Now all that is irrelevant, or almost.

Marketing now is about engaging with an individual, and groups of individuals with a common mind-set, weather they be social butterflies from the eastern suburbs of Sydney, or driving a truck in the Kimberley’s.

Their demographics do not matter any more, what matters is their mind set, and increasingly we can communicate to a mind set with the tools of the web 2.0.

This just makes marketing harder and more accountable, as creativity and innovative thinking now trumps budget dollars, and mass reach every time, and you can measure the return from every dollar spent.

It also makes it more rewarding for those who embrace the challenge.

So what happens to websites included in a print ad when a magazine releases an App for a tablet? There are a bunch of new dimensions here:

1. Does the advertiser pay more for the website to be activated on the tablet?, or
2. Does the cost of the ad to the advertiser include the cost of activating the website?,
3. Is an activation fee a one -off, or per site activation fee?
4. Should an advertiser pay an additional fee as a tablet subscriber clicks on an activated link?
5. Should the subscriber to the print edition have free access to the web edition?, or do they need to pay again for what they have bought already?
6. What is the cost relativity between the tablet version and the print? Does the tablet subscriber get a discount on the paper edition to put on her table?

This is making my head hurt, but I am pretty sure that there will be a huge amount of experimentation going on, and in 10 years we will be wondering what all the fuss was about, as the answer will be obvious.

However, there is usually a flip side to the stories of huge success, Jobs was not the nicest person around, brilliant, magnetic, but a real genuine article prick, according to his biographer, and the woes of Apple contract manufacturers in China are well known.

But, who has heard of the mineral Tantalum? Apple uses it, as does every other producer of our electronic gadgets.

Talison, a company headquartered in Perth used to mine tantalum in Australia, a mineral extracted from an ore called Coltan, short for Columbite-tantalite, but no longer due to competitive price pressure coming from African supplies. Pity we lost another market.

Coltan is now one of the minerals being mined in West Africa, using primitive tools, and kids paid slave wages, sold so we can have the latest gadget, and the nasties in charge can buy more guns and anti-personnel mines, and fill their Swiss bank accounts.

This blog is usually about marketing, management, and the stuff that hopefully scratches my readers brains to facilitate improvement. However, from time to time, we need to think about the ethical base of what we do. 

This almost unknown story of Coltan ore, and its derivatives should be on our agenda.

1. Plot a course that others can relate to, buy into, and understand.
2. Inspire and energise others to do better than they expect they can
3. Create a culture of action and integrity
4. Inspire and nurture innovation
5. Deliver results for all stakeholders.

Perhaps it should be a day for articulating our national challenges, in a manner that encourages rational debate based on data, whilst offering a real philosophical underpinning for decision making, rather than the current flatuant rhetoric and partisan maneuvering for short term political “advantage” .

That’s what I tell my clients to do, then often assist them through the exercise with mentoring and a set of readily available tools.

If it can be done for a business, is a basic discipline for survival, why can’t it be done for a country? Why shouldn’t we, as Australians, the shareholders in this Australia P/L  demand it of our Board of Directors?.

So, my call for today, is to dismiss all the puffery, glad-handing, and mutual admiration, throw it in the bin, and replace it with an agenda for the evolution of an Australia we would like to live in.

I would be talking about education, real education that sets up our engineering, operational and manufacturing competitiveness for decades, the means by which we demonstrate our humanity, to our elderly, those who want to come and share this great country with us, and to our disadvantaged, how we strike a balance between the short term expediency, and long term sustainability in all sorts of areas, and how we relate to those with whom we share the world, and finally, how our society pays for itself.

Not a word about gay marriage, the machinations of political parties, who has the best looking dog,  the latest shark attack, or nominations for an Academy award. All are irrelevant distractions, the detritus of life, ignore it, and consider something a bit more meaningful, and what you will do to push it, to put some meaning back into the day, and perhaps bit by bit, make the joint a better place.

Each tries to deliver a compelling and differentiated benefit, often to a very narrow but geographically spread user base.

It seems to me that there are a number of categories in the social media eco-system, just as there are product categories in a supermarket, and consumers benefit by understanding the role of each category, just as in a supermarket, to enable the best use decision to be made.

Here are my product categories:

1. Sound bites. Designed to attract attention for further investigation. Twitter is the king of sound-bites, 140 characters with links and search capabilities.
2. Taste-tester. Sites that offer you a taste of something more, a reason to have an increasing engagement. Facebook created this category, replacing the original brand, My-space with a superior offering, but is now being attacked by Google+ who have introduced a couple of new pack sizes and colors and are trumpeting them as genuine innovations. Of a different product line, but still in the category is  YouTube, simply a bigger bite from a different product to taste.
3. Taste-tester Premium. Similar role to the original, just more targeted to a user need. LinkedIn is the original, now stretching into providing other services like closed systems that require you to be a member of something outside LinkedIn to gain membership. The Australian Institute of Company Directors,  AICD, now has a closed group on LinkedIn that is proving to be very attractive to AICD members. A bit like a platinum Amex.
4. Mine, not yours. Closed  systems controlled to within a defined arena, a social media substitute for an intranet. Salesforce.com’s “chatter” is one such service housed within their cloud CRM offering, but they can be offered on a company’s server  just as easily with a whole range of search, co-ordination and networking capabilities.
5. Here ’tis. Sites that offer you the opportunity to find stuff. Google is the giant of this cateogry, but there are many additional services, Meetup, EBay, 4 square, and many others that make up this very fragmented category. You can find anything from an address, where your SM friends are hanging out, an obscure product for sale or swap, a service to be provided, or a car to hire.
6. The co-ordinator. This is your website, the place to which all your other stuff is connected, and provides a serious foundation for activity, information, and directing to the most appropriate location.

The whole ecosystem is a bit like an large iceberg with many peaks and crevasses showing above the water, but much more hidden beneath the waterline that floats it. This can be dangerous, as it can do a “Titanic” and sneak up and rip the heart out before you have the time to react. 

We all bitch about the inflexibility and unreality of the budget setting process, as well as the disruption to operations when they are being negotiated, and for what? Usually a set of numbers based on how well individuals and functions believe they can game the system.

It seems sensible to find a way to make the performance management processes much more responsive to the environment, changing circumstances, competitive initiatives, and innovation opportunities that emerge.

Given budgets are about costs, the costs of doing business, of investing, of risk taking, of offensive Vs defensive action, and resource allocation, it seems a simple set of questions before a cost is incurred would be useful.

Instead of just asking “do we have the budget”?

Ask:

1. Why is this action necessary”?
2. Will the action achieve the necessary result?
3. How is the expenditure adding value?
4. Can we effectively execute on time?

Questions like these can drive a continuous priority review process, always a good thing.

Obvious.

Why then is it that in corporate life we usually take the crash diet course?

There have been lots of headlines over the last few weeks about the probability of job losses in the banking sector, a response to the looming financial difficulties. The financial services sector has been doing very well, record profits despite the problems of a couple of years ago, and have been adding jobs, close to 40,000 over the last decade, and now they need to diet, so “crash” find 10,000 to cut.

Surely the problem is one of an ageing business model, in personal terms, too much junk food, not enough veggies and exercise, so now the management reaction is a commercial crash diet. History suggests there will be a lot of pain, and long term, little or no gain.

Those customers whose business is down the shallow end of the banks customer Pareto, the SME’s who are really the engine of sustainable growth in the economy will now find it harder to borrow. The banks are tightening the screws because of their crash diet, so there will be no-one to understand their SME customers business and consider their funding needs, and requests will be reduced to decision by an algorithm. Both the banks and the SME borrowers will lose under these conditions.

Pretty soon, hopefully, someone will realise the problem cannot be solved with a crash diet, it needs a lifestyle change, and only when that happens will sustainable recovery of commercial fitness be possible.

Kim Carr is just the latest in a long line (a conga line?) of Industry Ministers to go to Detroit, only to find that the captains of the car industry do not really care about a modest market and manufacturing outpost that has no real strategic place in the global supply chain, and therefore is expendable. If Australians want to keep them open, here is the price!

What a difference to the processed food industry.

It employs just as many, probably more, and does have a genuine strategic role, feeding ourselves seems pretty strategic to me, but is more fragmented and therefore unable to point to individual electorates and predict disaster, so we just let it rot.

Hypocrisy, perhaps blind stupidity, of the first order.

The act is a response to the digital piracy enabled by the net, but the probability of unintended consequences is absolute.

It is clear that there are problems, why buy music when you can download it for free? The legacy industries of the C20 whose business is creating content would rather you do not have the right to create and share it yourself, they want to produce second rate crap and charge you for it. You being able to do it threatens their profits. 

Better ask iTunes, a C21 business by the way, they seem to have done OK, their 10 billionth song was downloaded in February last year, or the boatloads of new bands who have a profile and market for their music via the net, but not a music company in sight, and the bloggers, who have a means to express themselves without a newspaper, the list goes on. 

The push against piracy is understandable, businesses are having their business models trashed, and they want it to all go away, but it won’t, simply because the world has changed and they have not, so they need to move over, or as it is happening, be moved over. Painful to the few, but inevitable. 

King Canute found the tide did not stop just because he wanted it to, and had pinned his future on being able to stop it, and I suspect the proponents of SOPA will discover the same thing. Being cynical, I suspect they already know it, but are just trying to buy time at our expense. This TED presentation by Clay Shirky, one of the real thinkers in this space says it better than I can ever hope to do.