Creativity = Using what’s already there

We’ve heard a lot about Facebook and marketing, whether through ads or applications, but this particular campaign has a “Why didn’t I think of that?” quality.

All of the functionality was already there, no application development needed, which means they could get it up and running in a few minutes, could adjust on the fly (using the fail quickly principle), and it could spread more quickly because the target audience already knew how to use picture tagging in Facebook. Brilliant.

*Found via Magma, a new video aggregation social networking site that gathers video content from all over the web and ties it in with views and comments to show what’s popular right this minute. Check it out.

Advertainment / entertising

Interesting article in the latest issue of Fast Company about Ashton Kutcher and his production company, Katalyst. Not so long ago, Kutcher made the news as he faced off with CNN in a race to be the first with a million Twitter followers. As of tonight, he’s got well over four million.

The article looks behind the scenes to the strategy behind that race to a million, and to how Katalyst is helping brands with social media strategy, including a few you may have heard of, like Nestle, Kellogg, and Mountain Dew. It’s worth a read.

One of the more notable points is Kutcher’s take on the “free” aspect of social media services:

“When I have a conversation with someone and they say, ‘I’m not worried about monetization yet,’ that scares the shit out of me,” he says. He’s poking fun at social Web companies that run up their user base without regard for how they’re going to make money. “I’m part of an industry that is struggling daily. Daily. And I’m always worried about the numbers.” He jumps up, turns his Cubs cap around, and tucks his legs underneath him before plopping back down. “You cannibalize this business” — he waves at Hollywood — “a profit-positive business that trades at a decent multiple, and you’re just going to put people out of work. And these folks are counting on just figuring it out. And if they don’t, we’re fucked! That’s not okay.”

Kutcher is not very optimistic about the entertainment industry where he’s built most of his career, which helps to explain his pragmatic approach here. Where stars ten years ago were reluctant to even appear in television commercials, Kutcher has made no bones about using his fame to sell products.

All of this begs the question… is entertainment going to be replaced completely by advertising?

Another article on the Fast Company site looks at a new online campaign from Stella Artois – an imitation retro television show that calls to mind the corporate sponsored TV shows of the 1950s and 60s. Given the trend toward brand pouring more production dollars into online-targeted content, the author asks:

“…how long is it until some canny marketer commissions, say, the Gossip Girl team to create extended scenes, and then publishes them to the Web? And after that, when will TV producers begin pitching pilots directly to marketers?”

I have a feeling Ashton Kutcher might be first in line.

Something in the air

Air Graffiti, in development by AT&T Labs, is an intriguing concept that holds a number of possibilities for marketers to consider. Here’s a short video that explains how it works:

Smartphones are the fastest growing category in the mobile market these days, and mobile network operators like them because smartphone customers use data plans, which are generally more lucrative than voice plans are. The more feature rich phones are, the more data customers use – iPhone users in the U.S. are averaging 400 MB of data usage per month, according to a report in USA Today, which is five to ten times the usage of other smartphone owners. Much of this data usage is being driven by applications on the phone.

With the addition of location based services like Air Graffiti or something like it, special offers could be suspended just down the street from a boutique’s front door, making its side street location less of a liability, or virtual treasure hunts could unveil an exclusive underground club open only to those who know the code.

What about the convergence of time and location? For example, a restaurant owner monitoring neighbourhood traffic feeds could react to heavy traffic volume by offering special dinner deals to lure frustrated drivers off the street.

Mobile marketing seems to get a lot more hype than its reality would generally afford, so some skepticism is certainly in order. But the reality is that most of the technology needed for something like this is already out there – it simply needs to be assembled into a workable solution with a profitable business model.

Even if this application was to never be used for marketing (which is unlikely), it would still hold implications for businesses. What if an incident between a restaurant patron and the staff was recorded on video by another guest and left in the air outside the restaurant door for viewing by potential customers? How long does it stay there? Small business owners, many of whom do not have dedicated marketing staff, already struggle with the need to keep up with real-time reviews and comments online, but when those comments are now hung right outside your door, doing so becomes even more imperative.

It seems the internet is quickly moving off our computers and into the world around us, and the line between offline and online is blurring.

Corporate blogging done well

I happened to be checking out the site for Elastic Path a few days ago (if you haven’t heard of Elastic Path, check it out – great local success story with an impressive list of customers), and noted the corporate blog. As we’d been discussing corporate blogs in class, and I’ve also been exploring how they can be used in conjunction with my day job, I clicked through to see what this one had to offer.

I was doubly rewarded. Not only is Get Elastic a great example of how a corporate blog can be used to highlight a company’s expertise in its market space, but it’s also full of really practical discussions around online retailing and ecommerce in general. The posts are topical, pointing out best practices used by a wide arracy of online stores to influence conversions and drive sales, and they include screenshot examples to illustrate the discussions.

There are several elements that make Get Elastic successful as a corporate blog:

1. Focus – The blog is focused on ecommerce practices and maintains a professional tone, positioning the company as an expert in this field. While it is fronted by a single person, the entries feature her expertise, not her life.
2. Low-key approach – While there’s no question the blog is linked to the company, it keeps the sales pitch to a minimum and offers valuable information that even non-customers will likely come back for or subscribe to. A product like what Elastic Path sells is not something a prospect would purchase casually or regularly, so the key to success is staying top-of-mind for prospects so that when they find themselves in a situation where they need an ecommerce software solution, Elastic Path gets into the consideration set. Get Elastic provides a reason for prospects to keep coming back and maintains brand mindshare.
3. Integration with other online marketing activities – One recent entry provides a summary of a webinar the company recently offered and has posted online for free (with registration). The webinar features Brian Walker of Forrester Research discussing trends in B2B ecommerce, and the summary does a nice job of hitting the highlights, while still leaving the reader interested in viewing the whole webinar (assuming they have the time). At the end, it includes details on the next webinar the company has scheduled.
4. Conversations with experts – While Linda Bustos, who maintains the blog, is an ecommerce analyst and quite knowledgeable, she also engages with other, more “neutral” third party experts, not only in the webinar mentioned above, but also in podcast interviews. This adds to her credibility with readers and supports her own expert positioning.

If you’re looking for an example of what a corporate blog (even one not fronted by the CEO) could add to your marketing program, this is worth a look. If you’re interested at all in ecommerce and online sales, it may also be a good one to add to your feeds.

 

Engaging under the new rules

David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing & Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly has been on my reading list for some time now, since I first saw his Pragmatic Marketing seminars advertised right after the book was released. And being in the middle of not only an eMarketing course (in the MBA program at the Sauder School of Business), but also a complete overhaul of our website and public relations planning for next year, the timing of this reading could not have been better for me.

Simply put, this is a practical book. If you’re a web marketing or social media neophyte, there’s plenty of basic information here to help you feel like you’re no longer wandering around in a foreign country. But even if you’ve been watching and working with some of the online tools for a while, The New Rules helps demonstrate how it all can be pulled together into a coherent program.

Scott’s main premise is that public relations isn’t just about talking to the media anymore, that the Internet makes it easier than ever to hold conversations directly with buyers, and that PR practitioners who believe that their primary target audience traditional press are simply fools. Based on recent experience, I don’t think this message would be considered groundbreaking anymore, though it may have been when the book was first written in 2006. However, the book remains useful and relevant, largely because it is based on sound marketing principles.

It’s easy for those of us working in technology marketing to get caught in the jargon trap – when we’re talking about complex products, we develop shortcuts to make conversations more efficient. Scott addresses this head on by putting the customer in the center of PR and marketing program development, advocating for the development of buyer personas before anything else. Then, every piece of content, whether it be a news release, a web page, or a direct mail campaign, is developed with one or more of these buyer personas in mind. Doing this forces marketing writers to think like customers and to replace jargon with plain language explanations of the products benefits for customers, ultimately making the material more approachable for media audiences as well. In addition, you’re far more likely to be using the language your potential customers are using to search for answers to their problems.

Scott provides an overview of the most popular online mediums in some detail, including examples of how companies and organizations have experienced success by targeting customers directly through these channels online. He then devotes the third section of the book to action plans – tactics in planning, content development, using RSS feeds, blogging, podcasting, social networking, and search engine marketing. He takes a lot of the mystery out of these tools and makes it look simple.

A little too simple, actually, and that’s the one problem I have with this book, and with many other online marketing and social media evangelists. There is rarely any real attention given to detailing the resources required to run programs like this. Much is made of the fact that the tools are often free or relatively inexpensive compared to traditional advertising, and Scott opens up a whole world of possibilities, but even in cases where he uses real world examples and has interviewed people about their approach, there is no mention of how many people it took behind the scenes.

The more our target audiences fragment down into niches occupying a wider variety of segmented networks online, the more time and effort it takes to find them and reach them, in smaller numbers, with messages that need to be more carefully tailored to suit each niche. In addition, the expectation of immediacy in response to online queries makes a well rounded portfolio of social networking tools nearly impossible for one person to manage alone in anything but the smallest organizations. And this doesn’t even begin to address the time to collect and interpret analytics reports so that tactics can be evaluated and adjusted on the fly to improve results.

The tools may be free, but time is not, and there are relatively few organizations that will be willing to drop their traditional public relations and marketing programs altogether to replace them with online campaigns. To suggest that online marketing or social media marketing is going to save companies a pile of money from their marketing budgets does marketing professionals a disservice. The new rules make new things possible, and for many companies, following the new rules will improve the results of their marketing efforts. But marketers looking to sell these ideas to senior management need to carefully analyse the shift in investment and resources required, or they may find themselves left with too little time and energy to execute an effective strategy over the long term.

You have more friends than they thought

Interesting study out this week from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey examined the role of the internet and cell phones in the way that people interact with those in their core social network.

Basically, while it’s true that people’s “core discussion networks” (that is, the group of family or friends with which they would discuss important matters) have shrunk somewhat over the last 25 years or so, the findings of the study show that technology doesn’t seem to be responsible for that. In fact, people who use mobile phones and the internet, particularly social media tools, have networks that are larger and more diverse than those who do not.

Shocking, really. Who knew that those tech tools specifically designed to help us stay in touch with people were, in fact, helping us stay in touch with people? They also, apparently, don’t prevent people from going outside – one of the more entertaining findings was that bloggers are more likely than regular internet users or non-internet users to visit public parks.

So what does this have to do with Marketing? Well, marketers, online or offline, are always looking for buzz agents – people who will tell their friends and family when they find a new product or service that they like. The rise of social media tools has escalated this, as it seems every brand is camping out on Facebook and Twitter. But as it turns out, not only is it easier for your fans to spread your message online, they’re spreading it to a wider, more diverse network of people, who are likely to also be passing it along to a wider, more diverse network of people, who are also… and so on… and so on.