Preference-based consumer marketing. Why do we ignore it?

There is a vast amount of research that has been conducted recently regarding the consumers’ preferred method of receiving marketing communication. A recent study by Forrester Research, and commissioned by ExactTarget, highlights that the majority of consumers today still have a strong affinity towards email.

The important take out: Consumers prefer email at a rate of three-to-one when compared with any other avenue for marketing communications such as social media, Instant Messaging, phone and SMS!

Despite the abundance of research that all points towards email being the marketing method of choice for consumers, why do marketers continue to ignore this?

Despite the spike of Internet users using social media, for example three quarters of Australian online adults use social technologies (Forrester: Australian Adult Social Technographics Revealed 2008), consumers in general are NOT open to receiving marketing communication via this channel.

As social media continues to boom with new channels for communication being created everyday with new social networking sites and the like popping up, there is an overreliance and tendency to use this medium for all-purposes in order to reach the masses.

Unfortunately we forego the very fundamental principles of Marketing 101. We need to stop, think, plan and go back to basics:

• Who are our customers?
• Where are they?
• What are their preferences for receiving marketing messages?
• What are the right messages for each customer segment?
• What channel do we use to reach them?

A quick Google search and some top line research is enough to reveal where our customers’ preferences sit. It’s all very simple. Follow the basic principles of marketing and target the appropriate marketing messages to the appropriate consumers based on their preferences using the appropriate channels!

Sadly, we are missing the point! We’re frustrating consumers and, ultimately, not getting the outcomes that we desire!

Online communities: think ‘quality NOT quantity’

Nate Cochrane pens his rules for social media etiquette on iTNews. And in a style true to the very fundamentals of social media which encourage active sharing and participation, he has made a point to list the rules he outlines as a work in progress and has opened it up for discussion on the site.

One of the rules that he points out is one that we tend to forget: ‘Quality NOT quantity’. Too often PRs get flack for doing a last minute dash to sign up as many people in their network to become friends/ fans on their clients’ Facebook groups and pages or on their Twitter handles.

As PRs, we need to continue to educate our clients that the real value does not lie in the sheer volume of people we sign up but rather in the quality of the people we engage (even if it’s only a handful!).

Consider who your target audience is, where do they frequent and how to reach them. Who is in your fans/ friends extended networks. Are they the right audience to target?

Using Twitter as an example, it’s important to do the analysis and drill down into who the person is that you want to connect with, get to know them, follow them for a while and find out what they write about. Also have a look into who follows that person, are they the appropriate person for your client to be reaching out to or is there someone in their Twitter network that is better?

The following tool can help you determine the most appropriate people to follow:
http://flowingdata.com/2008/03/12/17-ways-to-visualize-the-twitter-universe/

If we want to get some real and long lasting results for our clients, the key is to make sure that we’re speaking to the right audiences!

Enterns are the new interns

In the current economic climate, one would expect to see a rise in internship programs as people across a wide range of industry sectors struggle to find paid work and opt for any foot in the door with big brands and firms (something that an unpaid internship offers). On the contrary, could the GFC and rise in unemployment be responsible for a rise in the ‘entern’?

• There is a growing groundswell of entrepreneurs, and they bandy together;
• There are websites, forums, portals and blogs both dedicated to them and run by them;
• Yet again, we are seeing an upsurge in start-up companies by young founders; and
• Today’s business leaders are getting younger (see my247, Danoz Direct, Strike Group Australia, Moi Moi Fine Jewellery, Geekversity etc…).

Today, everyone is an entrepreneur and the art of entrepreneurship is a craft that cannot be taught.

Will we see more people bypass traditional internship programs, education institutions and other formal training programs as they start to hone their entrepreneurial skills and focus their efforts towards developing their own start up companies?

Something for smart companies and formal training institutions to think about…

The impact of the global recession on social media

I’m keen to understand how the global recession is impacting social media and particularly the North American powerhouse, Silicon Valley. I’m interested in the develpments occurring at Silicon Valley mostly because today we can consider it the backbone behind a lot of the big Web 2.0 companies.

Belts seem to be tightening in all industries across the board – banking, automotive, retail and so on – yet we’re still seeing big injections of capital in many of the Web 2.0 companies.

Take micro-blogging service Twitter for example. It was announced this week that Twitter has managed to raise $35 million in venture capital in spite of the challenging economic climate. This capital has come from Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital.

Are venture capitalists finally seeing the real value of Web 2.0 in helping deal with challenging times ahead?

I think that social media will come out on top in these tough times as people start using it as a means of cost-saving on entertainment. This is especially important at a time when people are becoming increasingly budget-conscious and are rather choosing to bunker indoors and save their pennies.

I’m a good example of this. I seem to find myself on fewer outings to the movies and instead I keep my cinema experience to my lounge room with my LCD TV, entertainment system and complete surround sound system. In fact, I can’t remember the last movie I saw at the cinemas but I could rattle off at least five DVDs that I have watched at home. I also spend less time travelling and more time talking to my friends overseas via Facebook and Twitter.

There are a plethora of online technologies and digital devices out there that provide consumers with their own portal to entertainment. Aside from big screen TVs that bring you a cinema at home, there are also notebook PCs to consider.

Notebooks are another means of cost-effective entertainment to online services such as online gaming, online video, video conferencing and instant connection to friends and family via IM, social networking sites, email or Skype with those embedded with broadband solutions.

Interestingly enough, consumer experts are also already tipping that many Australians will use the planned $950 Rudd Government cash handouts to splurge on games and gadgets, following record spending on electronics last year (as reported by the Courier Mail).

I’ll be watching these developments closely but please feel free to share any information specifically around how you think social media will fare in light of the global recession.

A covert operation: Naked causes social media uproar

It was only last week that I was talking about the use of social media and viral videos in particular to promote a brand and cause.

I was specifically drawing a comparison between Tourism Queensland’s fake viral video that appeared on YouTube with a woman getting a tattoo of the ‘dream job’ advertisement on her arm and comparing it with the video of Heidi Clarke, the woman with a jacket to return to a mysterious man that she met in the Sydney CBD.

Early last week it hadn’t been confirmed whether this last video was a fake but now it has been revealed that it indeed is a spoof. It has also been revealed that this is the work of Australian strategy consultancy, Naked Communications.

This misleading viral campaign has caused major uproar in social media and has captured many negative comments. These comments are mostly around the idea of using social media to mislead consumers in order to promote a particular cause and also particularly negative comments about the agency itself.

Was it a clever video? Yes. Did it get people talking? Yes. So much so that this actually caused a stir in both online and offline world. Would it have caused as much of a stir in social media if Tourism QLD hadn’t recently admitted to its hoax video? I’m actually doubtful although I don’t necessarily agree with these sorts of covert marketing tactics.

Naked Communications has taken a beating because of its actions. This is a mistake that anyone could have made and one that a lot are probably guilty of but yet to be found out about just yet. Although I caveat this by saying that we are likely to see a domino effect here and I’m sure there are many more dominos that will start to fall now.

We can take a lesson from this. Many savvy marketers are talking about the use of covert marketing and tactics in order to raise brand awareness and eyebrows. Many people believe that this is clever marketing and gets consumer excited. We need to be aware that this is clearly not the case. This sort of behaviour on social media is simpe not acceptable.

Perhaps we need to go right back to social media 101 again. Do we need to retrain people on the core principles that underpin this very medium? It’s all about honesty, authenticity and transparency. And you’re most certainly damned if you don’t!

Just look at the flack that the likes of Vespa and Sony have attracted in this past year for using covert marketing as a means to promote a cause. Vespa – slammed! Sony Fake Tourist campaign – slammed!

I’m really interested to hear your thoughts on misleading viral campaigns. Do you have any other examples you can share. What other big companies are using covert marketing as a means of promotion?

The Best Job in the World: social media and destination marketing

We’ve all been hearing and reading a lot about “The Best Job in the World“, the destination marketing campaign by Tourism Queensland. In short, Tourism Queensland put out a worldwide call for candidates to apply for a Great Barrier Reef-based job paying $150,000. This has played out quite nicely in social media – in particular on video aggregator sites such as YouTube.

The winner will need to become friendly with the locals and explore the Great Barrier Reef and indulge in activities that make up the island experience – swimming, diving, snorkelling and hanging out on the beach. As part of the ‘dream’ job, the successful applicant will also need to post their adventures on a blog, regularly updating it with the latest photos and video footage.

In order to apply, the candidates have been asked to create and submit a 60-second video of themselves. Part of a $1.7 million global marketing strategy and, according to a report in The Australian, the campaign is expected to generate more than $70 million worth of publicity for Queensland.

This is a great feat given the current financial crisis and particularly now that the heat has turned up in Australia. It was announced yesterday that NSW is officially in recession and this is expected to spread throughout Australia, according to the Access Economics’ Business Outlook for December 2008 (although there are still mixed reports about this). This campaign is raising the profile of this holiday destination at a time where people are less inclined to travel. This campaign is putting Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef on the global map.

Although this campaign is attracting widespread attention both locally and across the globe, there has also been a recent flurry of backlash. Yesterday, Tourism Queensland admitted to seeding a fake video of a candidate applying for the ‘dream’ job. The video is of a girl getting an advertisement for the Great Barrier Reef tattooed on her arm. The spoof video was uncovered by YouTube frequenters who acknowledged the video as a fake as there was no red on her arm immediately after getting the tattoo.

It was reported in The Sydney Morning Herald that this video was intended as an”…example of the creativity Tourism Queensland expected from applicants, and to spur people to post their own videos”.

This comes at a time where there has been a fair bit of scepticism around the use of video sites such as YouTube to promote a cause. The most recent example of self-promotion is the video of Heidi Clarke, a girl who posted a YouTube video about a man that she briefly met and spoke to at a CBD cafe.

The apparent man had left his jacket behind and because she insists she felt a ‘connection’ with him, she wanted to use the video site to try and find him. Not only did we see widespread coverage of this on YouTube and online news sites but this extended to traditional news outlets including TV. We are still yet to uncover whether in fact the girl and her cause is genuine but it is widely believed that this, too, is a fake.

Despite the furore of using social media and covert marketing to promote a cause, this has still been a unique and innovative destination marketing campaign. We are still seeing other applicants upload their own 60-second videos to YouTube.