Digital 4Ps of Power

As digital touches us throughout our lives and businesses, we need to step back and understand the fundamental forces that drive power versus the latest tactics or headlines from the tech titans. Like previous centuries, it isn’t until we are well into the next 100 years before we realize the real causes of change and how we can harness them like power through the digital 4Ps (link to the presentation ):

Peers; Participation; Platforms; and Performance.  

Let’s work through an example of digital power in action through Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) specifically the #EndangeredEmoji and Great Barrier Reef (GBR) campaigns. Non governmental organizations (NGOs) are a good way to test a new theory since they rely strongly on influencing others to achieve their outcomes. Their product is very intangible with the tangible aspect, fundraising especially from individuals, particularly complex. 

WWF launched its first ever emoji-based fundraising campaign to help support the organisation’s work to protect precious species and their habitats just ahead of Endangered Species Day on Friday 15 May. The idea for the #EndangeredEmoji promotion was sparked by the discovery that 17 characters in the emoji alphabet represent endangered species. WWF is seeking to translate the popularity of these characters into donations. Emoji have been used over 202 million times on Twitter since they were integrated into the platform in April 2014. In the first 2 weeks of the promotion, there have been over 374k social media mentions of #EndangeredEmoji and over 55k (net) sign-ups with half visiting the website monthly to see their emoji summary.  Just under 2 months later, the number of people mentioning #EndangeredEmoji reached 561k with 1.8M emojis tweeted with the hashtag. WWF tapped into a new digital trend, emoji, and a deep human way of communicating, through pictograms like the hieroglyphics. By riding the emoji trend, WWF hit the intersection of virality and our message and objective of increasing awareness that endangered species (and the natural world) needed saving. Obviously the digital 4Ps don’t replace the classic marketing 4Ps but give a new lens to view power.

Peers

I’ve not found a better way of evaluating an upcoming digital campaign then Forrester’s POST method (People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology) which has been around for many years but gets to the heart of a campaign – we want people to do something and people need to be the starting point, not the end point of campaign planning. 

At the end of the day, your digital activity will be judged by what business results it achieves which we’ll circle back to with purpose at the end of this article.

In the POST process of digital, we always need to start with “p” for people and never the “t” for technology. The viral video of a Sea Turtle's point of view of the Great Barrier Reef (via a GoPro) in June grew awareness that supported getting people to care enough to sign a petition that ultimately led to a change in policy in November - a government ban which was our “business outcome”.

Recently though, its been even more useful to shift from viewing customers as people (in the POST for B2C) or buying groups (B2B) to interconnected peers (crowd) influencing each other through participating. Of course everyone is not equal in influence but the term peer moves us away the notion of a one way influence to two way engagement, giving a different lens to view our relationships. 

To get our desired outcomes we need to partner with the right peers, working together towards shared goals for the benefit of each party ranging from people as consumers right through to partnerships and our colleagues internally. This is especially powerful when it emerges from out peers in the crowd like the Ice Bucket Challege (link to the presentation).

Participation

Source: Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms on HBR.org & their book "New Power"

Participation is doing something somewhere – more often than not these days, mitigated through a platform. Without (consenting) engagement, nothing happens - no organization gets anywhere. By harnessing peer power, you can change the world using their collective voice which increases in volume with higher levels of participation (on the scale above).

The relationships we have with peers range along a scale of participation. At one end, customers participate (however passively) buying offline.  At the other end of the scale is co-owning where the relationship is a true partnership. WWF’s Earth Hour is open source allowing people to participate in their own way towards the larger goal of a sustainable world even when there isn’t a WWF office in the country – it is the local crowd organizing it – they co-own it.  

We need to A.C.E. ideas, making them: actionable, connected, and extensible. The emphasis is on spreading ideas through maximizing participation versus just making an idea stick. Part of the #EndangeredEmoji saga was written by new and existing WWF social media followers with their own stories told through emoji as user generated content raising awareness of endangered species and creating a sustained brand lift for WWF.

Actionable: using the #EndangeredEmoji hashtag signed someone up to the campaign

Connected: users followers on social media would see the hashtag and later the Emoji

and Extensible: every Endangered Emoji tweeted added to the overall story.

WWF’s #EndangeredEmoji campaign resulted in 775k Twitter mentions in 6 months. The viral campaign also won 2 Drum Social Buzz awards - Best Use of Twitter and Best Charity Social Media Strategy. A shift to focusing on people and participation has resulted in 3 times the level of social media engagement than the previous year for WWF International.    See more in the "The New Power Audit".

Platforms

The most powerful companies in the world for the last 10 years plus, increasingly are running platforms. At one end of the scale you have Apple and Amazon starting with a strength of mainly selling product (with a platform for apps especially entertainment) to what have been traditionally been software services like Google (Alphabet) and Facebook paid by ever increasing better targeted ads. Microsoft is the most widely diversified tech titan across their business with components all along the value spectrum. As these tech titans concentration of capital explodes so does their expansion into our (actual and perceived) physical world usually through acquisition like Whole Foods by Amazon but also via Virtual Reality with Occulus Rift being bought by Facebook. What these tech titan’s have lost in innovation as they have grown into the biggest companies on the planet, they make up for in snapping up start-ups.

Adapted from: How the Tech Giants Make Their Billions Visual Capitalist

Any study of digital needs to consider the players running the platforms, not just globally but in the world’s biggest digital market, China with their own players, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (BAT). Nowhere in the world, is this being felt more strongly than in China with its prolific online to offline (O2O) services that go the last mile and deliver physical services using digital platforms. With data being called the new oil, Chinese companies are powering their artificial intelligence with more and richer data about the physical world. Uber’s worldwide rides were only a quarter of China’s Mobike (bought by rival Meituan Dianping). Winning the ultimate platform war, artificial intelligence, could come down to a race between the two superpowers: the US and China.

One unique aspect of participation is partnering with other organizations and existing platforms to achieve your goals. Using existing cloud platforms are the best way to scale and take advantage of improvements in service while weening the organization off legacy systems over time and as appropriate. A great example of this has been the migration of an aging proprietary system to a software as a service (SaaS). This is enabling WWF to re-engineer its content creation and distribute at scale since images are at the centre of our communications. Then partnering with organizations like Baidu’s Du Group we spread our images as Android battery skins through their battery saver app’s 150M+ users worldwide (outside of China). Similarly, every mention of #EndangeredEmoji got an automated response from @WWF asking if the person wanted to sign-up or opt out of the campaign through Twitter (and this could have expanded to other platforms like messaging apps). Participation on platforms is pushed up the scale when superusers go beyond consuming and begin producing.

Performance

As our abstractions from chaos (our personal and group subjective perception) to orderly (scientific theory and proof), move to digitalization (and therefore measured and stored as data), decisions can be optimized especially around resource allocation. As digital permeates everything, the physical world is being quantified through mobile and the Internet of Things (IoT). Increasingly this analysis is being done by artificial intelligence powered by data, predicting more and more accurately to allow companies to capitalize on opportunities. 

By applying the force of performance, we can maximize our organizations for opportunity not only resources. For instance with #EndangeredEmoji the campaign was easy to follow with social media listening and enabled the WWF to amplify peer’s conversations with purpose. When someone mentioned #EndangeredEmoji they were sent a tweet back immediately signing them up to the campaign or asked them to opt out – 90% of people stayed subscribed to the campaign. Augmenting people with AI has the potential to rival the power of either mind or machine alone.

Purpose is the business outcome that the organization needs to thrive on and we therefore need to map digital activity to the desired outcomes. In addition we measure digital performance indicators to compare and maximize the return on investment by campaign, country and channel across reach, action/engagement, and revenue. WWF uses the digital funnel to aggregate the activity and calculate key performance indicators to create benchmarks so we can identify best practices and re-use ideas and often content across countries in the local offices.  

Finally by harnessing the 4 forces together, new combinatorial opportunities emerge to produce:

Power

The Great Barrier Reef campaign previously mentioned is a good example of where digital was at the heart of WWF’s integrated mix of activity working towards a purpose – the business outcome – a ban on dredging in the Great Barrier Reef.

The major platforms are creating a small techno-elite (caste) who control more wealth and influence how we participate, determining the winners and losers across business, government and society at large. 

Although the growing power of platforms, governments are increasingly waking up and reviewing the anti-competitive actions of the tech titans especially the EU and US. The employees (peers) themselves are organizing walkouts and blowing the whistle on unfair practices by their employers.

On the other side, new technology like blockchain have the potential to remove the middleman from business and government to rebalance power towards peers. Examples range from digital societies like Estonia & non hierarchical organizations like the Decentralized Organizational Authority (DOA) & markets like Bitcoin (cryptocurrencies) and non profits (including public services) like ride hailing Ride Austen. 

In conclusion understanding the 4 digital forces that produce power is necessary to wielding it to achieve your and your organization’s desired outcomes - participating with peers in partnership on platforms, performing to produce power.

See the full presentation I gave at the #DLF2019 on slideshare. (C) David Drodge 2019