“And left this morning from the bell in Gardener’s Bay.” (Taken with instagram)
Charles Bradley in effect at GoogaMooga. (Taken with Instagram at GoogaMooga)
Funny how the city can just give way to the forest. (Taken with instagram)
Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
- Ferris Bueller
And then I woke up one day and, much to my surprise, it was a Thursday in late-April 2012. I don’t know if that is a reflection of how much distraction there has been, how busy I’ve kept myself, or a sign of abject-laziness. In the six years I’ve been writing in some form or another, I haven’t ever gone so long without putting fingers to keys just for the sake of doing so, and I can feel a bunch of knots in my head needing to be unwound, something the keyboard is particularly good for. At least for me.
I haven’t just not been writing though. If anything, I suppose I got a little tired of just talking about things, I wanted to do some making. The first thing was a collaboration with my friends at Projucer, along with a few other special individuals. The Meaning of Mate started off in my head as some sort of digital shrine to the word “mate” and how Australians (and, to be fair, Kiwis and those from the UK among others) use it in a variety of situations. Thanks to friends in low places, we racked up over 250,000 views in the first week and wound up on YouTube’s Australian homepage for Australia Day.
Next up was Shitter, with a much simpler premise: take people’s Twitter feeds and print it onto toilet paper. The tagline? Social media has never been so disposable. We thought people would have a laugh, and that the tech press might join in on it. We never expected to wind up in Forbes, on TV back in our native Australia, and a host of other channels and outlets. The euphoria of a successful launch turned into the pain of actually fulfilling on the manufacturing and shipping of the product itself, but it’s been a great learning experience.
All of this has been done under the banner of Collector’s Edition which is a company I’ve formed with some friends. I’m looking forward to writing more about it all over the next few months as we continue to launch projects into a fairly staid media environment, but I’m also looking forward to just writing more. It feels a little clunky at first, but in the words of your friend and mine Katie Chatfield, “Don’t tell me what you’re going to do, tell me what you did.”
I hit publish.
And then I got on with it.
Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people’s approval
and you will be their prisoner.
Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.- Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching
Mayer Hawthorne in effect. (Taken with Instagram at Webster Hall)
The end of liberty. (Taken with Instagram at Brooklyn Roasting Company)
What they don’t tell you is the flavor is locked *outside* the bottle. (Taken with Instagram at Big Spaceship)
#manhood by Steve Biddulph. Extraordinary (thank you @markpollard) (Taken with instagram)
So I was sitting in a presentation from a Facebook rep today, a guy who did his best to slaughter everyone in the room by first lulling us all to sleep. He was recapping their recent announcements, nothing you haven’t heard.
While I was sitting there contemplating the swift, gracious death that might be bestowed on me were I more fortunate, I noticed a theme in what the rep was saying.
The first thing was, essentially, “If you want your campaigns to work, spend media dollars on them.” This comes as no surprise, of course they’re going to say that. And in my experience, they’re right. They’re right because they know people actually do not care about your brand one little bit, and if you want to have something decent to show for your campaign spend, you’re going to need to force it in front of people. Funny how new marketing looks a lot like old marketing.
The second thing I realised was they had shifted so quickly to focusing on engagement. Talking about engagement. Talking, in fact about their new metric “talking about this”, where the number of people doing just that kicks off that sentence. Strange, I thought, to have made such a sudden about-face.
And then it hit me: they were running out of road.
Look at the below graph. This is Starbucks’ fan growth over time to its present day.
Now look at this, Starbucks’ average new fans per week:
The growth they continue to experience would be the envy of most brands, but it’s still a shadow of its former self. So, this is what I think.
Facebook realised that all brands, from the smallest upstart to globe-straddling behemoths, would have a natural ceiling on the number of fans they had. Once brands hit that ceiling, it becomes harder for marketers to justify the ad spend because they’re not seeing the growth they’re used to, which in turn would mean they started to seek alternate places to spend their media dollars.
So what do they do? Change the conversation purposefully from being about numbers to “People talking about this“.
Now, I actually think it is the right way to go, number of fans had little more meaning than the number of friends anyone had on MySpace, and smart marketers always knew it was about engagement. But in launching this new metric and focusing as much attention on it as they can muster, Facebook have managed to stave off any apathy that may have been headed their way from marketing managers on post-fan-drive come downs.
The above might strike you as wildly cynical, but look at those graphs again. In an environment that will accept nothing less than significant year-on-year growth in all forms, what other conclusion can you come to?
