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.

THe good just got really great.

sending unsolicited and inappropriate marketing messages has always been close to what we now call spam.  

In the blogosphere, this direct approach without first establishing an online relationship and credentials / rights is considered more invasive and inappropriate than in the offline or email-only world.

Bloggers are very good at negative publicity.  And at campaigning / lobbying.

This wiki suggests that people blog these PR companies' URLs.  I.e. get no email at all from them (and probably report them to spamcop and get the domain blocked at server level). And heres a list of individual email addresses blocked by the author of "The Long Tail" and editor of Wired Magazine.

How damaging will that be to your business?  Imagine, no emails getting through certain servers and to some key journalist/blogger individuals - and all because a colleague made a mistake… 

ACTION - check your PR company is not on that list and your individual PR representative isn't either.  Your brand is doomed online.  Move your business elsewhere. 

Companies that I know who are on the list include [note I am not linking this text] Edelman, Bigmouth, Bite, FourtyThree, Global Results, Lewis, Ogilvy, Porter Novelli, 

Wise up. 

What a disappointment.  I was driven to the O2 website by an advert for their new Bluebook service.

Curious, I watched the demo  and so I signed up.  Seemed a nice idea to keep all you sms updates, photos and phone numbers backed up.  

and then having gone through all the registration process, received a text with a unique code I got the immortal message 

You must be an O2 customer to use this service.

Thanks for your interest in Bluebook. The service is exclusive to O2
customers. The easiest way to become an O2 customer is to visit an O2
shop or click here to shop with O2 on line. (link to http://shop.o2.co.uk/shop/)

You may also try the following options:

• Go back to the previous page
• Go to the O2 Homepage http://www.o2.co.uk/
• Go to the O2 Sitemap http://www.o2.co.uk/sitemap

How blooming irritating is that?  you do the whole registration - they could have told me before that it was only for O2 customers.

I reckon that opening the service up for non-O2 customers would draw a much wider 'net' around potential customers who then might be persuaded to swap carriers because of the fantastic add-on services like Bluebook offered. 

Why is this good?

1. Offer a new service that other providers don't yet offer
2. Show prospective customers the 'inside' line on how wonderful it is to be an O2 customer
3. Create a uniquely receptive audience to switching offers
4. Undermine offers from other carriers by direct communication with their customers

Oh goodness, when will big brands realise that offering something online / digital for free to a wider audience than your own customers gives you an unique opportunity.  But they threw it away. 

And so if you are in a competitive marketplace, can you set up a service to attract new customers who might be persuaded to defect from the competition because of the excellent service you offer (particularly if the net cost to you is low) this could be a winning strategy.

Go for it.

The dark underside of the internet - picking up all the things said about your brand online.  Within a short period of time things can go wrong and the internet can change.  But we can harness that open-ness for good.A future that is basically here, the near future.  If we all have access to all the photos and live video of ourselves this protects our privacy more.  Many of the tools are already available.  The unbridled stream of information “ the new superpowers”.  The great shift – we are used to small communities and cultivating reputations there but it is now moving wider.  The networks can build a very complex reputation.  It requires the viewer to do more interpretation for themselves.   You work out which are the extreme viewpoints and discount them from your overall opinion.  

How can you control your reputation? the site reputationdefender.com – they sell the lie that you can control your reputation…. Not true, you can curate it.  
Five acts
1.    Six judo moves
2.    Griefer madness
3.    A tale of two lawyers
4.    Lane Hartwell
5.    Arin Crumley

The challenge: Reputation versus privacy versus free speech.  The management of reputation often had headlong collisions with  these other needs.  
Thor runs get satisfaction.com concept if you are a company you are vulnerable to what other people can say about you…When they respond to blog posts companies can be perceived as being over-protective.  This site invites the companies and customers to participate.

Judo moves

1.     Cast a long shadow.  In a world where anyone can bear false witness, try to make sure there are lots of witnesses!  Accrue more positive content about you to inoculate yourself against bad stuff.  This is a baseline plan.  There is a context for any comment.

2.    Tell your side of the story.  Julie Melton valleywag. Record your position online and send your version to your key audience, selectively.  Be engaging and non-defensive.  Use terms like proactive, nip in the bud.  Post a reply before they have the chance to strike.

3.    A heartfelt apology.  SW Airlines has a chief apology officer!  JetBlue apologised in a third party space and left comments open.  His criticism was in the context of the apology.

4.    Sarah Lacy: no apologies.  She apologies by blaming the audience.  Google results for today and an apology video showing above the critical bloggers.

5.    Inspire an Army.  Sometimes it isn’t enough just to tell your side of the story alone – get others to tell it for you.  Mike Brown of Foundation Capital’s clients used the Funded to say how well he’d treated them and what it was like working with him.

6.    Stand for something.  Patti of Timbuk2 started using get satisfaction – free advertising on the home page we used to have a strong point of view and being ‘snarky and opinionated’ and when she rejoined the company.  “here today, gone tomorrow just like that guy who stole your virginity”  an email campaign she wrote.  Her opt in list was 110k but the concentric reverberation from the womens rape advocacy group got their teeth into it.   She took a lot of direct correspondence back to their blogs.  But other evangelists started picking it up and responding to the bloggers.  Defence from outside the employee base.  She is still trying to be amusing, funny and opinionated but a lot more careful!
7.    Celebrate your critics.  Brian Shaler BitGravity videos people criticising himself!  Celebrate the worst of the haters in your life!  
Griefer madness – people who exist to make life hell for others.  Michael Crook (got a name change), A man who exists to destroy his own reputation.   You cannot control your image online.  He used the DMCA even though he was a ‘true villain’.

[not sure how I managed to write 7 down….. time-space-continuum issues, clearly!] 

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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

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They wrote a book, called Web Design for ROI.

Key learning from this session: Judgements made are very quickly online. Improved design can make users take more actions that you want them to do. Small % improvements can lead to significant ££$$ revenue growth.

Reasons for writing it – frustration… the business case and the design guidelines.

Clients don’t understand the impact design can have on their
business metrics led by a good user experience and a better web
interface.
Clients mostly think they want a Ferrari website… but it frequently
doesn’t lead with a clear business objectives. Usually they need
functional, utilitarian but good looking. What they have is a long way
from either of these!

• 43% of retail (offline) sales are influenced by knowledge gained by
  online research. 83% of businesses use the internet to research and
  find potential vendors. [true – I did the database research in this
  way].
• Judgements made are very quickly made online. Reactions to a new
  web page are made from 1/20th of a second…. likelihood of interaction
  is part of the reaction to these first snap impressions.

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When top bloggers complain publicly about not being able to work or use a bit of software, it is clear that the world will quickly try it for themselves, and spread the word.

i am not a techie… but I am reasonably competent at using technology. But long ago, I learnt to apply the “David Baker Test“.   I was working in-house doing marketing and was trying to get 14 operational departments to write a chapter of the business plan - in the same format.  Not as easy as it sounds.

David Baker was my acid test.  He was a fantastic deal-maker but didn’t really do paperwork much.  If I could get him to understand what I was seeking, and he delivered it, I had succeeded.  He represented the lowest common denominator.

Doc Searles’ blog post on Microsoft’s Live.com maps feature, fails to pass the David Baker Test…. in a major way.  He explains it here

It’s amazing to me that Microsoft doesn’t make live.com search any easier. Take the maps side of live.com. It beats the crap out of Google Maps in at least one hugely helpful area: “bird’s eye” views — from four different directions……Maps, and Geo in General, is one place where Microsoft could open up and leapfrog Google in features and usability. Hey, why not?

And here’s the killer…

[Later…] I’m looking for a way to show the birds-eye view to another person here at the Berkman Center, and I’m failing to find it. So are they. And they’re using a Windows workstation, even. So we’ve got maps.live.com flunking not just the Obviouness Test, but the Easiness Test too.

And the David Baker Test too, clearly!

Just got registration confirmation email…. and another trick missed.

If you feel that a colleague would also benefit from visiting Technology For Marketing & Advertising, please forward this email where they can register for FREE at:
http://www.t-f-m.co.uk/colleague

I left the link unconcealed so that you can see there is no embedded connection to ME.

The conference has no way of knowing who their most powerful & active referrers are.   Who are the “Mavens” who will help them with their marketing by contributing their personal contacts to hte common effort.

And other things…. no blog of the event, no questions about whether I write or contribute to a blog, no message forum space, no Jaiku / Twitter channel planned.  And that’s just the obvious stuff.

Gad, wish I wasn’t going now.

Correction: TFM&A doesn’t use best practice any CRM.

Just got emailed by TFM&A to get me to sign up to their 2008 event. I’ll probably go.

But first a gripe.

If they are the pre-eminent exhibition and conference for technology for marketing and advertising (as the name implies) why oh why can’t they use best practice for email communications?

My email WAS individually addressed to me “Dear Rebecca Caroe”. Good start.

It WAS sent just to my email address and although it made it past my Outlook spam filter, Mailwasher picked it up as ‘not to me” and I had to manually accept the communication.

But when I clicked on the link

It took me to a registration page where NONE of my information was pre-populated.

As I laboured my way down the registration opting in and out for various items, it dawned on me that this was just a ‘plain vanilla’ registration page for all the outbound email marketing. Why wasn’t there a unique response code embedded in my link? Why don’t they ‘know’ which email I replied to and from what source [they asked me both in the registration questionnaire and these questions were mandatory not optional].

And lastly, why isn’t Business Development, a skill area listed under specialisms?

I feel alone in the marketing world.