Adventures In Digital Marketing

I am working on an update to a work based wiki and I was wondering how many people currently use something similarly wiki based for:

• Information sharing
• Project team collaboration
• As a knowledge base for case studies, templates and more
• As a forum for questions and answers

The big question, of course, is how to encourage participation? I’m thinking that the build it and they will come approach is not going to take off.

Jon

At my place of work, which I very rarely blog about here - I don’t know why not, I know a lot of bloggers who do talk directly about their work but for me it feels wrong some how.  I know if it were an actual company blog then that would be different, but this is my own professional opinion blog and I like to keep it seperate from my work as much as I can - except this time.  Anyway, we’re rebuilding our agency website.

Anyone who has ever been involved in rebuilding their own company website will, I should think, immediately empathise with me and the whole team involved.  They’re often interesting projects, to say the least.  But fun, of course.  Honest guys.

We’ve been asked to answer three simple questions to show us what we’re like as real people.  These aren’t new questions - you’ll have seen them or very similar ones to them, before.  But we’re not reinventing the wheel here.

So, here’s my answers:

Q1
“The reason I come to work every morning is…”
I come to work because I love digital.  OK, that’s a cop out?  Maybe, but I know one thing.  I am a geek marketer.  And I’m proud of it.  I realise I have been ever since I got over my fear of building stupidly complex JavaScript websites to sell people trainers that cost them two weeks wages (I still blame you Raj Chavda for that lost weekend with the All Blacks!) .  I don’t know how many times a day you hear something along the lines of “the future of marketing is digital” but it’s something I truly believe, and I spend as much time as I can getting away with telling anyone and everyone.  So, I guess I come to work so I can tell some more people; co-workers, clients or consumers - I’m not fussy.  I’ll tell you all.

Q2
“The best idea I’ve seen recently is…”
The Age of Conversation - a single book on a single topic, conversation, written by over 100 different people.  In this age of blogging, many established (and some not so) authors are placing extacts of their upcoming or new books online, increasingly to tap into the collective review process of a thousand devoted digitally enabled fans.  This book, edited by Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan, moves the wiki style working process into a new gear by creating a single work that’s made up of 100+ different pieces.  All proceeds go to charity, and edition two (topic: Why don’t people get it?) is just kicking off.

Q3
“If I were a client tomorrow I’d…”
Stop buying newspapers, turn off the TV and walk to work blindfolded so I don’t see any billboards (although that could prove to be a bit of a challenge).  That way, I’d get a deeper understanding into the way consumers are starting to treat so called traditional ad formats - i.e. they’re ignoring them - so that I have to look at new ways to reach my target audience.  I’d also stop speaking on my mobile (& snd txt msgz insted), stop sending emails (and switch to IM) and only read facebook on my iPhone (63% of mobile web traffic goes to social networks).  Not only is the traditional marketing world changing, the new one is changing with it.  If you don’t stop and look around, you might miss it.

So, that’s me.  What I want to know is, what are your answers?

Q1 - the reason I come to work every morning is…
Q2 - the best idea i’ve seen recently is…
Q3 - if i were a client tomorrow I’d…

Comments, or emails to howard DOT scott AT gmail DOT com, really appreciated.  And, if you could pass it on to two of your bestest mates that’d be swell - just tag anything you post with “3simplequestions”.

Thanks

Saw this great video at the ESA event this morning.  Might be a bit old, but I liked it so here it is.

Give you something to thing about.

Howard
–

I’ve been using LinkedIn for some time now, and whilst it is in some ways nothing more than yet another ego surf exercise, it does prove useful as an additional contact store and tool for getting back in touch with people on a par with both Plaxo and way better than Friends Reunited IMHO.

A few weeks ago they introduced a new service on top of the usual jobs and other stuff they already provide, called Answers.

Answers is a way for you to ask a question, not necessarily related to your professional area of expertise although it would make a lot of sense I am guessing, to your network of friends, their friends and so on. 

Basically, it allows me, for example, to ask 97 direct contacts, 2,600 secondary contacts and an overall network of 224,500+ people the following question:

"When people from traditional marketing say "digital sucks" what do you use to back up your argument that it doesn’t? Stats, data, examples?"

OK, so it’s not the most eloquent of questions, but it’s to the point.  This was inspired BTW by an email from a colleague at work who sent an email around questioning the effectiveness of digital and saying that it "isn’t the silver bullet it’s cracked up to be" (i’ve paraphrased this slightly!).

I decided to address this point directly, and after writing a long, blog like response, I deleted that and took the mickey. 
Anyway, it inspired me to ask the network at LinkedIn and see what they say when this happens (and it happens more often than not working in integrated agencies - there are a lot of people out there who still fear the digital reaper) and see if i’d even get a few answers at all.

So, i’ve left it over the weekend, and what i’ve ended up with are six answers (one of which is a little weird and I suspect blog spam, but maybe i’m not reading it right?), which I’ll reproduce below, and follow up in a post later on to see what I think of the service.  So, here are the answers to the question above…

Digital is cheaper and I pay the bill.  Show me that your plan provide us with better results…

Lodewijk Hof, Owner, Hof Holding

Well it is eminently easier to produce, design, test, adjust on the fly, cheaper, better stats, more easily targeted, quicker to ‘mount’ a campaign….. there are arguments a plenty here. It’s also easier to, if not monitored and done right, waste a lot of money - so although it can be argued that digital works, in many ways, much better, it can go very badly wrong!

Chris Warrender, eBusiness Consultant; specialising in eCommerce, social media and online marketing and advertising.

Many of the consumers that clients are looking to engage with are leaving traditional media in droves and digital is the only place to reach them. My yardstick: clients trying to market to anyone within what is being called "Generation Me" (born 1970 or later) should include digital marketing and non-traditional marketing (including buzz, viral, etc.) in their campaign/marketing mix.  Unfortunately, we are in a transitional time where clients need to do both. Similar to the early days of the compact disc. Music labels had to provide both CD and cassette.

Bart Caylor, Principal, Owner, and Consultant at Brainstorm

Everything has its time and place. Digital doesn’t suck…and traditional media isn’t the end all be all. There are so many factors to consider…what are you selling? Who are you selling to? What is the purpose of your advertising?  As some of the other answers have stated…at this point in time you have to have a good mix…the right mix rather…in order to be successful. If you don’t have a large budget, make sure you’re getting an effective reach and frequency in your #1 medium before adding a second and third medium to your mix. Otherwise you’ll just be too spread out.  I guess if someone told me digital sucks…I’d first laugh in their face and then I’d show them Google’s stock quote.  Sorry I don’t have better resources to turn you onto.

Scott Aderhold, Marketing and Media

(This is the weird one!) Remember those Star Trek episodes "Scotty, beam me up!" ?  We humans have always dreamed of "beaming" ourselves, objects or even travel in time. In fact, every morning I travel on the London Underground to work, I ask myself how the world would look like, if we could all be "beamed". But that’s all science fiction - everybody would agree!  Not me. The world is currently coming apart. It divides itself in huge steps into what we would call the material and the virtual world. And absurdly while it splits into those two, somehow the borders between material and virtual world blur.  With virtual world I am not referring to Second Life, GTA, the Habbo Hotel or anything alike. The virtual world is the world where everybody is connected to each other and different mechanics and laws of physics play. The virtual world is the world of digital communication. The one on your e-mail client, on your iPod, your MSN Messenger, your Skype, your internet browser, your computer desktop or even your mobile phone.  And in the world of digital objects, "beaming", traveling in time (at least backwards), copying, replicating, distributing, referencing, linking, contextualizing, tracking, recording, remixing, archiving, searching, tagging, ordering, twisting and destroying is all too common.  That’s because all can be wrapped in ones and zeroes. And there’s a lot that you can do with ones and zeroes.

Christoph Burgdorfer, Telecommunications Consultant and Professional

I have coached our salespeople to not present it as better, but as way to target the clients campagin to a specific niche audience. I think trying to convince someone that digital is better is a philisophical argument that is to be avoided when dealing with a client.  I also tell the salespeople to encourage the client to develope a metric of how much a visit to their website is worth. That will force the client to look more deeply into their on-line presence. That analysis is good for them and good for us. It forces the client to look at their digital presence in a detailed way. They will ask us for help with the analysis which will deepen the relationship between client and us.

Murray Grevious, MIS Director at Creative Loafing

–
Howard

This Thursday I’ll be attending the GCI Digital Media Exploratorium 2007 (now that’s a conference name!) subtitled "Making sense of digital media and ‘consumer generated chaos’" at the GCI offices in London.

Not sure I agree we’re quite at the chaos stage just yet - but maybe they’ll persuade me during the course of the talk and post-talk drinks.

GCI are a PR company who recently formed a dedicated digital PR service for digital media, so it’ll be interesting to see their take on the current state of play as opposed to my own digital marketing approach. GCI do appear to have a blog of their own, but no trackbacks, so I can’t credit them with one

If anyone’s attending please let me know and i’ll have a drink with ya! It looks like you can email them on sparker@gciuk.com or call +44 (0) 20 7072 4152 if you’re interested in attending the event.

Howard
–

Tara Hunt from Citizen Agency was someone I was very keen to see speak as her area is probably the one closest to my own in terms of marketing and social software.

So, I have to say, I was a little disappointed with her talk but can completely understand why it was like it was.  Basically, it was a little high-level and skimmed over the community aspects of this thing we call web2.0 rather than go into any detail as such as to how she, as head of a self proclaimed agency which "specializes in developing community-centric strategies around product research, design, development and marketing" feels advertisers and marketers can use the community aspects of the internet as developed during the past few years.

As a big fan of this kind of thinking myself I was interested to see if she thought it was really a viable approach for marketers, and if she could see any major pros/cons or problems in getting clients to grab hold of it as an idea.

But, as I say, her presentation, good as it was, skipped over any real detail about the implementation of the technology and tools, and rather focused on an overview of what’s out there and so forth.  Perfectly fine I guess for 99% of the audience, but not what I was hoping for.

I did try and find her in the (rather packed at all times) lobby of the venue but could only see her to shout a quick "i’d like to chat with you later" at her, to which she probably thought I was a complete muppet :) 

It seems that the agency run a few events here and there, so perhaps I’ll jump into one of those if they do them in London any time soon and see what they have to say in more detail.

Howard
–

Probably the web celebrity for the day (sorry Mike), Kevin Rose was truly rock and roll (in a not at all as extreme as Motley Crue kind of way) in as much as he slept in late, turned up a bit scruffy and was drinking wine during his talk.

Taking us through the pros and cons of digg, i have to say he didn’t really, for me at least, go into much detail about what digg could turn into in the future.  I was personally hoping for a little bit of comment about how digg might actually be a new form of internet based communication rather than a site in it’s own right, but that wasn’t really covered.  we saw some graphs which were a little hard to make out.

ok - so i’ve actually not got a lot to say about Kevin’s presentation, but ho hum.  maybe i should delete this post

actually - one thing I heard at the conference about digg was interesting. I happened to overhear a couple of blokes say to each other "do you actually use digg?" "no" replied the other, adding, "no fucker does outside the US".

i don’t use it much I have to say - maybe they were right!

Howard
-

From GigaOm written by Robert Young:

Companies… increasingly gain their competitive edge
from the consumers themselves (now that they are also producers and
developers). As such, it’s critical to realize that the priorities of
“marketing” have been inversed… whereas the primary function of
marketing used to be to broadcast a product’s benefit to consumers, the
priority of marketing now should be to be a proxy for consumer control,
because it is the consumers who will lead your company to success. Just
look at the recent successes of MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, etc. These
companies let their users create their competitive advantages… the win
did not come from central product planning.

Link: Nivi : Greasemonkey will blow up business models (as well as your mind).

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets users add “user scripts” (DHTML, technically) to any web page. These scripts can change any aspect of a web page’s behaviour, interaction, or design. This little baby is going to blow up business models.

Greasemonkey can insert prices from competitive booksellers right into Amazon.

Greasemonkey can put links to BitTorrent movies inside
Netflix or Amazon.

Greasemonkey lets you mash-up websites. It lets you extend and script websites and integrate that script right into the original site as if the designers had intended it to be there. It lets you use their web site, their data, their servers, their work to serve your purpose and function. There will soon be an army of hackers enhancing every site you use. Whether that site likes it or not.

 

In the 4+ years I worked at TBWA I always remember wishing MyTBWA was useful - completed. Now it is and they have a video on YouTube as well as a Weborial. ..