What Shapes Communications Today

The Changes That Determine How We Build Creative and Efficient Programs

Developing ideas and communications programs, we need to keep in mind not only changes in habit of our desired audience — but also changes in technology and platforms surrounding us. Everyone talks about social, but this is not the main driver of change anymore.

All habits and all communication is driven by the digital transformation. What might be one — if not THE — reason, why communications is the first traditional industry that totally embraced this transformation.

Roughly said, we are dealing with three different “webs” today.

And it’s a huge mistake that most people in my industry are focussing on social only. One web is the search-web, the second is the social-web, the third is the ephemeral-web. And all these are undergoing big changes right now.

It’s crucial not to underestimate the importance of search for communication programs. In Europe other than in other regions of the world, this means Google (as they are a de-facto-monopoly here).

To say it frankly: No communications professional can afford
not to know at least the basics of SEO.

I would not hire any junior, any senior, any what-so-ever that can not explain the basics of search and how it affects communications. Especially as the changes in search have a huge impact on content and how to create and present it. It’s less about “good” or “bad” content, but more about content that performs in search.

This goes together with changing habits. What we expect from search and from result pages has changed over the years. Although you might trigger search for your brand through TV (or display) advertising to some degree, normal search will be mostly about me and not about the brand — about what I want to know or do.

It might be great to be the #1 result on your brand’s identity and attributes to get your bonus. But in most cases this is highly irrelevant for the reality of search and life.

What all communications can learn from digital, is the starting point — looking at the things bottom up, beginning with the user and their needs. From there we will develop stories and content and make sure it fits to the brand. Maybe this is even the biggest shift in strategic approach.

And what we learned from Facebook and other mobile centric platforms: that whatever we do needs to have a strong pausing power. This is more and more relevant for the search-web as well — as the analysis of user behavior and what they do once they click on a link to your web presence is crucial for your visibility.

What leads us to the second web. Social.

Most brands and marketers mean Facebook when they say social. In a way this is true (at least from an academic point of view).

But as organic reach has diminished and is down to nearly zero today, the role of Facebook in marketing and communications radically changed. Together with Facebook itself pushing video, the network has become a highly efficient targeting channel both for performance and branding — depending on your content and your strategy.

I refuse to start any Facebook program without a significant media budget right from the start, as it makes no sense anymore.

But much more interesting than talking about Facebook is looking for platforms in the social space where my specific target audience might be active.

The social web is no silo anymore but divided into several different and not connected areas that a segmented mainly by age — rather than gender or region.

Hiding from the clutter provided by old people or brands, young audiences join obscure networks and move on if they are not comfortable anymore. This is not new, of course — it’s a quite normal and expected habit of adolescent communication to be separated from adults and ugly old folks like parents, teachers, or the police.

But we need to keep in mind that most “tradional” social channels have grown up and are getting older and older by the minute. Not bad at all — because in most programs we definitly want to target these old audiences above 30.

It will be interesting to see if the next generation (under 15) will join any of our established networks at all. I bet my 13-year-old boy will not sign up for Facebook. He tried it once about a year ago, but found it boring. Not exactly a surprise, because so do I.

They instead have joined a lot of ephemeral channels.

Seeing what Snapchat, Yo, Meerkat, and others are doing is exploring what is possible with this new way of interacting and using “the web”. All these operate without a website by the way.

What all these networks have in common is that they are not searchable. Exacly the opposite of the first web, the search-web. And they have less visible signals — differentiating them from the social-web.

Ephemeral is not social. It’s used a bit like we used social in the early days when the superstars had 200 followers. And especially Yo with their third party services and Snapchat with stories and discover begin to build a new infrastructure for the ephemeral-web, like Twitter did for the social-web.

Like ten years ago with social we need to start experiments how to act
platform-adequate in these enviroments.

First efforts seem to be a bit weird as they just apply social mechanics to a new web. Like some marketers applied their known mechanics to the social-web back in the beginning.

Keeping in mind that we now have three different ways of accessing content in the web — search, social signals, ephemeral — we will embrace our own real estate online again and make sure it’s our home base for all these different ways of distribution and interaction.

To be honest, I see this as the real and only rational behind the ugly buzzword content marketing. And the truth behind its success.

That said, all three webs have in common, that they are mobile first today. Mobile doesn’t necessarily mean being on the run. Most mobile web activity is in un-mobile situations like sitting on the couch or at the desk.

(What by the way means that mobile communications is not exactly relevant anymore as an approach, because all digital programs are fully mobil anyway.)

Having an extension at hand all the time, and being on-line every minute we are not sleeping, changes not only user expectation regarding service and communication but also the way we as agencies and inhouse communicators are working. My community managers hate me for always telling clients this — but they definitly need to be on duty at other hours than some years ago. During commuting time and former TV prime time, a growing part of our audience now faces a different first screen. The one connected with the internet and in their hand and control.

What leads me to my ceterum censeo these days: