Blog posts in the strategy 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…..

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

Social Media Explained

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.

It is all pretty zen really. Forget your profound metaphors of trees falling in the forest and the sound of single hands clapping. If you are on the web and can’t be found then are you really there at all?

Sure your website may well be the design statement of your generation. The flash interface worthy of a Pixar showreel. Your mission statement inspirational and your prices unsurpassed. But, and it is a big but, who the hell is going to know if you are hidden away in some dark corner of the dubya dubya dubya? Your mum was right. If you’re not prepared to blow your own trumpet then no one else will. Hide your site and unless you have very deep pockets to plug your URL to the world it will never deliver any meaningful return on investment.

Unfortunately many bean counters take this as a failure of the medium rather than of its application. Better to throw money up against familiar walls than think through the issues. Web marketing is still just basic marketing.

The place of importance is not a post code but rather a placing on the search results screen of a Google or Yahoo. For many it is indeed page one or oblivion. It is important to remember that these things rarely happen by accident.

Let’s face it the vast majority of bricks and mortar companies are not going to be turned on their head by e-commerce. For every Virgin Atlantic there are a hundred widget manufacturers. It is not just about getting seen. It is about being found by the right people. Delivering motivated window shoppers to be exposed to your sales pitch and convinced to pick up the phone, walk in the door or send in an email enquiry.

Search engines are the key. What key terms are your potential customers searching for and how well does your site attract them? It is important to remember that for most companies the product of their web site is not the inventory in their warehouses. It is the information about that inventory and the provision of a convenient means of accessing it. Amazon is an online giant not because its books are bound better than anyone else’s or the stories contained within are better than the same title from the discount bookseller down the road. It is successful because it delivers its information product so well. If you doubt the importance of search engines in this process try typing a book title into Google and viewing the results. Smart marketers refine and update their optimization strategies for new products, brands and opportunities.

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?

Having been given a couple of IDs for the Google Wave sandbox, we decided to have a play.

Many of you will have seen the (rather long it must be said) official video from Google I/O 2009 (see it here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ) and, if you managed to stay the course you will have seen a great technology demonstration.

So what’s it like for real?

To begin with, in common with all products at this stage of their development it is buggy. Not majorly so, but subject to various browser crashes and unexplained behaviour, ho-hum. Since we first had access the stability has improved greatly, so there is a lot going on behind the scenes. Other than that, it is fairly polished and works as expected.

The best way that I can describe Wave is that it is a realtime email with bells on. The basic atom is a “wave”, which has participants, i.e. you and the recipient(s). You can both type and interact in the wave, seeing in real time what each other is typing, sharing (drag and drop photos and embed videos) and are able to invite more participants as you go along. New participants can add to and modify the existing wave, it’s completely open. Private messages can also be sent between any number of the participants of the wave allowing for more private discussion.

Along with human participants, you can also add software participants called robots. There are some neat robots already there for example:

Tweety the twitbot that brings a Twitter feed into the wave
Rosy Etta – the translation bot that does realtime translation across about 40 languages (and is pretty smart at it too)

Then there are gadgets that you can interact with, for example there is a Chess playing gadget, and one that brings Google Maps into the wave.

The wave continues forever so you can leave and come back where you left off whenever you wish. And because everything is stored, you can replay waves to see how the conversation progressed, so much better than trying to follow email trails.

At the moment it is only possible to run waves in Google’s sandbox, so there isn’t a lot of stuff we can show, but we have started doing some Google Wave consultancy, speccing out business applications looking at the implications and feasibility of new applications. In the future you will be able to run your own wave servers, and there will be, I am sure, a market for wave hosting.

It is fair to say that we are coming up with new ideas for this all the time, everywhere you look on the web you start seeing things that could be done better with waves.

The big question is whether it is sufficiently disruptive technology to change they way things are done now? From what I’ve seen I’d have to say yes.

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.

As the hype surrounding Twitter continues to grow, so does the innovation. There’s now a whole host of applications at your fingertips to help you understand yours and your competitors’ performance; find out the latest trends and gain industry insight.

When you find the right mix of tools, Twitter can be a prolific and social place for fulfilling valuable communication goals for your company.

With that in mind, here’s our hot-pick tools guaranteed to improve your microblogging experience…

The first Twitter challenge is actually finding and following the people who matter to you and your company. To get you started, try Twellow for a ‘yellow pages’ style directory that allows you to search for people by area of expertise or profession all to way from A-Z. Then, expand your network even further using who should i follow, a nifty little tool that suggests people who are similar to those you are already following.

Twitter is a place where words of mouth rules, so find out who is talking about you, your company and your products or services across the twitter-sphere using Twitterfall’s custom search queries. It will also help you find out who is chatting about the topics you are interested in so that you can join the conversation.

Now you know what’s being said about you, take a snoop into what you competitors are up to. What do they tweet about? How frequently do they tweet? Do they use hashtags or share URLs? Tweeps.info gives you the answers to all these questions and more, including interesting stats that will help impress the boss, including your competitors’ average tweets per day, commonly tweeted keywords and social participation ratio.

But Twitter is just a way to update people what you had for lunch, right? Wrong! If you’re serious about using Twitter as an element within your larger social media strategy you’re going to need measurement because, lets face it- in tougher economic times like these, no campaign is complete without it. There are plenty of measurement tools out there that enable you to follow feedback and optimize your campaigns real-time. Try trackable urls like bit.ly which offers a goldmine of data on consumer behaviour and trends as well insight into the usage of your links. Tweetreach does what it says on the tin and measures the exposure of your Tweets by calculating the number of people who saw something you shared (taking into account Retweets). Team this with web analytics you can get a solid understanding of how many leads came via Twitter.

By now the possibility of all this data may be making you sweat, so we’ll finish with one of the simplest tools around that helps you manage all your Twitter accounts from one single place and even connect with your other social networking platforms such as Facebook. Step forward the mighty TweetDeck. It’s already established itself as the second most popular way to tweet after Twitter.com itself and with a version now available for the iphone it’s one of the easiest ways to stay organised and up to date.

So there you have it, our simple guide to some of the tools at hand to improve your Twitter experience. We know there are plenty more out there, so why not leave a comment and share yours?