Social Media Comes of Age as an Advertising Platform

Social Media is a theme here at JET and we are great believers in the power of Social Media and think that Social Media is an important or rather a critical tool for businesses of all sizes.  


Even in large organisations we think that product managers and marketeers should be out there engaging with the customers - talking to them but also listening and learning. It is an easy and significant way to be relevant to our customers and customer centric. It is no longer a secret that social media can drive revolutions and depose dictators and in this recent post on Social Revolution we looked at some fascinating work by Shirky - Here Comes Everyone about how we all play a part and engage and how  Social Media gives us an accessible low cost platform to share information. We also looked at how Social Media allows us to recommend and find information to and from our social circle - a knowledge enabler perhaps on par to the invention of the printing press - See Social Media - Changing Society Forever 


The next stage of Social Media is to use it as a direct advertising channel - and many companies do use the social media platforms in their ad mix. The platforms also provide some great on board tools that are useful, accessible and affordable even for very small businesses. In this fascinating article it seems that Social Media has now come of age and for the first time a mega company - British Airways will be launching their new campaign on Social Media rather than on the more traditional media and advertising channels.Yet at the same time Sir Martin Sorrell the advertising legend, questions the value of large brand social media advertising. He also makes the very valid point that social media is now the new letter - its the way that we talk to each other and so advertising in this context makes it the wrong channel. Sir Martin also believes that their should be a subsidy for quality journalism (Sir Martin's speech) - surely a sign that opinion, blogs and personal news sources are having an ever increasing impact.  


Sir Martin is not a person to be taken lightly and many have commented on how difficult it is to get advertising right in a social media context. However, successful ads have always had the ability to engage our imagination and provoke discussion outside the delivery channel. There are a handful of ads that were popular on British TV 20 years ago where many of us still remember the slogan and joke about them today - ultimate success in brand recognition. Social media just makes it easier and more engaging to share and provoke the discussion. Many ads on social media will flop, but the clever ones will do exceedingly well - ultimately Social Media will be a channel that succeeds. I am sure that the BA ad in question cost a small fortune to produce - but the entry threshold for producing slick, clever and successful ads on social media platforms driving brand recognition and customer engagement is so low that even moderate success will make it compelling for many businesses.  At a small business level we have found that relatively cheap and unsophisticated text based ads from Google are very effective at driving quality traffic to our Israel travel website.  

WAC - Innovation & Standardisation

As telecom guys, we can’t let last week’s Mobile World Congress go by without a mention. One of the announcements was about the WAC (Wholesale Applications Community) standard. The WAC initiative was founded a year ago, has published v2.0 of the standard this week and plans v3.0 later in the year. A few telecom operators and suppliers have made some supportive announcements.

The basic idea of WAC is to allow developers a device agnostic way to bring their products to market and it will also improve operator involvement with application stores by allowing the operators to offer added value and services through their network. It is the latest in a series of initiatives to try to standardize this area of the telecom market.

Significantly Apple and Google are not members of WAC and are enjoying significant commercial success with their application stores. (In January Apple announced the 10 billionth app download.) They both choose to innovate aggressively, to create their own solution and to shun the standard approach.

The purpose of this blog is not to debate the merits of WAC, or its chance of success, but rather to consider the correct balance between standardization and innovation from the perspective of Product Management & Marketing.

Conventional wisdom (since the days of Henry Ford) has been that standardization rules. It simplifies the process, drives down costs and is at the core of mass production. WAC has the same objectives in mind – “WAC is …..dedicated to establishing a simple route to market for developers to expose their new applications to a customer base of over 3 billion customers.” It has been a brave PMM that has chosen non standard solutions – they increase cost, reduce the likelihood of success and are generally guaranteed to cause project delay.

However, Apple and Google have gone their own ways; and built their own solutions and created de-facto standards around their own eco-systems. Their strategy is that standardization should not be allowed to obstruct innovation. (There are many other technology examples in the past that followed the same basic strategy.)

However, also in the Telecom news was the agreement between Nokia and Microsoft. Behind the headline is the recognition that these two mega companies each with a strong tradition and proved track record of innovation have failed to deliver individually with Symbian (Nokia), MeeGo (Nokia & Intel) and Windows Phone 7 (MS). So clearly innovation even when driven by market leaders is no guarantee of success.

Often the process of standardization reduces innovation to the lowest common denominator to reach broad consensus and it can be driven by strong partisan commercial interests. In almost all cases it slows down the process – WAC is a good example. Compare the few early commitments with the number of devices and solutions in the Droid and Apple app stores.

Of course most PMM do not have the luxury of being able to create eco-systems on the scale of the app stores. However, we do need to balance standardization and innovation. Even today it is probably a wiser move to innovate in the context of app stores and not to rely on the WAC standard.

In many ways it is harder for the regular PMM; our product decisions are complex. We have to balance our need to differentiate with the need to be accepted via standardization. Our products are often expected to differentiate. We must also make some tough judgment calls on which are the correct standards and if it they are really appropriate for our product. If we are building a bleeding edge product we will often need to decide how we build a product that can be launched today yet is flexible to rapid change if a standard develops in a different direction.

Standardization is needed and should be supported, yet we need to remember when and how to innovate. Clever well executed innovation can be much faster to market and a strong differentiator and there is always the (remote) chance of creating a de facto standard!

When we manage our products we need to carefully evaluate what is our true ability to innovate and to generate product leadership and differentiation and when should we rely on standards and standardization. This is not a purely technical or tactical question. It is a strong commercial and strategic decision; just because a standard exists it does not mean that it will be commercially successful, nor that it is the correct product positioning for our product. The Telecom world has many examples of the standard that never caught on; Betamax is another example of the standard that didn’t bring commercial success.

However, to ignore an easy standard solution will ensure that we invest scarce resources in re-inventing the wheel rather than in creating the product we want in the time scale we need.

The balance between innovation and standardization is very difficult to achieve. Standards can simplify our product yet take time to evolve and are frequently not the best solution. On the other hand, wild innovation can produce an isolated, weak, expensive and late solution. However, without innovation it is very hard to differentiate at the product level. Finding the correct balance between innovation and standardization is The Art of Product Management & Marketing.