Fairwell, Square

The course is finish, and I feel I have to add a post to highlight what to me has been the best about Squared Online.

It's difficult to say whether the course met all my expectations, because I must confess I approached the course more out of curiosity than anything else. I have worked in marketing for over ten years, I have implemented campaigns and adopted whatever channels and options I had available. I want to stress that word: available. We often forget one of the major constrains we have to do our job: budget.

I want a new website designed, using the latest fancy tech fobs, but I don't have the money to afford designers and developers. Or when I have the budget for that, the company's current IT architecture cannot support half of it.

What do you do then? You adapt, make do, improvise. But you can only do that when you know what you can't have.

The course itself has not taught me anything I didn't know already. But it has put it in a holistic context. That's what makes this course worth doing and why I recommend it although that's not the most valuable part of the course. What really makes this course truly different and worth it is that people one has the chance to work with.

Until now, I have worked with people who had been part of the same team and company, shared a company/department culture and vision. Squared had made me work with people that come from all corners of the marketing world.

That's a great asset. And no, it is not easy or enjoyable to work for 6 months with people you don't see face to face, some of them you might find too bossy, some too mousy, but from each of them I have been able to learn something. If that's what Squared had in mind, they have succeeded tenfold.

I will miss the vibrant optimism and energy of some of my, now, ex-team mates almost as much as I am going to enjoy having my evenings for myself again!

Why does your data have to be beautiful as well as meaningful?

I must admit I had been looking forward to the last module of my Squared course, and not just because it would be the last one, but because of the nature of the assignment: an infograph.

Now that the assignment is out of the way and the course complete and I only have to wait for the pass or failed news, I have time to think, critically, about the whole thing. These are my musings.

We have more data than ever before, the amount of data we generate increases by the minute. In my daily job I suffer everyday the consequences of it: the means we use to collect data are not keeping the pace, the data I collect presents more questions than it answers.

Is perhaps for this reason that we fallen for the appeal of the latest fashion on visually appealing representation of data: infographs?

In the financial information services line and pie charts are still a must. In my opinion, they are the best infographs ever designed and they will never be surpassed because in their simplicity they are the most informative.

Looking at the infograph the team and I prepared, and going through it now that it has submitted and nothing can be changed, I can't help but thinking that this is a good example of what we are doing wrong with data: making visually appealing representations of it for the sake of it.

In support of this last point, I'd like to bring your attention to this book: Information is Beautiful. That's a coffee book of infographs (great ones). And to this website: www.christophermanning.org (I can spend hours looking at it).

A concern I have is that we seem to force ourselves to look at data to create a pretty story, rather than having a story supported by data.

Maybe because I can't resist pretty images. Here are some that didn't make it to the final presentation (thank goodness for that!)

The Responsibility of Social Media Users'

Until recently I have been ignoring most social media channels. I didn't feel they offered anything interesting to me. As part of a course of Squared Online, a Digital Marketing course organised by Google, I have revised what social media is and could be about. This has resulted in me revising my original view on Social Media:

It is not social media's purpose to offer anything interesting to me, it is my responsibility to use it in an interesting way. How can I do so?

Looking at the nature of my posts, few and far between as they are, I have come to the conclusion that they are overall uninteresting to a general audience and not at all representative of my interests and personality.

Here is why:
 
1. I feel one has to be careful about what one shares with the wide world: write in haste, repent at leisure. That spontaneity gone out of my posts.
2. There not sequence or trail path between post, not even within the same social media channel, let along the whole spectrum. This disassociation makes impossible to have an idea of the person behind the posts.

 I felt really flat about it, so I checked what my friends and social media followers had been posting, just to see if I was the only one missing the point here. It was not a surprise to see that I was not the only one at all. Far from it, everyone seems to be suffering from the same problem.

Of course, I cannot change the way people use social media but I have started taking action on my part. Here is a summary of the steps I am taking:

1. De-clatter: I am getting rid of everyone who is not contributing anything interesting to the conversation. But I am not being pedantic and exclusive in the least:

• If you want to talk about your children, I care, because that's important to you, although I really don't care about children.
•  If you are sad or glad because your team lost or won, I care, because I feel I am more of your friend when you share your feelings with me.
• If you want to brag about your latest exploits, I also care. They are just one of the many reasons why I am proud of knowing you.

What I don't care about is the people who share endless links without adding comments that will help me understand why they care about them. In social media that's the equivalent of spamming.

2. Create lines of thought to help me friends know what I am talking about and also follow the thread of the conversation. In order words, use the # with a purpose.

3. Have fun, spread fun. Avoid anger.

Traffic lights on

I have been using Google Analytics for a while and at some this is kind of exercise I really interested, and the site and the exercises were something I could relate to because so far the course has been very B2C centered and I have never worked in such area.

Having said that the lectures have been interesting to me I have this idea that the differences between B2B and B2C marketing will be soon very blurred. I was reaffirmed in my idea by this module: people do on any website pretty much the same thing: look for information, if relevant, take action, if not, leave it.

It is important not to get too carried away with data and feel the need to get a meaning out of every single figure.  Beware of spurious correlations, even if they can be quite funny: www.tylervigen.com.

That has made me look at the content of the lectures in a different way: I am now looking at how I can take this B2C concepts into B2B because since my audience is exposed to that marketing approach on their daily lives, stands to reason that they will expect the same for their business decisions.

In a way, I am looking forward to finishing the course and revisit the lectures at my own leisure without the pressure of assignment deadlines to meet.

Colouring within the lines - Kleur's Project

I was very pleased with the work we put together for our assignment. Although I found it very difficult to cut down on all the many good ideas we had.

One of the things that didn't make it to our final presentation is this infogram. I thought I'll use this post to show it off.

The best bit about this assignment was putting together digital and traditional marketing strategies, putting more emphasis on the digital side. The interesting bit is that whilst doing this assignment I realise that digital cannot replace other traditional channels of marketing, yet. Of course, there are many of will disagree with my opinion. It is interesting that they see themselves as the more forward thinking, ready to embrace the newest trends.

I think the main difference between their unbounded optimism and my cautious approach is the final purpose. My marketing campaigns have an ultimate goal: generate sales leads. If any of my campaigns went viral but brought no sales leads, it would be considered a failure. That's how harsh things are in B2B marketing. At present, digital marketing is just another set of channels we use.

This does mean that things will not change soon, indeed Direct Marketing, once the star channel, has now gone the way of the dodo. The change, will take at least another generation, though.

Setting shop is not easy!

I have never been short of business ideas. It goes without saying that I have never taken them farther than telling a few friends about them over a cup of coffee - or something stronger.

As part of Squared Online I was given the chance to take things way further than that. And it was a thoroughly enjoyable experienced.

To begin with I had to put my own idea to a particularly knowledgeable panel. My own dragon's den. My idea was not the winning one. Not even I gave it a vote because someone in the group had a wonderfully great idea that we all failed in-love with.

If setting your own business is difficult, setting it with a group of strangers over the internet is much more so. Tenfold so. Everyone has a different view of what the business should be like, what the priorities are and what the targets should be. Still, all the hassle was worth it.

It has given me the confidence of taking that start-up approach to my own product. Especially the looking at things as they could be not just as they are and involving as many people as possible in all discussions regardless of their areas of expertise.

My Social Media Life or My Cyber Footprint

The class assignment got me thinking of how, when, why I use social media and I realised something: I am there because of my friends and my job. At sometime or other I had to share something with them and social media made it easier.

Work has also has sent me to explore social media.

I feel we all have to have a digital profile in order to exist, and like in real life, what we put in determines what we get out of it.