Guardian Changing Media Summit 07
Thanks to Mike Butcher for this summary of a conference I couldn’t get to.
But I just loved this part of his write-up - especially the bit at the end about brands.
• The session on “brand engagement in the digital age”
was full of the usual marketing platitudes, with one of the few quotes
being lifted from Jeff Bezos, who said the ratio of spending 70% of
your budget on marketing and 30% in creating a good service will
reverse over the next 20 years. Over in the “Radio in the multiplatform
era: how are listeners consuming?” session Suw twittered:
“Radio panel seems to be a bit of a stats-fight. Who cares who was
first to podcast? Question is, are they any good?” And possibly some
conference controversy as Antony Mayfield
was asked to ’stop typing’ by a delegate who appears not to
understanding someone might be blogging a conference about changing
media… Perhaps she didn’t get the memo.The brands panel heated up later on during Q&A, when people
started to mention - almost in passing - that monitoring blogs and
online discussion about your brands was important. Sue Elms of Sue
elms, executive vice president, global media practice, Millward Brown
said that despite all this talk about brands losing control to social
media, brands must not lose confidence and should “continue in a
leadership role.” She quoted a a survey in the States which said 7% of
people go onto blogs and online community to find out about brands.
Only 25% of people trust blogs about brands. “That’s quite small.” 55%
of people ask friends and relatives about a brand “in the pub. That’s
always gone on and will continue to go on.” [Stop me if I’m wrong, but
isn;t that the point here. A few years ago, that 25% figure was zero,
so the trend is upwards and smart tech firms are making all this stuff
easier to aggregate and track for the ‘ordinary people’. I mean maybe
Google, for instance? How many of us just Google to get the low-down on
a brand. The panel didn;t seem to touch on this much, perhaps because
SEO and PPC is too geeky a topic].
Too bl**dy right, Mike!
Here’s what I have done recently with clients. (tip: if you haven’t done this for yourself yet… do it!)
1. Get a PR agency to use Google News to track their client mentions online (blogs and news)
2. Demonstrated how the SEO on a site determines relevancy to search terms and how important it is to be at the top of the list.
3. Discussed what to do when someone writes something nasty about you or your client (shock horror)
4. Reviewed the options open to a company when a similarly-named organisation chooses a domain name which is the same as theirs but with a different dot extension.
As an aside. I do check myself out regularly via the main search engines. Don’t you?