Nick Martin's Marketing Pages

 

Who ate all the pies? Social marketing.

New research from Sherpa shows - surprise, surprise - that social media marketing is absorbing increasing marketing spend, principally in support of driving traffic, lead generation, sales revenue and SEO.

In an improving but cost-conscious environment, this new slice of the pie means that other slices will continue to shrivel, albeit progressively to begin with as businesses trial the impact of facilitating, joining and influencing/ monitoring conversations; as they seek to identify key opinion leaders and their social networks and vital effects; as they try to understand how to improve search effectiveness... 

Sherpa touched upon the evolving shape of the marketing department as most near-term cost goes into recruiting fresh staff with the digital competencies needed to develop engagement strategies that don't conform to traditional campaign constructs. Businesses can't afford the time and trial and error rates associated with converting existing talent pools, and consequently digital marketing recruitment is exploding. 

UK freezes in face of new ePrivacy Directive: Respond to the Consultation

The UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has just published a public consultation on the implementation of the revised EU Telecoms Package. 

The Telecoms Package, a set of five directives that regulate the electronic communications sector in the European Union, contains the so-called e-Privacy Directive. As part of the review, the existing opt-out rule for the use of browser cookies, which are widely used to deliver targeted marketing messages on the internet, was replaced by a requirement to collect the consumers' "consent". This ambiguous wording leaves it up to national governments to clarify whether they interpret "consent" to mean "prior opt-in consent", or whether they prefer to stick with the existing "implicit opt-out consent" rule.

BIS proposes to implement the relevant parts of the Directive by copying the exact wording into the new, national law - without clarifying whether "consent" is to be interpreted as an opt-in or opt-out approach. In practice, this would mean that the exact meaning of "consent" is to be interpreted by the data protection regulator, the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).

According to Outlaw.com, BIS recognises the importance of cookies (AKA targeting) to make the Internet work and deliver value to users:

 "The internet as we know it today would be impossible without the use of […] cookies," says BIS. "Many of the most popular websites and services would be unusable or severely restricted and so it is important that this provision is not implemented in a way which would damage the experience of UK Internet users or place a burden on UK and EU companies that use the web."

"The Directive acknowledges this by saying that consent is not required when the cookie is strictly necessary to deliver a service which has been explicitly requested by the user," it says.

BIS goes on to say that since the range of uses where a cookie is strictly necessary to deliver a service online are impossible to define due to the fast moving nature of the Internet, and therefore it will be down to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) to interpret the Directive in practise.

The risk, and likely outcome of this tactic, is that any degree of certainty around the use of 3rd party cookies for online targeted advertising, or online behavioural advertising, gets kicked into the long grass until next spring 2011 by which time the ICO will be forced one way or another to declare its hand. 

In the meantime, we await the moment that some EU member states will no doubt feel compelled to be more forthcoming - and give their view on what constitutes personal data; the weight they will give to Recital 66 (non binding guidance that suggests browser settings could constitute an affirmative consent mechanism), and illuminating examples of application areas that are to be construed to need cookies to deliver a service.

Imagine a scenario where every member state interprets the e-Privacy Directive differently. Now combine that with a further scenario which obliges business to apply country of destination laws to their online activities (instead of country of origin laws) and you end up in with an almightly mess. This, I'm afraid to say, is exactly the scenario we are about to face in reality.

That's why it's important to participate in BIS's Consultation, specifically responding to the impact assessment questions.

BIS Consultation is open until December 3rd. You can respond with your point of view and any evidence via this link or directly online via BIS's Survey Monkey. Don't just listen to the debate, submit your view to the UK Government and help legislators understand the impact of a literal implementation of the ePrivacy Directive.  

Call centres & the rise of personal assistants

Speaking at the Travel Technology Initiative’s Innovation Summit, Continental Airlines senior director of merchandising and ancillary revenue Chris Amenechi said the industry would have more intelligent approaches to the phone.

He also predicted the widespread use of kiosks and mobile kiosks to solve queuing and other passenger issues going forward.

“Wouldn’t you rather talk to someone who knew you and you can talk to in any language? That’s innovation, that’s avatar,” he said.

Amenechi added that for medium to high-touch customers, call-centres would still be important and be staffed with consultants with skill sets different to today.

He also talked about the development of mobile applications for exclusive services that travellers would be willing to pay for such as airport shopping concierges.

Continental launched its virtual agent Alex a year ago to try to deal with some of the traffic to the call-centre.

Amenechi said specific applications and the use of avatars for the trip cycle from pre-travel and post travel would increase revenue and drive down costs.

“A new way of travel is going to happen. You can imagine the avatar as a personal assistant going out and scouring sites and bringing back all the information to you. In-flight entertainment will change the way we enjoy travel and mobile will proliferate everything. The way we travel and these long lines will be a thing of the past.”

The technology behind personal assistants is coming of age: avatars are lifelike and conversational, they can self learn, will represent a business, its values and externalise internal knowledge in a consistently accurate and predictable way that outsourced call centres will forever struggle to emulate except at premium levels. 

Personal Assistant technology is now widely available, delivered via such programs as Azigo and Vlingo. Connect this technology with human-like avatars and Chris Amenechi's vision for the travel industry is born.

Core story courtesy of Travolution.co.uk