Posts Tagged ‘Content’

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 »

Are you engaging the right fans?

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010
Great response, but you'd expect that from your employees, wouldn't you?

They're all big fans (but you'd expect that from your staff, wouldn't you?)

As a communications and marketing agency that helps run a number of social media programs, we spend quite a lot of time looking at Middle East social media marketing campaigns from around the region. It’s still early days, but the number of brands experimenting with social media in the Middle East is growing and, as with many things in business, you can almost always learn something from someone else’s work. So, on finding a brand’s Middle East Facebook fan page with 25 comments and Likes on its last post, I’m ready to be impressed. However, being the suspicious character that I am, I start to Google and check Facebook profiles of those commenting, and soon discover that most of them seem to be directly related to the same brand (employees, distributors, ex-employees). Whether that’s a successful outcome or not ultimately depends on the Facebook page’s objectives, but perhaps it does help to illustrate that all kinds of online engagement are not equal.

It’s always been a challenge to accurately attribute response to the different marketing programmes. No matter how many reply devices, coupons and codes you include in your programs, you will always get leads that are not possible to attribute to any particular program and responses attributed to one promotion that you suspect were strongly influenced by another. Online marketing really is as good as it gets when it comes to tracking marketing campaign results and it offers a wealth of opportunities to build in mechanisms to track responses and enquiries. However, as with all measurement and metrics, online metrics are there to be abused! None more so than social media campaign metrics, which routinely include tracking the campaign’s following (fans, followers, members, subscribers etc.) and measuring the engagement with people that campaign drives by counting the number of interactions (conversations, comments, ‘Likes’, shares, retweets etc.). The reason that theses metrics are open to abuse is that there are many ways to increase both following and engagement, whilst ignoring your primary target audience completely.

Building a meaningful following is not just about the numbers

Businesses like numbers and big numbers in particular. And so it’s no surpise that what most marketing managers really want out of online campaigns is scale and reaching thousands or hundreds of thousands. There are usually good reasons for this, even if some of those reasons come from marketing strategies past. However, with the growth of the social web, online users have more and more choice in what content they consume, which platforms they use and how they spend their time online. Contacting people in high numbers is not the same as connecting with people in high numbers, and adding contacts as connections is not the same as engaging them with conversations and content. Send enough invites to enough people, particularly if you build or buy a half-decent database, and you’re going to be able to build a following. And the more people you contact the more people will sign-up. Overall, that’s a good thing, but these new followers are only really useful if they i) have an active interest in your brand and ii) if they are the consume your content and are open to interacting with your brand. A good question to ask yourself is: are you building a following that is important to your brand? 1,000 subscribers that are made up of your primary target audience and engages with your brand frequently are infinitely more valuable to your marketing effort than 10,000 subscribers that ignore you and your content.

All online engagement is not equal

If you’ve done a good job of branding and populating your blog or social media page with content, you stand a good chance of getting the benefit of the doubt from first time visitors to your page. However, it’s now very much down to how compelling your content and promotions are to what level of engagement you drive. You’ll need to be aware that different people respond in different ways to content they like. Some will comment on your page, some will share with their contacts, some will bookmark, some will import your RSS feed into their feed reader, some will send you an email, and some will recommend your brand or content to others. Therefore you’ll usually need to track more than one or two metrics. As with building an online following, online engagement is not always as simple as driving higher numbers either. For example, it’s nice to get endorsements from audiences like job seekers, employees, distributors and business partners, but if your budget has been allocated to drive customer engagement, success rather depends on how many of your interactions and endorsements are actually from your customer audiences. Getting your employees talking about your new product is one thing, getting your customers talking about it, quite another.

Being able to take a critical look at your social media results, what’s working, what’s not working and most importantly who is engaging with your campaign is key to both continuing to drive your campaign moving forwards and assessing your campaign’s ROI. Social media offers some great tools to run low cost programmes and so your expectations for a low-volume, low commitment social media programme can afford to be quite modest. However, if you’re running a more extensive, more integrated programme that demands more time, advertising spend and vendor costs, the pressure is on to deliver bigger numbers. So, it is worth taking a step back and making sure your effort is focused on driving the right numbers. It’s great to have an enthusiastic employees behind your social media programme, but if most of the response to your campaign is internal you’re probably not helping them sell much product.

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Posted in CRM, Content, Customers, Facebook, Internet, Measurement, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Online marketing, Twitter, social media | 1 Comment »

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 »

5 reasons Spot On PR uses Twitter

Monday, January 18th, 2010

Using Twitter for business@SMEXbeirut asked recently if we’d written an article on why Spot On PR uses Twitter and what we get out of it, so now is probably as good a time as any. Those that have been following our social media efforts will know that we embraced Twitter almost as soon as it was unblocked in the UAE mid-2008. We already knew that Twitter could be a great connector of people and that it was another key piece of the social media puzzle. One and a half years on, and even with Twitter’s growth flat-lining (see Mashable story from 11 January), we still believe it offers great value to communicators.

As a communications, PR and marketing agency Spot On is committed to Twitter for 5 key reasons.

1. Twitter helps MENA’s web community join up the dots.

The Middle East and North Africa is becoming increasingly web-friendly with online ventures, web developers, application developers, bloggers and social media power-users growing in numbers across the region. However, despite the Internet’s ability to make location irrelevant, a great deal of talent and knowledge is local and focused on national opportunities and knowledge sharing and collaboration across borders has lagged a bit. Twitter allows web-friendly people across the region stay in touch daily and brings them closer together. Using Twitter, Spot On is able to swap notes and follow the news from these audiences across the region, on a daily basis and at no charge.

2. Content producers, aggregators and distributors love Twitter.

In last year’s Spot On MENA Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey we found that 65% of those surveyed were bloggers. Furthermore, nearly 80% of those surveyed interacted frequently with bloggers via Twitter. The Middle East and North Africa Twitter community remains a relatively small one, but it’s an influencial crowd and this is because many of those using Twitter in the region are involved in the creation, distribution or sharing of content as bloggers, social-media power users, journalists or communications professionals (some 35% of those in our survey worked in public relations, media or marketing). Twitter helps us keep up-to-date with new blog posts, breaking media stories and content recommendations.

3. Twitter provides a useful media relations tool.

Spot On follows more than 150 journalists from across the Middle East and North Africa and has added them to its private Twitter Lists in order to have the ability to browse all their tweets in one screen. Like most PR agencies, we deal with hundreds of journalists and we simply don’t have the time to talk to many of them as often as we would like and listen to what’s on their minds. Twitter helps us keep up-to-date with journalists news and latest stories. We also quite often receive client-related enquiries from journalists via Twitter.

4. Twitter helps you discover the unexpected.
Twitter is great discovery tool. It can introduce you to new information, news stories and people every day. However, we often find that people we wouldn’t normally think of, or deal with very much, share some of our interests and we have rather more to talk about than we expected. Discovering unexpected interests and synergies is a huge Twitter benefit and its helped us strike up conversations with some very interesting people and organisations. It’s also, of course, introduced us to new blogs, bloggers, journalists, communications and marketing professionals and other interesting Tweeple.

5. Twitter can be a window allowing others to see more of your company.

I suppose that business development is what pays for our time to do all the other good stuff on Twitter and other social media. Twitter gives us another platform to share information on Spot On, what we’re doing, what we’re thinking and what we’re interested in, which is a great way for potential clients to get to know us a bit better before getting in direct contact. It’s like opening a little window that lets people see more of what’s inside the company and tune in a little bit better to what we’re thinking. It’s also a useful platform to promote our blog and other social media activities. Twitter has introduced us to a number of new clients and new potential clients, that we probably wouldn’t be talking to if we weren’t on Twitter.

If you’re not already following us, you can follow Spot On Public Relations on Twitter here: @spotonpr

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

Losing the battle for control

Monday, January 11th, 2010
Losing the battle for control?

Losing the battle for control?

A man goes into a shop to look for a new electronic product. He’s already been researching his new purchase online via the manufacturer’s website as well as news sites, product review sites, blogs and by asking his online and offline friends about which brand and products they know and recommend. Armed with this store knowledge he knows exactly what to look for when he goes into the shop and is, in fact, much better prepared on the subject than the sales representative he’s just about to ask for help. Some of the customers calling the retailer’s help line for support are similarly empowered with the latest information and frustrated when the customer service reps don’t know what they’re talking about. A journalist calling the marketing department for an interview already knows about a product recall that has so far not even been communicated to the shop floor. However, some of the company’s staff have already found out about the recall via Internet chat and so have started to post jokes about it on Facebook. Meanwhile, it comes as a surprise to the customer service team that a disgruntled customer has aired his colourful views on the company’s service via his blog and that this has attracted a wide audience and much agreement from dissatisfied customers.

The company management takes a long hard look at its communications and concludes that an increasing number of communications about the company, its services and its products are completely out of its control. The more difficult reality to come to grips with is this is perfectly normal and will, in fact, become increasingly the case.

Social media is bringing changes at every level of organisational communications. And this is not simply online communication either. Increased consumer access to information and opinion means that customers, employees, investors and other stakeholders engage with organisations with the benefit of knowledge gained from a wide range of other sources. Organisations now have much less control over what their customers see, read and hear about them. Customers, on the other hand, have an almost infinite choice of information sources. More and more consumers decide when and how they access news and information, and then access it via their preferred media platform. They also become conduits for information, creating their own content channels: filtering, sharing and recommending content to their own contacts, forums and audiences.

In the past organisations have focused a great deal on putting out what they want to say and far less on what their audiences want to hear. In the age of social media, where people have an overwhelming choice of content, every organisation needs to be in the content business – and that means carefully considering the content consumption habits and needs of its stakeholders. Those that fail to meet the content challenge may see third party content, well informed or not, fill the vacuum.

The consequence of this shift in communications is that many organisations are likely to find that focusing on information or messaging control as a core strategy is going to become less and less effective as time goes on. Some will simply find that the battle for control is simply not worth fighting, since the Internet provides so many ways for content to be created, copied, edited, shared and commented on that are outside the possible purview of corporate control. The new challenge for organisations is to ensure that their own content is the most compelling, most easily accessible content available and therefore the most appealing for their stakeholders. Ensure that your own content is the most copied, shared and commented on by your key audiences and suddenly the ubiquity of content channels becomes an enormous strength.

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