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

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

Just a quick update to say that, as you can no doubt see, we’ve made a few changes to Adventures In Digital.

First, we’ve switched from Typepad to Wordpress.  Rightly or wrongly, and there are advocates for both, we decided to switch from a hosted platform on Typepad, where we had been for the past two years, into an open source and effectively free environment of Wordpress.  This was for more than just the monthly fee – we also have more control over what we do on WP as we’ve got hold of the actual server.  Now there are some changes between TP and WP, and they mainly revolve around permlinks – so there is a chance some of the old ones are now broken – hopefully this isn’t the case as we updated the link format in WP to be the same as TP but you never know.  The other thing is images – Typepad make it practically impossible to export your images out of their system en-masse, meaning that for us to migrate all of the images we’ve used on adventuresdm.com for the past two years would have taken days and days of manual graft – so we decided not to do this.  Instead, we’re going to keep the TP account live for about six months in an hope that old images and articles by that point aren’t visited as much (longtail be damned!) – after that we’ll turn off the typepad account and, with it, all those images will probably break.  can’t be helped I am afraid unless Typepad get real and give users a bulk export tool for images (they have a bulk import tool already!).

Secondly, domain name.  In order to smoothly (well, smooth-ish) manage the migration to Wordpress we setup adventuresdm.co.uk and are now pointing the .com address at the .co.uk address.  Everything should work fine and you shouldn’t notice any change, but again, with this internet thang you never know.

Third and finally, we updated the design to be something a bit more contemporary and interesting.  It’s based on an open source Wordpress theme we found on a themes site, and we adjusted it slightly.  For those of you interested in what it is the link is in the ABOUT US section.

So, hopefully it’s all good and you like?  well, if not, let us know either way and we’ll ignore your comments   just kidding, but, hopefully it’s been a smooth transition over to a more open source, friendly and flexible (bulk image export typepad come on!) transition.

Howard

Some of my colleagues at Boxer, sister agency of TMSW (where I work) in Birmingham, have started a new blog called "Soak It Up"

In their own words…

"Soakitup is our blog and our way of talking to the world. We are based
in Birmingham UK and will be posting stuff that we are thinking about,
stuff we get up to and stuff that we like."

Good work guys – make sure you keep it up! Nothing worse than a non-updated blog   hehe *cough*

Howard
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ps – more adventuresdm posts coming soon – if I can get Jonathan to type anything!

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
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So I must offer five little-known things about myself. These are:

1. When I was 12 I had a depressed skull fracture. I was helping Dad build a fence in the back garden and the sledge hammer slipped – that’s what he says anyway
2. I spent almost 6 years living in Paris, France between 1995 and 2001
3. I have the worst Irish accent ever – see 1
4. I collect cook books and collect recipes but never, ever use them and instead improvise. This concerns those who have to live with me and my clutter.
5. I need a cleaner – see 4

I tag Brigid Buckman, Howard Scott again , Peter J. Bogaards, Adaptive Path can you tell that I don’t know many bloggers… finally 37 signals

Jonathan

This Saturday, 18th November, London hosts the 2nd annual UK Podcast Con at the CCT Smithfield venue in the city.

Speakers include CC Chapman of Managing the Gray, and Suw Charman of the Open Rights Group.

Registration opens at 10am with the final session finishing around 6pm.  A full programme of events can be found here.

I should hopefully be attending so I’ll aim to have a report from it some time early next week.

If you want to go, tickets can be purchased via an eventbrite site here.

Howard
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It seems that Walmart isn’t the only company who’ve been persuaded to stick their toes into the fake blog (or "flog") water recently, as McDonalds appears to have jumped right in feet first on a flog called 4railroads hosted over at blogger.

In fact not only have they used one flog, but there was a second, called Mcdmillionwinner, also hosted on blogspot.com, but as The Consumerist reports, this has now been pulled and  is only visible on the google cache version which is here.

It really is astounding that there are people out there in this industry, either on the client side or the agency side, that thinks this kind of venture into the blogosphere is a good thing.  I mean for crying out loud!  It’s hard enough work for us to convince people to use blogs in the correct manner as it is, with adequate amounts of transparency and real people, without muppets like this jumping in and trying to get away with it.

From the first post…
"Oh yeah. Its that time of year again. Every since I can remember the
fall means the start of the monopoly at mcdonalds game. Two years ago a
girl walked away with $1 million bucks. Imagine that – $1 million
dollars. I thought I was gonna win that year. I am convinced that this
is the year. What a win it will be."

Could the copy smell any more floggy?   

They’ve put some effort into this as well – it’s backed up with YouTube videos (which don’t seem to want to play for me) and everything, so it’s taken some time to think this through.  Oh, and just to make sure you can’t go and do anything nasty like add a negative comment (or for that matter, a positive one!), they’ve disabled them!  Blog as conversation enabler?  Don’t be silly.

I’ll say this now (again!)… If you get tempted in any way to suggest to a client that they do a flog, or a client asks you to work on one for them because they think it’s a good idea please, please, PLEASE DO NOT DO IT.  Don’t even entertain it.  It won’t work.  It’ll stink of everything that is wrong with trying to use a format that is intrinsically linked to transparency, honesty, and basically having a conversation with your audience that doesn’t treat them like idiots – i.e. isn’t like advertising or marketing in the slightest!

Blogs are great for PR, immediate response, telling the truth and getting your audience involved – go read Scoble’s book Naked Conversations if you don’t already know this – but please don’t go venturing in like this. Hell, I’ve even personally mentioned blogs to clients and people I work with (and have high hopes one of them will eventually see the light and take me up on the idea ), but not in this way – it’s just not on.

Whoever you are that did this (perhaps at JSH&A PR agency?): you do none of us who are actually trying to get the world to change with this stuff any good at all, so please stop.

Howard
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A collection of excuses for not blogging more.

"I haven’t had the internet and I have been drunk or busy alot." 

"This guy says he hasn’t blogged in awhile because he’s busy becoming a full-time blogger."

"work has rurned out to be a curse and blessing, more money but I work with a bunch of alcoholics"

lol