thenewmarketing

The tyranny of always being online

Steve Ellis — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 23:58:00 GMT

A colleague forwarded me this Out of Office message...

Thank you for your message.

I, however, am attending a funeral on Friday, with, shall we say, rather limited network access. For quick assistance nonetheless, please text (SMS) me on...

Despite the benefits of ubiquitous internet access, I think there are times when it is still acceptable to be beyond the reach of broadband (and SMS).

Wikis: amazingly easy and useful

Wade Rockett — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:18:00 GMT

I don't think it's a stretch to say that blogging, once considered so strange and scary and geeky in a business context, has finally joined the mainstream in corporate communications.

Wikis, though...no, those are too strange, too scary, too geeky to have a place in the enterprise. Oh, maybe your software team uses one. But that just reinforces the point, yes? It's all right for technical types, but what about the sales team, or HR?

It's time to demystify wikis, and the best way to do that is to convince ordinary people to start playing with them. To that end, I do NOT recommend that they begin by editing entries on Wikipedia. Maybe I would have suggested that once, since Wikipedia is so well-known; but there are so many issues now around what constitutes proper editorial practices and what is and is not "noteworthy" enough for inclusion that it feels like sending hapless newbies into a minefield.

Instead, start by watching "Wikis In Plain English", a short video by Common Craft. Watching this zippy little demo recently, it struck me that my wife and I are planning a trip to New York City this summer--just the sort of use for a wiki that Common Craft suggests. I thought it would be great to have a place online where we could plan our trip, a site that both of us could easily update and which could include links and media. But would a wiki be too strange, scary, or geeky for my wife?

Not at all, as it turned out. I set up a private wiki on Wetpaint, a free wiki-building service. (It really is as easy as Common Craft makes it look.) I quickly created a home page and a Things To Do page listing some places that we wanted to visit. Within a couple of hours I got an e-mail from Wetpaint saying that my wife had created a Possible Hotels page, with links to each hotel's Web site. She also put a link on the home page to a New York Times article about touring the city's art galleries.

Pushing the geekiness envelope, I called up a Google Map of Manhattan and placed virtual pushpins in the places that we wanted to go and the hotels we were considering. I then linked to the map from the home page. Now we had an aerial view of exactly how far we'd have to go in order to collapse in our room at the end of a tiring day of sight-seeing. This new information led us to dramatically revise the Possible Hotels page.

Since then I've discovered that you can embed schedules and calendars in your Wetpaint wiki, which will be tremendously helpful in planning the trip.

So, yes: the wiki, despite its odd name and the disconcerting amount of Pokemon information on Wikipedia, is non-threatening and useful. You probably have a small project in your life that could use organizing--give it a try.

Shameless plug: The Metia Software team would probably like me to mention here that wiki creation is now included in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, which they are very good at customizing and deploying. Just in case you're interested.

BusinessWeek revisits its views on blogging

Steve Ellis — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:01:00 GMT

BusinessWeek has revisited a post from 2005, Blogs Will Change Your Business.

It has now, of course, become, Social Media Will Change Your Business.

The gist remains the same though: you have to get involved, so overcome your cynicism and get started.

Its interesting to review an article from almost three years ago. If you have been involved in blogging or social media during that period some it is very 101 level. But that doesn't mean it isn't still necessary.

I've just reviewed a list of 100+ delegates from corporate digital marketing departments who are attending a conference we are attending, and of that group - all of them with digital marketing in their job title - a significant majority include simply, 'learning more about the relevance of blogging and social media' in their information gathering requirements at the event.

As early adopters forge ahead it is too easy to forget the needs of the mass majority following behind.

Tags: blogging, BusinessWeek

Video evidence doesn't work

Andrew Martin — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:57:00 GMT

This is according to Intel's Chief Reference Office Rhett Livengood.

Sales outlaw's apply here

Andrew Martin — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 14:01:00 GMT

As Steve mentioned I’m at the Customer Reference Forum this week and will be presenting later on for newcomers to reference management about the infrastructure required to manage an effective program.

This morning I was thinking about a theme to base my presentation around and thought of the film I watched on the plane on the way here – 3:10 to Yuma.

In it a poor rancher is tasked with getting an outlaw onto the jail train to Yuma which leaves Contention at 3:10, hence the name. Along the way there are many difficulties and when he does succeed the rancher finally gets shot by one of the outlaw’s gang even though the outlaw was allowing him to get on the train because he knew he’d be able to escape later on.

Now replace the rancher with a person who runs reference programs and the outlaw and his gang with sales teams and, I think, you get something like some corporate customer reference programs albeit without the guns.

The rancher / Reference Professional is doing a difficult job that they haven’t necessarily been trained for as there is no training, the Customer Reference Forum comes as close as anything, out there. They have an incredibly tight schedule to hit and if they don’t all is lost.

The outlaw / Sales Professional doesn’t really want to provide a reference and the others in that team see it as possibly limiting their potential. However once they see the light and understand the end goal they’re more than willing to help because they realise it’s much better for everybody.

Before anybody asks I’m not saying that all sales professionals are outlaws this kind of connection is what happens when you’re jetlagged and first look at your clock at 3:10am while trying to think of something to say to a room full of people having just watched a film with 3:10 in the title.

Tags: Customer Reference Forum, 3:10 to Yuma, Customer Advocacy

Forrester's Big Idea - the Connected Agency - comments #2

Steve Ellis — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 22:17:00 GMT

Having commented on the first question raised by Forrester's recent Big Idea - the Connected Agency - in this post I'll whizz more quickly through the second.

So what about: agencies getting it about social media?

Well yes I'd have to agree with Jeremiah. How could anyone think of using an agency that didn't 'get it'? But what does 'get it' really mean?

Speaking as the principal of a medium sized agency with a heavy IT orientation, both in terms of client focus and our own core skills,

Parnassus offers free Webinar on participating in online conversations

Wade Rockett — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 11:38:00 GMT

Teresa Valdez Klein of Parnassus Group will be giving a free Webinar entitled "Locating and Participating in the Online Conversations that Matter" at 10:00 a.m. PST on February 19th, with an encore presentation the following day at the same time. The description reads:

This hour-long presentation will give you the skills necessary to find and participate in online conversations about your products, your industry, and your competition quickly and easily. You will will take away key techniques for monitoring online chatter and deciding when and how to chime in. The presentation will cover technologies and techniques for blog monitoring with RSS, engaging on social networks like Facebook, and participating on microblogging networks like Twitter.

Parnassus hosted the highly successful Facebook conference that I went to in December, so I expect this will be worth attending. Here's more information on the Webinar.

Forrester's Big Idea - the Connected Agency - comments #1

Steve Ellis — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:52:00 GMT

Last week Forrester published a new Big Idea on the Connected Agency.

Their exec overview of the Big Idea is:

Today's agencies fail to help marketers engage with consumers, who, as a result, are becoming less brand-loyal and more trusting of each other. To turn the tide, marketers will move to the Connected Agency — one that shifts: from making messages to nurturing consumer connections; from delivering push to creating pull interactions; and from orchestrating campaigns to facilitating conversations. Over the next five years, traditional agencies will make this shift; they will start by connecting with consumer communities and will eventually become an integral part of them.

I saw the coverage coming out from Forrester in various blogs - here for example - but didn't post on it at the time for two reasons:

Fear of my opinions reading as chippy and know-it-all
I haven't seen the actual report, so am only working from those blog posts and the outline on the Forrester site

But since Jeremiah - who I respect enormously - has asked for comments, here goes.

First, there are two connected but different points here:

Agencies understanding and connecting with their client's customers
Agencies 'getting it' about social media and technology

In this post I'll add some comments on the first point, and follow up later on the second.

The risk of chippiness derives from the fact that for twenty years - in the B2B marketplace, to be clear - we have earnt a living by connecting our clients with their customers. Sure, when there weren't social networks, online communities and the rest of the marketing toolkit 2.0, we did it in different ways. But certainly we connected them - through the marketing tools then available - with their customer's fears, concerns and issues, using their customer's language and jargon, and in the context of that community, in the conversations and at the meeting places that then existed.

I would argue if you have that experience, skills and aptitudes, then transposing them into the new techniques and channels offered by social media is a lot simpler than trying to come at it from the direction of the advertising agency.

Metia was by no means unique in that regard. In B2B especially, lots of other marketing and PR agencies paid the monthly wage bill by having a deep understanding of their client's target customer audiences. The tools and techniques being applied were always secondary to an understanding of what was driving the audience.

We had to get it right because we all survived on the dog end of the budget that was leftover after the advertising agency had spent the bulk of it randomly carpet bombing an unmoved audience with the advertising idea du jour (I exaggerate, a bit). We won our clients and projects by knowing the client's audience inside out. Ad agencies seemed to win clients and projects through the magic of advertising (a good trick, and yes, we would probably have swapped places like a shot).

Enough chippiness (sorry, but I warned you).

I suppose my point is, this might be a Big Idea for advertising agencies (and especially in B2C, and especially if they are still living in the 1980s), but its not a Big Idea for marketing or PR agencies. Take a look at the organizations Forrester interviewed, they are all classic Big Ad Agencies.

The question I would have is, do they have the appetite or inclination to get into the detail of these customers' worlds, especially in a B2B context. I think it will be a big ask. Most ad agency folk I meet glaze over when asked to get passionate about the ins and outs of server virtualization or MiFID or fractal ownership or whatever.

What other evidence have I got for the fact that Ad Agencies are far behind in this race? Well, never mind five years to change, lots of marketing services companies left the start line years back.

Item of evidence # 1

When the technology started to open up opportunities, a lot of us 'got it' early on. Eight years ago we built our first global online customer community. It was aimed at channel partners and in three years went from zero to 15,000 participating organizations worldwide. It mixed traditional marketing to recruit, with online community building, key influentials were cultivated and relationships bonded through complementary face-to-face events, all managed and measured through a software platform to run the program. Our people were the frontline, accepting members into the program, meeting them face-to-face, administering the program benefits. All made possible by a far sighted client who go it - and the sheer luck that this all grew up in what started out as a quiet backwater, so was under the radar of the corporate marketing machine.

Item of evidence # 2

Six years ago we got serious about customer advocacy, although we didn't use that term back then, we developed a methodology, tools, resources and capabilities. We developed applications to manage customer reference communities - and measure their contribution to sales. Now we manage those communities for clients, their communities in that particular case.

It would have been interesting if Forrester had interviewed more broadly and more diversely, in order to compare and contrast the approaches taken by smaller agencies outside advertising, which may have a track record in connecting their clients to customer communities.

Tags: The Connected Agency, Forrester, Jeremiah Owyang, customer communities

Does your corporation have a Chief Reference Officer?

Steve Ellis — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:34:00 GMT

I can't make it to Bill Lee's Customer Reference Forum 2008 next week in Berkeley - a heavily pregnant wife means getting on a plane to the West Coast isn't sensible. Which is a shame because it's a great event and I always enjoy it. My colleagues Andrew and Caroline are attending though. Andrew is talking about customer reference systems during one of the sessions and has some cool mobile apps and gadgets to demo to anyone attending.

One sign of the increasing maturity around this sector is the appointment of a first ever Chief Reference Officer - congratulations to Rhett Livengood at Intel. That's the first time I have heard of that role existing on a corporate org chart. Smart thinking by Intel to recognise the value provided by references to the business, and to give someone the job title and the remit to pull together all the threads into a coherent program.

Although I won't be there, Andrew has promised to blog from the event, so I look forward to staying in touch through his reports.

Tags: Customer Reference Forum, customer advocacy

Problem? Speak to the CEO

admin — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 18:04:00 GMT

This BusinessWeek article relates that Jason Knight, CEO of web start up Wesabe is available to speak to customers for four hours every day. He gets three or four calls a day directed from a link on the Wesabe home page. That's from a user base of 100,000 people.

Knight says that this policy was driven by the need to build trust among customers, I'll bet it also keeps him tightly tuned into his customer's needs and pain points. All without a market researcher in sight.

Tags: Wesabe, customer service

Google and Twitter mash Super Tuesday live

Steve Ellis — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:03:00 GMT

Google Maps linked with Twitter to bring you Super Tuesday 'live' with dynamic news updates and personal tweets from across the country.

Effectively, this created a one night national network of local citizen commentators, limited in numbers only by the inclination and resilience of individual Twitterers to participate (they were still going strong when I posted this).

I got pointed at this by Pete, who heads up our content team in London. Pete will shortly join the roster of contributors to TNM, so I'll have to get used to finding my own stories.

Google releases Social Graph API

Steve Ellis — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 15:59:00 GMT

Google's Social Graph API aims to automatically map the relationships between 'friends'.

According to a Blogoscoped report, Google are claiming to crawl publicly available data on social networks or blogs (blogrolls and friend lists) which can then be used to show the connections that exist between different individuals. A demo can be found here.

Like others we are investing resources into understanding the nature of influence and to build tools that help us to understand and manage it. This type of API points to one important aspect of influence, understanding the degree of 'connected-ness' between different participants within a defined universe of influence. It also shows some of the challenges and holes that currently exist in trying to build maps of key influentials using public data sources.

Tags: Social Graph, Google, influence

RIP Jeremy Beadle: father of Consumer Generated Content

Steve Ellis — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 00:17:00 GMT

Jeremy Beadle died of Leukaemia this week. The sub head of his obituary in the Independent was: Loved and Loathed TV Prankster. Which is both a blunt and accurate statement for his obituary. I can't honestly say I was one of his fans.

In recent years Beadle had drifted away from the mainstream of TV in the UK. But looking at his obituary today was a reminder that his great knack was tapping into popular appetites. Essentially, twenty years ago he saw and exposed the same popular appetites that have driven the emergence of both reality TV and consumer generated content on the internet.

Game for a laugh and Beadle's About were both huge shows in the 80s and 90s. They put normal members of the public at the heart of a contrived comic prank and (sad to admit) were compulsive primetime viewing. With the benefit of hindsight, it doesn't seem such a leap from proving that millions would happily rubberneck on members of the public exposed at the centre of a prank, into recruiting the public to participate in the extended and contrived package that is Big Brother and its copycats.

His other big show, You've been framed, pretty much invented the concept of consumer generated content, some fifteen years before the term had been invented, people were posting in their VHS videos to get themselves on TV. Obviously it took the arrival of widespread Internet access, broadband and cheap digital video cameras, in order to allow consumers to bypass the bottleneck of TV editors, and enable them to share not just comic moments but any personal video or creative statement with an unlimited Internet audience via YouTube.

While few of us may have seen the phenomena of YouTube before it broke, with hindsight the clues were out there.

This brief distraction from looking at the current and future state of social media caused me to reflect that, the characteristics of people fundamentally always stay the same, its the changing of the technology around them that alters their possibilities.

Tags: Jeremy Beadle, consumer generated content

Have you appointed a Facebook correspondent yet?

Steve — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 09:26:00 GMT

When MP Derek Conway was outed yesterday by the Conservative party for apparently very nominally 'employing' his sons at the public's expense, journalists were faced with the question of where to look for 'colour' to illustrate the story? Straight to Facebook of course.

The Times found more than enough colour to lighten up a story fundamentally about accountability for public funds. Curiously the Sun is far more dour.

Which begs the question, if Reuters has a correspondent in Second Life, and everyone obviously has a TV correspondent and a gossip columnist, which national newspaper will be first to appoint a Facebook correspondent?

Tags: The Times, Derek Conway, scams, The Sun Facebook

A Scrabulous update, sort of

Steve Ellis — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:48:00 GMT

My friend Eric once described Facebook as a platform for serving up Scrabulous games. Beyond that, it offers nothing of interest to him.

I have to wonder how many Erics there are out there, and how many of them would wander away from Facebook if Scrabulous were killed. Because if you haven't heard of it before, Scrabulous is...well, it's Scrabble, really. Or at least Scrabble-ish to the extreme. Hasbro owns the rights to Scrabble the physical game, while EA owns the rights to a hypothetical online version, and recently Mattel and Hasbro asked Facebook to remove the incredibly popular game on the grounds that it violates Hasbro's trademark. The game's fans responded by creating a "Save Scrabulous" Facebook group that currently has 52,681 members.

The deadline to shut the game down came and went with nary a ripple and no word about its status. The game remained active with a message promising that new features are coming soon. Today that message was replaced with an update from the game's creators that is short on information but offers hope that Talks are in process.

Hi folks :)

We are really grateful to the entire Scrabulous community for the exceptional support that has been provided. It is amazing to see that a small application has touched so many people across the world! There has been a lot of speculation about the future of Scrabulous and it is currently impossible for us to comment on this matter. However, like always, we shall update you as soon as we can.

In the meantime, please click here to enjoy a song created by an anonymous Scrabulous fan. :)

Which is encouraging to me, because I am currently losing about six Scrabulous games right now and would hate to see the plug pulled before I have a chance to make an astonishing comeback.

Many bloggers responded to the move by Hasbro and Mattel with posts to this effect: What a bonehead move, defending their trademark! Don't they understand this Brave New World of the Internet? They should buy or sponsor the game! These responses struck me as long on outrage, short on actual knowledge of trademark law.

So I loved this post by Shel Holtz and the comments by Mike Keliher, Jake McKee, and Roxanne Darling. Holtz explains that under the terms of current trademark law, these lawyers are doing their jobs very well. Then Keliher, McKee, and Darling clarify various factors in this case and come up with a scenario that could potentially satisfy everyone--lawyers and PR folks alike. Here's Darling's wrap-up:

People get bullied into corners based on advice to follow traditional behavior, when even the law itself does not require it. “Defending your trademark” can be established in many ways. Being an engaged corporate citizen has more value these days than ever. Why wait for the law to change when we can craft win-win responses right now?