations of other
transforming the branding people’s thoughts. Some authors
process. They have surveyed the like Sergio Zyman, Seth Godin,
best contemporary thinking Scott Bedbury, and Marc Gobe,
have made bold and meaningful
about engagement marketing,
interpretations of contemporary
participatory culture, and con- opportunities and helped me to
sumer relations, translating it clarify a new advanced perspective
into terms which will be accessible on how to be a more successful
to industry insider and lay reader marketer. Tomi and Alan have
alike.” done that and with Communities
Henry Jenkins – author of Convergence Dominate Brands will end up
Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide shaping our thinking and
and Co-Director of the MIT Comparative approach for some time.”
Media Studies Program
Stephen C Jones Chief Marketing
Officer the Coca-Cola Company
2000 - 2004


The philosophy, principles and tools of Engagement could help
sell a product, an industry, a region, or combat a social issue.
Engagement is built upon : the power of the meritocracy of ideas, that we
live in a participatory culture, the principles of attraction, co-creation, harnessing
collective intelligence and connecting people’s deep need to connect, collaborate
and communicate with each other towards common goals.

Engagement is about connecting large or small communities to an idea/task/goal/passion
that they want to be part of, and, that they want to share with their friends driven by
a commercial or social agenda.


Engagement theory
Multi-platform: Today’s world is multi-platform and multi-channel, and communications must be
designed and executed around this fact.

Coherent: Unity must be achieved via an overarching theme or idea. ‘Integrated’ is not really the right
word, because ‘integration’ assumes we are starting with separate bits which we need to bring together.
Coherence means we are starting from one single perspective and then allowing for many different
manifestations of the central theme

Technologies of cooperation: New technologies offer huge opportunities in areas such as interactivity,
immediacy, accessibility and addressability. Communications programmes need to use these opportu-
nities to the full.

Which means we can
Create ‘matching and connecting’ services and propositions that revolve around the rich use of
personal information and new information technologies and that can put the consumer/buyer in
control.

Transform how organisations, businesses or brands communicate with their multiple audiences,
share and harness collective intelligence and play a more meaningful role in the fabric of society


The 12 principles of Engagement
1). Participation : physical, intellectual, emotional
2). Co-creation
3). Trust & Transparency of contract
4). Social Marketing Intelligence
5). The 4C’s: Commerce, Culture, Community, Connectivity
6). Flowability of information
7). Hot Media (We) Media
8). Higher order ideas and beliefs
9). Timely, Relevant & Contextual communications
10). Technologies of co-operation : Harnessing collective intelligence
11). From Efficiency to Effectiveness
12). Life Enabling – Life Simplifying - Navigational : services & propositions


SMLXL What we do: Create customer and business value in the digital age
SMLXL creates new products and services, new ways to communicate, new ways to create
consumer communities and new ways to win their advocacy, and how to successfully derive
revenues from those interactions.

In today’s world, creativity has to be repurposed for the world we now inhabit. It is a synthesis
of understanding business, media, technology, peer-to-peer flows of communication and,
the economics of our digital world. We call it Engagement, and, were the first to do so.

A lot of us see a lot of strategy, but Alan Moore’s company SMLXL has a
unique way of bringing that strategy to life. You can guarantee that if you
give SMLXL a problem they are going to crack it.
Keith Pardy Senior Vice President, Nokia Strategic Marketing
Nokia Corporation

You can work with SMLXL in 5 different ways
1. SMLXL : Consulting
2. SMLXL : Accelerated innovation for products and services
3. SMLXL : Technologies
4. SMLXL : Engagement Marketing/Communication Workshops
5. SMLXL : Mobile Advertising Consulting and Workshops

Our Clients:
Blyk, Nokia, Microsoft, T-Mobile Germany, Sony BMG, Accel, Cyrte, H&M, IPG, WPP, EMAP,
TV2 Norway, The Coca-Cola Company, North One Television, News International, Masterfoods,
Neals Yard Remedies, Millward Brown, Korg.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new
landscapes but in having new eyes”
– MARCEL PROUST


At SMLXL we don’t do mediocrity, we are are Working with Alan Moore and SMLXL has enabled NorthOne TV to
start thinking about tomorrow. We have been able to start strategis-
unusual and that’s the way we like it. Who needs ing about new integrated media neutral ventures. In fact without
more of the same in a world that has plenty of it? the time spent with Alan I doubt we would even be using words like
“strategy” and “media neutral”.

With all our clients SMLXL has : Further we look forward to continue to bring our joint
ventures to fruition, after all we are a business, which is about
delivery. Alan’s creative thinking allows us to hopefully deliver “dif-
- Created new business concepts ferent”, deliver “better” and deliver “more profitably”.
- And enabled companies large and small to rethink
their business strategies John Nolan, Head of Commercial Programming,
North One Television
- Created ground breaking cross-platform
TV formats
- Relaunched TV stations As the Economist Herbert Simon wrote:
“What information consumes is rather
- Advised on digital and mobile strategies
obvious. It consumes the attention of its
- Created products & services
recipients. Hence a wealth of information
- Developed cross-platform marketing creates a poverty of attention ... The only
communication initiatives
factor becoming scarce in a world of
Contact: Alan Moore abundance is human attention.”
alanm@smlxtralarge.com


Smlxl On Engagement

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Similar to Smlxl On Engagement

Similar to Smlxl On Engagement (20)

More from SMLXL Ltd

More from SMLXL Ltd (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Smlxl On Engagement