Creative Agency Secrets

One of my clients just got their very first email newsletter from a supplier. 

Oh my goodness, it is so DULL.  Here's the opening paragraphs

Welcome to the first edition of XYZ's Connections e-Newsletter, designed to provide timely information and tools to help your business run more efficiently.

The cornerstone of our first issue is exciting news about the global alignment of our organisation and the development of our powerful international processing platform, designed to help your business efficiently accommodate industry regulations and technological advancements.

 I have changed their name to protect the innocent and deadly communications advisor who must be surely about to lose his job for sending out such twaffle. 

Apart from being rather far behind the curve for newsletters (albeit sending it by email is vaguely 21st Century) This communication sucks. 

It's full of corproate-speak, management consultant catchphrases and has a TOTAL LACK of orientation around the customer.

Why would my client be interested in the "global alignment" of their organisation.  WIIFM? 

PS here's the text from the rest just to make you cringe further. The first sentence reminds me of a ghastly corporate mission statement written by Peter Jenner for Erdman Lewis while I worked there "Anticipating the needs our our clients, we bla bla bla…."

As we continue to add value to your business, we will provide you with industry-leading support and service. That is why each issue of Connections will connect you with valuable information about security, compliance and innovative solutions to help maximise your operational and financial efficiencies. We hope Connections helps you stay connected to your payments processing operations and the robust solutions XYZ offers.

Many thanks to Mireira Fontbernat from Qik who has uploaded video of the three speakers this morning (and a little bit of me doing introductions).

Bloggers reactions: FreshNetworks' Helen Trim 

Charlie Robertson of Red Spider 

Quentin Boyes of Honeycomb Software  

Sadly the one of Andrew Howells of Zype didn't come out…. darn phone reception. 

I am hosting my third breakfast event.  "Should Brands be Broadcasters?" on Wednesday 18th June, 2008 at One Alfred Place 

I run these breakfasts in order to showcase new ideas and innovative marketing thinking.  Past speakers include Adriana Lukas on Social Media and Mark McGuinnes s on the Enneagram. 

Three speakers will give their unique points of view on this issue:

Charlie Robertson, Red Spider speaking on extending brand strategy to the online world

Sign up here to come along!

PS if anyone is willing to blog the gig for me, please get in touch! 

I have been given sight of the Forrester report "The Connected Agency " Feb 8th 2008.  And it spells gloom and death for the current traditional agency business model.

Definition of a CA is

An agency with a deep understanding of consumer communities, helping brands create and nurture connections, deliver targeted, on-demand messages, and network for talent and insights. 

Key points and the impact on your biz dev methods are:-

• Data - if you aren't deeply into collecting it (audiences as well as prospective clients) start now.  Great databases, good data insight professionals and the means to interrogate with tools like DataCentre.
• Communities - get into the groups online who are talking about your brands, products, clients, marketplaces.  Lurk and read.  Then participate.  Prepare to lead the conversation.  Conversational (closed loop) marketing is the future.  Dialogue, listening, endless conversations not 'campaigns' will be your metrics.
• Analytics - The authors particularly berate the lack of 'left-brain' mathematical and statistical skills in the industry.  These are key to analytics, segmentation and customer insight.  Buy in and develop these skills for your team.
• Stop-Start Campaigns die and continuous customer conversations rule driven by account managers at the heart of the conversational community.  Be prepared to go to your prospective brand clients and demonstrate your connections into their target audiences, what matters to the audience will drive creative not what the agency thinks up.
• So start by knowing the target markets you work in, browse the blogs, forums, message boards and listen carefully.  [If you don't work in a niche, get one.  Fast]
• Use this online audience for research, find your early connectors, mavens, critics, UGC creatives and make friends with them.  Test campaign ideas on them.
• Have your own "private" marketing funnel that can generate early WOM adoption or buzz.  Not got one?  Give me a call.
• Start planning initiatives (not campaigns) to that audience group from a range of brands - who all want the same audience.  Force collaboration among brands but driven by customer needs.
• Beware auctions.  They will grow and the lowest price point will probably win.  If you are not yet offering a low cost solution to your clients, find a way to deliver it.  (ideas: use young staff as training, outsource to lower cost locations [USA? China, India, Australia, NZ] and find ways to use technology to streamline process and use fewer people)

[and they used the word 'nonfungible' that according to my Dictionary doesn't exist!  Now that's leading edge progress.]

 Media planning works on prices driven by the nonfungible metrics of audience, circulation, and page iews, complicating the decision about where marketers should allocate media budgets.

(or five huge egos at one table….)

Chris Heuer   Partner,   The Conversation Group
Tara Hunt   Co-Founder,   Citizen Agency
Jeremiah Owyang  Forrester
Deborah Schultz   Founder/Chief Catalyst,   deborahschultz.com
David Parmet   Owner,   Marketing Begins At Home LLC
Hugh MacLeod   Grand Pooh-Bah,   gapingvoid.com

How to market into community without appearing totally overbearing?
How do you build the community around what you are doing for your company?

TH - the more I gave away my expertise the more expertise I seemed to get.   this giving away stuff led me to give my time to creating new communities (barcamp and co-working). People open up their offices and lives to me when I do this.  Social capital - the value of the relationships and your reputation. We are raising our own social capital with what we are doing. online it is about how much you can give away - the best way to get your own stuff you should give more away to help others.  You need a patronage model of people in large companies who are prepared to pay for it.

CH - you need a way to sustain your life as well as giving things away free.  Tools creating for Web 2.0 is democratising and enabling good to be given back. 

HM - STormhoek - sent out 200 bottles of wine to bloggers who asked for it from Hugh's website.  And then they sponsored the geek dinners.I never thought of the drinkers as 'the stormhoek community' it was just wine drinkers - but the conversations happening around the wine were interesting.  Social gestures beget social objects and these beget social markers.  The new N95 and IPhone are territorial demarcations in the phone geek community.

DS - spend your marketing budget by getting out and meeting customers e.g. go to conferences and see what's happening at the fringe.  Find the customers who love you and talk to them.  In start-ups you have a low ratio of employees: customers don't put up an FAQ, use humans to answer questions.  This is smart marketing and customer support.  FAQs are for big organisations. (more…)

[I only caught the end of this talk because I got lost trying to find a way up to the 4th level from the 3rd (don't ask it really did happen!) and Dierdre Walsh was sitting by the door and sent me her notes. Cheers, Dierdre]

Overview: Marketers can no longer interrupt users with advertisements and other materials thanks to technology advancements like TIVO. Now, we need to engage users.

Here are some helpful guidelines:
(more…)

Key learning:
Community is Grown not built. “building community” is for architects not online. Read the wisdom of crowds. And build the tools people can use and trust them to use appropriately.

You may remember Fray from very old web. Derek started it in 1996 as a live story telling site. Each story ended with the question “when has this happened to you?” . This started his interest in community online and how to invite participation.

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro” Hunter S Thompson

Today the web enables people to get exposure that used to the exclusive preserve of adults, authorities and experts. So what can you do if you want crowds on your site?

| View | Upload your own

Content owners have 3 lies they tell themselves when confronted with free content:

1. Everyone on the net is an idiot.

2 Good stuff is too hard to find

3. You can’t make any money.

1. Everyone on the net is an idiot… for past 10 years the mainstream media only focused on this. But refute it using Google – value based on number of links to pages… proxy for votes and voters are important. Kim Pedersen’s Backyard Monorail – 300 feet of track costing $4000. He shares what he knows for free – created a community of shared interest. Wikipedia because it was the first makes it a bad site to copy, now. But the small community of editors who do the most (0.7% of users) are key to small edits/spell checkers (tend the Drafted Postsgarden) and new users who post substantive new articles.

2. Good stuff is too hard to find. Traditional ways of finding good stuff is human editors (magazines / newspapers), non-traditional editors took this and applied to the web (Amazon where users were reviewers) and moderators. Computers took on the task (text search), Google’s page rank (more sophisticated weighted by incoming link) and technorati. But the middle path of hybrid using both human and computers is where most of the opportunity lies today (Flickr interestingness, community vote and best of both). Flickr algorithm is voting by actions (going to look at photos). Displayed by leader board by day. This created a competition and people trying to gain the system. Later they made a 7 day version, recent randomised of 9 images.

The Wisdom of crowds – the number 1 book to read. It is about how people can use groups to be smart. Summarised as selfish behaviour aggregated for a common good. The interaction is simple – key. Simple questions. “did you like this?”. You need diversity across the spectrum to make this work. But selfishness is important – design for selfishness [we think our products are awesome and anyone who disagrees is an idiot!] High on our own supply. If you can create a desire for the user to put their voice onto something you may succeed. Rewards can be ego or money.

Assignment Zero using wiki software collaboration with Wired Magazine – crowdsouring stories. The crowd didn’t want to participate by writing stories. So they changed to asking for research… asked people to sign up for interviews (instant response!). Doing an interview was a simple task compared to writing something. Read a list of people and decide to take action by asking a few questions… their editors condensed into print-worthy text. Using crowdsourcing as a cost-saving measure doesn’t work. Communities must be cultivated, respected and managed if they are to create economic value” Jeff Howe who coined the phrase crowdsourcing.

3. You can’t make any money. Threadless is a great example – t shirt store with no designers, just an interface. The best get printed, bought. A trusted middle man. Golden tag in 1 shirt per 1000 (Willy Wonker thing), member forum for people who’ve won in the past… cultivating a winner class. Have a plan with good answers ready for when you get ‘busted’!

Derek's new startup Pixish – bringing the threadless happiness to any image based contest. Cautionary tales – Yahoo games Wii site…. create niche sites pulling stories, photos and stuff tagged Wii including a strip of photos from Flickr. They didn't’ give the users any way of opting out… all sorts of things tagged Wii including Yahoo sucks, baby weeing etc… It wasn’t a legal reason. Because there was no clear way to opt out users rebelled. Copious opt ins and opt outs are needed. Need a group opt in. GM Tahoe Apprentice Campaign. User generated content to make an advert…. but users put their own captions on “Waaa? No iPod plug-in??” and you could only use their existing photos and videos… you could add text over the video. “We paved the prairies” and “The ultimate padded cell! “Global warming isn’t a pretty SUV ad”, “The Earth is now your bitch!”. They designed for their own selfishness not the participant. Narrow scope of creativity – text only. Content was greedy – couldn’t export to any other place….YouTube or your site. The audience was wrong – this should have been just GM owners not the entire internet! Cf Saturn owners club. But it worked.. really well. the microsite had 600k visitors in 3 weeks with an average 9 minutes online and many visited Chevvy.com too which was what they wanted.

Community is Grown not built. “building community” is for architects not online.

How to do it. 5 steps

1. Give people tools they want
2. Trust them to do good
3. Reward good contributions
4. Punish bad contributions
5. Expect the unexpected

(more…)

Had a fantastic evening (I always do) at the BIMA dinner “The future for PR in a digital World” with Jamie Galloway, Director of Digital Media, from COI speaking.

I took a couple of clients Hugh Birley from Lexis and Lorraine Jenkins from Wildfire PR (sadly got blown out last minute by Mat Morrison). We made up a strong PR contingent separate from the mainly digi-types otherwise represented!

Jamie spoke based on some work he’s done for the Cass Business School a dissertation about how clients have created silos of information based on the medium of delivery - TV, Press, Digital and this leads to isolation of messages and confulsion for consumers. Overall he thinks OTL agencies now have a decreasing influence on the marketplace

In his Governmental world, ministers are leading conversations on how we should engage with social media. [this is far more advanced than I had expected]. Traditional agencies are not aware of online conversations that are happening and this represents risk to them and theiur clients who rely solely on their guidance for marketing execution. In his view, the Government needs tio be where the conversations are happening.

In Jamie’s view, PR specialists are fantastic at research and crafting a message. They understand issues, message immediacy and have a great ability to react fast. And good PR is both open and consultative. Therefore PR people are a ‘helpful’ runway for advertising, particularly digital advertising. In fact, it’s a perfect skills fit.

Agencies should be working to integrate more closely with PR. [Mark Adams, working with me at Pembridge, tried hard to persuade Advertising agencies to buy PR teams and clearly he was ahead of his time because he failed to find buyers from OTL businesses.]

Interesting job movers - Jimmy an ex-10 Downing Street webmaster has joined Freud Communications. Antony Mayfield is at Spannerworks. Daniele Fiandaca from Profero didn’t wholly agree saying that PR techniques don’t work online. And Jamie agreed but countered with the observation that advocacy for brands works best when it comes from a PR agency much more effective than from a digital or online media agency.

Further clarifying the fit between PR and digital, Jamie cited the tight targetingt of audience research and understanding, the ability to build networks offline where PR is good and online where digital leads. PR is less good aty measurement compared to online where he thinks the ‘gold standard’ has been set. [this squares with Andrew Walmsley in Marketing this week who says “The easy results achieved by search in improving the accountability and effectiveness of advertising have created one of the marketing phenomenons of the century.”]

Jamie also likes the fee structure of PR agencies where they are pre-agreed or set as hourly rates enabling realy understanding where value is applied. And there’s an active involvement at senior level. Hugh Birley agreed with this saying that when PR works well it is because it’s honest counsel.

Felix Velarde asked how online copes with negative PR and Jamie said that he thought this was untapped opportunity because PR agencies aren’t looking at this area. It is important to know when to respond and when not to. Print media has to check its sources but online (blogging) media does not have the same responsibility. Mike Teasdale reminded us that Amazon is now a social media space because new listings now attract reviews from people with real names not avatars and they are rated as reviewers. You can clearly see the % of good and bad reviews.

Clare O’Brien agreed saying that there is a time and a place to respond and she advises her clients to ‘pick their battles’. Being in an immature industry populated by ‘excited’ people, wading in has its risks. This can lead to cul de sacs and pointless arguments [what Mike called “Dad Dancing”!!! touche]

To summarise “Digital offers high involvement strategies to PR in real time” and its important to know where the conversations are going on.

Some musings….on Networking and technology…..

I received a link to an academic “paper” written about networks by a group of keen MBA students. Intellectualising what is currently happening and really giving me zero insight into what I might do next with my networks…. but here’s the link if you want to read it yourself.

Lloyd has been thinking about tagging on photos and whether this can be both good and bad. And why it links neatly into social objects and how they get used online.

And while working with a client this week, I wrote a summary about social objects (and I was at the NMK conference where Jyri mentioned them and have been reading Hugh on the subject regularly since).

I was thinking a bit on the theory of WHY digital customer engagement is becoming so compelling and HOW data connects brands to potential consumers in both B2B and B2C.

Social Objects are a useful means of creating lasting customer engagement on websites and other digital media.

Background on Social objects from Jyri Engstrom (who I heard talk about it at NMK) The slides are at the bottom of the page and here’s a video.

This blends sociology theory with the real stuff happening on the web today. It explains why we find social media sites compelling and keep returning to them. This takes on from the CRM ideas of Don Peppers and Martha Rogers who, when discussing how to Interact with customers, recommend allowing the customer to dictate how and when they want to communicate with you and the medium for that communication. On social media sites this is the starting point for the ‘conversation’. [I prefer the word conversation to interact - which is rather sterile and sound pre-planned or managed]. And the key difference between social media and CRM is that the brand DOES NOT control the conversation - but it may participate, initiate and guide. Just like a trusted friend or adviser.

And so what are the ‘verbs’ that can apply to your website? How can it be a place for customers to return and visit frequently?

Hugh McLeod has worked hard to continue to promote Jyri’s ideas. He has developed his own ideas on what are social objects and the link is a list of great suggestions. And an application of a social object to blogging.

For this site, I hope that the social object is “Learning about business development”.
Commentary on what makes a social object in a marketing context (there’s a lot here… so read it last).

If there is enough interest, I’d be keen to have a pub drink and chat session to discuss Social Objects for biz dev folk…. let me know if you want to come along.

More anon.

Are you involved in any customer loyalty schemes?  Do any of your clients  use loyalty and repeat purchase campaigns to improve sales?

Take a look at this email I just got from Lovefilm.  I’m a customer - have been for two years.  it is a great service.

For a while they’ve been offering member get member schemes with 3 months free use and a voucher.  But today, I think they have begun to learn more about the possibilities of connecting up customers with others.

I got the email below…. and in case anyone out there fancies joining their programme, here’s my reward link!

Five more things that Lovefilm could do to improve the loyalty and community aspects of their marketing programme:

1. Enable ‘friends’ groups on lovefilm so you can see what your friends are renting and how they are rating rental movies
2. Set up a facebook application to improve movie rating data sharing
3. When launching any new programme within the overall marketing campaign, find the early adopters and offer them additional incentives to participate.
4. Make sure the database has categorisation for members by value and by needs.
5. Improve personalisation in weekly email newsletter - what is the ‘next’ thing you want me as a customer to do in order to improve my participation (they currently offer polls, ‘user collections’ i.e. lists, and quizzes) add in a few more features with the opportunity to connect to friends who are also lovefilm customers and compare notes.

Enough about Lovefilm.  What about your customers?

Run a quick check on which of your clients repeat purchase.  What do you do for them to make it easier to buy and re-buy?  What additional features can you offer to enhance the experience of buying from your business (recognition, gifts, rewards, community features, plugins to favourite sites, recommendations).

Start planning the long term “conversation” your marketing will drive with your customer base.  Here’s how:

1. Set the vision
2. Outline the ideal customer profile
3. Categorise current customers according to value and needs
4. Plan marketing communications as a sequence of exchanges - each interaction promts the next question and answer.  All designed to discover the customer category and hence their likely needs and what you can try to sell to them.

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