Blog posts in the general category

Has geo-tagging revolutionised social media and marketing?

Collect Badges on FourSquare

It’s no longer enough to tell the world what you’ve had for breakfast, how pleased you are with the parking ticket you’ve just got or what colour your bra is. Thanks to the likes of foursquare and gowalla now you can ‘Check-In’ using your smartphones geo location software at, well, any place you happen to be.

Just nipped down to the pub, ‘Check-In’ at the dog and duck. On the train home? You can even check in at platform 11 at London Waterloo.

But what does this mean for Marketers and their brands?

The possibilities are endless. Domino’s are already offering Mayors (see foursquare for details) a free Pizza once a week. Debenhams, yes that’s right, Debenhams, are offering free coffee to their Mayors, and it won’t be long before other stores follow suit.

As a brand, to know where my customers are, when they are in my store, and what they’re thinking is just too good an opportunity to miss. Pushing vouchers, content and offers that reach the customer just as they ‘check-in’ to your outlet takes targeted, timely communication to the next level.

All aboard the vouchercloud…..

It’s that time of year again, when the future-gazing bandwagon kicks into full swing bringing a mass of end-of-year roundups and predictions for year ahead.

We’ve ploughed our way through them, weeding out the far-fetched and over-hyped and bundling up the finest to bring you a rundown on what you can expect to happen across digital in 2010.

Simply put, we’ve searched the best of the web so you don’t have to.

10 web trends to watch in 2010

Pete Cashmore, CEO and founder of leading Social Media Blog Mashable shares his thoughts on clear trends in web innovation for the year ahead.

Social Media Top 10 Predictions for 2010

“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” says Marketing Magazine of Social Media in 2010, “Partially fueled by mobile internet usage and partially by new tools such as Google Wave, the surge in social media user numbers we have seen recently will go nuclear.”

Tools of the trade: new year devices

The Guardian flags up their top 2 tech trends to keep tabs on this year. Social TV is marked as their one to watch and we’d have to agree. Always ahead of the trends, click here to see how we championed this technology earlier in 2009 for the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing show and made TV more interactive.

Mobile 2010

NMA reports on what’s in store for Mobile this yeah and well,  let’s face it…no  self respecting 2010 trends list would be complete without a nod to the proverbial “Year of the Mobile.”

Enterprise Trends to watch in 2010

Mash-ups, the Mobile Enterprise and more…brought to you by the good people at ReadWrite Enterprise.

Predictions 2010: The Future of Twitter Google and everything else

“Smoke blowing but they’re blowing such specific smoke.” Based on conversations from TechFlash this Wired Blog entry certainly makes for interesting reading.

This visual representation of social media by Kyle Studstill sums it up pretty well

Social Media Explained

In the red corner, the latest X-factor cyborg flashes a Colgate smile as he churns through an achy Breaky Brat’s tired ballad. In the blue corner is a soap avoiding anarchist and a preachy song largely notable for its profane repeated catch phrase in a temper tantrum climax. Old Smelly from LA won.

The victory was celebrated and decried. A triumph of popular groundswell movements over the soul less corporate machine. A cynical denial of a poor Geordie teenager’s reward for rehashing last years song in a pretty wrapper. As Jimmi Carr says, you can’t polish a turd but you can roll it in glitter. People are attracted to familiar pretty baubles and well crafted spin. Find the right dog and sheep can be herded in surprising directions.

What this event illustrates is not how popular the X-factor is, or even how many people hate Simon Cowell. What is interesting is that it demonstrates how much untapped potential there is in the music market. The vast majority of the people who downloaded Killing In The Name are not hard core fans but merely disillusioned by their exclusion from a contrived process that often rewards mediocrity and paints the airwaves in coats of beige. He who controls the airwaves controls the purse strings, or at least used to. The ability to control the channels is diminishing fast.

Analogue product has become intangibly digital. Controlled distribution became peer to peer sharing. The rich media promotion machine with its expensive barriers to entry, high production values and smug presenters; is increasingly being undermined by web cams, compressed content and word of mouth communication through social networks. The barking music industry watchdogs, chained to their infrastructure kennels by increasingly inefficient chains of production and distribution; are being overwhelmed by a flood of nimble cats. As everyone who has attempted knows, it is very difficult to herd cats. RATM manged to do it but unifying events such as this are difficult to engineer without appearing contrived.

So what does this mean for web marketing in 2010? There will be a mad rush into social media. Someone will try and engineer a similar download stunt. It will fail miserably. Smart music marketers will target offers into social media via pay per click ads targeting profile preferences, or the friends of those users (hence Facebook’s recent “Privacy” changes). Exclusive content will increasingly be delivered into social media rather than the current practice of rehashing archive material. Social media will become an active part of “live” presentations through traditional media, and there will be more paid download opportunities than you can poke a stick at.

Social media is a tsunami but just having a board is not enough if you don’t know how to surf. The X Factor has a Facebook group with nearly a million fans, a dedicated YouTube channel with over 230 million views and enough tweets to bury the London Eye in pigeon poo; but, they still got their butt kicked by a couple of amateurs. The lesson is it is one thing to have a fast car but another entirely to drive it around the track. Social media optimisation and targeting will be the big discussion point and service offering next year… and yes we can provide it. Thanks for asking.

So Rage against the Machine have done it. A track originally released by the band in 1992 (original chart position No.25) pips poor old Joe to the much coveted number spot for Xmas 2009.

But let’s be honest, how many of us had heard the Rage Against the Machine track before? How many of us know what the band look like? Where they’re from and what their favourite colours are? Not many (Not that we care).

Now Joe McEldrey…..

The song -  “The Climb”.

What’s he look like? A cheeky Geordie chappy with a Hollywood smile.

Where’s he from? South Shields.

Favourite colour? Anything that Cheryl likes.

So how do a band that relatively few people have heard of make it to Xmas number 1 toppling the behemoth that is X Factor with it’s massive television audience, huge publicity machine and endless marketing efforts?

Simple – Facebook.

Let’s be honest, it wasn’t the great song or the love of the band that got RATM to number 1, it was Facebook. To be more specific, it was a brilliantly orchestrated social media campaign by Jon and Tracy Morter, a couple fed up with the domination of the Xmas number 1 spot by X-Factor winners.

Their campaign highlights the phenomenal reach and influence social media channels can have. Zach le Rocha (RATM lead singer of course – c’mon guys) summed it up perfectly, “It was incredible organic grassroots campaign”. Indeed it was. A campaign started by a couple wanting a change, rapidly joined by 486,781 fans and quickly becoming the hottest topic on Facebook culminates in delivering the UK an alternative Xmas number 1 and delivring a crushiong blow to the slick marketing and publicity machine that is X-Factor.

So the platform that brought the Whispa back to our shelves, returned Monster Munch to the cupboards of children of the 80’s now has an ever greater feat to its name. A new Xmas number one.

At the risk of repeating a previous post. Social Media – Powerful stuff.

Q: What happens when someone on Twitter with more than a million followers recommends your website?

A: Your website traffic goes through the roof

But you only know this to be true if you track your social media mentions properly…

Burger King recently launched Singing in the Shower, the digital extension to their breakfast re-launch campaign (which just so happens to have been built by Pancentric Digital).  If you’ve not seen it yet, you’re missing a treat take a peek.

The site, featuring a bikini clad shower girl “shaking her bits to the hits” was recently spotted by celebrity blogger Perez Hilton who decided to “tweet” about the site.

@perezhilton

What happened next? Perez’s loyal followers duly flocked to the site, increasing traffic by 3000%, voucher downloads by even more and it helped create a great online buzz about the site with hundreds of re-tweets and blog posts.  All this within 24 hours of dear Perez’s post.

So the question is, are you tracking your websites & brand across social media platforms the way you could be?

Perhaps somebody is talking about your brand right now, sending waves of traffic to your website or creating a powerful online buzz about your latest initiative but you just don’t know it.

There are a number of great tracking tools for Twitter & other social media platforms, Viralheat, Twitterfall, and your trusty Tweetdeck to name but a few. Setting these up and tracking your brands mentions across social platforms is as important as your web analytics and your email tracking.

Don’t miss out on your brands social media exposure, as Perez has proved, social media can be powerful stuff.

Sometimes you see a piece of advertising and think to yourself “Damn, I wish I’d thought of that”.

The latest advertising campaign from Dixons makes you do just that.

Bold, brave, exceptionally clever. As Dixons disappear from our high streets and shift their focus to their online store, how do they get the footfall that used to trundle through the stores on a Sunday afternoon into the homepage of their website?

Like this:

Dixons latest advertising campaign

An interesting fact for you. Netbook PCs (very small laptops with 7-10 inch screens)  have accounted for 30% of all Laptops sales in the UK in 2009. Sales of these tiny laptops are currently outstripping sales of the iphone, and sales are expected to rise throughout the remainder of the year and in to 2010.

So with emergence of this new ‘mobile’ laptop device and continued increase in their popularity, are there challenges that lay ahead for website designers and usability experts?

The software on these devices is for the most part a simple copy of their bigger brothers, the Laptop, which has lead to issues viewing and navigating websites on these tiny bundles of joy. The screen is so small that scrolling up and down, and left and right is inevitable. A very interesting white paper I recently stumbled upon from Mobilein.com explores this in more detail.

There are already tools to help you Netbook users, Minifox and Google Chrome both help the Netbook user with resolution and re-sizing issues, as well as tools like Ubuntu Netbook Remix which helps move a lot of on screen ‘furniture’ to the side of the screen for you. But does the real work need to be done at the design and build stage? And what are the implications, will we start to see the fold moving up the web page?

So, just as most mobile phones work better with the ‘mobile’ version of the website, will we now need to start considering Netbook versions when designing new sites? Have the considerations for website builds changed forever? The Mobile version, The HTML version…. The Netbook version?

We all love to find something out about ourselves that we never knew. Go on admit it, you do.

I’m talking specifically about websites here. What if I told you that I knew something about your website that you didn’t? That I knew where a certain % of traffic was coming from, or that I could tell you your share of traffic for a particular key word or phrase? You’d be impressed right?

In surely one of the best uses of Twitter in recent months that’s exactly what Compete are offering.

Compete: Winning followers on Twitter

Compete, a website analytics service, are offering followers of it’s Twitter page the opportunity to learn something about their website or indeed a competitors website even if your not a registered user of their analytics software. On ‘Data Nugget Friday’ simply add #datanugget on and the URL you want the dirt on for an intriguing fact or insight. A brilliant use of Twitter, which has helped them to find a band of loyal followers (Celebrity status according to Twanalyst ) and create the most important thing of all intrigue.

How intruiging is your Twitter page, Facebook Fan Page, Email Communications or Website? Do you leave the audience thirsty for more?

The Campaign Kick-Off…
“I want to move the brand forward, I want fresh thinking, new ideas, a new approach, something that stands out and makes us look difference.”

Initial Concept Delivery…
“It’s not really on brand, I don’t think the brand team will sign this off, this needs to look like the things we’ve done previously.”

Sound familiar? Are your internal brand police holding back your marketing? Here’s a thought, perhaps it’s down to your approach.

Simply putting a new creative approach in front of the brand management team and expecting them to get it won’t work. Next time you have that new revolutionary approach that pushes the brand values and guidelines to the limit why not explain where the approach has come from. Perhaps feedback from customers,  a new research report or developments in technology have dictated the change? You might have evidence that shows this change will make a huge difference to the effectiveness of your marketing.  What ever the reason is for the change (providing you have one), try explaining it to the guardians of your brand, it might just help move things along.