I haven’t seen much evidence of success in three years of developing strategies and research for clients across a number of sectors. Yet it seems to still be happening – Huffington Post today is riding the FourSquare hockey stick upcurve of success; they’re giving out “badges” for good behaviour.
Are we secretly craving that return to elementary school days and getting those gold stars for good behaviour? Perhaps deep in our psyche we are. Or not.
Our attention for media channels is so fractured today. It would appear that when a new app comes out (i.e. Twitter) and begins an ascendancy in popularity, other Web services jump on to attempt to cash in – the halo effect.
But what are the expected and acceptable returns? A 2% uptick in traffic? Direct Mail campaigns are considered successful with a 2% return, 3% is knocking it out of the ballpark. Email campaigns have slid down to the 2% mark for a success metric.
Microblogging service Plurk gives you “Karma points” for building friends and engaging in conversation. Plurk has failed to garner the traffic and growth of Twitter. By a long-shot. I don’t know about you, but I have enough trouble managing my karma as it is without someone else messing with it.
While I see increased use of FourSquare and Yelp, they too rely on rewarding you for activity. The simple reason is creating loyalty since the more eyeballs and activity increases the value of the ads sold on the site. But is it sustainable? Games like Mafia Wars and Farmville are but fads.
The question is, will loyalty marketing behavioral promotions be effective? Modifying peoples behaviour through marketing techniques is never easy and often a losing proposition.
(Author: G. Crouch, MD)
One of Canada’s top marketing minds, Mitch Joel, rightly asks that if the big companies and marketers have truly delved into the Social Media sphere, then is Social Media dead?
I wonder if perhaps the reverse is more true? Is marketing dying as a result of Social Media? Let’s face it, marketers walk an uneasy line of stretching the truth and so it’s no wonder that only 14% of people trust advertisements. As marketers, we’ve gone and shot ourselves in the foot.
Social Media is a ray of sunshine into media channels previously controlled by gatekeepers (editors, journalists, broadcast network owners)…and don’t they say sunshine is the ultimate disinfectant?
Each company that has waded into Social Media channels with a heavyweight or heavyhanded approach has suffered; Motrin, Nestle with Facebook (just this past week!), JetBlue, Rogers and so on.
It’s still far, far too early to make any concrete predictions when it comes to Social Media (no one is truly an expert yet in this space) and perhaps all we can say is that it will change. Quite significantly. People are only just finding their voices.
I suspect Social Media will thrive, while it is marketers (I’ve been one for nearly 20 years) will be the ones to suffer and businesses will adapt in whole new ways. Eventually. In the meantime, it’s going to be a rocky road…
What do you think?
(Author: Giles Crouch)
Reputation, Thunking•
on January 5th, 2010•
I had the pleasure of being right in the thick of the first Internet bubble from 1995-2001 and lived through the implosion, even building a small .com and selling it off a few months later. They were heady days. Flying all over creation raising capital and so on.
We made bold statements then. Such as “we’re the leader in…” or “we’re the leading global provider of…” and “world leader of…” or “market leading…” says who? Is there an international organization that carries little gold crowns around and anoints your company saying “thou art now the global leader in…” while the clouds roil and thunder strikes shivers of terror into your competitors? No. There isn’t.
Anyone can write these statements, hey, I did, back in the day. But then it was the pioneer days of the Web. There were so few competitors so if you had three clients, well, you pretty much were the leader. Especially if they were paying clients!
I saw a new social media consulting company that launched a few days ago, I won’t mention the name. The first statement on their site was “…is the leading provider of social media marketing worldwide…” I’m impressed. Only in business a week or so and already the leader. And points for gumption in putting themselves on a timeline of social media as the next big thing…wait, I thought they were already the leader. A VC friend of mine once said “those who have earned the title seldom, if ever, have to use it.” Kind of like silly marketing statements.
I write this blog entry because the more research we do on the social web, the more we see that citizens engaged in social media don’t buy these messages anymore. Stating your “world leader in…” goes along with other inane marketing statements like “best deal in town” or “your only chance to save” they’re tired and us marketers are to blame for it. Blogger and PR pro Sasha Halima offers some great insights into similar such failures. As consumers, these statements today cause suspicion, not conviction. If you’re going to make such a statement, you’d better have proof.
What do you think? What other inane marketing statements are there that drive you nuts?
(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director of the global market leading authority and provider of …oh, never mind…)
Best Practices•
on November 7th, 2008•
Peter Drucker said 40 years ago that a business need do only two fundamental things; market and innovate. With the advent of Social Media and it’s growing consumer adoption, the ability to “Market” has arrived. Over the years, business have only been able to “market” with a small “m”. So what’s the difference?
The practice of “marketing” for the past 60 years has been very one-way. A business saw marketing as either supporting sales directly as a function of sales or as creating awareness to drive sales leads. Even worse, sales was (and often still is) either pitted against marketing or valued higher than marketing, since marketing is often (wrongly) seen as a spend item and sales results can be measured faster and more quantitatively. True marketing is a managed investment, since the the ROI in marketing is longer term. That said, marketing had limited channels to broadcast it’s message (TV, radio, mail, print, Web 1.0) and the feedback channels to measure and obtain “input” for ROI analysis and revisions to strategy were even worse – focus groups (with inherent bias), phone surveys (high rate of false data), unsolicited snail mail or trade shows. In too many organizations it’s also sales vs. marketing so the two don’t trade data, creating a gap in understanding front line needs. So what does Social Media change?
The fundamental change in Social Media is that there is now a zero cost to the “market” a business is engaged with to communicate to the business. Conversely the marketer now has increased and often more targeted, ways of reaching their market. In the broader sense of a business, “marketing” a company is not just customer acquisition and retention anymore. A business should use “marketing” to attract new employees, retain employees, find investors, reduce retention costs, gain product insights and develop better integration with sales. In other words, for the first time ever, Social Media combined with traditional marketing channels enables a business to Market itself as the Whole Business – a holistic approach. And metrics can be put in place in each area of the business (Finance, Sales, Marketing, Administration and Operations) to understand the ROI. SMB’s will gain a huge advantage in this regard in the coming years.
If a business can Market itself as a whole entity, at lower transactional cost, then it can grow. By staying narrowly focused on it’s marketing activities, opportunities to new segments and true, real-time customer feedback are missed. This is a huge shift in thinking, best practices need to be re-invented, cultural shifts need to happen and the C-suite needs to adapt. It’s not easy and it represents risk. But it is also inevitable as Social Media adoption and usage by consumers who buy products and services will force this change. Once businesses start to see how they can Market themselves in so many ways, and measure it, a whole new approach to Marketing will evolve. This is just one way Social Media is changing business practices. What do you think?
(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Partner)
Best Practices•
on August 11th, 2008•
Tired of decreasing response rates to your email marketing efforts? Maybe you’re just noise like everyone else. Try leveraging a corporate blog by integrating your blog strategy with email marketing and you may find a whole new level of results. Here’s our experience:
We all receive a lot of emails in the run of a day. Next time you’re planning an email marketing campaign, think of how you use your email. Look at your own “inbox” and look to see how many marketing emails you subscribe to, and how many you open and read. I suspect the truth might disappoint you somewhat. Your customers think in a similar way.
So here’s a different approach. Continue the email marketing, but change the message and turn email marketing into a conversation spark. Print ads are a great example; the best ads say the least, yet spark a desire in us to buy, to investigate further or in other words – take action. Email marketing tactics can be leveraged with the same principle. The key here is understanding that email marketing is now just like a banner ad on a website, and its “interruptive” since people are online to “do” something, the Web is not passive like television – this is largely why banner ads don’t deliver good results.
Send your email, but use the principles of a print ad to create an action – the action being to drive them to the blog, not the usual Landing Page. Engage them in a conversation. Part of the reason email marketing messages fail is that as soon as you get such an email your first thought is “I’m being sold something.” So you filter them. You just know the email is going to send you to a Landing Page that’s going to pitch you a product – and you’re busy right now thank-you. It fails right out the gate for 98% of your target!
Using email to drive a prospect to a blog infers that there’s something “more” on the blog, since blogs are considered to be 2-way, the “sell” takes on a different tone. If you invite dialog on your blog, perhaps the prospect will say something there? That’s engagement, and you might also learn about a customer need, and be able to sell them more or handle an objection. So many companies send out emails today, it’s boring. Years ago businesses found high return rates over 8% from email marketing. Today email marketing is lucky to work like regular direct mail and deliver 1-3% responses.
We’re not saying stop the “direct sell” emails, but mix it up, engage the prospect. From the blog, you can drive them to relevant product pages. If they’re satisfied with the engagement in the blog, we’ve found they are 30% more likely to buy or give buying indicators. Your sales cycle is reduced, your leads are warmer and…you increase revenues! Blogs can be a powerful sales tool.
