AllOneWord

Forrester EMEA Marketing Forum 2009 notes

Last week Forrester ran their annual EMEA marketing forum, focused on the one thing that has dominated the marketing and business world over the last 18 months – the recession. There were two days of talks, primarily focused on digital innovation and techniques to surviving the downturn and thriving in the upturn.

 

The digital world has created consumer communities which unite people by their friendship groups, their interests, or even seemingly trivial things like their favourite coffee shop (Starbucks has over 5m Facebook fans) or their favourite sandwich spread (Nutella has 3.5m fans).

 

We can either ignore these groups and let them have conversations about your brand without participation, or we can embrace the fact that people have an interest in your brand and give them a reason to continue speaking about it, with the positive comments outweighing the bad.

 

We can’t forget that the two most common ways consumers communicate about brands is face to face (twice as likely as any online channel) and on the phone. Also, online display formats are the least trusted of all media channels (Nielsen Online Global Survey 2009). However, social media and modern technology can amplify all your comms in a cost effective way.

 

The major trends across the two days were as follows:

• Align around consumer groups – scrutinise the behaviours of your customer, find out what their conversations are and be a part of it. Gillette India knew that their customers loved nothing more than a good debate and an argument, so they created one – “what do women prefer, stubble or the clean-shaved look”. This activity led to a 40% increase in sales and 400% increase in awareness.
• Use consumers intelligence – it’s instant R&D and usually free – they’ll tell you what they like and what they don’t. www.MyStarbucksIdea.com is a great example of customers volunteering ideas for a brand and many have been actioned.
• Give consumers extra value – exclusive and interesting content shows an understanding of what your customers want and gives them an excuse to talk up the brand. Starbucks sent their CEO to coffee fields in the developing world which showed a huge insight and a degree of humility. According to Toyota, “You are what you share”…  and according to Starbucks, “your fans are your soldiers – arm them well”.
• Trust is crucial – let’s face it, banks have a lot to do when it comes to trust, but ING built their whole strategy around understanding their customers to gain their trust. They have done this through innovation in mobile and using their vast data resources for personalised and bespoke messaging. Virgin Atlantic have a course to help you get over your fear of flying – even with an iPhone app featuring Richard Branson himself – who will these travellers use in future?
• Be creative – Lego and Toyota have used augmented reality really effectively to demonstrate consumer understanding. The Toyota iQ was aimed at those with a passion for design, so this webcam app helped demonstrate the unique traits of the car such as a flat fuel tanks
• Be human – we know it is a difficult time right now but empathy and understanding go a long way. Hyundai gave customers money back guarantees if they were made redundant but also gave them the car interest free for an additional 3 months to help them find a job. This led to a 50% increase in market share and untold trust for the future
• Create a mobile strategy now! Current mobile internet penetration is the same now as PC internet was in 1999. Failing to form a mobile strategy now, is the same as refusing to develop online strategy 10 years ago – the same year Amazon and EBay were formed.
• Mobile is the only truly 24x7 digital device. The iPhone can play games, video, music, you can read books and maps, it has a camera and a video recorder – it is winning the share of wallet and the share of pocket / handbag.

 

From all of this the things we must remember are that the most successful companies are embracing social media and having long-tem conversations with their customers – it is not a “campaign” or short-term directive. Also, mobile is about to take off in a huge way and your clients must start considering how they might use it, even if they aren’t quite ready to take the plunge just yet.

 

All the seminars have been written up in detail, so let the digital strategy team know if any areas are of particular interest.

Finding a use for AR

Augmented reality is one of those things that seems super exciting but in practice isn't that easy to convert into viable, useful ideas. It's probably not the first thing you think about to promote postal services, but enter AKQA and suddenly you wonder why no-one has thought of the below before.  Excellent work.

The 2009 Digital Trend map

Every year a groovy design agency in Tokyo called Information Architects produce a Web Trend Map which attempts to a: Illustrate all of the important sites and people of the year and link them together with meaningful trends and b: show off how clever they are at fitting in so much information in to such a small space based on the Tokyo underground map. The above is far too small to read so the full size version is here.

Reading the map is very subjective but I think its interesting how much of the advertising line Google takes up ( about half of it), Microsoft accounts for much of the rest. We also see how the most important entities are at the centre, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are all there but also some that are more left field such as Firefox and ThePirateBay. The turquoise opinion line also has many of the better geek/tech culture blogs. I am not sure it tells us much new but it does provide a great structure into which we can place our ideas.

really useful apps

JP and I have been thinking about really useful apps lately for a client and his favourite is the Charmin Loo finder and grader - similar to the fantastically named SatLav from earlier in the year.  

I just stumbled across this app from Boxee - which turns your iphone into a remote control.  It's quite simple but a really good use of an iphone app and taps into the fact that boxee users are probably gadget lovers who would be more interested in merging two technologies, like boxee and the iphone, rather than having to buy a new piece of excess kit.  

My new addiction

Streetview.  How I love it.  Takes snooping to a whole new level.  Within minutes of its release i'd googled my house, my sisters house, my local pub, my favourite pub, my favourite shops, the man being sick outside Pool Bar, my friend Paul outside his office - the fun was endless.  And then after a while, I got a bit bored of it and went back to work (sorry JP...)

But not everyone likes streetview.  Not Pool Bar man, who has had that image taken down, or the man walking into an 'adult' shop.  Google have been very compliant and have promised to continue to remove any images that people oppose to.  Which means we will end up with a weird semi-mapping tool that has lots of gaps and blurred images which is a real shame.  Probably due to snoopers like me.  I find it a shame that digital innovation is now overshadowed by privacy issues in most cases.  Rather than commend the positives of digital mapping and visualization tools (all of

London

in your pocket, seriously how great is that?), they are instantly blasted for being intrusive, dangerous and encouraging crime.

 

However on the sunny side, I'm quite excited about the first streetview mash up and can't wait to see what people come up with and which advertisers get on board and start to use it as a customer or creative tool.  Imagine an augmented reality map that overlays the inside of houses or shows internal architectural structures like x-rays or secret underground tunnels for gamers.  No more getting lost looking for places on long streets – streetview it and you know what end number one is and number 300 is.  It could be an invaluable tool for estate agents with virtual walks around the neighbourhood, not to mention a cost cutting tool in place of bespoke photography.  Until then I’ll just have to make do with looking up my local.

What is a Living Room session?

Living Room III is the third installment of our Living Room project which we have been running for the past 5 years. We have run almost 300 client seminars in that time leading to dozens of campaigns in emerging channels and techniques.

Living Room III is very much about accelerating the process of change to create a common view of what’s important, what the communications challenges are in this new world and how we should approach these challenges.

 

The first part of this process is a step back to look at the broad trends in the media and communications landscape. Each presentation is bespoke and discursive, built around 4 themes which we have developed over the three versions of the project.  They are illustrated with technology demonstrations and case studies from relevant brands around the world.

 

The new themes are;

1. The Marketing Meta-verse - the impact of accelerating technology in creating immersive experiences

            2. The Content Cloud – the availability of content anywhere in any form

            3. The Social Graph - the structure of communities & social networks and             how messages move through them

            4. The Attention Economy - the business implications and the new                         economics of Media

 

The next stage can take one of several routes but each is focused on understanding the implications of change either through experimentation in new channels, a fundamental re-appraisal of communications strategies, an exploration of new commercial opportunities or even an understanding that change is not a requirement yet.  

 

The Living Room is part of our commitment to Continually Create Difference for our clients and as such we’d very much like to invite you and your team to use it as part of a strategy of change.

Social Media - Play Time is Over

In a recession, budgets are tightened, jobs are cut, and those who remain are expected to do more with less. Given this type of economic reality, it's surprising to hear of an industry reporting an increase in spending on anything, much less on something as new as social media. Yet that's exactly what's occurring. According to a new Forrester Research survey of 145 global interactive marketers in both B2B and B2C companies with more than 250 employees, the use of social media as a marketing tool is on the rise. What's more, Forrester reports that over 50% of marketers said they will be increasing their spending on social media marketing in the coming months.

Part of the reason for this increased spending is thanks to the low cost of social media tools. Compared with larger expenditures like that of advertising for example, social media requires much less investment. In fact, three-quarters of those surveyed who knew their budgets said they allowed for $100,000 or less for social media tools over a 12-month period.

It's also easier for firms to increase spending on social media applications because they aren't yet formalized line items in marketing budgets. Because of their relatively new and still somewhat experimental nature, marketers aren't necessarily predetermining the exact amount they'll spend on these types of applications. Instead, some marketers (45%) pull together funding for social media projects as needed while others (23%) scrape together funds from wherever possible to pay for their various social media efforts.

Yet despite the unconventional methods which are use to fund many companies' social media investments, 53% of marketers believe they will increase their spending on these initiatives over the next six months. Another 42% expects their investments to remain the same. That makes sense since almost all marketers surveyed were already using some form of social media, whether blogs, social networking sites, or user-generated content.

Unfortunately though, marketers who still fund social media projects only as experiments may be putting future initiatives on shaky ground. Without concentrating on measurable objectives, it will be difficult to justify further investment in the future. Businesses also need to understand that social media efforts should analyzed for effectiveness based on things like customer awareness through activity, interest through interaction, and intent to buy through registration and/or questions. These are the types of successes that social media can deliver; less important are traditional web analytics like page views.

Also key to long-term success in social media are having the necessary assets on-hand. For example, social media strategists and community managers should be dedicated resources.

To prove the value of social media to the business, Forrester recommends marketers start with a listening platform and then integrate social media marketing metrics like share of voice and engagement to demonstrate the value of these new tools.

Sounds like a broken record...

Do entertainment brands actually want internet consumers to buy their products?  With nearly 40million of us you'd think they'd be banging down our door, but apparently not.  First we had the collapse of Project Kangaroo - making it easier for consumers to watch internet TV was not high on the agenda.  Then Spotify ran into rights trouble and now Youtube have pulled a whole host of music videos after legal wrangling with the Performing Rights Society fell down.

 

Now I know that nothing good ever comes for free, but the idea of some sort of pre payment seems archaic?  The Youtube situation highlights how some brands just do not get the idea of content as currency.  Youtube are saying the fees charges by PRS are exorbitant - and when the top 10 videos watched on Youtube last year were mostly music videos, you can see why they are reticent to hand over the cash. However, as usual, it is the consumer that is losing out here and in turn the artist or brand.

 

Unable to watch the latest videos in a controlled environment, people will simple look for illegal options, or worst still not watch at all.  This may lead in extreme cases - and hopefully not - to lack of awareness and interest, followed by a fall in single, album and ticket sales.  Why the music industry doesn't understand the idea of free content as currency confuses me.  Ultimately it’s consumers who suffer and yet they are the ones that fund and facilitate the industry in the first place.

A Cloudy Day at Tech Crunch

Tech crunch hosted an interesting round table on cloud computing last week with:

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.com
Vic Gundotra, VP Engineering, Google
Amitabh Srivastava, Corporate VP, Windows Azure
Lew Tucker, CTO, Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems
Scott Dietzen, SVP Communications Products, Yahoo
Paul Buchheit, Co-founder, FriendFeed; creator of Gmail
Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon
Mike Schroepfer, VP of Engineering, Facebook
Gina Bianchini, CEO, Ning
John Engates, CTO, Rackspace

Will we really see the end of hardware, software and datacentres?  The discussion is over an hour long so I will post a synopsis once I get my head around it.

Twitter: Flavour of the month

The rise of Twitter seems to fit with the current news agenda, many sources are covering it. Shortlist have a cover article on Twitter this week and it makes regular appearances on news shows. Growth has been sharp after bubbling along in techie and social media communities we have seen usage escalate in the past 4 months. Steven Fry and the at the time very bored Jonathon Ross helped propel it in to the mainstream consciousness. Whats it all about what does it really mean? There is no one better to explain this than the Twitter CEO Evan Williams in this talk from February 2009 at the technology Entertainment and Design conference in California.

My take on all of this is that it is the flavour of the month, exponential growth is not sustainable so it will plateau and the media will probably turn on it; flash in the pan, yesterday news so 2008 etc etc.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Twitter Frenzy

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

Evan's talk does show how it can be sustainable in the long term, its a different kind of communication platform. I think it is a kind of media duct tape, you don't know why you'll need it but its good to be aware of it. unexpected events, local issues, sales micro marketing to a very small very influential group. If you have stock that needs to be gotten rid of at rock bottom prices then reward the people who are interested enough to follow you. Have an opinionated CEO? Give them a mouthpiece to speak to lonly those who want to hear. I doubt we will be seeing Twitter on the news much in 3 months time but micro packets of information easily distributed by on the fly structures of people with a temporary common interest are here to stay.