Posts Tagged ‘advertising’

A particularly delicious cake

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

A particularly delicious cake!The promise of behavioural marketing is a wonderful thing. After hundreds of years of mass media advertising that targets broad audiences with the same advertising message (whether they like it or not), the technology is now becoming available to advertise very specific advertising offerings targeted to reach only those that are likely to be interested in them. It’s a concept that excites both advertisers and consumers, since advertisers get to market to specific consumer audiences in the most profitable way and consumers only see the ads (and other types of content) that are directly relevant to them. However, as with many good things in life, there is a price to be paid by consumers and the currency is information. As the old English proverb goes, one can’t have one’s cake and eat it.

The cake is particularly delicious one. The Internet promises to tailor its audio, video, text, links and other content specifically to suit your individual preferences. Advertising is obviously leading the charge here, by investing in campaigns that are more closely targeted to consumer needs. However, the technologies can be just as useful to provision any kind of content over the Internet. Just imagine a web site, where every story, video clip, link, recommendation or advert was exactly according to your preference, not only in terms of content, but delivery, frequency and style too. Ultimately, it has the potential to become your own personal Internet, just the way you like it and as you discover new websites and services they automatically change to suit you.

Now here’s the catch. In order for behavioural targeting to be effective, it needs to know your preferences and behaviours, and update them in real-time. This includes data on the websites you visit, what you search for and where you spend your time whilst online, plus information like what devices you use to access Internet content, via what browsers, from what locations etc. It raises a plethora of privacy issues, and does so at a time where consumer attitudes towards privacy and knowledge of privacy issues are changing rapidly. Many thought little of putting all their personal details on Facebook a year or two ago, but recent media coverage of user reactions to changes in Facebook’s privacy settings has given many Facebook users pause for thought. A year or two ago it became quite common to find out that ‘all’ your friends were suddenly on Facebook. These days it’s quite common to know someone who’s quit Facebook entirely.

A new survey undertaken by Real Opinions highlights that there is enthusiasm for behavioural targeting and concern over privacy issues in almost equal measure. Consumers appear to appreciate efforts to provide them with more relevant content, but don’t want to control access to their personal information and behaviours online. The survey found that 60% of Internet users in the UAE favoured behavioural targeting for customised advertising and Internet content over less targeted means. However, 76% of UAE Internet users would prefer that behavioural data was only collected with their express permission, given in advance. In the fullness of time, it’s likely that users will have access to more and more tools to control their level of privacy online. In the short term, the likelihood is that new technologies are going to offer opt-in/opt-out options for Internet users. In other words, you’ll need to choose whether to enjoy your cake today or save it for later.

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Posted in Content, Facebook, Internet, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Newspapers, Online marketing, Publishing, social media, strategy | No Comments »

10 social media myths exposed

Monday, May 31st, 2010
You don't need a magic lamp either

You don't need a magic lamp either

To our delight, more and more Middle East brands are looking seriously at using social media in their communications and making efforts to plan, structure and invest in strategic activities. It’s no secret that Spot On PR is a big fan of social media and actively recommends that all organisations pay attention to the irreversible changes that social media are bringing to business communications. However, no two companies are the same and we have no ready-made proposals for what social media tactics organisations should use and we would caution company’s against trying to copycat as an alternative to proper planning, particularly if your organisation is a large one. Learning from others social media efforts can be extremely valuable, but not as a replacement for having your own strategy. Equally, beware of one-size-fits-all social media campaign solutions. Here are some common social media myths that are worth being aware of.

1. Social media is cheap.

It certainly can be, but as with many things in life and business, you get out of social media what you put into it. Low budget, low effort social media campaigns have their place, but success usually means more audience engagement and more engagement means that more management and resources are required. Scale is obviously a key factor in influencing costs if you already have a large audience online, don’t expect an intern with a new Twitter profile to be the best way of managing conversations, enquiries and complaints: you’re going to need to have a system in place.

2.You have to be on Facebook!

There are lots of good reasons why it might make perfect sense for your organisation to have a Facebook fan page. However, bear in mind that Facebook is littered with the inactive pages of companies that started a Facebook page because everyone else did. If you can’t think of a good reason why your customers would sign-up for your Facebook page, or what you could post on it beyond company press releases then your brand may be better off without one.

3.You have to be on ‘X’ (where X is a social media platform).

Social media platforms will come and go. Whether they make sense for your business will depend on whether your brand can engage effectively with relevant audiences on them or not. Finding out where your key audiences spend time online is a good first step for any campaign.

4. More connections = more success.

This is obviously partly true, but there are limited returns in investing in indiscriminately increasing the number of social media connections that your brand has. There are many ways of enticing social media users to connect or sign-up for pages, but real engagement is about how audiences interact with you, not passively remain connected to a page or profile they never visit. Focus on making the connections that matter.

5. You have to be ‘cool’.

Of course, everyone likes a cool brand. However, if you’re providing a business-to-business product or service, don’t expect teenage SMS-style messages to resonate with your target audiences. Communicate with your brand’s stakeholders in the way that they expected to be communicated with. Don’t translate all your communications into SMS, MSN or Twitterese!

6.You can automate everything.

Beware of “experts” telling you how to automate your whole social media campaign. Plans are good. Social media tools are good. Any tools to help with content management are good. Frameworks and policy documents are good. And you will find some time-saving practices. However, at the end of the day, people respond best when communicated with personally. If your customers, partners and other important audiences expect to communicate with a real person, don’t give them an RSS feed that SPAMs them thirty times a day instead. If you’re not continuously in dialogue (versus simply broadcasting your messages), then you’ve sort of missed the whole point of social media.

7.You have to have a blog.

A blog is a communications tool like any other. Blogs can be very useful and a provide a cost effective way of publishing information and getting feedback. However, not every business has the content or writing skills to maintain a blog to quality, and many businesses still need to cater for less Internet-savvy audiences that are more reliant on the press, broadcast media and email for their information. Invest your social media efforts where you’re going to be able to drive the best results. If a blog makes the most sense from a content, audience and a resource point of view, then blog away!

8. Social media campaigns replace advertising.

For sure, the open access to information, viral nature and sharing capabilities of social media are forcing significant changes on the world of advertising. Advertising is having to shift its focus from broadcasting brand messages to creating platforms for dialogue with consumers. However, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here! Don’t mistake resistance to advertising for resistance to irrelevant advertising. Social media hasn’t replaced email marketing either, but you’re only going to get an increasing tide of negativity if you insist on spamming your audience over and over in an effort to increase your email response rates.

9. If you have budget, you don’t need to do it yourself.

Agencies can play a pivotal role in helping your brand leverage social media platforms within the scope of your brand’s communications (but then I would say that, wouldn’t I!). By their very nature agencies gain insights into how different campaigns are implemented for different clients and so can provide useful third party advice for brands planning campaigns. Your agency should be able to help you plan, focus and manage your social media activities for maximum returns, but subcontracting the running of your social media profiles, blogs and other social media tools to your agency in their entirety is a short term fix at best. Your customers think they’re connecting with you, not your agency. Even if your campaign is heavily agency-assisted, plan on being directly involved day-t0-day.

10. It’s not all about “the conversation”.

Thanks to the Cornwall SEO blog for this one. Taking your brand onto social media should take place within a pre-defined framework that allows your brand to both promote itself and take part in conversations with key audiences. Being part of “the conversation” on any social media platform, knowing how to engage other users and being, well, social is a pre-requisite. However, being part of the conversation probably isn’t your most important objective. So, while you’re tracking your followers, conversations and social media engagement metrics, try to remember your original objectives. How many people have you reached? How many sales leads have you generated? How many customers have you engaged with? How many customer service issues have you solved? How many new visits did you drive to your website? That was the whole point, right?

Useful links (external)

Social Media Myth No. 1 “It’s about the conversation” (Cornwall SEO Blog)

Debunking Five Social Media Myths (Socialmediatoday)

4 Myths About Social Media and Business (Mashable)

Want to read more?

If you liked reading this post about social media campaigns, you might also like:

Are you engaging with the right fans? (May 2010)

The coolest agency in the world (February 2010)

Social media measurement (November 2009)

Social media isn’t socialist media (November 2009)

Social media takes time (November 2009)

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Posted in CRM, Content, Customer care, Customers, Facebook, General, Internet, Measurement, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Online marketing, SEO, Twitter, brand marketing, public relations, social media, strategy | No Comments »

We’re no longer wowed…

Sunday, February 14th, 2010
Marketers can no longer expect this reaction to every new tech product

Marketers can no longer expect this reaction to every new tech product

In my thirty-odd years of involvement with technology, my favourite acronym remains TWAIN. In an industry so littered with acronyms, that’s some achievement. You may well recognise it if you’ve ever used a scanner hooked up to your computer – changes are that you’ll have been told you’re using a TWAIN driver. To my continued amusement (so I’m puerile, sue me) it stands for Technology Without An Interesting Name.

However, this is about as interesting as technology gets these days. We’re no longer wowed by operating systems or ooh-aahed by CPUs (if many of us ever were). We tend to get excited about iPhone apps or new smartphones, but we don’t actually tend to spend hours poring over hardcore technology – we want it to do what it says on the box, simply and consistently. And beyond that, we don’t actually want to invest a huge amount of energy or emotional commitment into the technology we use – unless, say, we run data centres as a day job.

Alongside this change in consumer attitudes to technology comes a series of changes in the way in which people inform themselves of new things. That information flow, which used to take place across magazine pages or at exhibitions, now takes place online 24/7. The technology publishing market, once artificially inflated compared to the publishing seen in other vertical market sectors, has shrunk to virtually a handful of titles.

This commoditisation of technology is something of a challenge for the marketers tasked with trying to make it relevant to all of us. We don’t care about it most of the time and we’ll serve ourselves with the information we need from online resources when it comes to decision time. There are all too few publications that reach consumers – and broader business titles, say, tend not to buy technology stories.

What’s the solution?
Companies that are recognising that their technology isn’t perhaps the most important thing in the world to their customers are coming up trumps. In recognising this, they are able to take a realistic approach to what is important to customers and how they map to those priorities, provide content that is relevant to consumers and position themselves appropriately within that content. By maintaining an ongoing relationship that is based on providing content that customers actually want (as opposed to just saying whatever you’re doing is what customers want) and also by being ‘valued members’ of communities, these companies are standing in the wings when customers actually do say ‘I’m interested in you today.’ It’s a sea-change for marketers used to buying the right to access customers with dollars – increasingly they’re having to use a different currency.

This piece originally appeared as one of the chucklesomely named ‘A Moment with McNabb’ columns in Campaign Middle East magazine.

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Posted in Content, Customers, Internet, Middle East marketing, Online marketing, Publishing, public relations, social media, strategy | No Comments »

The coolest agency in the world

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
Social Media Plans

Campaign planning is the easy part!

The coolest agency in the world can’t execute brilliant social media campaigns if the client doesn’t want to invest in the idea – not just of using social media as a megaphone like an advertising replacement, but of actually changing things around to make open social communications a long term investment. That investment necessarily takes a number of forms, too.

It’s not just about assigning a budget, by any means. The investment in time and effort required from the client in executing sound social media campaigns is nearly always greater than that required by advertising campaigns. Engaging with customers over social media platforms can mean some pretty big changes at the client’s side. They don’t all have to happen at once, but it’s important to map out some of the expected change points and commit to them in order that a long term programme of value is created, not just a tactical ‘quick hit’ with potentially negative consequences.

Is your management ready?
You have to ask if your company is structurally ready to undertake social media engagements – a process that involves some difficult questions. Do the management and reporting structures you have in place map to social media? Can you escalate issues quickly and effectively to all your different departments? Can you guarantee to respond quickly? How do your current HR policies map to social media? Who is responsible for that unhappy customer on Twitter – marketing or customer service? And how are you going to resource manning your social media engagements? (because if you think the agency is going to take the full 100% of the load and handle it, you’ve got another thing coming! If your agency says that you don’t have to be involved day-to-day, get another agency fast. Really.)

The next investment comes before you ever tweet a tweet or book a face. It’s in defining your social media guidelines, working with HR to make sure that these are embedded as a core element in the company’s process. Next up it’s making sure that staff are aware of what those guidelines are and, ideally, have the chance to question them or clear up any areas which appear difficult to understand or apply to a given person’s situation.

Now there’s a process of defining roles and responsibilities – who owns what platform and what are the internal processes and ownerships?

Once the job of deciding the niceties is out of the way, things like the naming conventions you’re going to use, building the graphical elements of your ‘social identity’ and deciding on the tools you’re going to use, you’ll need to work together with your agency on selecting platforms based on your target audiences, planning the use of those platforms and their rollout. Part of that process would include working out which platforms your key audiences frequent and what you can contribute to the communities you’re joining – what their informational preferences are and how you can help to improve things for them.

In fact, the key challenge that social media poses for companies, particularly those that consider themselves to be ‘customer centric’ is that they have to re-think their processes in order to be truly customer-centric via social media.

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Posted in CRM, Content, Customer care, Customers, Facebook, Internet, Middle East marketing, Online marketing, Twitter, brand marketing, public relations, social media, strategy | No Comments »

Keeping up with ’search’

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

SearchThere are a series of interesting battles unfolding in the world’s technology markets and they’re going to define a great deal of what we all get up to in the years to come, mark my words.

Let us for a moment assume that search is the future of commercial transactions and, increasingly, consumer interaction with brands. In other words, people google stuff before they buy it, google products when they have concerns or curiosities to assuage and google for the opinions of others regarding companies, brands and products.

Critically, people are increasingly making their own editorial decisions – balancing company statements and claims with consumer opinion and feedback, from the crowdsourced feedback of tools such as Twitter through to the opinions expressed on blogs or forums such as TripAdvisor which aggregate consumer reviews. It can be hard, keeping up with these connected consumers, but many of the world’s leading companies are starting to evolve strategies to manage their role in this tide of consumer opinion and information. Those companies are already finding that getting ‘social media’ right means an increased investment in applied time – and not just at ‘Twintern’ level, either, but even (gasp!) at C level. That additional time investment is being made on the assumption that social media is a marketing tool and will therefore be taken from marketing budgets – most sensibly from advertising budgets, although there are a slew of other applications for social media (customer service, R&D etc) that would potentially spread the budget impact.

Now there’s something of an emerging punch-up over the idea of real time search – making search not only contextually accurate (I want to find what I want when I look for what I want) but placing search results in a linear context (I want to know what everyone’s saying about what interests me). That will put pressure not only to focus on techniques such as SEO (search engine optimisation) but also to keep currency – to keep being talked about and to keep driving the conversation with positive engagement. That’s going to be expensive.

And it’s going to be paid for by advertising budgets.

This piece originally appeared as one of the chucklesomely named ‘A Moment with McNabb’ columns in Campaign Middle East magazine

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Posted in Online marketing, SEO, Twitter, social media | No Comments »

Mr. Futurist

Friday, July 31st, 2009

The way we talk to technology and the way we talk to each other is changing at a pace that I can only describe as frightening.

You understand, the ‘f’ word is coming from a life-long technocrat.

Right now, we type on mobile keypads to retrieve or dial a number. We sit, fingers crashing down on nasty, analogue keys or dragging mice around in order to instruct our machines to do stuff or to send text to each other. But innovations afoot today are going to change the entire nature of our relationship with enabling technologies.

The keyboard will be a thing of the past in a few years’ time – we’ll use voice and hand movements to manipulate systems and objects on screens, walls or other surfaces. We’ll be able to take our ‘stuff’ and deposit it wherever we want – on walls, products, bulletin boards or public places (‘digital graffiti’ will become a problem) or add stuff from those places to our stuff if we want. We’ll be able to interface to systems and query them about products in supermarkets or people, to send messages or update friends or special interest groups which we belong to with new information. We’ll get used to a world where everyone, potentially, knows everything – and where consumers can access peer reviews, scientific information, manufacturer claims and third party viewpoints at any time.

We’re going to share video and voice more than text – we’re going to become digitally tactile and our world is going to be based on streams of information served up to us through ‘real-world’ interfaces to information networks. We’ll likely access all of that through one ‘network device’ which will be camera, credit card, database access tool, megaphone and information system all in one.

It’ll be smaller than today’s mobile phones.

The totally empowered consumer will be a result – a process that is also evident in the way today’s markets are changing. The game is about putting the right information in people’s hands when they want it – reliable, believable, credible information. Even today, as we look at this brave new future world, consumers are increasingly information-centric.

And they’re already buying the steak, not the sizzle.

This piece originally appeared as one of the chucklesomely named ‘A Moment with McNabb’ columns in Campaign Middle East magazine.

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Radio Gaga

Friday, July 31st, 2009

Radio is probably the most undervalued advertising/communication medium of the lot: something of a shame, it’s one of my favourite ‘legacy’ media…

I had always thought of this as a Middle East problem, but apparently it’s the case worldwide. People just won’t invest appropriately in creating compelling executions for radio.

I’ve also always believed that crappy radio advertising stemmed from the relative affordability of the airtime on a slot by slot basis, that it was the consequent underinvestment that lies behind the awful executions that we all know and loathe so well. Because, let’s face it, Middle East radio advertising is mired in awfulness that is beyond simply bad – it’s heroically bad.

However, the almost total lack of data on the reach and influence of radio is, I believe, a uniquely Middle East problem. It’s hard to actually define who’s listening to what, when. And that, of course, makes it difficult to justify investing in radio from a cost per listener point of view.

Taking the issue from the other end of the pipeline might help – what’s the value of radio if you look at results. For instance, if you promote an event in a public place, say a shopping mall, over radio do people actually pitch up? If you ask for a response, for instance a phone-in or an SMS, by radio, do people respond?

The answer is not only yes, but it can also be a resounding yes – depending on how well your message is put together and how it resonates with its audience. Radio can be a very targeted medium indeed – and one interesting piece of evidence for this is to be found in the growing relationship between radio and social media. Thousands of people are starting to follow Dubai DJ Catboy, for instance, on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter – and as that relationship matures and strengthens, new followers are being added hourly. And those followers are active participants – they respond to competitions, give opinions, take part in what has become, in a very real sense, the ‘conversation’ that every Web 2.0 proponent will gladly talk to you about until your ears bleed. (Incidentally, over 4,000 people are currently following Simon ‘Catboy’ Smedley on Twitter).

So I’d like to suggest perhaps a slightly different approach to radio – one that’s not based so much on ‘How many people are getting our message when we scream slogans and benefits at them’ but more on ‘What stuff can radio help us to encourage people to do and participate with them in doing’ – the action in itself being a symptom of a deeper understanding of, and relationship with, your audience.

This piece originally appeared as one of the chucklesomely named ‘A Moment with McNabb’ columns in Campaign Middle East magazine.

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