dirty, nasty, digital

Ham not Spam

Email is known as the "workhorse" of Direct Marketing beacuse of its wide usage across all demographics, ease of implementation and good ROI. It has also become a victim of its own success as it is cheap and easy to flood consumers inboxes with irrelevant messages.

Everyone talks about seducing consumers with timely, relevant messaging, but have a look at your own inbox and see if you feel loved. 

So how can you make sure your communications are seen as Ham and not Spam? 

Technical (the easy bit)

Deliverability is still a major challenge, especially for verticals like gambling and healthcare which create false positives for spam. Brands need to develop best practise templates which show the ISPs they are credible and playing by the rules. While good quality ESPs proactively manage the relationship with ISPs and list holders, brands should monitor their campaign delivery rates and investigate sudden changes.

Relevance (the harder bit)
Brands need to demonstrate the value of their emails to get permission to communicate and maintain relevance with their email base. Consumers classify unwanted email they have signed up for as Spam. It’s easy to flag an item as junk from an email client and this action feeds back into filtering applications, making each of your future emails harder to deliver.

Consumers value service messaging which gives confirmation, dispatch and delivery notifications when they order products and this is a good place to start a relationship. The initial motivation for allowing brands to communicate expires quickly and you need to provide new value to keep consumers engaged.

In summary, make sure you've got the technical stuff under control and start thinking about how to maintain relevance on an ongoing basis. 

Calls to Conversation

Emails are a simple marketing tool which brands are pretty comfortable using. Every time they send a blast out they see a spike in traffic and conversions.

I spotted this nice “call to conversation” on an email from online art store Eyestorm. Rather than using the “visit our website, book a test drive” sign off associated with traditional brands in digital channels, Eyestorm have focused their energy on deepening their digital relationship.

Obviously it helps if you have an active & relevant profile in a conversation space. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more traditional brands taking this  approach during 2009.

Why brands should consider the video conversation

Lauren Luke is the 27 year old single mum from South Shields whose make up tips are watched by a global audience of millions on YouTube.

She ditched her job in a taxi firm 18 months ago and started selling makeup over eBay. She was answering so many questions about applying her products by email, that she started to create video demonstrations on YouTube.

These videos were shot in a bedroom, produced with a laptop and webcam have had over 5million views. A typical clip will run for 10 minutes, have 100k+ views and 1k+ comments. Fast forward 18 months and Lauren is launching her own makeup range and writes a weekly column for the Guardian.

Stories like these have been a feature of YouTube since it launched in early 2005. Semi-pro filmmakers could film a few scenes on a mini DV video camera in the morning, plug the cable into their computer and use free software like imovie to make a 3 minute video promo to upload to YouTube that evening.The reason that video is going to explode into the mass market in 2009 is that the means of production have been simplified.

The recent Cadburys Livebrow MPU extended their dancing eyebrows TV campaign by letting users film themselves using their webcam and submit it via the Flash MPU into a competition.

Its easy to capture and upload video from most modern mobile phones, but the hot video product at the moment is the Flip Minos camera. It costs £99, uses solid state storage, a built a built in USB connection and has a simple workflow that lets you publish to YouTube on the click of a button. Cisco are hoping that this will be the perfect device to go mass market and democratise video. They have a serious interest in high bandwidth infrastructure and purchased the parent company, pure digital last week.

In a move with a similar end result, naked conversations author and rabid video blogger Robert Scoble recently announced he’s moving to hosting company Rackspace to work on a new video network.

So if video is going to overtake text as the currency of social networks, what lessons are there for brands? The workflow for video has been radically simplified with a variety of channels and tools for creators. My advice is to take a lesson from Lauren Luke and engage your users in a warm and honest conversation.

This post originally appeared on March 23rd 2009 on Brand Republic

Another one of those viral setups: this time for Vodafone

Actually they've done quite a nice job of this (Dare? BBH?), but these things are starting to feel a bit formulaic.

- impossibly complex heath robinson-esque setup: check
- over choreographed shoot to look natural (those toilet rolls are over art directed): check
- shakeycam blurry shot of celeb: check

Is Google “interest-based advertising” evil?

 

At the Digital Britain keynote a couple of weeks back Peter Bazalgette (ex Endemol) said "The truth is that not a single media company knows what its model will be in ten years' time." His vision of a content model for publishers was that "In future all content will be paid for either by people's attention spans or their personal data".

Internet users refuse to pay for mainstream content and services, preferring to substitute a worse free version rather than shell out for micropayments or subscriptions. The challenge with ad-funded models is that the advertising is not valuable enough to pay for the content or services. Increasing the relevance of advertising means that publishers can charge more for relevant placements, which generate higher conversions and ultimately better ROI for brands.

Enter Google, with their announcement of a new service “interest-based advertising” a polite way of describing their behavioural targeting platform.

Behavioural targeting has been a hot topic for digital strategists. We’ve been leveraging the personalised communications which we carry out through other channels into website experiences with tools like Omniture’s Touch Clarity for many years. But taking information we’ve learnt from one site and applying it to adverts on another (“cross domain”) has raised privacy and legal issues.

Google are the masters of digital relevance, their Adword PPC product put relevant ads next to search results for active seekers. Their Adsense product puts these Adwords onto content partner sites, this time matching the site content. This is great for the low hanging fruit, but after last years acquisition of DoubleClick. Google is focusing on display advertising, to stimulate demand.

Google has been laying the foundations for this, on the 3rd of March they collaborated with the IAB to launch “Good Practice Principles”, the UK’s first self-regulatory guidelines to set good practice for companies that collect and use data for online behavioural advertising purposes.

While Google’s new offering has an “opt out” option in line with the IAB best practise, the mass market know that their data is being used, but can’t be bothered to opt out.

Other practitioners of behavioural targeting such as Phorm are about as popular as a spammer at a Tweetup. Will this move put a dent in netizens perception of Google as a brand, looks like we'll have to wait a bit until the come up top in organic results for "pure evil".

Microsoft Office labs vision 2019

 

This Microsoft vision of how people will use office in 2019 is pretty impressive. Tablets, real life annotation and integrated i-paper all get their spot. Shame the reality of their current offering (e.g. Vista) is such a piece of crap. For more info visit the Office labs vision page here

Case study: the Barack Obama Strategy

Case Study: The Barack Obama Strategy

View more presentations from Socialmedia8 Amsterdam. (tags: lacomunidad socialmedia8)

Great article on Read Write Web which acts as a washup on the Obama elections use of digital channels, god i love slideshare!

"This presentation was done by Igor Beuker of viralblog.com, with research by Paul van Veenendaal - who apparently used over 250 different sources to create this impressive slideshare.

The presentation lists the following ways that Obama was "everywhere" in social media during his campaign:

  * Obama has gained 5 million supporters in third party social networks.
  * Obama maintained a profile in more than 15 online communities, including BlackPlanet, a MySpace for African Americans, and Eons, a Facebook for baby boomers.
  * On Facebook, where about 3.2 million (during the campaign) signed up as his supporters, a group called Students for Barack Obama was created in July 2007.
  * It was so effective at energizing college-age voters that senior aides made it an official part of the campaign the following spring.
  * And Facebook users did vote: On Facebook's Election 2008 page, which listed an 800 number to call for voting problems, more than 5.4 million users clicked on an "I Voted" button to let their Facebook friends know that they made it to the polls.

Also check out these statistics from Obama's main website / social network, My.BarackObama.com:

  * On MyBarackObama.com, Obama's own social network, 2 million profiles were created
  * In addition, 200,000 offline events were planned
  * About 400,000 blog posts were written
  * And more than 35,000 volunteer groups were created - at least 1,000 of them on Feb. 10, 2007, the day Obama announced his candidacy"

Internet enabled cars

In the first internet bubble there was a lot of talk about internet enabled domestic devices, but somehow the idea of a fridge that could order beer from Sainsburys before you ran out never really took off.

Fast forward to 2009 and BMW have launched their ConnectedDrive, which will be available as an option across the range for German customers. ConnectedDrive is tacked onto the iDrive interface, offering on board internet access for driving apps (mapping, tracking and roadside assistance). It also offers unfettered access to the internet, so you can poke your friends on facebook from a service station or search for Sushi as the charming euro ad above shows.

For safety’s sake you’ll have to be doing less than 3mph for the system to work in the driving seat, although rear seat passengers can use the service in full motion (see more about this in the “innovation lounge”). Critics have argued that this is an unnecessary distraction in the “ultimate driving machine” and that these kind of services can easily be accessed via your iphone or PDA.

Scientists have also been hard at work, with UCLA Engineering's Network Research Lab team, led by Mario Gerla and Giovanni Pauhave working on a system dubbed “CarTorrent”, after the popular filesharing service “BitTorrent”. This will allow cars within 300-1000 feet of each other to talk to each other simultaneously downloading information in the shape of road safety warnings, entertainment content and navigational tools. They say this system could be ready for the market in 2012, there’s more information on the Guardian website.

2009 Digital Trends: Optimisation, Multichannel and Succinctness

  

El Pais 2009 trends predicts that we'll be wearing pyjamas more often in the street

This year is going to be tough for consumers, brands and their agencies. After the perceived “corruption” of 2008 from banks, financiers and failing brands, consumers are looking for honesty and transparency.

Respected Spanish newspaper El Pais (El Pais 2009 trends, via google translate) states that “white is the new black”, with brands looking to distance themselves from the events of last year and white coloured goods dominating recent motor shows and upcoming product ranges.

Amongst all of this there are three key trends that look certain to dominate the digital landscape:

Optimisation

Over the last couple of years, brands have invested a lot in digital destinations and now they need to see a payback. Those big new commissions are getting put on hold as tactical communications come to the fore. It’s about using the budget you have to delivery better a better user experience and better results.

Maths is back with Taguchi, latin squares and statisticians using their insights for multivariate testing across email, landing pages and sign ups.

Planners need to focus on using hard data to free up budget to make business change.

Multi Channel / Multi touchpoint

2008 saw the evolution of complex ARGs (Alternate Reality Games) into softer versions for the mass market.

The best example of this was the Vodafone Liveguy campaign which used blogs, facebook, twitter, picassa and the inevitable google mashup to create a competition where you could win a Dell netbook by interacting with him and following the clues to find him in a different UK City each day.

Another example of this was the Samsung Pixon campaign by Lean Mean Fighting Machine, which wasn’t quite as direct as LiveGuy, but had the multi touchpoint spirit.

The key to these campaigns was 2 way communication (you ask a question, he twitters back), participants in social media are often seeking attention and brands can deliver this in multi-touchpoint campaigns (there's a great slideshare presentation here called "discovery is the new cocaine"). As the dialogue builds online it should resolve offline in an event or real life interaction. As phones get smarter and consumers more demanding, this type of branded entertainment seems a good way to get attention for brands and build relationships.

Succinctness

A long held maxim of communications is to keep your message singleminded, concise and memorable. Made to Stick, a book by brothers Dan & Chip Heath has some great case studies and principles to evaluate and make your ideas more sticky. Among other things, they imply the length of the message is important, but looking at the best performing channels for 2008, succinctness feels like the defining characteristic.

SMS: 140 characters max

Email subject lines: most effective at under 49 characters

Google Adwords: 105 characters (25 for the title, 70 for the description)

Twitter: 140 characters max

Facebook status: unlimited, but generally less than 140 characters

The ability to be concise, descriptive and interesting in short communications environments looks like a key to success in 2009.

Digital Inclusion: evolving accessibility and usability

As part of our work on a new digital Government project for the COI targeting at risk clusters, I’ve been getting my head around digital inclusion. Developing public websites has traditionally focused on accessibility and usability, but it's clear that better insights into the users themselves are essential.

 

Government services are increasingly being delivered online, but this carries the risk of increasing exclusion for disadvantaged people. For example the figure below shows that in 2007 only 10% of over 70's have internet access at home and 35% of DE's.

 

Figure 1: Growth in take-up by platform, 2005 and 2007, by age and socio-economic group
source: http://www.ofcom.org.uk/advice/media_literacy/medlitpub/medlitpubrss/ml_adult08/

 

When you’re trying to communicate with at risk groups you can reduce exclusion by having a good understanding of their digital behaviour. Ethnographic research into the topic would give some good insights, but if you don’t have the luxury of budget for bespoke research, there is a wealth of information available on the web.

One of my first ports of call was with the Digital Inclusion Team. They are part of the Communities and Local Government department and their focus is on the use of technology either directly or indirectly to improve the lives and life chances of disadvantaged people and the places in which they live.

Their 2007 report “The Links between Digital Disengagement and Social Exclusion” states that 33% of households don’t have a home computer and 50% don’t have broadband. The report confirms that use decreases with age, increases with wealth and socio-economic status.

Ewen at the Digital Inclusion Team has a wealth of information on the subject and pointed me in the direction of the Ofcom website. Part of Ofcom’s remit is to monitor the Media Literacy of the UK population.

They’re definition of media literacy is “the ability to access, understand and create communications in a variety of contexts” and breaks down into

 

Access: includes take-up of media platforms such as computers and mobile phones and how they connect to digital media sources (e.g. broadband, dial-up, wireless, mobile)

Understand: includes interest and competence in using the features available on each platform, extent and levels of concern about content, trust in internet sites

Create: includes people’s confidence in engaging with digital creative content, and their interest in carrying out creative tasks, notably using social networking sites.

 

Their most recent research is the “Media Literacy Report 2008”. The report has a wealth of useful information and robust statistics. Their core model of media literacy (Access, Understand, Create) is especially useful building personas and use cases.

Understanding that users may have to go to a relatives house to get broadband access, or may need help (from their kids) to use basic internet services can help digital planners focus on functionality which supports these behaviours.

The Digital Inclusion team are currently finalising a piece of ethnographic research on at risk clusters in Kent with Dr. Robin Pharoah from ESRO which should be available later this month.