Karan Chadda

Global digital marketing and communications leader

Campaigns

Who’s controlling the social media treadmill?

The ideas that attention spans are shorter and audiences operate in discrete silos are received wisdom. As a result, companies produce and repurpose more content than they previously did. All this happens under the presumption that consumer habits are changing and firms need to keep up.

Last week, Instagram rolled out polls. The move, mimicking functionality from Twitter, enables users to run polls in their Instagram Stories. It’s an incremental and unsurprising move. And yet, when you note the vast array of other changes (like trialling swipe up links for some accounts) that are only available for those publishing Stories, it’s obvious that it’s all designed to encourage more, and more frequent, posting.

Meanwhile, posts published on Google’s My Business, which helps firms take control of how they appear in search, only appear in search results for a week after they are published. After that, they expire. Again, this is a move to encourage more frequent publishing.

Over on Facebook, for those seeking to maximise their organic reach the consensus seems to be the consistency with which you post (alongside how well received your posts are) has a dramatic impact on reach.

So, alongside the received wisdom that consumers want targeted, bite-sized content, we have social networks increasingly shrinking the lifespan of content.

Consumers and platforms are turning up the speed of the treadmill. Companies are the ones doing the running, but they’re not in control.

Hire the best

Today, FuturePRoof has published my analysis showing that the PR industry is further behind on ethnic minority representation than it believes. I’ve tried to construct and present that analysis in a dispassionate and reasoned way. But here I’d like to outline why I think the lack of diversity, in all its forms, needs addressing.

At the heart of the analysis lies a simple assumption: that no ethnic group has a greater proportion of creative or talented people. In the wider context of diversity, I’d extend that to say that regardless of its wealth, sexual orientation or gender, no group of people are more creative or talented than another. This is an assumption I strongly believe to be true.

If you gather a group of industry leaders together, you’ll hear the same refrains about the lack of talent. Talk to awards judges and they’ll lament the paucity of truly creative campaigns.

Despite this, dataset after dataset reveals that we continue to hire from the same tiny strata of society. Let’s take graduates as an example. The industry tends to look for graduates from redbrick universities. We compete with Goldman Sachs and Clifford Chance and Accenture and almost every other business out there to fight for the attention of this tiny group. We fight for newly minted classicists, economists and historians.

And yet there are a group of people for whom ‘Classics’ is a type of shoe. This group has creative and talented people but they’re not travelling along the formal education channels that we use as a proxy for talent. So we ignore them.

That ignored group contains award-winning campaigns that will never happen. Ideas that could, but won’t, transform companies and countries. Words that would sell millions of products, if only their creator was given the chance.

But we’ll never see any of this. Because we do things the way we always have. Because we want to get the best we can of the group everyone’s fighting for (except when we’re hiring friends’ kids or clients’ nieces and nephews).

To me, the need for diversity is not primarily about ethics. It is about getting the best, most creative talent. Looking at the skewed demographic structure of the industry, it’s not surprising we complain about a lack of creativity. We’re not hiring the best talent.

10 quick-fire responses to Twitter’s 280 character trial

  1. Double the length, half the insight.
  2. I was going to write a short note, but didn’t have time so I wrote a long one.
  3. At least 100-tweet threads will be half the length.
  4. Sedentary thinking leads to bloated ideas.
  5. War with North Korea is now twice as likely.
  6. Less editing lowers quality.
  7. You’re not supposed to feed the trolls!
  8. If brevity is the soul of wit, Twitter’s soul is dying.
  9. We have double the characters to lament losing a sixth of our Jaffa Cakes.
  10. Too many tweets makes a tw*t (ht @David_Cameron).

Social media changes – summer roundup

 

What changed on social media over the summer? A fair bit. Brush up here.

LinkedIn decided to jump on the native video bandwagon.

Instagram began allowing verified accounts to add links to their stories.

Medium rolled out a partner programme, essentially a way to trial community publishing that pays.

Medium also decided to encourage applause.

Facebook dived into TV, sort of.

Facebook also took a tiny step toward stopping ads on pages that spread false news.

Facebook expanded marketplace, watch out ebay.

YouTube had a spruce up, the changes go beyond the logo.

YouTube also took its first step in social sharing within its platform.

Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube formed the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism. Not exactly The Avengers but it’s early days.

LinkedIn went Lite in emerging markets.

Google let people publish posts directly to search results.

Google+, yeah it’s still there, launched a discover tab.

No one cares about your diamond

In 1849 the Treaty of Lahore was signed. A 10 year old boy, who also happened to be the Maharaja of Punjab, lost his kingdom to the British government and a very special diamond to Queen Victoria.

The then Governor General of India, Earl Dalhousie, played a central role in obtaining the diamond. Once the treaty had been signed, he wrote to a friend declaring, “I had now caught my hare.”

Dalhousie believed, having captured one of the East’s most venerated gems, he was going to be a hero of the Empire.

When news spread of the Kohinoor’s arrival in Southampton, Britain was gripped. People clamoured to see what was, at the time, the largest diamond in world.

The first opportunity for people to see it was at the Great Exhibition. There was a great rush, but the crowds left disappointed. Newspapers reported that it didn’t really sparkle. It was overrated.

A lot work went into fixing Dalhousie’s gift.

First, the organisers cut off all natural light to the diamond and shone lamps upon it at specific angles. Reports came back that although its lustre was much improved, visiting the Kohinoor was a hot, close and arduous visit. Some viewers fainted.

It was then decided that the diamond be cut. In the process it lost almost half of its size, but it shone like never before. At last the diamond was fulfilled its promise. It went on to be set into jewellery and has sat in the crowns of three different queens.

What did Dalhousie get wrong? He misunderstood his market. In the East, the fashion with precious gems was to leave them as natural as possible so you could appreciate the beauty of nature’s creation. In the west cutting and polishing gems to bring out their lustre was the thing. It was about getting the most sparkle.

Dalhousie was mesmerised by his product, but he ignored the audience. They weren’t impressed. It’s an instructive lesson: he failed to understand his market so even the world’s largest diamond did not impress.