Adventures In Digital Marketing

• RT Marketeers plan 20% cut to DM and divert funds into soc-med marketing says Alterian research http://tinyurl.com/yh5cekp #socialmedia #sm2 #

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• updated blog post: How (NOT!) to engage a blogger audience. http://tinyurl.com/ydozrn4 whatcha know! they are a real person! #

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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…

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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

Woot! – Google released the Nexus1 phone that runs the latest version of the android operating system.

Cue Twitter going crazy with #nexus1 hashtags and a million phone übergeeks foaming at the mouth.

But you know what?

Who cares – I’ve already got my personal iPhone and I’ve got my work HTC Hero which runs android – so as far as I can tell, bar perhaps a few bells, whistles and a bit of a speed bump, i’ve got that base covered (and I still prefer my iphone).

The Nexus1 looks OK though, and sure, the OS is way better than the blackberry offering that was on my Storm, so anyone who’s never used an iPhone is going to love it – and in fact I am sure a lot of people who HAVE used an iPhone will love it to and switch across.

But is this the iPhone killer that so many people seem to be saying it is?

Erm, frankly, of course it isn’t!

iPhone was a smartphone killer because until it turned up nothing was doing the phone thing in any way decent compared to what the phone from Cupertino burst onto the scene doing. Blackberry was rocking the email world, Windows was doing it’s crashy bloat thing, and there was palm trying to keep afloat by producing the Treo (pre-Pré of course and how that shook things up right?!)

but when iPhone burst onto the scene it was all new, it was shiny, and it “just worked” – you’d not really had all of it’s features on a handheld device before in a form factor and such well executed good looking package until it came out – and that’s why it was the killer phone – because it was truly revolutionary, not because it did a few things better or in a different UI than it’s competitors were already doing – but because it was effectively doing them first.

So, in comes Google and Nexus1 – and you know what? It’s doing the same stuff as the iPhone and nothing really that different.

iPhone killer? get real – and if it does i’ll gladly swap my trusty 3G for a nexus2 in a years time.  But until google gets it’s thinking cap on and actually innovates in the mobile space I think the guys in Cupertino are probably sleeping easy at night and focusing on their iSlate concepts.

Howard

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• RT anyone know if poss to write a plugin effect for MSN messenger? to alter the image or do face recog? #msnmessenger (via @Howard_Scott) #

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Find your nearest pint of the strong stuff with this AR app for iPhone

Augmented Reality apps are obviously popping up left, right and centre, and I’m yet to truly see if people actually use them and they’re more than our industry beating itself off yet again over a new technology – and I know, i’ve posted a lot about them previously and I do like them a lot myself – maybe I am just envious as I’ve not persuaded a client yet to take up the AR challenge

Anyway, latest brand on the scene is your favourite male binge drink for the discerning “Beer Connoisseur” (watch the vid and you’ll get that) Stella Artois with it’s app allowing you to directly find the nearest bar that sells Stella.  Surely over here in the UK it’s a no brainer anyway as most pubs seem to serve it and, I am guessing from a UK point-of-view if they don’t you’ll happily switch over to Kronenbourg at the drop of a hat.  But in the US it’s a different thing, and I know from personal experience with my good mate Bill over at Hot Topic that Stella doesn’t have the wife beater image that it so desperately wants to shift but can’t over here in the UK.  Plus, it’s a major import so it’s not in every pub unlike the usual buds and MGD etc…

Nice looking app, good user interface, but how many of us are going to be able to walk in a straight line down the street, let alone carry an AR iPhone for directions, after the first six pints of the stuff?

Howard

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• Android apps hit 20,000. 60%+ free. 99%+ utterly rubbish. http://tinyurl.com/yay7mre #
• The #tweetlevel influence score for @Howard_Scott is 42. How influential are you? http://bit.ly/tweetlevel #

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• latest blog post on adventures in digital: Digital Wales Google Map! http://bit.ly/4OGvFU #

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As some of you may or may not know, I recently left the sunny shores of London for the green and pleasant land that is Wales, returning to my roots but taking my digital mindset with me for the classic “lifestyle move” cliché that is the late-thirties with kids moving to the country thang.

So, I ceased being Head of Digital Marketing at The Marketing Store, London, and became Director of Digital Marketing at Sequence – a full service digital marketing agency based in Cardiff.

So, it’s all going well, and I am enjoying it very very much, but one thing bugs me.

I don’t know much about our peers in the area, who they are, what they do, or indeed much about any “digitally minded” agencies in the area, let alone Bristol, Bath and beyond.

Now, this is my fault, I know this, because for the past 13+ years I’ve been looking inwards and had a very London-centric point of view. In fact, I probably know more about the agencies in New York or San Francisco than Cardiff.

So, to help with this, and to, quite literally, put digital agencies, businesses, and in fact anyone who works within the internet field in one way or another “on the map” i’ve created a google map, entitled Digital Wales, and started to place pins in it.

I can’t claim this is an original idea, and in fact I got the notion to do it when reading about the Silicon Roundabout map that was created by Dopplr’s Matt Biddulph a wee while ago – and I thought his map, now being managed by Wired.co.uk magazine, was such a good thing I wanted one to help me, and hopefully others in Wales, have a single resource for our own part of the UK.

My map is on this URL and has been handily included in this post for you to persude and, very important, edit!

Yes, you too can place pins and stick your own company, or anyone else’s you think should be mentioned, on the map to help me grow it as a resource for us all.

I’ll give it a while and see how it’s going, and hopefully we can develop a map which will be useful to all of us.

That’s it for now.

Thanks (or should that be Diolch?)

Howard