Nick Martin's Marketing Pages

Google grips its social tiger firmly by the tail

Google+, the search giant's new social sharing project, looks like it's going to be a blockbuster.

In beta phase by invitation only or by request from the Google+ page, beta user numbers shot up to 10M before Google temporarily closed the platform to new requestors.  

Most beta users have GMail accounts, a rich future seam of (currently) 170M consumers worldwide.

Econsultancy report that several thousands brands are said to be extremely keen to get involved early.   

There are two aspects of Google+ that excites me as a marketer:

• Google Circles enables the user to categorise groups of connections or friends according to interests. This compartmentalisation makes sense from the user perspective and may encourage more mature consumer groups to use social media in a more widespread sense. From a brand marketing perspective, it permits a higher degree of segmentation and targeting, should make it easier to tap into the long tail.

• Google+ takes an important step to evaluating the relative behavioural strength of social networks. Just because you're highly connected on Facebook doesn't mean that you're friends with all of them, or that they have any influence over the things you decide to do or buy.  Functionality within Google+  opens up possibilities to sift and separate the relevant from the irrelevant. An individual may have lots of apparent connections, but how many of them have significance? 

Understanding these nuances should help brands determine who is influential within groups and what recommendation strategies are likely to be most powerful in kicking off purchasing journeys.

July is shaping up to be a good month for Google. On the back of tremendous quarterly results showing a 36% jump in earnings, could Google+ represent a major new marketing channel, where the undoubted power of trusted recommendation takes a further significant step in capturing a material slice of online marketing spend? 

 

Questionable ethics of data collection

Who is collecting data on behalf of 'The British Consumer' using offshore call centres? Despite being on the UK's Do Not Call List, The Telephone Preference Service (TPS) for 3 years, I'm getting duplicate calls from an offshore call centre requesting permission to undertake a 'survey' on behalf of this dubious entity.

Various tactics are being employed, from a request to verify address and telephone details before launching into a lifestyle questionnaire - and including one that promises to ensure that your details are taken off our list before then saying we'd just like to verify the details we hold about you and your household.

Either no record is maintained of previous contact or they just aren't bothering. All part of a truly low-cost, low-ethics exercise...

One can easily see how hundreds of thousands of consumers are surely being duped by these approaches, that seriously misrepresent, flout TPS regulations by calling under the guise of research when what they are doing is data gathering (but clearly not market research), and damage consumer confidence.

When I pushed representatives to disclose which legal entity they were calling on behalf of, the phones were put down. So they might be naive enough to call repeatedly in spite of several bruising encounters, but not that naive! 

Here's the thing; if data collection goes down an ethical slippery slope in pursuit of the lowest cost collection, campaign performance will follow. Not only that, execution comes with hidden costs arising from higher than average complaint rates. All of which feeds into a negative cycle of brand perception, at a time when reputation and trust is more important than ever.

Among other parameters, being able to provide a simple audit trail to complainants in respect of their personal information when asked, helps allay concerns and restores trust. Transparency is more important than ever, and practitioners using poorly acquired and badly permissioned data run greater reputational risks than ever before.

Radian6 highlights shift in Social from defence to value creation

Salesforce.com certainly splashed the cash on Radian6 - to the tune of $340M - because they believe that Social will profoundly change sales and marketing, and want to connect market conversations with marketing and sales.

As SF's PR put it:

Radian6’s unique technology captures hundreds of millions of conversations every day across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs and online communities. The intelligence gained from these conversations has become critical in helping companies better market and sell to prospects, serve customers and understand what’s being said about their brands, products and competitors. With Radian6, salesforce.com will add the ability to monitor and join in these public conversations across its products, bringing the heart of the public social web to customers’ business.

In other words, from SF's perspective, Radian6 will bridge the conversations happening on public social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, and Salesforce.com’s private corporate social network, Chatter. 

To date social media monitoring has been used a bit like Talk Radio - defensively. Brands have learned that they can no longer smother isolated unhappy customers with broadcast market messaging, and need to nip destructive conversations in the bud - which have an unpredicatable tendency of catching like wildfires.

 

Now brands are trying to work out how to integrate social into their marketing and relationship management strategy. 

Where are we likely to go from here? How about leveraging social networks through recommendations from trusted sources? It's like adding a whole new dimension to targeting, just as the traditional push marketing model is flagging.

World class prospecting and market development is as much about trust as it is about cut through, and solutions that simplify that challenge and make it easy to deploy authoritative acquisition and development programmes will help solve one of marketing and sales' great current challenges.

Image courtesy of Brian Solis

 

The price of customer engagement

How many consumers start a transaction, only to drop out before agreeing terms or completing payment?

The truth is, winning the attention of consumers - then proving the value of your product or service in an increasingly frictionless environment - is tougher than ever.

In a recent consumer survey by Fastmap, a third of all people visiting financial services websites or dialling into a call centre found the experience confusing, whilst a further third would have appreciated a more skilled advisor.  That makes two thirds of consumers who might have bought a financial services product may not have done as a result of an inadequate user experience.

There is of course a broad range of reasons why people abandon a transactional process. Shipping charges and price comparison browsing are commonly quoted. Notwithstanding, understanding the avoidable barriers that dissuade buyers from following through with a purchase is key to improving the consumer engagement.

Established agency solutions to winning those consumers back who have dropped out of the online sales funnel includes retargeting – the process of serving ads via a network following, for example, basket abandonment on destination sites and portals.  

The trouble is, using browser data for retargeting falls under the broad category of online behavioural targeting (OBT), the recent subject of the EU Article 29 Working Party. Their published opinion does not augur well for the future of any kind of third party OBT marketing activity; even where browser based cookies do not hold any personal data.

To quote an excellent summary and initial analysis by FEDMA:

In the view of the Working Party (WP), the revised ePrivacy Directive (as a part of the reviewed Telecoms Package) reinforces the requirement to collect “informed prior consent” as an adequate legal basis for 3^rd party OBA. The opinion stresses that consent, which must be freely given and specific, needs to be obtained before the cookie is stored. In order for consent to be valid, highly visible information must be provided. Information about the use of cookies also needs to be provided prior to the processing. In order to collect valid, informed consent, the WP recommends that ad network providers create prior opt-in mechanisms that require an affirmative action by the data subjects, indicating their willingness to receive cookies and to the processing of these cookies for the purposes of delivering targeted advertising.

 So is now the time to look beyond online consumer activity and implying conclusions about habits and purchasing needs through behavioural analysis, notably in regard to acquisition marketing?

There is undoubted value in responding in real-time to consumer confusion or questions that demand a degree of expert knowledge and a consistent approach.

 Call Me buttons that route users to an off-line call centre, or Agent Chat programs that enable you to connect with a call centre are both important ploys to handle questions and improve conversion to sale. Their weakness is in the depth of knowledge of the call centre agents. Many times I have sought help, only to discover I know more about the product or service I wish to purchase than the agents on the other end of phone.

 Part of the answer surely lies in the creation of a really effective company knowledge base.  With this in place, it becomes possible to accurately respond to questions & obstacles to sell in real-time. Translating the product and service value proposition, together with detailed practical and operational information (e.g. delivery options) into a knowledge base needs to be a core building block of online marketing.

Currently this information is hopelessly fragmented across the majority of organizations and therefore is impossible for its customers to access. As a consequence, when IKEA implemented a rudimentary, cartoonish avatar on their site, its ability to answer questions effectively was severely limited.  On a recent visit it was unable to answer any of the questions my wife posed.  Needless to say, the impact is lost business.

Once the creation of the knowledge base is undertaken, it can be turned into consistent, accurate dialogue with consumers via enabled call centres, online avatars and drive social media conversations.

Recent experiences of avatar deployment have delivered astounding results, for example improving quote to book ratios by 300%+ in France, proving that there’s no help like real time help, as long as it’s delivered with the requisite level of expertise.

In an increasingly unforgiving, socially networked world, knowledge and the ability to apply it in real time must be a core business competency. It is up to marketing to seize ownership.

Customer Management Trucks

Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently made a comparison between PCs and trucks, vehicles that once dominated the car market in the US, but which got killed by smaller cars as the US consumer got real.

In an article in the WSJ, Mr. Jobs said computers, including Apple’s own Macintosh, won’t go away, just as trucks didn’t disappear. But he suggested that sleeker portable products such as his company’s iPhone and iPad would be the equivalent of cars—offering touchscreen Website browsing, droves of applications and other features not found on PCs that run Microsoft Windows.

Arch rival Microsoft reacted negatively to the pronouncement, after all laptop shipments are still showing double digit growth rates. Yet Jobs is simply facing up to the reality of a changing world.

And so to the analogy: in business, we have witnessed just as profound a change in the challenges that confront CMOs in the face of the mind-blowing explosion of online and interactive channels; increasingly important social media with the potential to become as significant a source of demand as Search; in short the most radical market-led upheaval we’ve ever experienced.

You’d wonder whether the same tools and platforms proposed by marketing services providers that promised tremendous business improvements just a few years ago might be struggling to make an impact in today’s shifting landscape. You’d be right to.

Forrester, in a report entitled Campaign Management Needs a Reboot (April 2009) highlighted how platforms were struggling to keep up with business change: 

Today the notion of campaigns extends beyond traditional communication channels to include emerging and inbound channels like mobile, Web sites, landing pages, and social networks. Campaign management applications struggle to keep up with the design, management, and reporting needs of these channels. But an explosion of channels is only one of the many challenges that threaten the relevance of campaign management solutions. Campaign management tools also struggle to:

·       Improve cross-channel customer interaction. 

·       Make sense of the social phenomenon.

·       Lack defined processes and methodologies to use social insights to improve marketing campaigns.

·       Marketing campaigns no longer have finite start and stop dates. 

·       Social media channels and customer conversations.

·       Lower the learning curve associated with technology adoption...As one direct marketer said, “The complexity of the system makes it hard for our distributed stakeholders to build and execute campaigns and increases dependence on our small group of power users.” 

Forrester’s perspective is that there are too many different platforms that make it hard to integrate, leading to missed business opportunities, poor customer experiences, and inefficient program execution.

Whilst I agree with the analysis, I disagree on this conclusion. On the one hand, multiple marketing execution platforms tend to make it harder to integrate and measure the vast range of engagement activity that marketing has to deploy across. On the other hand the solution isn’t to create one meta marketing platform. Software rarely shines when it’s asked to do many tasks in one. Marketing users hate ‘integrated’ platforms that attempt to do everything, because they’re hard to use, overly complicated and tend to be too rigid. 

Specialisation is the name of the game. Solutions for lead generation that work on demand pull principles are a totally different proposition to campaign managers that are designed for push marketing applications. 

In the world of multi-channel integrate marketing, the execution platforms can be managed in house, outsourced or rented - in the form of SaaS or cloud computing. Frankly, it doesn’t matter in principle. What matters more in practise is which platform suits the business needs best, and complies with their policies in regard to security, control, strategic and privacy imperatives.

But how to integrate effectively, in order to deliver the vital operational improvements whilst allowing the organic and fluid nature of marketing communications to follow its customer-led path of least resistance?

The answer lies not in embedding rules engines, data management et al into campaign management and other marketing execution tools. That’s yesterday’s model and simply reflects the established order: one of channel specific siloed organisational structures where marketing teams are responsible for online, for direct mail, for contact centres and so on. 

What's needed is a much broader marketing biosphere, which comprises 3 key areas:

1. Data management, analysis and rules definition

• Design of the data model, single customer view creation, activity data, semantic web data.
• Analysis and segmentation
• Rules engine

2. Marketing Activity Management

• Document processing
• Digital asset management
• Marketing workflow automation
• Resource management/ web-based utilities

3. Marketing execution

• Campaign managers
• Email/ SMS platforms
• Networked lead generation deployment & settlement platforms
• Online advertising network platforms
• Social network solutions
• etc.

The centre of gravity in creating a truly effective, flexible, adaptable customer communications management environment lies in getting the first two areas correctly architected. Herein lies the solution to true multi-channel integration, an approach that can be orchestrated manageably.

 

It means that wherever the media explosion takes us, however many new and unpredictable IP enabled channels open up, the means to be able to simply integrate them exists; using the right data, content, channels, technology and people.

 

More specialisation around execution, not less, is likely to win out. Fees associated with those platforms will continue to fall, as users pay for what they actually need and use, safe in the knowledge that their marketing biosphere is in place, ready to meet with every fresh challenge. 

Marketing in the cloud

Marketers should have their heads in the cloud.

If you haven't read The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr yet, you need to add it to your list. Cloud computing — that is, computing infrastructure that is based somewhere out on the Internet, rather than installed on hardware locked in your company's IT center — is becoming real. Fast.

Combined with the maturity of web-based software-as-a-service offerings, the strong gravitational pull of social media sites where marketers now work beyond the borders of their company's sandbox, and the widespread proliferation of web services and mash-up APIs, the cloud has become marketing's new IT platform.

For marketers, this is a terrific opportunity (a) to re-calibrate the relationship between marketing and technology and (b) to expand your capabilities in the "new marketing" environment, where the pace of innovation in online marketing channels and methods continues to accelerate.

I think of "computing in the cloud" for marketing in fairly broad terms — more broadly than the technical definition of cloud computing — and divide it into four buckets:

1. Web sites where you are a participant or sponsor, particularly social media communities. These are sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Xing, MySpace, Yahoo! Groups, Digg, del.icio.us, Twine, etc. This isn't what most tech people think of when they talk about cloud computing, but from a marketer's perspective, these are important services out on the Internet that you must plug into to do your job. Your audience is in the cloud, and you have to go in there after them. The IT aspects, however, reside outside of your control.

2. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. These are applications that you access through your web browser, are hosted on a server farm by a third-party, for which you have zero operational involvement. Some are free, such as Google Analytics, but many are provided on a subscription basis, such as Salesforce.com. Pay only for as much as you need for as long as you need. There are a plethora of SaaS applications for marketers available today, with more coming online every month — if you have a favorite that I've missed in my "for instance" below, please add it in the comments:

• customer relationship management (ex: Salesforce.com);
• landing page management (ex: LiveBall — disclaimer, my firm);
• surveys and questionnaires (ex: SurveyMonkey);
• email marketing management (ex: ExactTarget);
• web site analytics (ex: Google Analytics);
• marketing resource management (ex: MarketingCentral);
• blogging platforms (ex: Typepad);
• lead nurturing (ex: Marketo);
• digital asset management (ex: Celum Imagine);
• search marketing management (ex: SearchIgnite);
• project management (ex: AtTask);
• web conferencing and webinars (ex: WebEx);

Click here to read the rest of this excellent piece from Scott Brinker's Chief Marketing Technologist blog.

via www.chiefmartec.com

Nick Martin: A truly great introduction to Marketing in The Cloud from Scott Brinker...or the future of marketing services. He's quite brilliant!

One significant challenge remains how to glue together several marketing components, which is why Salesforce's apps exchange is so compelling, acting as it does like an apps bus/ backbone for a myriad of third party Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. Nonetheless, as long as database integrity is far from ideally managed - and so often seriously compromised - there will remain questions around the feasibility of integrating web components into a Cloud based set of marketing processes. That's where marketing utilities come in, to glue bespoke solutions together made up of numerous application components around database integrity, quality and real time customer information management. More thoughts on this coming soon...

Reshaping strategy through changing consumer behaviour

Barry Clark, of Future Foundation, delivered a thought provoking lecture on the changing consumer landscape at the Financial Services Forum's (FSF) absolutely superb General Insurance Summit.

                                        
 
New behaviours and attitudes are being shaped by the last two years, that he categorised into seven trends that marketers need to take into account in the shaping of strategy, innovation, propositions and communication strategies. Here we review four:

The first is Living Lite, caused by a sense of rising clutter, the war on waste, gathering environmental concerns within middle England, greater awareness of recycling and an entrepreneurial approach to finding new value in old goods.

Trends this is informing include renting vs purchasing, a return to the Radio Rentals model. Owned by Thorn, its Australasian offshoot today rents completely new categories of good, proclaiming on its website 'join the rental revolution'.

The second is a return to professional budgeting. With a middle class squeeze caused by rising education costs and tax, tighter personal budgets are informing budgeting behaviour.

A return to maximising describes behaviour when consumers are scrutinising offers more carefully, resarching as much as possible pre purchasing decision, searching independent views and consulting friends (in today's society substantially aided by user generated content online). As the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) puts it, today we place more trust in the collective voice of complete strangers than we do in the individual opinions of close family and friends.

Clark's next trend is the rise of the discount and free society, enabled by advertising supported economic models, spanning free films, music and information content. In conjunction with maximising behaviour, you might reasonably conclude that this change lies behind the rise of the thriving 99p chain stores.

Yet I would challenge whether this trend is likely to endure. Consumers are getting used to spending money and recognising value differently, as micro-payments. As a result, online music sales are rising (now entirely compensating for offline declines), premium publisher content is being increasingly charged for successfully, and whilst ad-supported models will no doubt continue to flourish, we should take care not to overestimate the strength and singularity of the free services movement.

This is all very well, but will behaviours change with a future return to economic prosperity? The answer is probably yes and no, due to environmental and related attitudinal factors counterbalancing economic ones. In the meantime, the West is quite likely to experience several years of extremely low growth and further declines - at least 5 more years - due to lower levels of large-scale investment as we slowly but surely deleverage. As The Economist explains, it's barely begun.The reasons why we'll discuss separately, along with the opportunities this presents firms that drive efficiencies and better organisational integration.

The Internet Villager

Some time ago David Ogilvy said that a brand is built from the sticks and stones that you leave for people to pick up and discover. 

That's more true than ever in a world of proliferating interactive media. Yet the implications of  market penetration in 2010 are considerably more difficult when you consider that 40 years ago just four or five core channels would have reached the majority of your market. To achieve the same coverage today you would need to have a presence across hundreds of core channels.

Marketing channel strategy can no longer be based on the definition of a minimum number of channels that give the maximum coverage. It follows therefore that you need a very large number of sticks and stones to address your market. Or do you?

New research from The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) proposes the idea of Internet Villages, comprising a network of sites that represents most people's home turf. 

'There is an intuitive assumption that the internet widens our communities. However, the reality is that people don’t particularly behave like this. Think about how you use websites: do you go to new ones each day? Do you regularly explore the web, or do you stick to the tried and tested sites? Most of us choose to belong to particular ‘villages’, small clusters of people with whom we regularly communicate, and use a small number of websites that we visit frequently.'

A 'village' typically may consist of portals, destination sites and social media. How you engage with consumers needs therefore to vary in tone and execution from street to street; from established forms of advertising and demand generation to short informational forms eg Twitter, to marketing that doesn't feel like marketing and is easily copyable - for word of mouth and viral eg Facebook, myspace.

Understanding the composition of these villages, and tuning in to your prospective customers, is an efficient model to determine where to leave your sticks and stones, as long as you hang around enough to keep listening in, and adapt to the lessons of the feedback loop.