Awesome, lovely superb…. just finding which social media sites exist today is hard but having to chase round and research available ‘names’ on each one for a new client – time consuming.
Thank heavens for the wonderful people at NameChk.com
They do the grunt for you.
Now all I need is to go register the name…. there’s a handy text download file option that gives you the URL you could get for each one.
Just don’t expect me to know what they all do!
NameCheck social media name availability
We are members of the Open Rights Group, ORG and their really helpful newsletter gives updates on the lobbying work they do to preserve and promote your rights in the digital age. For a £5 monthly subscription, you can support their excellent work – from which we all benefit.
Here’s an extract from their recent email about Privacy.
Ignoring an EU decision, Ed Vaizey has not required that advertising agencies ask customers to opt-in before using tracking cookies to collect their data. Instead, he’s stated that people can ensure they “consent” by changing their browser preferences. How someone can give “consent” without knowing what’s happening, and be expected to withdraw consent when they work out what browser preferences are, is beyond us. …Read more
There are great discussions in the comments thread from Owen Blacker, Gervase Markham and Jim Killock – we recommend you read them.
This has obvious implications for lead generation and reverse IP mapping for business development experts.
How big does your company need to be before you use marketing professionals?
For brands who are growing and becoming profitable there comes a time when you choose to professionalise your marketing. Many businesses decide at this point that they have two choices: to hire a staffer or to buy in expertise from an agency.
Why you need better marketing
The needs are clear – you want more traction with your marketing, you suspect that there are better ways of doing promotion and marketing to get inbound leads and you can afford a budget just for marketing. These are good signs.
You have identified clearly that your brand has a need and the possible shortcomings of your current set-up.
Hire versus buy: the dilemma
There are advantages and disadvantages – the internal member of staff will need to have well-rounded skills in a range of marketing disciplines (web, advertising, PR, copywriting, print design) and therefore a senior hire with this range of skills is more expensive than a junior.
Using an agency also requires decisions about their skills and area of expertise compared with the type of marketing and communications activity your brand has done in the past or plans to do in the future.
Costs are usually the determining factor
It may be less costly to hire external advisers compared to the cost of a senior member of staff – compare the full cost of hiring and paying (including office costs) a new senior marketer with the price an agency would charge you.
Have a couple of ‘chemistry’ or getting-to-know-you meetings with local marketing agencies and ask their advice. Also ask to speak to a couple of their recent clients to see if they also made the same transition.
A third option worth reviewing is using a freelancer. You don’t have the full hire costs of a full time person but can often get very experienced people at lower fee rates. Check out the freelance hire websites like eLance.com and Freelance.com, Freelancer.com and guru.com. I’ve successfully hired people for my agency and for clients using eLance.
Creative Agency Secrets has two current clients who use us for mentoring work. They hired a junior marketer and we speak weekly to review their work, priorities and give guidance. Could this work for you? Give us a call – we always offer a free 20 minute first call.
In the meanwhile here are a few other articles that may help you figure out what to do
- Advertising – do it yourself or hire
- Hire a PR firm or do it yourself?
- Do it yourself internet marketing, or hire
- Hubspot offers inbound marketing tutorials for people using its website / content marketing system.
- Read Creative Agency Secrets’ assessment of Hubspot and how to do it yourself
- SEO do it yourself or hire a professional
- Small Business marketing – DIY or hire a pro?
- Web design – do it yourself or hire someone
- DIY or hire a market research company?
How much do marketers and their agencies need to know about technology. Code is now on a par with content.
- Allison Mooney, head of trends and Insights, Marketing Google
- Ben Malbon, Director of Strategy, Creative Lab Google
- Matt Galligan, SimpleGeo
- Rob Rasmussen, Tribal DDB
- Rick Webb, The Barbarian Group
#agileagency
How much do marketers and their agencies need to know about technology. Code is now on a par with content.
Rasmussen - campaigns aren’t dying but seasonal work continues. Campaigns work on top of the platform of engagement. We try to do it backwards – all the funding is against campaigns especially media buying not spend on platforms.
Webb - Platform = brand; Campaign = products
Malbon - at BBH we tried to dismantle the “masterpiece mentality” of it had to be perfect before we show it to colleagues let alone clients. Tech companies are better at killing stuff that doesn’t work.
Webb - campaigns are humdrum.
Malbon - Tech companies make things that last much longer than a campaign, which lasts 5 minutes
Mooney – creative is being tested on YouTube by BMW.
Rasmassen - it’s almost backwards to create it and later push out to channels… reverse the order the core idea rather than individual executions.
Galligan - FourSquare and Amex combined deals so Amex built a tech platform to enable this it’s more than a campaign because it uses multiple platforms and FourSquare happened to be launch partner – they’ll extend it to others later. It was an experiment the first implementation. Take interesting bits and remove the poorly performing parts and go on. Software companies have one core concept we stick to one thing that we do.
Webb - software companis need marketing and Brands can’t take it back like software can.
Galligan - Marketing is every aspect of what you do as a tech company. E.g. Twitter began as Twittr and was a hideous purple website. Someone turned that brand round. The danger is to think the core product is what matters. We market as a consumer internet comp[any even though we don’t deal with consumers
Malbon - Three things in summary
- Software companies need agencies to capture and distill the culture. Because inside tech the world is your company. Agencies can do this and understand who you’re designing for.
- Importance of having untethered creatives around the place inside tech cos. The best agencies have random crazy people who think Tech has too many people who are samey.
- Agencies push tech companies in directions we could never have thought of. Brining the two worlds together is great. Tech can be used to create magic plus agency crazy thinking person.
Also covered by RachCreative
Related articles
- Do Agencies Need to Think Like Software Companies? (adgeek.us)
- SXSW Day One Delivers…Everything (adrants.com)
Imagine a world in which brands tell the truth, advertisers act like publishers and all communication is real-time. Is this world possible? #brandjo
- Kyle Monson – Editor JWT
- Brian Clark – President of GMD Studios
- Bob Garfield – Advertising Age
- David Eastman – CRO JWT North America
- Shiv Singh – Head of digital, Pepsico
Eastman: Everyone understand the brand bit – the journalism is an editorial approach to brand buildling – thinking engagement and transparency over messaging and control. It’s a non-fiction attempt at advertising which people would rather engage with. From an agency point of view it’s about thinking as publishers rather than marketers.
Clark: I think everyone would prefer advertising to be like content rather than the other way round.
Monson: Been a journalist for 6 years. We are making journalists more relevant rather than less because this skill of publishing is more relevant than ever.
Garfield – the marketing maven part of me says ‘interesting’ and the journalist in me makes me want to punch you in the face.
Singh – this is a clear imperative. Important. The definition is all about real time marketing – as life happens.
This is a JWT event…. demonstrate your bona fides.
Monson: Who’s doing good stuff? MacDonalds 5 years ago. Mormon.org is running – turning their brand over to church members to say why they are members of the Mormon church in video. They aren’t editing it at all just deciding whether to run or not run. Representing the brand to the world.
Clark: MacDonalds took a PR agency solution the Moms programme. They took 8 mothers to where they grow the potatoes all on video. ”the mom says they use real eggs?” This is custom publishing (a print industry) this has been around for years and has been created using the same process. [interesting....I disagree] The process how a brand and a content editor can work together is ‘muscle memory’ and can happen.
Singh: We compete with everything else for consumers’ attention we have to act and think the way someone who is writing a status update does. We can’t just launch something about co-creation – it has no resonance or meaning for consumers or us. If it’s not aligned with our values it has no meaning. It’s about the resonsnce between our brand essence and values and where they meet together.
Eastman: The bigger picture is everything is becoming digital and becoming media and when everything is media it’s becoming marketing. When everything is marketing how should brands and agencies behave with each other?
Garfield: Advertising goals are awareness and persuasion. In Social Media the goals are credibility and trust. How do you forge a relationship around sugar water?
Singh: None of us have a deep relationship with this building. Our relationship is with SXSW which is at the Austin Convention Centre. With Pepsi the relationship is with the brand, it’s often the moment and what the drink evokes. Goes beyond the product itself. The Pepsi Refresh Project – we gave away $20m to good causes. This wasn’t philanthropy budget but marketing.
We saw a lift in persuastion, brand health, brand equity. People who voted / participated formed a closer relationship. We are scaling it up for 2011 because it worked for us.
Clark: Ford Bold Moves was part-documentary enabling film crews to access new places like board meetings, plants being closed and part-journalism they agreed not to edit what the journalists wrote. Point, counter-point articles. Debate about what Ford should do to turn the corner. Because we let them say what they believed, they were willing to work with Ford. Ford uses a lot more real people, informal tone of voice, got away from “sheet metal porn” and into more real stuff. This can still be seen today.
Monson: Aggregation is hard – pulling in negative news stories is a hard nut to get clients to agree to. We’ve got Microsoft to hire freelance journalists and publish things that MS doesn’t agree with – they post a response post to these articles.
Clark: I disagree – third party content exists already – why are we still talking about bad things on the internet being an issue? It’s here. don’t be afraid of something that isn’t a glowing testimonial. A good review should be showcased. 80% might be as good as you’re going to get.
Singh: That misses the point. If I publish 25% of my content that’s bad about my brand just to show I’m transparent it is inward looking even if consumers think we ‘get it’. I think it’s about adding value to consumers’ lives – the 183,000 ideas submitted gives us insight into what matters to people in the country today. This is an example of doing something new but adds value.
Garfield: Chrysler “I find it’s ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity but nobody knows how to f** drive!” The employee got fired from the social media agency. This is a pretty good line about Detroit. Does highlight how vulnerable a brand can be – careless candour, morbid humour, maligned conduct. How to reconcile the control freakdom of brand management versus individuality of social media.
Singh: It was by the PR agency – they got fired as an agency by Chrysler. If we as brands want to take brand journalism seriously the jounalists need to be part of your organisation and they know brand values. Chrysler didn’t have an employee tweeting on their behalf – if he’d been an employee he might have said the same thing and he shouldn’t have been fired. They should have taken this opportunity to fix the driving issues in Detroit.
Eastmen: without the word f*** it is a perfectly acceptable sentiment. Doesn’t this say more about the reaction from Chrysler – they look slightly foolish for having over-reacted. Not particularly smart.
Monson: It’s a Public Relations thing – this is a tweet that the public actually related to and they fired the guy for it.
Singh: To think that in social media a brand can have a big fat anonymous voice [is wrong]. A tweet error mistake hapens. we know our executives also make errors. We’re all human.
Garfield: The guy should have gotten a raise. The tweet is about the community – it made a human connection. Are we engaging as people or as brand messangers?
Singh: if Chrysler had their other 300k employees tweeting about what they think about driving in Detroit that would have been authentic about the brand and the city.
Eastman: in 1990 Iraq invaded Saudi Arabia and they managed to keep it secret from the populace of Saudis – now the social media transparency makes that impossible.
Monson: employee social media policies. Write as if your boss isn’t reading over your shoulder. As consumers we are very good at avoiding advertising.
Eastman: Should a cereal have a twitter account?
Monson: but who are the 1100 followers? Are they relevant to the brand? [these guys never work in a niche].
Singh: I don’t think the number of followers are a measure of active engagement. I think we all need to ask Twitter and Facebook to move away from followers as the core metric. But daily engagement or active engagement gives much more value. Can they improve the public metrics?
Monson: is there a direct relation between attention and quality of writing. The Internet is tooled to respond to ‘awesome’ not to respond to quality and it could be terrible.
Eastman: there’s a backlash beginning with un-friending happening.
Q&A
Schwartzkopf new home page is all focused on content (Oscars hair styles) all produced by Conde Nast editors. After 4 weeks we have 10x more usage. Is it the wrong idea to employ journalists in agencies?
Clark: Use custom publishers, second bring someone in-house to cross fertilise to colleagues; or freelance writers. Brands can do the same thing.
TimeWarnerCable Blogger – what’s the best way to teach people storytelling skills that doesn’t just say ‘this sucks’?
Monson: Are you doing conversation monitoring? Pick up themes and how you turn those into contents that can draft off what your readers are talking about. You need a mix of proactive and reactive content. You guys have gotten involved with me when I was in despair from my twitter feed. You encourage me to complain by responding to me. Is this a good idea?
Singh: One role of customer journalist and social media can’t be merged. The training for customer journalist is not the same as customer support. Acknowledge the differences.
Garfield: I disagree the public sees one brand, Pepsi not separate job titles.
We’ve been takling about content creation not about journalism “non-fiction” content by brands.
Monson: I agree. What about non-fiction narrative as a definition of journalism.
Clark: if done right you are holding up a lens to show what’s happening in the world. Ad agencies put vaseline on the lens andgetting them to buy in is a key change.
Eastman: we are talking about agencies and brands doing things in a different way – agency hire different skills. Ultimately what you call it doesn’t’ matter. We know there’s an interest in doing this. Clients think they can do it themselves. When we talk about editorial calendars, real time responsiveness, the implications of legal then they realise they need an agency.
Related articles
- Chrysler dumps agency linked to F-Bomb tweet (windsorstar.com)
- Employee canned after sending out F-Bomb on Chrysler’s Twitter account
- Brand Journalism: “It’s a Trap!” (adgeek.us)
- SXSWi Video: JWT’s David Eastman (clickz.com)
- Chrysler red-faced and fuming after employee posts obscene tweet against Detroit drivers on company’s official Twitter feed (dailymail.co.uk)
Here at Creative Agency towers, we are usually coy about sharing information about our clients. But today one blogged a detailed update about the work we’re doing to help improve their website design, CRM and usability.
The client is Feedblitz.com – an RSS to email service provider. A very neat tool that enables marketing newsletters and blog RSS feeds to be merged into a single site service. The advanced functionality is very useful.
Take a read about what they wrote about the project.
Creative Agency Secrets has worked on
- User interface redesign
- New site features
- Logo redesign
- CRM customer analysis (value ranking and customer needs analysis)
- Marketing communications – to come later.
We congratulate Phil Hollows and the Feedblitz team on the work so far and look forward to an awesome relaunch… more anon.
Adobe Connect impresses
Signed up to join a webinar and was directed to a very impressive Adobe Connect service for the presentation.
In advance of the event, it suggested I test my browser and connection speed to ensure that I had the latest version of flash player.
A great back-stop service for the presentation to ensure that everything that goes out is seen by the participants in all the glory it’s intended.
]]>What is ‘fair’ on the internet? Should your brand engage in unscrupulous marketing techniques in order to gain ‘followers’ and raise brand awareness online? Search engine optimisation is a bag of tools that can be used to drive brand popularity – but how far should you go?
David Cushman writes a helpful explanation of the difference between “black hat” and “white hat” search engine optimisation. He is careful to explain where he sees the boundary between appropriate and unscrupulous marketing practices.
Abuse is normal in business and in life. There are always people who play ‘fast and loose’ and ‘fly close to the wind’ and sometimes the law catches up with them. Most people and businesses play fair and North Americans and Europeans brought up on a strong sense of fair-play will tend to align with these rules of engagement.
What is right for your brand?
Brand positioning is a fine art and the tools used for marketing communicaitons will tend to help consumers reinforce their views of the brand positioning. As David says, Twitter is open; the API is open. Opportunists will continue to spot ways of gaming the system.
I am grateful to David for writing this article and ‘labellling’ the practice. I have been irritated recently with a similar action by Scribd. It’s a nice file sharing tool a bit like Slideshare. But it automatically told my friends about itself on Facebook (because I used FB to sign up) and signed them up too.
I received a flush of inbound emails from Scribd telling me my friends had signed up to it – but few had any documents loaded. So I wrote to them asking what they use it for, how they found me and what the purpose of the app is if you haven’t got any documents loaded onto it.
Kristie Wells of Social Media Club’s views matched most of the other respondents. She wrote back to say she agrees with me
I just started using Scribd on a different account to host a couple of Social Media Club’s documents, and had signed up a personal account (just in case). I had no idea signing up via Facebook was going to automatically seek out friends and add them for me. Honestly, I hate that. I actually wondered why I was receiving quite a few notices of people scribing to me, especially when there were no documents there.
To be honest, I am not sure I am going to use it personally. A good business tool for me, but now I wonder about the practices with the auto add I am not sure I am thrilled about using them.
I absolutely hate that feature. Give me a choice to auto find friends and add – I don’t like any service that does that automatically.
Unscrupulous, certainly. Fraud – probably hard to prove. It’s certainly an app that is now unlikely to gain widespread traction because of this practice.
Spread the word.
Related articles
- “I feel like Scribd used me” (ericgoldman.org)
- Black hat peer-to-peer (fasterfuture.blogspot.com) David Cushman’s article on his blog
- SEO is Dead, Long Live SEO (level343.com)
- SEO Avoid Black Hat Techniques (stevehartkopf.com)
- Image via Wikipedia
A survey dropped through my in-box last week asking about the various different types of digital agency and the jobs they do within the advertising, marketing and communications industry. Which set me thinking.
In the 80s agencies were either ‘above the line‘ or ‘below the line‘ where the line defined the separation between direct marketing and advertising. Or they might have been media or PR and that was about it.
In the 90s the vogue was for ‘integrated’ agencies or ‘through the line’ where we did a bit of everything. Sometimes this included digital. It rarely included media or PR – although that split into press relations, lobbying and marketing communications.
Come the digital revolution and agencies are splitting into ever-smaller niche operations (though the big boys are still ‘integrated’). In which part of the line would you place search, SEO, digital, social media, PPC, games, front-end/back-end design, content management, community management, apps, blogging – the long list continues to grow. Basically everything is about ROI nowadays and increasing numbers of marketing techniques are direct to consumer – and so by the old definiition they are below the line. But there’s proabably a pride issue for some agencies not wanting to be seen as moving “down” the food chain – so the blurry line continues to exist.
[What ever happened to Sales Promotion agencies? Have they reinvented themselves? What are they called now?]
A handy A to Z list of digital job descriptions has been published by Spotlight Ideas Jobs. It makes mostly useful but occasionally curious reading.
What sort of an agency are you?
Categorising yourself as an agency may be helpful when presenting yourself to brands who do not yet know your skills, capabilities and track record. It also makes categorisation easy.
But few agencies nowadays want to be pigeon-holed into a single space. Many want the flexibility to add new skills and expertise areas as these develop. And that’s a strong logic.
So go and check out your public listings, your website and credentials – how do you describe yourself?
And the agency to whom you last lost an important pitch to – how do they describe themselves?
Should you adapt or change your listings?
Oddities in job descriptions
For example:
Joomla Development is described as “Customer Management Software development”
And the same is for WordPress Development. Surely this should be CMS = content managment software. Who ‘manages’ their customers using a website built in Joomla or WP?
But you’ll be pleased to know that business development seems about right.
Business Development, of course, is not confined to digital marketing. Business development, generally-speaking is about finding new customers / breaking into new markets. The role of the business developer depends very much on the nature of the organization (you would normally find the role of “business developer” in companies, but business development skills are important in agencies as well). General business development skills / competencies include: generating leads for sales; gathering and assessing information about the market place in general, customers, the competition and so on; pitching for new business; and much more.
Lead management is about generating leads / new business opportunities using a variety of different marketing/business techniques. It involves using advertising / marketing materials to generate leads. Responses to advertising / marketing have to be assessed and categorized. Leads are then passed onto Sales, mainly, but, also customer relationship management.
The development of online money-making by bloggers and early-adopter affiliate marketers has progressed from stage one – write stuff and hang adverts around it; to stage two – use affiliates to promote it on your behalf and is now moving into a third stage.
Building closed spaces where you can pay a bit to get into the ‘inner circle’ and learn new stuff early on thus taking advantage ahead of the crowd.
There is a nice logic to this. We’ve done it, let us show you how.
The Third Tribe Story
I got an email last week inviting me (and you) to join a new private online space Third Tribe Marketing. I know where they got my name, I’m signed up to ProBlogger, Copyblogger, Chris Brogan and Lateral Action. All high volume readership sites that talk about online marketing.
Getting them together to co-launch a members-only site for super-cool-new-stuff is a very neat idea. The copy on the site is in a frame so I can’t send you separate URLs but the Story, the People and what’s Inside are very well-written pages with compelling reasons why you should spend $27 a month to join the inner crowd.
Join it if you want – or just read the copy and see what a lovely warm feeling it gives you when you see such a great proposition combining and re-working content from a range of great sites into one place.
Congratulations, guys. It looks like a super money-maker and I hope it works well.
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