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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Related articles by Zemanta

• 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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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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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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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…

——————————

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.