Digital Strategy - Servant of Chaos

Reading Mean Tweets – Social Media Beyond the Magic Mirror

Digital Strategy, Social Media, The Social Way

Are you an executive stepping into the world of social media? Are you a leader learning to tweet? Or are you in charge of a social media account or community site for a brand? If so, you may have experienced a flurry of mean tweets. And by “mean” I nasty.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, whose brand is fairest of them all?

You see, for decades, we have all been living the life of the Evil Queen, viewing the world through the wonderful frame of our very own magic mirror. We frame the question. Ask it. And wait for the adulation to return. And in a world where every question, all “market research”, surveys, ratings, reports and so on can be framed by our own perspective, we’ve lived a relatively sheltered life.

But the moment we step into the world of social media, the Magic Kingdom disappears. In the real world of 21st Century marketing, there is no Fairy Godmother. You are known – and become known – for your good works and bad, your efforts and your laziness. You are what you tweet. It’s what I call the “4 BEs”.

You want to be found, known, trusted and successful. Many of us, however, fail on one of these counts. Especially in the early days of our social media journey.

Now, no doubt, you will have heard the cliche that social media is a marathon not a sprint. And like most cliches, it is based on a deep truth – you cannot build a relationship with anyone – a customer, a friend, a partner or supplier – without investing in that relationship over time.

And it is with this in mind that I would encourage you to step out from behind your own magic mirror. Read some of the tweets that are sent your way. Read them out loud. To your teams. Think about the impacts that they make. Is there a truth? Or are there always going to be haters?

Take a look at the way celebrities respond to some of the nasty tweets sent their way. Notice how, when spoken aloud, some of the nasty tweets lose their impact?

Reading the mean tweets will prepare you for what will follow. For no matter how many white horses you ride, one day you’re going to eat an apple meant for someone else. It’s time to end the fairytale, but with some work, a decent strategy and a bit of luck, you may just reach your happily ever after.

THE END

Marketing to Marketers – Just Add ICE

Customer Experience, Digital Strategy, Marketing

The five forces of the Consumerization of Information Technology (CoIT) do not just affect the chief information officer (CIO). The impact of social media, Big Data, analytics, mobility, cloud computing and unified communications will be felt across every business unit and across every enterprise.

However, it is the office of the CMO – the organizational executive responsible for the “front of house” – which will be increasingly exposed to the challenges presented by consumerization. As a result, marketing leaders will face significant new strategic and technology decisions in the next two years.

Outdated theories and metrics, however, frame the practice of business marketing and continue to inhibit the ability of marketers to respond to the rapidly changing consumerized landscape. CMOs need to plan and execute against a new vision of the connected consumer.

The connected consumer, who uses a range of digital and social networking technologies, discovers, debates and decides on purchases in a completely new way. These processes occur almost completely independent of your brand, your communications and the messages they carry. The connected consumer may share your Facebook fan page with friends and buy your products on the way home. She or he may be your greatest critic or your staunchest defender. They blog, tweet, write reviews, self-publish books and hold online film festivals. They are influencers in their own right.

Marketers need to adopt a long-term view that demotes the campaign-based thinking that has dominated the marketing agenda for decades, replacing it with a focus on relationships, value and customer experience.

Companies that are prepared for the future do three things right when it comes to digital marketing. First, they understand the customer journey as a series of flows between touch points over time – and plan and execute their marketing plans accordingly. Second, they understand the power of data and analytics to create a deeper understanding of that customer and the approaches that can deliver customer engagement at scale. And finally, CMOs are recasting the marketing funnel to model and map the customer journey to better direct their marketing investments.

My report into re-casting the marketing funnel for consumer engagement set out the new touchpoints that marketers need to map against their buyers journey. But this, of course, requires an understanding of that journey not from the brand point of view – which is inside-out – but from the outside-in. And this requires additional thought, planning and preparation. In fact, it needs education.

One of the great successes of Google has been it’s relentless focus on technology. This has also been one of its great failings – and lies at the heart of its lack of success with social networking. With search – where Google clearly dominates, they have followed the ICE approach:

Interest – create interest and intrigue in the solution by generating immediate VALUE
Contextualise – help EDUCATE the audience in this new world by contextualising the old vs new with patterns of user behaviour
Evangelise – show, support and evangelise the OUTCOMES of the new behaviour in the new context

Not only have new behaviours emerged thanks to Google search – whole industries have been built, careers have flourished and our personal and professional lives have been shaped in new ways. Except in small pockets, this has not happened with other Google solutions.

But things are slowly changing.

The Think with Google website has become one of my favourites over the last year or so. Their recent work on the How to Go Mo website took a huge step in educating and empowering marketers in their quest to understand mobile marketing. And now, this planning tool on the customer journey helps explain some of the complexity around multi-channel / omni-channel marketing, analytics and attribution.

If Google wants to see more marketers getting value out of their digital marketing investments (which is in everyone’s best interest), then more of this work will be required. Having great technology is only half of any answer (or maybe even less). Without the people, you don’t have a party. For that, you need ICE.

I’m Just a Little Bit in Love with This

Audience 2.0, Customer Experience, Digital Strategy, Story of the Week

I’m just a little bit in love with a great presentation by Martin Weigel.

How to (not) Fail from Martin Weigel

I didn’t want to get in the way between you and this presentation – but it’s important to remember that there is a huge perception gap between what WE think consumers want, and what they EXPECT from us. It’s not even that we have to CLOSE the gap – just acknowledge it is there. Then we can get to work on truly inspirational customer experiences.

Brandon Warren via Compfight

Content Marketing in Australia Needs a Wakeup Call

Conferences, Content Marketing, Digital Strategy, Social Media

The Content Marketing Institute’s new report on Content Marketing in Australia is timed nicely for the upcoming Content Marketing Conference (4-6 March 2013). The report contrasts the content marketing approaches taken by marketers in Australia vs the USA and reinforces much that we already know:

Over 60% of marketers expect to increase or significantly increase their expenditure on content marketing in 2013
Australian B2B marketers prefer LinkedIn as a social channel while B2C prefer Facebook
B2B marketers allocate higher proportions of their budget to content marketing activities than their B2C counterparts
A large proportion of marketers outsource content creation (B2C 74% // B2B 54%)

These findings, however, should raise alarm bells for CMOs across Australia.

Poor digital capabilities inhibit success. While 96% of Australian marketers use content marketing, the tactical choices favour traditional marketing channels with much lower levels of investment in experimentation and digital engagement. Marketers should set aside greater levels of budget to experiment and innovate around digital and social media. Training and workshop/conference attendance should be provided to help more traditional marketers to transition their skills.
Weak digital strategy delivers weak outcomes. Weakness in digital strategy is seeing a misalignment between content marketing objectives/focus and measures of success. Marketers should draw upon skilled digital practitioners beyond their organisation (and even their industry), to begin to correctly align their business and marketing strategies.
Conservative channel choice cripples engagement. Marketers the world over are challenged to create engaging content, yet continue to focus on non-digital channels which produce high-levels of engagement. Again, experimentation is vital. Also, look to pure-play agencies to bolster internal skills for particular marketing programs – for example, work with a social media agency on a social media project, bring in a digital experience expert to reinvigorate the online customer experience.
Lack of effectiveness is undermining confidence. Content marketing effectiveness levels remain abysmally low, undermining confidence in marketers and the work produced by their agencies and suppliers. After correctly aligning strategy (as noted above), marketers should build metrics and analytics dashboards to report on effectiveness. Investigate options from companies like Anametrix.
Executive buy-in to content marketing needs to be revitalised: Connecting results with effort will give marketers the tools to gain buy-in from their Boards and from senior executives. Investments in analytics and reporting software that aggregates multi-channel data should be prioritised.

The detailed report appears below. Remember to check out the Content Marketing Conference, using the code CMI200 will save you $200 when registering.

Content Marketing in Australia: 2013 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends. from Content Marketing Institute

Happy Saint (St.) Valentine's Day Heart ? - MCA - heart of gold - Chicago - fluid still video image

Doug Siefken via Compfight

Gustin Shows Why Retailers Still Don’t Get Digital

Crowdsourcing, Customer Experience, Design, Digital Strategy, Disruptive Technology, Retail, Social Recruiting, Story of the Week

For years, Australian retailers have under-invested in digital. They held back technology investment, closed down innovation programs and hired traditional marketers when they should have been growing their own breed of tech-savvy innovators. And while retailers had their heads in the sand, the world changed.

Recent failures like ClickFrenzy have been down played and it’s clear that even the retailers with some digital budget are unprepared for the fast moving transformation taking place thanks to mobile.

In spite of all the trends, facts, figures and forecasts, retailers remain unconvinced. What is driving this myopic view of the future of business? In many ways, it feels like a classic illustration of the The Innovator’s Dilemma – companies (and indeed a whole industry) misses out on new waves of innovation because they are unable to capitalise on disruptive technologies.

But I also think retailers are captives of “Big Thinking”. Because they operate at scale, big thinking clouds their judgement. It’s easy to discount competitors when they generate sales that are fractions of a percentage of your business. But it’s not the percentage that’s important, its the velocity and momentum.

Hand made men’s clothing manufacturer, Gustin, illustrate this shift beautifully. They launched a Kickstarter campaign some time ago with the aim of raising $20,000. The premise was simple:

Capitalise on their growing brand and reputation for premium menswear hand-crafted in San Francisco
Allow for pre-purchasing of products through crowdsourcing – perfectly matching the demand and supply chains
Deliver the retail items to customers directly at wholesale price

Now, with two days before the campaign closes, Gustin have massively over-reached their goal. Currently sitting at almost $407,000, Gustin have smashed the target, connecting with almost 4000 new customers and validating not only their approach but also whole product lines.

And all this was done by taking an outside-in view of their business.

Until other retailers can transform the way they think about their business, their customers and the experience they provide, they will continue to struggle with this new world of digital.

The Brand Behind Your Buttons

Branding, Customer Experience, Digital Strategy

Sometimes the most important aspects of brand experience happen below the level of our consciousness. Think of the sound that is made when you close the door of your car. Manufacturers spend millions researching, designing and engineering that experience. Same with the exhaust note of a Harley Davidson. All of this careful thinking and planning has been crafted to heighten and differentiate your experience of a PARTICULAR brand.

This approach should also be applied to the digital domain.

Over the last dozen years or so, I have built a number of online platforms for clients or employers. Each time, I have focused on designing not just a “user interface” but an on-brand experience. And this process begins, surprisingly, with buttons.

Marc Hemeon, designer at YouTube, eloquently connects the use of web buttons with brand experience. He proposes “the button test” – and sets a surprisingly easy challenge. Can you pick the brands that use the style and colour of the buttons shown in the image? I bet you can. But more than that … can you pick the call to action, the behaviour and your sense of intention that is connected to that button? That’s the important and interesting part!

When I am thinking through and planning a digital platform, I focus on user behaviour and intention. I plan for interaction and process but I also take a leaf out of Amazon’s books. I plan for trademarking. Imagine coming up with a single button that brands an experience, explains a process and corresponds with an inherent behaviour. It’s the digital equivalent of a “Kleenex” – where the act of using a tissue has become synonymous with the company that produces the product. Amazon’s 1-click purchase button is the prime example.

As Marc’s button test shows, the smallest element on your website delivers brand impact. Maybe we should pay more attention to the digital brand experience rather than just making the logo bigger.

The Rise of the Social Prescription

Analog to Digital, Digital Strategy, Healthcare

For decades, many industries have resisted the shift to digital. Retail, pharmaceutical, financial services, healthcare and even the media have fortified themselves against the changes taking place in the global consumer marketplaces. But one-by-one, all industries must, sooner or later, engage with those customers who have already made the digital transformation or risk losing businesses to more nimble and digitally focused competitors.

Over the last half dozen years, social media has been the more publicly acceptable face of the digital revolution. And while it is wrapped in positive terminology (friends, likes, hearts), these mask a deeper and more profound shift – the shift from analog to digital. It is this shift that is sweeping all before it, impacting all aspects of business.

In the healthcare industry, peer-to-peer recommendation is giving rise to social health – and what I am increasingly calling the social prescription – diagnosis and product recommendation via social networks. For better or worse, the social prescription is a reality that healthcare specialists now must also contend with. People are now consuming health information, content and services like they do any other product – and have expectations more in line with retail experience than the traditional doctor-patient relationship.

This infographic from the alliedhealthworld site shows how this plays out:

More than 75% of consumers expect a response within a day after requesting an appointment through social media (note the use of the word “consumers” rather than “patients”)
20% of consumers join online health forums
25% of internet users watch health related videos

But the real challenge is not in understanding the shift, it is in applying that understanding to the strategy of your business. How do you:

Transform your healthcare or pharmaceutical business while navigating government regulation?
Combat misinformation and uninformed recommendation?
Compete for the mindshare of the connected consumer?
Integrate your business strategy with the demands for a digital future?

Contact me to learn how I can help.

Free Your Instagram Photos with FreeThePhotos

Digital Strategy, Disruptive Technology, Social Business, Social Judgement, Social Media

Remember when Flickr was cool? It has the no-brainer business model of $25 per year, in-built community functions like sets, groups and connections, and it helped manage copyright through various licensing arrangements. And the open API meant we could do cool things like

But then it lost its way.

Yahoo! stopped telling us about what they were doing and why. The diehards continued to post their images to Flickr but many others, attracted by easy-to-use apps, newly emerging and vibrant communities and a hipster ethic switched to Instagram, or Path or even to Twitter to share their photos.

When National Geographic suspended their Instagram account, it got serious

Over the lasts couple of days, I have written a couple of pieces analysing Instagram’s change of terms. It would be naive to think that Instagram did not expect a backlash of some sort, but by dumping the early adopters, they are opening the door to a more mainstream audience. The backlash then becomes a form of earned media, creating a social media news story that jumps into mainstream news consciousness.

Of course, the beatup around photo ownership is actually not about intellectual property – but about the influence we each hold within our social networks. Social judgement’s a vital and highly prized element in a digital campaign, and the change in terms from Instagram opens the door to a level of granular automation that perfectly compliments the shift to real time bidding and automated digital ad targeting via systems like Facebook Exchange.

But when big brands who have made a significant investment in building communities within Instagram take a stand, it’s time for the rest of us to take note. National Geographic’s single image announcement boldly features on their Instagram page – making it clear that the terms of use scheduled to take effect in January were not to their liking.

Next step – migration – Google+ or Flickr?

Now at this time of year, we can expect people to be taking MORE not less photos. And we will be wanting to SHARE them with our friends, families and random social network connections more than ever! So what is one to do? The obvious suggestion is to migrate photos to another service, close your Instagram account and find a new network for your photos.

Google+ has been recommended by some, with its Picasa-based system. But Google has yet to crack the non-tech feel to most of its systems and this is a major barrier to entry for the average non-tech Geek. My choice would be Flickr – and as I have a long standing account, it’s really a non-contest.

Free your photos

If you want to follow me over to Flickr, you can do so using this great new site – free your photos. It takes the pain out of the download and upload process.

Visit freethephotos.com
Visit Instagram.com and login
Visit Flickr.com and login (these steps make it easier)
Login and authorise your Instagram account
Login and authorise your Flickr account
Click the Free Your Photos button

It takes a while, but you can set the site to email you when the process is complete. Then it’s just a matter of using the bulk management tools on Flickr to sort through and arrange the images.

But is there a replacement for my Instagram app?

And of course, if you are looking for an alternative iPhone app to Instagram – one with filters and auto uploading etc, Flickr have just released one for iPhone and one for Android. There are also dozens of community sourced Flickr apps for Android available here.

Marissa Mayer will be loving Instagram’s early Christmas bonus

Judging by the number of new connection requests coming through from Flickr, it would appear that there is some shift already taking place amongst my network. Our natural inclination is to establish trusted connections within a new network early. So not only does Flickr benefit from new members, those members are bringing their community strength with them.

Instagram may have unwittingly delivered an early Christmas present to Marissa Mayer at Yahoo! But let’s see what the new year brings.

HT @JohnHaydon

The Long Trail of Digital’s Long Tail

B2B Marketing, Case Studies, Digital Strategy, Social Media

For the last couple of months I have been researching the digital marketing automation market – speaking with vendors, watching demos, listening to customers and analysing features, statistics and case studies. It’s a crowded market with a wide variety of feature sets and capabilities.

But if there is one thing that is obvious in all the noise, it is this: while the technology has matured, digital marketing skills, capabilities and processes are comparatively immature.

Marketing automation software delivers impressive outcomes:

ROI: Identifying, nurturing and delivering warm leads into your sales funnel gives your marketing a direct line to ROI. This path to revenue provides marketers with the confidence and knowledge to understand what works and what doesn’t when it comes to digital marketing investment
Accelerate marketing maturity: marketing automation requires a certain level of process maturity in your marketing. For businesses where process has been lacking or alignment with sales has been ambivalent, marketing automation can deliver a relatively quick win
Generate uplift through omni-channel integration: many marketers focus on “last click attribution”. But we rarely make single click decisions – especially on more expensive purchases or when we are in a B2B situation. Integrated or omni-channel marketing has been shown to significantly impact revenue and pipeline.

The presentation below is a case study of one of Marketo’s own omni-channel campaigns. It reveals that the digital long tail is indeed, a very long trail. But careful planning and management can, with targeted content, deliver value across your marketing programs – not only for your digital work.

Interested in marketing automation? If you are interested in my upcoming marketing automation report, contact me here or sign-up for access to the Constellation Research Library.

The Path To A Killer Online Marketing Strategy from Marketo