Marketing magazine recently published an article from me about putting people first. They’ve been kind enough to let us reproduce it in full below:

A few years ago I attended a screenwriting class taught by a friend at UCLA. The topic that night was television.

After some discussion about the major television networks, a student asked what they generally looked for in a script.

“Well, who are their customers?” my friend asked the class – mostly mature students looking to break into full time writing. Hands shot up, and we all agreed that the viewers, the television audience, were the customer.

“Okay,” he continued, “what is their product, what are they selling?”

“The shows are the product,” a student answered, voicing the consensus.

“Nope,” my friend, a film and television producer, smiled. “Advertisers are the customers.”

He paused.

“The product is you.”

Mind blown.

It makes sense, of course, when you consider the origins of the televised serial narrative – the soap opera – funded by detergent brands in order to promote their wares.

It makes sense, and yet hearing it put like that, well, left a sour taste in the mouth. Something about that model just felt wrong. Obscured. Perverted.

But I’m not here to talk about television.

‘Advertisers are the customers.’

When Facebook went public earlier this year, much like television, people were no longer the customers. Brands were. Users simply became product to sell to advertisers.

When analysts spoke of Facebook’s need to monetise the platform, what they were really saying is that Facebook needs to monetise the users.

Since its IPO earlier in the year, Facebook has been building and testing, deploying and upgrading, optimising and tinkering. Why? To make its ads more effective.

To make users, Facebook’s product, more valuable. Users. You.

But I’m not here to talk about Facebook.

‘The product is you’.

Twitter is battening down the API hatches and locking the doors to its user base in order to more effectively monetise. Tumblr has begun rolling out (thus far relatively un-obtrusive) ad-supported content.

But I’m not here to talk about those platforms, either.

I’m also not here to talk about users, followers, likers, players, gamers, subscribers or customers.

Today I want to talk about people.

Today I want to consider the human.

Humans are an okay bunch. Most keep to themselves. They eat, they sleep, they love and laugh. They live. For a while anyway.

Humans have limited time, which makes them worry. They want ways to make their life easier, less complicated. They want less clutter.

They like new, shiny things. They like information. They like stories. In fact, humans love stories.

Humans buy what we sell. Sometimes because they need it, sometimes because their neighbour has one. If they like it, they’ll tell other humans. Sometimes, those humans will buy one too.

As marketers, humans are very valuable to us. But a single human can be subjected to as many as twenty thousand marketing messages a day.

Twenty thousand.

That’s not very human friendly.

Marketers are human sometimes, but probably not often enough. Instead of finding ways to talk to other humans, to listen, to understand their needs, we spend time and money trying to shout louder than other marketers, and creating new places to put our messages.

How often do you hear a human say, ‘Well golly, those clever souls at Brand X found a devious and downright genius new way to show me ads. It’s amazing – the ad followed me around every other site I visited for days until I just had to buy one of their products. I just had to. It’s brilliant. I’m telling everyone!’

That’s not a speech I’ve ever heard a person give. Marketers… maybe. Perhaps this one is more recognisable:

‘I just read/watched/heard the most amazing/heartwarming/incredible/funny story. Brand X just shared it. It’s really good. I’ll send it to you.’

Humans love stories, not adverts.

When you’re thinking about your marketing plan for next year, when you’re allocating your budget and planning channels; consider the human.

Take some of that budget and hire content producers. Hire storytellers. Start campaigns that put humans first.

2013 is not the year of mobile, or whatever new social network your kids are using. 2013 is the year of the human. 2013 is about finding the right platforms and the right campaigns for the people who want to buy what you sell, and creating stories just for them.

Marketers are human sometimes. Why not think and act that way all the time.

We Are Social Australia is looking to add the right people in a range of roles across the business.

We’ve grown dramatically, both globally and here locally, where we’re working with some of the biggest and most socially ambitious companies in Australia - and now we need more great people to join us in our Sydney office.

We are looking for;

• Front end Developers – Mid level
• Back end Developers – Senior level
• Digital Producers
• Account Managers
• Account Directors
• Social Strategists
• Community & Content Managers
• Social Media Researchers
• Interns

How to apply;

Send us an email with your name and the role you’re applying for in the subject line.

Attach your CV, and then introduce yourself in no more than 400 words – tell us your background, examples that clearly demonstrate your proven track record – links to work if possible, and importantly, why you want to work at We Are Social.

We suggest adding links to LinkedIn and your social profiles.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Welcome to Movember, folks! Also know round these parts as ‘Tom Selleck appreciation month’.

To ease you into your month we’ve gathered the biggest stories from the social web for you to digest in one-easy-to-swallow blog post.

Here are the Top 10 stories in social media this week;

1. Facebook and Twitter users spamming friends in exchange for cash

In what amounts to a hijacking of brand advocacy, Socialloot are offering marketing dollars to users who sign up and post about brands to their communities.

The site has over a million users in Australia across Facebook and Twitter, with 500 Australian brands – including Reader’s Digest, Perfume Connection, Starshots and Bevilles Jeweller - offering users cash in exchange for links.

With the company set to go Global next year, it’s worth keeping an eye on. If your friends start trying to sell you random products, it’ll likely be the end of social networking as we know it.

Also, you should totally buy a Slusho.

2. Marketers use fan numbers to measure social media success

A newly-released survey suggests that although marketers realise fan numbers aren’t the be-all and end-all, they do end up relying on them for measuring success. 60% still used fan numbers as a primary measure of gauging success.

The folly of this is clear: just accruing fans is not enough; it’s what you do with them which is important.

3. Vitrue research into Facebook fans
Vitrue have produced a really useful bit of research outlining how the demographics of Facebook overall are markedly different from the sub-group who like Pages, who tend to be younger and predominantly women.

In the case of consumer packaged goods Pages, the fans skew even more female but are slightly older.

4. How the F8 changes are affecting Facebook Pages
Analysis from PageLever suggests that the recent Facebook changes have made more fans see Page updates, but those fans are seeing fewer updates:

Facebook’s changes, announced at its F8 Developers Conference last month, appear to have boosted brands’ visibility among more of their fans but decreased the frequency with which a brand’s fans see its messages, according to a study of more than 300 brand pages. In what should be considered good news, the new layout has substantially increased fan interactions with brands.

EdgeRank Checker have produced other research, highlighting how engagement is generally up massively, with comments up 14% and likes up 16%, although impressions are down 22%.

In addition, engagement has dropped on smaller Facebook Pages, meaning that although this is good news for big brands, it’s bad news for local restaurants:

5. Google+ launches more updates in bid to improve UI
Google+ rolled out three new features last week, in a bid to increase the amount of time people spend on the site:

1) They’ve launched a what’s hot on Google + feature, to highlight – how did you guess?! – what’s hot on Google+:

2) There’s also now Google+ Ripples, which allows you how to track how popular posts are shared, and who the big conversation drivers and contributors are:

3) Finally and most interestingly, they’ve launched Google+ Creative Kit which allows users to edit their photos with some cool effects:

With Google+ now also available with Google Apps, one can hardly accuse Google of giving up on Google+ just yet.

6. BBC moves to human-edited Twitter feeds
The BBC has announced that its four core Twitter feeds will now be curated by real people. Nieman Journalism Lab has an interesting post about the effect human curation can have.

7. Airlines outed for bad customer service in social
There was bad news for two airlines this week: first, American Airlines was declared the least popular airline in social media, with only 12% positive sentiment.

Then, Qantas managed to fully step up to the fail-plate with some unbelievably wooden customer service via social media.

All of this left them flying towards the top of the trending topics, before the fuel of negative sentiment overpowered the account, leading them to truly crash and burn. It’s plain simple: it’s just not good enough to wing it.

8. adidas Originals Womens’ Look Book Instagram Contest
adidas recently launched an interesting city vs city Instagram challenge to encourage fans to capture their Originals styles.

Fans then upload photos of their outfits and their friends’ and tag them with #adidasoriginals and a geo-tag of their city and vote for their favourite look.

9. Chapstick’s social media suicide

A real #epicfail for Chapstick: first they posted an image of a woman with her backside in the air looking for her chapstick behind the sofa.

This photo received a spiral of negative comments which were subsequently deleted. More comments were posted, more comments were deleted, still with no word of apology.

Finally Chapstick issued an apology containing the words “we’re committed to listening…” but we’re not sure that message will stick, chaps.

10. Mexican football team replaces players’ names with Twitter handles
In a nifty move, Mexican football team Jaguares di Chiapas put their players’ Twitter handles on the back of their shirts instead of their names.

They also advertised their sponsor’s Twitter account, rather than the sponsor itself. Tweet idea!

The Week According To The Internet:

• Twitter Account Of The Week: Shippam’s Fish Paste
• Tumblr Of The Week: Barack Obama
• Heartwarming Reddit thread of the week: Boy suffering Leukemia photoshopped into amazing pictures to cheer him up.

Microblogging platform Tumblr has had a phenomenal 12 months, both outgrowing rival WordPress and posting some undeniably impressive stats.

Not only that, but they can now count President Obama among their users.

While print media has been quick to adopt the platform as an extension of their social strategy, brands have lagged behind, preferring to target the usual suspects in the form of Facebook and Twitter.

But as brands saturate those channels further – social ad spending is set to hit $10 billion by 2013 – the case of Tumblr becomes clear, as it represents a unique opportunity for your social ecosystem; visibility.

Here are the 10 reasons why every brand should have a Tumblr;

1. Growth.

Tumblr’s growth is becoming impossible to ignore; 33 million registered blogs serving an estimated 12 billion page views a month as of September 2011 (8 times higher than WordPress), according to Quantcast.

2. It’s free.
Tumblr is single-tier platform, meaning it’s free no matter the size of your brand or the scale of your operation.

There is no charge for hosting, and no charge posting video or audio files, meaning you can upload a variety of strong, unique content, safe in the knowledge that it will be seen by the community.

3. It’s easy.

Well known for its user-friendly interface, Tumblr also has a host of simple, extremely flexible customisation options meaning that within minutes you can set up a blog that is on-brand, looks great, and the whole team can use.

Sure it isn’t as flexible as WordPress, but it isn’t trying to be. If you want a website, get a wordpress, for your brand blog, look no further than Tumblr.

4. It’s social.
Tumblr is inherently social. Users can follow other Tumblogs and have content posted by those blogs appear in their Dashboard, Tumblr’s answer to the newsfeed/timeline.

Following users with similar interests means that your feed will be populated by relevant content, and thanks to the powerful native tagging system, you won’t have to go out and beg for traffic – the community will find your content.

5. SEO.
Tumblr’s native reblogging system – allowing users to repost your content onto their blog – means that any links you embed in your posts can quickly spread around the site, generating potentially hundreds, even thousands of link backs.

6. Community.
As a Tumblr user you are given access to a highly interactive, passionate and youthful community of users. With around 44% of users aged 18-34, Tumblr’s community represents one the most youth-centric networks on the web.

7. Referrals.
Posting snippets of articles on Tumblr with a link back to a paid domain can create a strong referral channel, with fans of your content clicking through to read/see more.

Not only that, but users entering the site from Tumblr stay longer and view more pages than users from any other source, according to our analytics.

8. Brand Management.
Curation is the name of the game on Tumblr, and thanks to Explore – a collection of curated content channels edited by experts in the community – a strong content strategy can see you become the authority on your industry for over 30m users.

9. Event Management.
The tagging system also allows brands to take advantage of major events by posting and reblogging content from staff and followers in attendance, making your blog an authority for that event on Tumblr, and making you visible to a wider community.

10. Crowdsourcing.
Tumblr has some of the most knowledgable and passionate users with a collective deep understanding of subject, multiple areas of expertise and a unique voice.

Add to this the highly collaborative nature of the platform – each blog has a built in ‘submit’ function – and you’ll be able to source unique, compelling content from your followers, and the community at large.

At We Are Social, we’re already using Tumblr for ourselves and our clients, but for a comprehensive lists of who is using Tumblr well, see here.

Already a Tumblr user? Are you a fan of the platform? Let us know your thoughts in the comments…