Adventures In Digital Marketing

If you’re an iPhone 4 wannabee – like a lot of us right now, signal failures or not – and a twitter fan then you probably can’t have helped to notice the sales promotion that was offered recently by a bulk-purchase discount website called Groupola.

Now, I’d not heard of Groupola before these last few days, but I sure have now, and that was obviously the point of their sales promotion – to raise awareness of the brand and to attract huge numbers of subscribers to their email list.

To that end there wasn’t anything wrong with what they were trying to do, and they won’t be the last brand to offer a heavily discounted offer in return for your valuable contact details – something a lot of people forget when they ask questions naively like “how can they offer these phones so cheap? It’s got to be a scam” – because of course it’s not – they’ve (hopefully!) worked out the average value of you as an individual to the business and bobs your uncle, 80% off an iPhone.

That’s all fine, I get it, no worries.

But why then has there been such an outrage on the web around this piece of SP?  Is it because it was a scam and the 200+ iPhones they’ve apparently “sold” were never sold?  I don’t think so and to be honest I have no reason to believe one way or the other but there are lots of people who don’t believe (me not being one of them!) but I think most of that is anger at not getting one and they’re bitter because they’re tight and don’t want to fork out £499 for a legit one from Apple.

Not getting your hands on one wouldn’t have been a problem if the site you were directed to via the “secret” link (which they then asked you to retweet in the same email so, not that secret then!) hadn’t spectacularly crashed out and simply stopped responding because of the huge volumes in traffic directed to the site.

And that’s the fail.  This brand grabbed a basic idea – give something amazingly popular away for next to nothing to raise awareness of your brand and your business model (this is after all what they do – bulk discounts) – but they failed to consider the technical implications of a major web traffic spike to their infrastructure.

You simply cannot do that with digital marketing because as we all know, or at least should know, technology, serving and all of that generally boring (sorry networks guys!) ugly stuff behind the scenes is just as important as the good looking sexy stuff in front of the web browser.  Forget that simple fact and you are doomed to failure.

Imagine if the BBC site crashed during the World Cup or Wimbledon coverage recently – like it did during 9/11 all those years ago when the web was still in infancy – or if something like the telephone system behind American Idol couldn’t cope with the calls during the show.  All stuff like this could be a disaster, and that’s exactly where Groupola now find themselves.

If they’d thought it through, up-scaled their server capacity, and put in place the correct pages to say “sorry guys, we’ve sold out, but here are the lucky real people winners” no one would have minded.  But they didn’t.  And the servers crashed.  And the rest is twitter history.

A lesson learnt for sure.  And possibly a world record set in how to quickly grow a mailing list and then lose it all to a huge unsusbcribe request 24 hours later.

Howard

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• Apple admits iPhone signal fault (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Apple iPhone 4 on sale for £99 (guardian.co.uk)

Shouldn't this be a webpage?

First off, let me just state I don’t have an iPad (my boss does so I have seen one at least) and I haven’t yet had the pleasure of the new Wired magazine app.

But I’ve been thinking…

Shouldn’t Wired’s new iPad magazine app (soon to be “all tablets” apparently) actually be an HTML5 website? That would be truly cutting edge right? And accessible to all, regardless of platform, machine or OS?

And shouldn’t it be free? I know Chris Anderson has said a “freemium” version is on it’s way – which is great.

“For all asking about Wired iPad app pricing, it will evolve as we build new ecommerce methods. Freemium is in our future about 22 hours ago via web @chr1sa“

But right now, as far as I can tell, Wired’s app is just their version of a Murdoch’s Paywall. At £2.99 a month it’s not that expensive, but it’s not that cheap either. Actually scratch that.  it is cheap.  I’d gladly pay that myself.  I’ve bought the magazine for years and don’t see any reason why I am going to stop.  But it’s still not free is it!  Not that I necessarily think free is right – but I do believe Chris has said he does in the past once or twice. (I am, after all, mainly in the business of trying to sell stuff to people, and so are most of you I suspect!)

But I can’t help feeling for such a supposedly cutting edge geek-guide magazine, it should have been web-based, in a truly cutting edge tech, and “open”.  And that’s something coming from me, as someone who’s built his fair share of flash-based websites in the last few years and screw the UX! (I’m a changed man at my new agency, what can I say!)

Howard
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• looking for an Ektron 8 freelancer / contractor. if you are or know of one let me know ASAP please. Thanks in advance. #ektron #ektron8 #

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Updated for a new set of stats, but still as good as it’s always been.

image by Jeremy Brooks on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremybrooks/

When I worked in an integrated environment I thought all the digital marketing on a campaign should come to my department.  That’s not because I was greedy (although I was of course – we all have targets!) or that I was naive.  I just believed that we were best placed to handle the digital side of an integrated campaign that we were leading.  It hardly ever happened and often it was given to a pure play digital agency who were on the roster for digital, much to my chagrin.

So, now I work in a pure play digital agency.  And guess what?  Now I think all the digital on a client should come to us and that the integrated agency isn’t best placed to do the digital because they don’t understand the medium fully.  And, once again, this isn’t happening and integrated agencies are stepping in and taking bits and bobs here and there, more on some clients, less on others.

OK, so the grass is always greener and I am really hungry when it comes to clients and potential work – but we always knew that!

But, off the back of this something else is happening.  And it’s in relation to Social Media Marketing as opposed to web design+build or campaign based digital activity in traditional digital channels.

And what’s interesting about Social Media Marketing is that not only do we as a pure play have to contend with an integrated agency but more often than not we have to work with/alongside/around a PR agency who are now more and more frequently getting involved.

Now I don’t think this is the same thing as with the pure/integrated angle – not entirely anyway.

It’s more of the fact that I think clients seem to interpret Social Media as more inline with PR than it is with marketing.  There’s a lot of content creation, which PR agencies are very good at.  I think this is what the issue is. PR agencies seem to just be viewed by clients as being better at content creation and dealing with a high-risk situation that needs quick responses and turn arounds than an agency of either a pure or digital nature can do.

But does this mean PR agencies are the best ones to actually deal with this space? Well, that depends.  I personally think that some PR agencies are a bit too old-fashioned to deal with the true intricacies of the social space and tend to just be too formal, too old-world PR in an environment that really doesn’t suit it.

But new PR agencies, and I think this will happen more and more as their nature changes in the ways that ad agencies have had to adapt in the past decade or so, makes PR agencies, or rather forces them, to adapt or die.  I actually think it’s probably a very exciting time to be working in PR – and believe me that’s something I didn’t think I’d ever say!

There are some amazing agencies out there that seem to bridge the gap between PR and social and ad and marketing and pure and integrated.  The one name that immediately springs to mind is We Are Social who call themselves a “conversation agency”.  I’ve got a lot of respect for this agency, especially after seeing them speak at events in the past where they just seem to “get it”.  Maybe this is what PR agencies need to become?

Well, I don’t know and I am sure I’m not best placed to answer either.

I do know I get a little bit “annoyed” when I hear that i’ve lost out to another agency on any piece of work, and more and more recently i’ve been hearing “we’ve given this to the PR agency”.  Especially as someone who loves his social networks and media.  But, you can’t win it all and maybe we aren’t best placed?  Who knows – and I’m not convinced yet.

But I do know it’s intersting and, for me, social is the new battle ground where the old versus new agencies are fighting it out.

Intergrated versus pure play? Who cared – that’s so last year!

Howard

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As soon as I moved to Cardiff I had the great pleasure of very quickly meeting two people attempting to organise a very cool event.

Neil and Claire have done something great – organised the first ever TEDx Cardiff event, due to happen in April this year.

For those of you not familiar with TED, and trust me there are still a few people on the planet who don’t know about it believe it or not!, TED is a global phenomenon with one simple concept behind it: Ideas Worth Spreading.

Now, TED itself is a big big affair, with some of the worlds most famous and most interesting people speaking at it – Bill Gates, Al Gore, Jamie Oliver ;P  they’ve all spoken.

TEDx by comparison is a sub-brand allowing independent events organiser, like Neil and Claire, to put on licensed and branded TED events in locations where the normal big full-on TED brand wouldn’t go (yet?)

Hence, TEDx Cardiff.

So – congratulations to Neil and Claire, for putting this all together.

The reason I blog this is that their new website (wordpress-based) went up today, is looking great, and was created through volunteers some of whom I work with – so it’s close to my heart.

Visit the new site at www.tedxcardiff.co.uk for more information.  I think most, if not all, of the tickets are now gone I am afraid – but you might be lucky still.  It’s at the Wales Millennium Centre on April 14th April.

I can’t wait myself

Howard

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On Friday last week I gave an hour long lecture to 3rd year management students at Southampton University on the subject of Digital Marketing and how it’s evolved from my own perspective, 14+ years into a career in the business.

After the event I was interviewed by Karen Woods, a freelance journalist working for the University, and she recorded this interview.

I waffle a bit, and I am really not used to being recorded so excuse it if I say some things that are a bit weird and fumbled

Generally I am happy with what I said though – it seems to make sense after 2 re-listens

Howard

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• Hey @netmag! We never knew you cared! http://www.adventuresdm.co.uk/archives/2010/02/the-highest-form-of-flattery.html #

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Spooky!

Hey .Net magazine! We here never knew you cared so much for our humble, little, not updated all that often nowadays, blog.

But then we go and see this cover of .Net magazine and we’re totally flattered.  Seriously, thanks for the tip of the hat on the cover design

And the cheque is in the post right?

Cheers!