Posts filed under ‘digital’
since when did clicking ‘like’ become the price of beginning a conversation?
I got a press release from Lemsip’s digital agency the other day, rather belatedly letting me know about their ‘It’s a Man’s Flu’ facebook campaign. I dutifully headed over there to have a look…but you couldn’t have a play with it unless you ‘liked’ the page first
It’s not just Lemsip, they’re all at it. The new Justin Timberlake film In Time, Yeo Valley, Heinz baked beans, Innocent Drinks, BMW and so on all require a Like for access.
Brand manager’s (and sometimes their digital agency’s) obsession with racking up as many Likes as possible doesn’t seem to be abating, but now they’re increasingly using clicking Like as the price of entry to interact with their content or receive special offers.
But I thought social media was all about having conversations? And the last time I checked, I didn’t have to offer a public endorsement of someone I’d recently met before we could start having a chat. After all, I might need the chat to know if they’re the kind of person I’d like to be friends with anyway.
It feels like brands want consumers to pay for access with Likes. Which means that there will be higher expectations of this ‘paid’ content and a relationship that has been wrong footed from the start.
In fact recent research suggests that over half of US facebook users expect to gain access to exclusive content, events or sales after “liking” a company, while a similar amount also expect to receive discounts or promotions. In the same piece of data, a quarter of users disagreed that marketers should interpret “like” to even mean they are a fan or advocate of the company.
As I’ve posted before, I only feel a real connection with maybe a dozen or so brands – and therefore don’t feel the need to Like everything in my wardrobe, kitchen and medicine cupboard.
You could of course argue that putting this content behind a wall is a way of rewarding brand advocates. But it doesn’t do much for those other consumers that the brand should really be wooing to eventually perhaps win a coveted space in their list of Likes.
the *other* facebook marketplace
My facebook newsfeed has recently turned into a virtual version of exchange & mart (or even, say, ebay).
It seems that some people are more comfortable buying and selling with friends-of-friends than from random strangers who have positive feedback from other random people (cough, ebay). So my network are merrily flogging second hand cars and horse rugs (hundreds of rugs, the local riding club fb wall looks like Rugs R Us at the moment).
pic from here (randomly, just as I found this image I got a text from a mate inviting me on a trip to this very shop)
I suppose it’s an organic development of the whole social shopping thing, but these people aren’t doing it via facebook marketplace. They’re selling only to their network (with face to face payment and delivery) and in doing so are effectively trading outside the system.
I checked and there isn’t a single horse rug for sale on fb marketplace within 10 miles of me. Just sayin…
if owned online spaces are a house party, most brands should be out on the town
I had an, erm, lively conversation with a client recently when they suggested connecting with their target audience by “doing something with our facebook page”. Since I’d just spent the preceding ninety minutes telling them that the majority of their customers really wern’t that bothered about or engaged with their brand and mostly bought it mainly because it tastes quite nice, I felt a ‘build it and they will come’ approach to online marketing was perhaps a bit flawed.
I think brand owners as a whole currently are having trouble getting their head around the idea that most of their customers and broader target audience won’t want to have a relationship with their brand. They just don’t want to engage. They’re not interested and are busy doing other stuff.
Think about it, how many brands do you buy or consume on a weekly basis? Are you likely to make an effort to interact with each and every one of them?
There’s probably half a dozen brands you feel a real connection to and another dozen you’d Like on facebook but that’s it. For the majority of brands, concentrating on doing online stuff in your brand’s ‘owned’ online spaces is like throwing a house party and expecting every bloke you’ve ever fancied to turn up.
The challenge for brands with low engagement audiences is to provide interesting, helpful and relevant stuff in an environment their customers are already hanging out at. That’s why the NHS does stop smoking roadshows at supermarkets and why O2 Gurus was a good idea. Translating this to online still means working with partners, they just might be bloggers, media partners or entertainment brands.
To stretch the analogy, if you’re on the lookout for a boyfriend, you’re more likely to find one by venturing out to a bar or friend’s dinner party than if you invite your mates round again to watch X Factor.
with social media lowering the bar, are some businesses doing themselves more harm than good?
There are an awful lot of businesses and brands out there doing the whole Social Media thing rather badly.
Getting Marketing Wrong isn’t a new phenomenon, I only have to look at the dross which drops though my letterbox from Indian takeaways, landscape gardeners and cleaning services to see that there are a lot of smaller businesses out there Doing Their Own Marketing who need help (like that dress shop I blogged about before).
But social media is so accessible, affordable and easy to get started with that the entry requirements rule out almost no-one. Which means that the over-confident wade in without a clue of How To Do It.
Take my local horse rug washing company. They have a facebook page which I happily liked. Then the founder (met her once, spoke on the phone twice) sent me a friend request on facebook. She obviously hadn’t twigged the public/semi private differentiation between pages and people.
The fab transcription service I always use seems to see twitter as some kind of occasional use broadcast tool for sales messages and still has an egg as their avatar.
And then there’s the frankly worrying number of marketing agencies (who really should know better) out there with a blog that hasn’t been updated in months – perhaps one of those cobbler’s-children-having-no-shoes situations?
It’s just so easy to set up a twitter account, blog or facebook page that I suspect some of those happily doing so are doing their brands or businesses more harm than good.
taxis get a pizza the action
At the end of a night out over the bank holiday I called my favourite taxi company Amber Cars to take me home. They’re my favourite as they have a fancy computer system that sends you a text to say your taxi is waiting outside (so no hanging around outside the bar trying to avoid drunk weirdos) and then there’s a screen inside the car showing your name and destination so you know you’ve got into the right vehicle (they have 200+ cars so often have several waiting outside the same bar).
But Amber have taken it to another level. Not only did they text me with the make, model, colour and reg of my waiting taxi, but they also sent this:
Local, needstate specific cross-selling. I love it.
online is all about when and in what context people experience
One of the things I’m increasingly finding online is that I’m experiencing stuff that was produced at different times but collides in the same timeframe for me.
Like this video for google mobile (via AdAge and I’m warning you its nine minutes longer than the joke is funny), explaining how cool it is that you can ‘search for things nearby without entering your location’, which is illustrated by searching for pizza in cities all over the world:
Except that this week I also saw this older video from the American Civil Liberties Union (via Neil and Wired) panicking about technology, civil liberties, loss of privacy and its implications for, say, ordering pizza:
The outlook for Christmas 2010 is digital
The predicted top ten best-selling toys for Christmas 2010 have been announced – and they’re all basically digital (whatever happened to creative play?). The maddest of them all is Barbie Video Girl, who has a video camera lens in her necklace and playback screen embedded in her back:
It looks like we’re going to have a Digital Christmas all ways round. Not only will we be gifting digitally themed gifts, we’ll be buying them online. Depending on which report you read, between a quarter and half of us plan to spend more online this Christmas, reassured by good customer service experiences in Xmas 09.
According to The Centre for Retail Research and Kelkoo, the first Christmas where 50% of festive purchases are made online will be December 2015 (assuming a 24% online growth rate) or 2021 (if growth is slower at 16%). And that doesn’t include purchases that are researched online but bought in a real, live shop.
Internet Retailing’s research suggests that a lot of this growth is going to come from late adopters to online shopping, primary the 45+ age group. But this age group are also particularly prone to researching purchases online before buying offline. In fact, more than 70% of them did so in Christmas 2009.
The challenge for online retailers is going to be differentiating between buyers (who are planning to purchase online) and browsers (who are researching with a view to buying offline at a later date). For example, if you’re an offline retailer with an online presence, how do you provide an easy purchase experience for buyers while catering for browsers and directing them to store. And how on earth do you go about tracking conversions of these online browsers into offline buyers?
Hate hospital food? Bupa suggests you go private.
Via caterersearch.com’s Kitchen Rat blog I came across tumblog hospital food, which encourages patients to submit pictures of their ‘delicious’ hospital meals such as this:
At the bottom of the page, there was this great example of online media placement:
printing the internet out and squirting it into things
From the Lift Conference (via @rooreynolds) comes Russell M* Davies’ talk ‘printing the internet out and squirting it into things’ (can’t embed here, sorry).
Really worth watching, especially for his thoughts on analogue friction, information design, the ubiquity of screens, turning data into physical things, exploring the recently easy and other phrases with which to impress the digital guru in your life.
(*The ‘M’ is presumably because he’s got sick of being confused with the Dr Who bloke…)
photo by Stephanie Booth on flickr, CC applies
Planning is still all about the conversation
Northern Planner Andrew wrote last week about why a digitally flavoured agency needs planning.
Which prompted me to comment on his post that I had a post of my own chuntering about in my head about how the maturation of Digital might have created a bit of a conflict between Account Planning and Channel Planning. So here it is:
Ten or twenty years ago (depending on the size of agency and it’s geographical location), Account Planning was the Best New Business Tool Ever Invented (© Jay Chiat). Every agency that was big enough to afford it bought into Planning and put Insight at the heart of it’s business. Then all the big clientside brands put Insight at the heart of what they did too (Nike even hired W&K’s Head of Planning).
And then, in the last couple of years, Digital finally came of age.
Suddenly, there were media and channel options that were measurable yet also cool and cutting edge. In a recessionary environment, it was the answer to client’s prayers – the ability to do activity that was edgy yet ROI-able.
Every agency with a passing knowledge of HTML proclaimed themselves Digital Specialists. So the agencies that really did get Digital upped their game and put some real rigour into the process, introducing proper Channel Planning for their clients.
It almost becomes a numbers game – work out how much stuff you need to sell / how many people you need to change behaviour and work back from there in terms of conversion rates, click through and so on.
But Digital is still about Conversations. Its all very well identifying what the touchpoints are where you could have these conversations – but you need to know what people are likely to want to talk about too. Which is where Account Planning comes galloping back in, waving qual reports.
As Northern says, “Digital stuff hasn’t changed people, its simply enabled them to be more human…humans are social creatures and can’t help responding to others around them, wanting to belong to a group and acting social.
“In other words, it’s not enough to know the technology, you have to know people. You have to build ideas around how real people behave, be relevant, interesting, know when to show up, how to fit into their lives.”
Its chicken-and-egg. What comes first? – finding out where your target audience are most likely to be hanging out, or working out what messages will engage them?
I just worry that as digital becomes an integral part of everything (rather than simply a channel), we might sometimes forget that it is still all about the conversation.
