Archive for March, 2009

So here I am watching ER and there is an advert for something (doesn’t say what) which features a directive to search “who is she”

Now, I am thinking, wow what a great idea, make sure you are top of the listings for that phrase, after all we know how to do this, don’t we? So I do the search and its just a PPC campaign, no cleverness, no style, no substance. For goodness sake the top organic listing is about CRB checks and there is no mention of the product on the 1st 2 pages.

If all you were doing was getting people to use a PPC link, what was the point? You could have driven them directly to the site without using search at all. It just added an extra click for the visitor and no added value. A really dumb move.

Another of those campaigns where they just don’t get digital. Oh, someone had an idea all right, but if only they’d spent a few % of the ad budget on some proper digital expertise they could have had a much better result.

And I will not dignify the product with a mention.

You’ve been working away tirelessly at your marketing strategy and found the perfect way to communicate your new/improved product or service, show the business as a market leader and pioneer of new and innovative approaches, all the while boosting you SEO efforts and keeping up regular communications with your audience. Yes you’ll create a corporate Blog.

So who will Blog? You’ll get the head of product innovation blog about why he came up with the latest solution and the MD to blog about how the business has emerged as Market leader due to its customer centric focus. You and the rest of the marketing team will then keep the blog ticking over with timely news and updates that will be of real interest to your customer base.

So what’s the problem? The problem is the experts in the business, the ones who know your product inside and out, help shape the business and its direction tell you they simply haven’t got the time to Blog.

I would argue they can’t afford not to have the time to blog. If there is an audience out there that want to hear from you and you have the people who have something meaningful to say then find the time.

Here are my top 5 reasons for creating a corporate blog:

1. Most Blog platforms are free, so the only real expenditure is time.
2. Blogs help improve your search marketing efforts. Fact.
3. Blogging helps create a community of loyal followers a.k.a brand advocates
4. Blogs help you understand your market. Look at the comments left on your blog, are they telling you something?
5. Publishing regular, useful, engaging content to your audience strengthens your credibility in your given industry

Now there’s no need for any excuses.

A new buzzword for you. ‘Crowdsourcing’, Heard of it? No? Let me give you the definition from Jeff Howe, the man who wrote the book:

“Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.”

Let’s simplify that, getting your audience to do your work for you! Genius.

It’s a brilliant approach to marketing strategy. Ask the audience their opinion, get them to contribute and feel part of the business. Then Utilise user generated content for new product and service ideas and new approaches to marketing your business.

It’s not a new concept either. Some classic examples include the Walkers ‘Do me a flavour’ campaign, istockphoto.com (you add your images to build their library), and of course wikipedia. There’s also an example of this on the way from Pancentric, so watch this space.

Crowdsourcing: Highly successful, highly engaging, highly recommended.

A friend who knows how much I love celebrity gossip (and discovering new search platforms), recommended a new website the other day. Intrigued, I paid it a visit….

Kosmix is essentially a vertical search engine that aggregates content from a number of sources across the web; it then builds you a profile of your search query right before your eyes. There are several vertical search engines and apps aggregating content from multiple sources, Globrix and Headup being just a couple of examples, but this is definitely the best I’ve seen so far.

There are still a few things they need to iron out, country specific results would be nice, suggestions for search strings with spelling errors – essential, and improvements are needed for non-people based searches. However, if you’re trying to find out more about a particular individual the results are mighty impressive. A quick search on Jeffery Archer (no particular reason) for example presents me with his Wiki, a selection of blogs related to him, his official website, pictures, videos, book reviews, twitter feeds and even amazon purchase recommendations.

Perfect for all your celebrity stalking needs…. and some background research on authors!

To try it for yourself visit www.ksomix.com

How successful are those demonstrations you get when you go to marketing conferences?

If you don’t know the ones I’m talking about, it’s where the presenter tells you how great this new approach to marketing is, or how wonderful this new piece of technology is. The presenter then proceeds to fire of a twitter, a blog or a forum post only to be inundated with responses by the time they finishes their talk. Success!

So here’s my attempt. Right now myself and two colleagues are giving a talk on the benefit of search marketing to businesses. We’ve just set ourselves the challenge of getting this blog post to the top of Google before the end of the talk. Nothing like pressure then.

Yes, this is something we’ve done before on the Pancentric blog, but we want to prove to our guests this morning that it works, and works quickly.

Simply type the title of this blog post into Google, and (fingers crossed) we’re top.

The title of today’s blog post was provided by our esteemed guests, nothing to do with me. Honest.

But they are – according Neale Martin.

A new one for me on this blog, but today’s post is a reading recommendation.

I’ve just finished an excellent book. Habit: The 95% of Behavior Marketers Ignore

The book, by Neale Martin explores the reasons why 80% of new products fail, why traditional marketing techniques of the last 50 years are flawed, and how we’ve ignored what’s been in front of us for all these years – that human behavior is largely managed through subconscious process.

Neale provides an excellent insight into today’s marketing techniques, and challenges the reader to focus more on behaviour than attitudes and intentions.

It certainly provokes a lot of thought and gives a new perspective on approaches to marketing to your loyal consumers. Actually, are they really loyal customers or just creatures of habit?

This started as a project like many others. There was a great concept, an idea, a strategy, a plan, and a creative, for engaging with the client’s audience.

The concept is great, the client loves it, it ticks all the right boxes it shows the human side of the brand, it (dreaded words) “could go viral” – all we have to do now is implement it. What could be simpler? Frankly, almost everything.

So the Q&A starts:

• How many visitors – loads
• How many uploads – as many as we can get
• How big will the files be – hmmm, anything from a few hundred K up to 10’s  of megabytes
• How long is it going to run – don’t know

so, no change there then.

Now in the old days,we’d have a bit of a think, scribble some numbers into a spreadsheet, multiply everything up, say “how much?”, revisit the assumptions (how many people are really going to scan and upload all of their business cards?) vacillate between the two extremes of its trivial and it’ll melt down the web until eventually we stick a finger in the air take a deep breath and say don’t worry it’ll be fine on our existing infrastructure. Cue sleepless nights and lots of contingency plans, worst comes to the worst we can xxxxx, you can fill in the blanks.

But not any more.

Now we go, no sweat, when do you want it live? No panic, no worry, bandwidth – all you can eat , server getting overloaded, run up another one, overcapacity, shut one down. How cool is that?

And all because of Cloud Computing.

Cloud Computing is the concept of using large virtual servers on the internet.  Amazon and their ilk have to have massively more capacity than they use at any one time for resilience to cope with peak loads, all sorts of reasons. Rather than keeping this spare capacity sitting there doing nothing, there is a business to be made offering them it to other companies. And so were born Amazon’s Elastic Computing (EC2) and Simple Storage Services (S3) offerings.

For a low rental price you can sign up for either or both of these services and away you go.

These services are most commonly used by Software as a Service (SaaS) companies. No up front investment in hardware and infrastructure, low ongoing costs and the ability to be “web scale” if you’re massively successful.

You can sign up online, choose your server capacity, choose a disk image, boot it up, install your software (an Apache web server and an Adobe ColdFusion server for example), point your DNS and away you go.

We have now set up our first client site on the Cloud. It is a promotional site, with relatively unknowable parameters that could use a lot of resources. By using the cloud we can be very confident that we can cope with any peaks that the internet can throw at us and we can scale accordingly. And when the promotion is over, we just scale back down onto some real servers somewhere. Better for us, better for the client, better for the visitor, better for Amazon, it really is a win, win, win, win situation.

The lesson here for brands is that Cloud Computing is an effective, and low cost way of getting large scale promotions onto the web at low risk. The downside, and the reason I wouldn’t suggest the cloud for mainstream systems, the “keep everything in the Cloud” approach, is the limitations of a relatively weak SLA and the immaturity of the solution. Recent episodes where both Amazon and Gmail disappeared for extended periods show the risks, acceptable for a promotion, a killer for your core applications.

The Project? Ah, all in good time, just watch this space.

I hate to say I told you so, but (read my last post), I told you so!

Just two days after its launch, Skittles was forced to rethink its social media strategy after users deluged the site with inappropriate and profane tweets. The Twitter feed, previously prominently displayed as the home page, is now much harder to find (it’s now a small link in the corner of the floating app).

That’s not to say the campaign wasn’t without its successes. For every negative, inappropriate tweet there were 5 times as many positive ones. But it’s a lesson brands utilising social media need to take heed of.

Give your audience the opportunity to talk back to you and you need to be prepared for them to say whatever they want, and when they do, don’t run and hide.

Before your business dives in and begins tweeting to the community, you need to plan, and plan well. Decide on your objectives early, why are you ‘tweeting’ in the first place? As a business you need to share information that is unique and valuable, not information they can get from your website, wikipedia page or anywhere else on the web. The important thing is to think about your target audience and the information you can give them.

As twitter says every time you tweet, “What are you doing?”

That’s the question your audience want the answer to and that’s the question you should expect a reply to, no matter what that reply is.

Is this the future of digital campaigns?

http://www.skittles.com/

Skittles have had a rather extreme social media makeover.

Product descriptions on wikipedia, promotional videos on youtube, Product advocates/testimonials on facebook all held together with a nifty little app in the top left of your screen.

I like it, it’s a brave move to allow all of your content to be generated by your consumers, but do Skittles realise what they’ve opened themselves up to?

‘Rufus_Jay’ told the twitter community that “Skittles plan to destroy the human race” this morning.

‘julianharris’ suggests Skittles contain narcotics.

One things for sure, it’s already proving a big hit. People are tweeting away about Skittles bold move, with 1000’s of comments already filling the Skittles feed, and hundreds of thousands of friends on their facebook page.

The perfect example of your consumers creating online buzz for you.

Stop marketing to. Start engaging with.