Adventures In Digital Marketing

I don’t normally post items about this kind of thing but with this one I feel I have to because it illustrates clearly how not to engage a blogger audience and get them to talk about your campaign, IMHO at least.

We at AdventuresDM receive these kind of emails all the time – requesting that we blog about, or check out, or generally get involved with campaigns to spread the word – and more of the time we’re happy to do so – we’ve even road-tested new pieces of hardware for people like Nokia in order to take part – so we get it and we like it when it’s done correctly.

And we of course understand, as agency-types ourselves, why you’d want to do this and involve them as brand advocates etc. – it’s stuff we suggest often to our own clients.

But I just got this email from an agency asking me to get involved, and it so clearly shows how not to do things that I really wanted to highlight it.  To give the agency, brand and person (real person??) a bit of privacy, i’ve starred out their name and details, but you’ll get the drift I am sure…

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Have you seen the latest cool ******** ads?? Of course no, it’s super new!!

This week sees the culmination of ****** ******** campaign. The ad features the song ‘********’, written and performed by ********* and set up using only ******** free texts and internet *********.

In fact, **************** were involved in the recording of the song and each one is featured on the track.  What’s more, the song was released as a single by Universal Records on Monday.

The ad was air on Friday, 15^th January during Channel 4’s Celebrity Big Brother, running for the entire ad break.  And while this marks the end of the ‘******* campaign, it also marks the one year anniversary of **************, which aired in the same week and during the same show in 2009.

Check it out http://***.*******.com/***************

And tell me what you think!

If you like it why don’t you embed it on your site and let your readers know about it?

G******

G****** F******

B** Q******

0207xxxxxxxx

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Now, I am sure some would argue there is nothing wrong with the following, but for me it’s so impersonal, so badly written (i wonder if the spelling mistakes are intentional to give it realism?) and so obviously a “one size fits all” blanket bomb of an email sent to a load of bloggers that it isn’t worth the time of day following the campaign itself.

To put it bluntly, it’s a bit insulting to the audience for whom it is intended.

But this email, this impersonal way it opens (the phrase “super new!!), in fact the whole way it’s structured to do nothing just push the content out, regardless of who they’re writing to, and get them to embed the video shows a complete lack of understand for the blogger audience, disregard for them as people with value to add and treats us, bloggers who are passionate about what we write as nothing more than a cheap win for them – they’re playing a numbers game on this one.  Send it to X number of bloggers and hope that 10% of them post the link and video – bingo!

It’s like the worst kind of old-style marketing, Direct mail state of mind, that we’ve been trying to change for so long now – that we’re not numbers and hit-and-hope anymore – but engagement and interaction and dialogue and conversation.

This is trying to do things right but it’s doing it so wrong it makes me truly sad.  What makes me even more sad is that in some way this probably will achieve what they want an a certain number of desperate bloggers will go right out there and post the link and embed the video just to get themselves in as part of a campaign and a few links into their own blog.  But this isn’t how to do things.

This is how NOT to engage a blogger audience!

We are not numbers out there to get your in-bound links up and extend your reach.  We’re advocates and enthusiasts who add true value to your products, services or campaigns.

As both a blogger and an agency employee I cannot emphasise this strongly enough.

Treat us with respect people! it’s one of the golden rules of social-media engagment.

Howard

2009 was quite a good year for us at AdventuresDM, and to bring a bit of light back to some posts which have now dropped off the page, and some which you may not have caught first time around, here is the top 10 posts of last year.  Enjoy!

1. Digital Wales: A Google Map (you can edit!)

2. Sony’s new TV’s bring Yahoo! widget content to the masses

3. Twitter as a sales promotion channel

4. Augmented Reality on the iPhone

5. Future of Web Design 2009 London

6. ASOS using real-time sentiment analysis direct to consumers

7. Oxfam’s Cannes Lion Youtube Competition

8. Some digital marketing predictions for 2009

9. Yahoo!’s connected TV platform

10. Honda Insight Takeover Shines

ASOS, the ultra popular online fashion retailer, has taken a brave transparent step with it’s latest dedicated campaign site and pushed their real-time sentiment analysis straight to the consumer via it’s new site asosreviews.com

Sentiment analysis, just one of the ultra hot topics currently rocking the Social Media Monitoring (SMM) world is when you use tools, sometimes manually but often these days automatically, to judge/guess what the people out there who are talking about you/your brand/your product are saying and basically if they are saying nice things or horrible things.

it’s not an exact science at the moment, and it can be done wrong in the raw terms of GOOD vs BAD (especially when you consider things like the word “bad” sometimes meaning “good” – well, in a king of Michael Jackson way… I am sure you know what I mean! Hey, I’m down with the kids!) but overall it is good at giving you an idea of if you’re in the good books or not. backed with human elements then, and manually going over the conversations happening in various social media spaces, you can get a pretty good understanding of things.

so, what ASOS are doing is sticking that raw (presumably) sentiment analysis straight online for all to see.

Their policy is one of transparency – and this is about as transparent as you can get with your audience. if you do something bad, they’ll tell you I am sure, and that in turn will tell other customers etc. so as a brand, in this way, you had best be good right!

it’s very brave of the brand and I have to say I do salute it as a campaign move. I think it’s safe to say that they have the right kind of audience and are the right kind of brand to do this kind of thing – there are certain brands which this obviously wouldn’t work for or just plain wouldn’t have the b*lls to go for it in the first place – so it’s a good bit of judgement on their part and the part of the agency who put it together for them, thruSites.

At the moment apparently the world is happy with asos – which is nice to know

I like this – great piece of comms and good for some quick, easy win, hot topic awareness raising.

Should get the tongues wagging!

Howard

Today I am at the Monitoring Social Media conference in London to hear what some of Europe’s leading thinkers have to say about this hottest of topics (OK, it’s not as hot as Augmented Reality, but it’s a very close second especially when you mention Twitter!)

Actually, that’s one thing – i’ve ironically been locked out of twitter temporarily because stupid useless annoying tweetdeck which i foolishly opened instead of tweetie screwed up again and tried to login a million times in a second. I HATE TWEETDECK!

anyway, I’ll try and takes enough notes to write-up the conference when I am on the train tonight. So far it’s a mixed bag – first speaker, Alan Moore from SMLXL was really interesting, talking about how networks have changed everything and it’s the theory of networks that you need to be able to understand as a marketer in order to fully address people in the 21st century.

second speaker on the other hand, who is speaking right now, Neville Hobson, is really disinteresting and, for me, saying nothing new at all – would have been good a year ago but now it’s old hat. ho hum

anyway, if you want to follow the hashtag on twitter it’s #msm09

Howard
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There’s a few of these videos knocking about on Youtube and elsewhere, and I’m sure you’ve seen the like before.  But this is a nice one, with a few new stats in there for those persuasive soc-med presentations you need for clients and colleague who don’t get it yet.

This is great.  Not just because I love kinetic type, but because it shows Best Buy get it, and they realise the power of the revolution we’re involved in.

Big thanks to Matt Alder as always for sending it my way.

Howard

I love the bloke at the end who comes in and says “Are you making a movie?”

Couldn’t have written it better!

I’ve seen more and more brands dipping their toes into twitter for use as a sales promotion channel lately.

Brands have been on twitter for quite some time now, as well all know, some having good success, and others not doing it quite as well as they could, but what we’ve not fully seen are brands using it as a direct communications channel to clients in relation to a competiton or game, with differing end goals by the look of it.

Only last week, my attention was drawn to a competition being run by Asus computers, producers of the well loved EeePC series, for the launch of a new model they have created (known as the Asus SeaShell for reasons that I can’t fathom aside from it, like all laptops, looks a bit like a clamshell). For your chance to win one of these machines you simply had to follow the brand on twitter (@asusuk) and in turn, they would select a user at random, once a week, to be the lucky winner of the machine.  When I chose to follow them they had about 40 followers.  Now, they have 1472 – not massive by anyone’s measure, but not too shabby either.  All I can think of was that this was an attempt to grow their follower-base to hit the right kind of people who might, in turn, spread the word to others interested in netbooks and so on – so, actually, in terms of “hitting the right people” this is probably quite an interesting exercise for them.

So, one week later, and I come across an email from another technology company, Novatech, a tech and PC retailer which you might not have heard from (but for those of us tech-inclined on the south-coast of the UK trust me, they’re a god-send at times!)  Novatech are running a similar competittion to Asus, but it, for me, fails at the first hurdle due to the barrier to entry.

Again it’s to win a netbook (this time from MSI) and all you have to do is follow BOTH MSI and Novatech on twitter (@msitweets and @novatechltd) – so not one, but two – and then you have to tweet on your own profile that you’re following them, AND then…  you have to register on the novatech forum and post a link on that to your twitter page.

*PHEW*

got that?  couldn’t be simpler right?  erm… well, perhaps it could.  I think this is a bad example of how to use the channels around twitter for a promotion.

And finally, although by no means the last “brand” on twitter doing so, everyone’s favourite mockney chef, Jamie Oliver (@jamie_oliver), is running a regular competition each Friday called “Jamie’s Twitchen” (see what he did there?) where by he asks a question, and the first person from around the twitterverse to reply with the correct answer and the hashtag #jamiestwitchen wins a prize which changes each week.

This is, for me, a great example of how to use the channel in a positive, respectful way that actually makes use of the unique nature of twitter itself, rather than trying to make it into something it’s not intended to be for the sake of a few thousand email addresses you can bombard.

What I think these illustrates is a couple of things.

1) brands (large and small, world famous and not) are waking up to twitter as a very immediate here-and-now channel to run competitions in – and the power of communicating directly to your core audience and what that can give you.

2) sometimes, social media usage can be taken to far (not mentioning any names Novatech!) in your quest to grab user details and build up a pool of “followers” to spread the word to (less is often more)

Twitter is, as I pointed out to a senior client I work with via a linkedin conversation last night, simply another channel within which we can conduct digital marketing.  It’s not the answer to everything, but it’s emerging quite rapidly, that using twitter as part of a sales promotion strategy, or a games/comps strategy, really does seem to work – but as with everything, treat it with respect and don’t abuse the power it can give you.

Overall, I like this trend, I like that we, the users of twitter, are coming up with a plethora of new ways to work it.

It’s evolving!

Howard

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Recently I keep coming up against a seeming growing obsession with proposing TV ads as legitimate content for digital communication. It burns me up.

I see it in retail stores, on tube media, online and more recently I’ve been exposed to lots of situations where in the process of proposing digital content people (non-digital mind) instantly default to “hey, we could use the TV ad on there”.

Why do people insist on seeing the moving images of TV as being suitable for any and all screens someone might be exposed to?

Tube screen? TV ad.

Instore plasma? TV ad.

Interactive kiosk. Use the TV ad.

Plasma screen. What about (hey you guessed it) TV ad.

But the same logic is invariably not applied to all other consumer touchpoints. Do we see a poster site and say, hey lets take stills of the TV ad and print that!

Or an advertorial and take the TV script. No we don’t and why?

Cause it’s not relevant message for that media at that stage of the consumer journey.

TV has an ever growing tenous role with the growth of digital, but if we do see it as relevant then only at a single  point (hey on TV!), and assuming that it’s universally relevant and pertinent content for an audience to be rolled out at all screens a brand owns is surely flawed?

Lets take, oh i don’t know a plasma at retail. TV won’t provided enhanced perceived value at that point of purchase. That push to buy.

Medium and moment should decide the message and content.

Screen does not = TV!

Paul