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.

Thank you, Squared Online

It is now a month since I signed up for Google’s Squared Online (#squaredonline) and I think this gives me the perfect excuse to reflect here on what I have gained from the course so far.

It is often the case that one enters a particular project with a very clear idea of what it will be like and what experiences and knowledge will be gained from such experience. That was not quite the case with Google’s Squared Online , which is the reason why I signed up for the course in the first place.

Online learning is now a common experience: Lynda.com and Coursera are just some great examples of successful learning experiences. Squared Online is a bit more different, thought. It is truly interactive and hands on. Reflection is not only encouraged, it is compulsory as part of the compulsory assignments.

Under the guidance of the course lecturers and resources that are part of the first module of the course and reinforced by the comments and assignments of my fellow students I have been able to learn this much already:

The internet has revolutionised our lives much more than any other cares to admit. We have adapted so easily to new channels of information that we don’t often realise that the information itself is also changing.

I am not making the best use of these new resources, and this applies to my professional and personal lives.

When preparing the Digital Life Slide assignment I realised that I am part of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, a blog, email, etc. I don’t consider myself a Luddite, far from it: I have been around computers since the early 1990s, I have two laptops, a tablet and a smart phone, which I use daily.

And yet, I now see, thanks to Squared Online, that I am not making the best use of the technology at my disposal to dig deeper into the many lines of communication and sources of information. Find my own blogs boring: I have failed to use them for a unique purpose, as such their purpose has diluted and they are little more than a notebook of random thoughts. My use of Facebook, Twitter and the like is very sporadic. My Facebook life video has put slides of people, activities and places which are mere footnotes in my everyday life, a friend pointed that out to me when I published the video. I seem to use Twitter just to attract the attention of the Customer Services of big companies – the ones who seem to be listening, even if they can do very little to solve the actual problem. I have not done anything in Pinterest and other similar sites since the day I joined them. I only check LinkedIn when I am looking for a job or for employees.

In summary, I am wasting my digital life. Squared Online has made me see the many opportunities available. I am most excited about the coming lectures and assignments because I see now how much they are going to help me to build a digital life I can be proud of. 

I am a curmudgeon who doesn't like social media

Why I don’t bother with social media – well because it’s full of very unhappy people, who complain about everything…like me!

First of all to say that I do have accounts in several social media platforms, which initially never bothered to update. Then my friends started updating their own status and I felt I had to add my two pennies worth every now and then and never thought much about it. Until I started Squared Online and I asked myself why I, who has adopted every gadget under the sun (I even have a Pebble watch, a very silly thing to have, I admit), has resisted to fall for social media.

Let’s start with Facebook. When I first joined I used an alias instead of my full name. Gradually friends found me and to this date it has remained a friends only network. Some of those friends have started using Facebook messenger, which annoys me no end. I prefer email.

Twitter. I was a very late adopter of this network and I am still doubtful as to its potential. Part of me thinks it could be a wonderful way of communicate. The limitation to 140 characters could help users to sharpen their wits. A sort of Haiku. I am still working on this, although in the meantime I only tweet tennis results or silly updates about Clumsy Ninja to get free lives. I have certainly failed to make the best possible use of Twitter.

Blogging seems to offer a great opportunity to say all those important things we feel strongly about. And yet, I have not really taken to it. I have two or three half abandoned blogs littering cyber-space. They are of very different topics. It is only now, as part of this exercise, that I have forced myself to really think about why I had given them up so quickly. It was not the lack of things to say, it was boredom. Those were just monologues, individual ramblings and as such boring.

This is exactly the reasons why I like sending and receiving emails. Much more so than telephone calls. I can’t always take the time to talk at length on the telephone, but an email I can answer easily. Emailing is my blogging, Facebook and Twitter combined.

I am a conversationalist and I like choosing who I talk with. That’s why social media, in its current format, is not quite for me.

A critique to Prosumer Report’s Millenials: The Challenger Generation. Vol 11, 2011.

I read this report a while back and I really didn't take to it back then. Today I re-read the whole thing again and jotted down some of the reasons I didn't like it.

It is my opinion that this report presents a very rosy view of an entire generation which so far has been responsible for an increase in consumerism, a drop in literacy, and one of the most mindless protests (London 2011) in recent times.

The report praises the close and positive relationship between this and the previous generation. I acknowledge that these generations are united by a sense of collaboration that has not existed in previous ones. However, this collaboration is based on two principles:

•          Parents want to be seen as young and adopt some of the characteristics of their children to achieve this. The negative result of this is that the parents’ generation has failed to grow up. They are the Peter Pan generation. Their lack of responsibility has caused one of the worst economic crises in history.
•         Children know they need their parents’ support to maintain their status. With no job, or a badly paid one, and with a lifestyle which is way over their means, they have seen that antagonising the older generation is in detriment of their interests.

They are also great manipulators. They grow faster than their predecessors because they have easier access to information, and to so much of it that they don’t know what to do with it. This and the fact that they have not been able to leave the family home or attain the same economic status than their parents at their age has made this generation more insecure. Hence their constant need from approval who they try to achieve by reporting everything they do and expect Likes for it.

But then again, this description of an entire generation applies to a very specific group: the middle class in developed countries. There are a vast majority that cannot relate to technology in the same way because either they can’t afford the latest gadgets or because the limitations of their levels of literacy. These are the young ones who took part in the London and Paris riots and who will be likely to start the next revolution or at least be cannon fodder of those orchestrating it (think of the Arab Spring in Egypt and how their aspirations have been hidden behind a thick veil).

Squared Online Module 1 - Video

Here it is: short and sweet (I hope).

http://youtu.be/zKzerCIUfFo

What I want from Squared Online

There is no way of talking about what I expect to get out of this new experience of Square Online without talking about myself, and all the many things I still have to learn more about.

By way of background to my interest in Square Online let me introduce myself: I don’t have an academic training in marketing, and yet I have worked in marketing for nearly ten years now. I have learned by doing, which is always a very good school, and from the people around me.

Internet has changed the way we interact with each other dramatically and it’s continuing to do so at a staggering pace. At times I feel the-must-haves tools and channels in the morning are yesterday’s news in the afternoon. There was a time when one could rely on training manuals to learn the ropes. Now, the manuals are obsolete by the time the reach the bookshelves.

I see Square Online as an interactive manual that teachers and students will write in real time. I see Square Online as a massive brainstorming session with people with different skills, experience and interests (I already said I have learned a lot of what I know from others, and I am proud of it). I see Square Online as my chance to see Digital Marketing with new eyes.

And I will take all that to my marketing role, in B2B marketing. I think B2B still have to learn how to use Digital Marketing effectively. With Square Online I will gain exposure to the tools and ideas that will allow me to work with my team in more creative and productive manner.

As you all can see, my expectations are a bit high.