iThnk.com – Business Insight About: Social Media, Co-creation and Free/Style

Most companies still refer to their customers in a ‘them versus us’ sense. How much more money can we get off them? How can we get more of them to buy our products or services? We need to research them so we know what they want. Why have they switched brands? We need to get them back.

If history has taught us anything it’s that everything good comes about due to successful relationships. This mantra can be applied to war, parenting, sports teams…almost nothing comes down to the pure success of one individual. Trusting and valuable relationships are the basis for most anything that it successful.

I know what you’re saying, relationship marketing isn’t a new concept. Everyone practices relationship marketing these days.

The relationship between a company and a customer has the same basic needs as the relationship between romantic couples might have. Both parties need to feel trusted and need to receive trust, both need honesty, attention, respect, love and admiration, both need to feel as if they are really truly desired. Do you feel like this with any company?

The concept of Lovemarks has sought to do this and sure many people love, trust, and desire and give plenty of their attention to their Apple computers. Does Apple give this back to their customers. Is there any form of personal interaction with this company, a company that expects such respect from their customers? Of course the relationship can’t be as personal and intense as a true romantic relationship but companies sure could use a bit of a rough guide.

Throughout my long, frustrating and arduous search for a job during the past few weeks I have come across one company that I believe respects me in a way that no other employer or recruiter has, ever. Over just one meeting and one phone conversation I have created a lasting bond with this company. They trust me enough give me their time, to send me off to some of their best clients for interviews. This trust in me builds my trust in them immensely. They have given me plenty of attention, making sure I know what is happening every step of the way. Going out of their way to chat with me about myself and not just how I would be suited to a particular job. I in turn have chatted with my recruiter about herself and I feel she is more than just a recruiter, she’s someone I can respect as a person and not because of her career status. Moreover the attention I am given makes me feel totally desired. Not like I am just another CV in that darned huge pile, “let’s not bother writing back to each person that has applied, it will take too much of our time, they’re not worth it”. To those companies that haven’t made me feel in the slightest desired, trusted, admired, attended to, or respected, I will never again interact with your company so don’t worry about me being a nuisance any more.

Companies need not only to have knowledge of the concept of relationship marketing. They need to practice it. Try and treat your next customer or potential customer as you would someone you truly desired.

• Would you leave them waiting in line while you chatted to your colleague about the weekend events?

Of course not! As soon as you saw them your face would light up with happiness and your attention would turn to them.

• Would you ever be left wondering why they had left you for a more improved version of yourself?

No if they were that important to you they would never have left.

• Would you try and push them into buying something you knew they didn’t really want or need only to have them dissatisfied with their purchase and you afterwards?

Never! you would talk to them until you had an understanding of what their real need was and then you would help to fulfill that need the best way that suited them.

• Would you have to do background research to know their needs and wants?

No you wouldn’t your daily interaction with them would give you a better idea of who they really were and what they truly desired.

Go give your customers a hug today…you won’t regret it!

It’s no secret that the almighty interweb has caused a major downturn in the print magazine biz. All sorts of fixes have been tried, for a while some were hailing embedding video players in print magazines as the saviour of print based advertising.

When talking about the future of Wired, Chris Anderson said “We need to do something that doesn’t exist online, and do it in a superior way. Otherwise we should just do it online.” This might just be the superior way that they’ve been searching for…

Did you notice the sharing interface…pretty cool aye!

Now imagine how impressive the Mag+’s interface and social sharing system could be if coupled with augmented reality, so kinda turbo-charging what Esquire did with their Robert Downey Jr edition.

The problem with print is that once something has gone to the press its locked in forever – unable to be tweaked or reshaped. But for a long time the tactile and visual experience that was confined to the world of brochures, magazines and newspapers made it worthwhile.

The reason that the Kindle put a dent in the market share of newspapers and print books but didn’t really touch the magazine market, was simply that it couldn’t create that tactile or visual experience. But the Mag+ and AR might just be the forces that truly puts printed magazines to death.

Thnk about it…you’ve got a beautiful visual interface, an amazing tactile experience that has wicked social sharing and interactive features and ads that blur the boundary between the real and the digital worlds…why would you use anything else.

The “Marketing Renaissance” is a beautiful term that I began using after hearing it in CC Chapman’s podcast Manageing the Grey. The term really resonated with me, it seemed to sum up all the changes that free and open media is bringing about. But having only a basic understanding of the renaissance I decided to explore it a bit further and see how applicable it actually is for describing what  we’re going through. So what was the renaissance? – vid explains it well.

“Renaissance” literally means “rebirth.” So is this really a renaissance period? Is this the rebirth of marketing?

If so what are the changes that are to live for the next hundred years? And who are our people?

• Art
  • Social Television? Augmented Reality?
• Literary Ramifications
  • Blogs and tweets?
• Scientific progress
  
  • The scholarly world of marketing is redefining it’s principles around embracing rather than interrupting. But is this a rebirth?
    
• Religion
  
  • Is social media a religion? (there are certainly enough fanatics).
• Self-awareness
  • Maybe we’re more aware of how interrupting others with ads over the last 100 years is intrusive and annoying?
    
• People?
  • Jeremiah Owyang, Seth Goddin, Kevin Rose, Ev Williams, Larry Page, Sergey Brin?
    

Improvement?

Much of the debate around the Renaissance has centered around whether the Renaissance truly was an “improvement” on the culture of the Middle Ages. How will this period of change for marketing be seen in 100 years from now? What do you think?

Has the plethora of new marketing tools available with Web 2.0 helped create a more even playing field for business? The short answer is; potentially…the more accurate answer to this somewhat loaded question contains a lot more ifs, buts and maybes.

The Dilemma

Web 2.0 certainly has the ability to reduce the gap between small and big business. See  Micro-brewing Social Media for a great example of how. But as the gap potentially narrows; the reality is that it also widens in the majority of cases.

Sounds deep I know, and it is. Deeply troubling if you’re an old school small business content to watch the world pass by. But equally as disturbing at the other end of the spectrum if you’re reliant upon traditional media to push your message to increasingly selective consumers. In either case opting not to join “the conversation” will put distance between those who do and those who don’t.

Small Business

If you’re a SME ticking along nicely it may be hard to see how an activity like joining a social network could help improve your customer relationships. It probably seems like too much hassle for most. For those who consider online communication just as a necessary box to tick and not a powerful marketing platform; investing time in Web 2.0 not going to appeal. It will always be difficult to make inroads when the true value is not fully understood.There are heaps of SMEs embracing web 2.0 with great results – check out this success story. However, I don’t think I’m wrong when I claim is the exception rather than the rule (at least for the time being).

The Big Fish

A lot of the big companies that have historically spent loads of cash through print, TV, and radio advertising are in the same boat as the hesitant small companies. The “lets see what happens with this second web thingee”, soon to sink boat. Being purely a spectator to online developments will certainly allow competitors to catch up, or more likely, go further ahead.

What I’ve eluded to above is that it’s not the business size, rather the business attitude that dictates what impact Web 2.0 can have on growth. So to answer the opening question; no it doesn’t create an even playing field. I personally believe the new net has actually pushed big business even further ahead. Why? I’m glad you asked…

Reality Bites

Bigger companies are in a better position to capitalise on new developments, quicker. It comes down to resources. Lets say you’re trying to build a kick ass corporate blog…First you need good content. That content comes form interesting people, genuine company insight, and well written posts . Putting all these together is hard work, time consuming and almost impossible if the right people aren’t involved. Big business have the resources to put all the ingredients in place. If one of the important ingredients [e.g. video production] doesn’t exist in house, they have the means to outsource it. Importantly they can do it quickly, spread the load between employees to ensure good content is always coming through, and even throw some money into search engine advertising to promote it if need be. Not very “even” if you ask me.

Small business does has the advantage of agility. Less organisational red tape coupled with a more intimate company culture can help SMEs rip into new web domination. I believe the rise of Web 2.0 has given small business a realistic opportunity to compete with the big boys head on. Communicating through blogs and social networking is much more cost effective (than traditional media), and  the barriers to entry are few. The well resourced companies will make it happen quicker, that’s for sure; but there’s no reason why the underdog can’t catch up.

Several weeks ago I posted Advertising Conversations – An AdWords Experiment. Now the budget has been exhausted and the results are in. Our initial strategy proved costly. We used a lot of quite broad keywords, had a high average cost-per-click (CPC) bid (relative to our budget), opted to use both managed and automated ad placements, and had a high daily budget allocation. The fact  that we were using free money (thanks Google!) probably didn’t help motivate us to formulate a more economical strategy from the outset. However, we always had the intention to make mistakes so others wouldn’t have to. You can thank us later…

Most of our impressions (and about 40% of clicks) came from the automatic placement network. The managed content placements we used had next to no traction at all. There is a lot of material going round stating the risk of allocating much of your budget to the automatic content network, check out this Internet Marketing Blog. Like many others I would advise to err on the side of caution (at least initially) when it comes to the auto content network. Focus on optimising your keywords first.

Content placements drastically reduce your click-through-rate (CTR), which in turn adversely affects your quality score. This means your ads are less likely to appear at the top when your keywords are searched for. Bummer. Unless you have a lot of money to allocate to AdWords campaigns (enabling you to frequently outbid the competition), I would suggest giving the auto network the flick. Sure you can get a lot of impressions and possibly clicks, but are these people really interested in what you do? The majority probably wont find what their looking for. Hello high bounce rate, bye bye budget!

Give us the stats already!

Ok for our $95 we got 134 clicks, 286,874 impressions, and had a click through rate (CTR) of 0.05%. Our most successful keyword was “Co-creation” with 23 clicks (CTR of 0.91%), followed by “marketing tips” with 20 (CTR of 0.59%). Interestingly the term “join the conversation” had the highest CTR of 2.59%. We burned through most of the budget in less than a week on when our daily limit was $20! In an attempt to gather more information with what money remained we adjusted our campaign settings. This enabled the ads to continue running for about one month all up. What it also did was make us consider the most efficient and effective way to manage our ads.

That is about the best advice I can offer. Keep tinkering with your keywords. Add more, remove non-performing ones and keep a close eye on those that are generating rubbish traffic. Consider using negative keywords where you think people may be inadvertently clicking on your ads. We noticed a pattern of searchers looking for Facebook login info so we added negative keywords that were associated with this search.

Overall the AdWords experiment wasn’t hugely successful in terms of getting people to “join the conversation”. More people visited the site for sure, but as for getting the community to contribute, well I guess that is still a work in progress… What it did teach us was that the saying “build it and they will come” doesn’t apply to AdWords. Build it (your ads), they will come, leave quickly, and you’re left out of pocket in a hurry. Build it well on the other hand, adapt you keywords and ad text to what the searchers are looking for; and you will increasingly improve your R.O.I

If you have any AdWords advice, stories or questions please comment below or contact us at @iThnk.

Design Thinking” is now a global buzzword, which leads me to two conclusions. Firstly, that there is a lot rubbish out there on what this buzzword actually means (and more importantly, how it adds value to businesses). Secondly, that there is likely to be a good deal of value somewhere within whatever Design Thinking is, which has led it to becoming a buzzword in the first place.

So I want to briefly cover how I see Design Thinking adding value to businesses.

But firstly, please stop here and watch this presentation by one of the thought leaders in “Design Thinking” globally, Tim Brown of IDEO. He covers what Design Thinking actually is in a much better fashion that I could, so I won’t waste your time on anything less clarifying that his description:

The Design Thinking approach has a lot of potential for creating radical changes in a business, resulting in significant advances on the competition, and in some cases creating entire new industries.

Tim completed his talk with the statement on the application of Design Thinking that “the first step is to start asking the right questions”. Which is a small thing to say, but quite a challenge to work through. Because that little statement implies that a business leader must step back and look at the business in terms of the needs it exists to meet. This gives the scope of what Design Thinking questions are relevant to the specific business in question.

Stepping back is difficult, because it is such a gear change from the typical day-to-day work of optimising the business by increasing efficiencies, customers and financial returns. And the longer one is in this “optimising” mode, the more difficult it becomes to even consider that there might be an entire new solutions to the delivering meeting customer needs.

Businesses that manage to step back, look again at their core purpose, then ask the right questions and engage in the Design Thinking approach that Tim describes, get real value. And for the rest, “Design Thinking” remains a buzzword.

This is a guest post written by Matt Ayres, a Business Catalyst at Polson Higgs. Matt is a great proponent of design thinking and disruptive innovation. Contact him here.