Social and corporate values - making them play nicely

Overview of Telecom case study from recent SOMO Conference. 

As one of NZ’s most well-known brands, Telecom concentrates heavily on managing as opposed to branding or building an online profile through Social Media.

They’ve had their fair share of problems over the last few years – the XT network launch, Steven Fry rant, broadband inaccessibility and network coverage issues,  to name a few.  Until recently their Social Media, particularly Twitter and Facebook, was run by a group of passionate employees within Telecom, operating without mandate or structure.  Despite trying their best, too often they found themselves seeking forgiveness for sending inconsistent and sometimes incorrect messages to the media and public.

Times they are a changing. Recently Telecom has formalised their social media path, investing in people and processes and  viewing the channels as important extensions of Customer Service, Marketing and PR.   Richard Irvine, the Online Community Communication Manager, is solely responsible for the policy and management of these platforms in-house.

Richard directed an internal Social Media ‘Online Response Team’ of a dozen employees.  He sought out individuals who were already very active and highly regarded on their internal Yammer network, and Geekzone (the website).  These individuals from across the company volunteer their time to monitor and contribute to customer queries on Facebook, Yammer and to a lesser extent, Twitter.  Richard briefs them using a comprehensive social media policy to help them work with a common set of values and messages, which is approved by the Exec prior.  The team feel they have been the given scope and trust to respond to posts, and they use ‘Co-Tweet’ to ensure only one person replies at once.  They use their own voice and sign off using their own names - as opposed to acting on behalf of Telecom.  For example, “Hi Sally, the issue you are experiencing is… From John Smith”. 

Richard monitors and responds to the majority of the tweets the Telecom Twitter account receives.  Twitter is seen as a Stakeholder and Reputation Management tool, with an ‘always on’ approach (weekends / evenings included).  His motto is ‘two ears, one mouth”, as he does far more listening than tweeting.   

The analysis and insights generated via Social Media channels is presented to the Senior Leadership Team regularly, and is used to help shape views of customer’s satisfaction, trends and issues. 

Richard suggests these guidelines for running successful social media platforms:

1.       Purpose - have clear objectives for each social media channel

2.       Be social – be familiar with it, both using and knowing 

3.       Governance – where does it sit within the organisation? Who actually does it?

4.       Stakeholders – who within the organisation?  E.g. the Exec, Comms, Brand/Marketing, Customer Service, Legal

5.       Who – one voice or many?

6.       How - tone and style and transparency

7.       Availability – responsiveness agreed up front

5 reasons why you should be running ‘Always On’ Paid Search

It’s tempting to want to save media budget by running your paid search advertising during tactical campaign periods only.

However, for almost all advertisers, I recommend taking an ‘Always On’ approach – that is, having your paid search campaign live all year round. Here’s why:

5 Benefits of running ‘Always On’ Paid Search:

1.       You gain incremental website traffic, by capturing search volume throughout the year, rather than just during campaign periods

2.       You can increase your brand awareness through year-round exposure on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)

3.       You can often decrease your average Cost-per-click (CPC); a campaign's CPC generally tends to decrease as it gains ‘history’ with Google

4.      You'll have more time to conduct ad copy and keyword tests, and capture long-term data which can be used to further optimise your campaigns

5.       Another benefit – for seasonal products in particular – is that by advertising during less competitive times of year, it can be possible to achieve a higher ad position and/or pay a lower CPC overall

There are a number of options during tactical campaign periods. Depending on your campaign goals, you could considering altering your ‘Always On’ campaign in the following ways:

•       Up-weighting the budgets to increase Impression Share during the campaign period, in order to get maximum exposure; capitalising on your ATL advertising spend

•       Replacing existing ad copy (or existing Sitelinks) with campaign messaging

•       Adding additional campaign-specific keywords

If budget is an issue, the 'Always On' campaign can always be run on a low weight in between your key tactical periods.

The important thing is that you always have some level of visibility on the SERPs – after all, consumers don’t limit their searches to your key campaign periods! They expect to be able to find relevant information quickly and easily, whenever they decide to search for it.

Content sharing is not content curation.

“Curating” is the new buzzword around town, and like most new buzzwords their meaning can be easily misconstrued.

The other day I came across the “Second annual Content Curation Adoption Survey” informing me that “95% of Marketers are Curating”.

While I have no doubt a lot are through Twitter, Pinterest and other social networks, the penny dropped when I read that “of those respondents that indicated they had not knowingly curated in the past six months, 100 percent of them had, by sharing an article, blog post or other content with a prospect or customer”.

Breaking news: sharing an article with your facebook fans or twitter followers is not content curation.

Content curation involves gathering digital content from a range of sources and then sorting, art directing and representing that content in a way that creates an editorial experience. It’s not about creating, it’s about sifting through the raft of content available on a particular topic and presenting the best and most relevant pieces of information to your audience. It’s something you do regularly and consistently. There is nothing random or one-off about it.

So what makes for good curation? Google it and you’ll find a myriad of lists and opinions. My five favourite are:

Have a reason for being: knowing what your point is will make it easier to filter content, and to build an audience. It’s a bit like making a mix tape – knowing who it’s for and what you want to say makes picking the songs easy.

You can’t survive on curation alone: You will gain more credibility with your audience, and more support from other curators if you are also creating your own fresh and interesting content.

Give it the personal touch: automated curation tools are popping up all over the place but curation does require the personal touch to ensure quality content is being shared.

Quality not quantity: if time and resource is an issue then sharing quality content once a week will build more credibility than sharing rubbish content daily.

Become part of the ecosystem: always remember the content you are sharing is not yours! Always, credit your sources.

Content curation is a long term platform that needs a strategy behind it. If your objective is to become an authority on something, then you can only do this by building up a following of people who trust that authority.

Is App Usage Really on the Rise?

Worldwide smartphone use continues to rise at a rapid rate. In 2011, there were 38 million smartphone users worldwide; in 2012 the figure is at 84 million with the rise in numbers of users comes a rise in the range of apps on the market. Popularity of apps seems to be at an all-time high, with the average user’s smartphone containing on average 41 apps, compared to 32 in 2011. The average user is spending 39 minutes engaging with their apps a day in 2012, a slight rise from 37 minutes in 2011. Competition among app producers is similarly at a high point, with up to 20,000 downloads in the last 24 hours needed for an app to be listed in the top 25 of its kind. This number was 10,000 six months ago.

Despite these soaring statistics, is app usage really on the rise? Only 20% of smartphone users revisit a free downloaded app the next day, and a staggering 5% reuse apps a month later. This has a significant impact on advertising within these apps. For these ‘free apps’, if they were used on average 12 times by the user (a figure which seems unlikely for the typical smartphone user), the application would have to “bombard its users” in order to match the money it would make from paid sales. In dollar terms, the app would need to generate $8.75 per thousand impressions (CPM) to match such revenues raised by paid apps. Currently the average free app generates $0.50 to $2.00 (CPM) from advertising. Despite the growth of apps on the market, Facebook, Youtube and Gmail are still the most popular apps available. Another point of note: deal of the day websites have been used by 87% of all smartphone users.

What conclusions can be drawn from these figures? On the whole smartphone use is growing at a rapid rate, with this comes an expanding market for free downloadable applications. Is app use rising at an equivalent rate? While the average number on apps on a smartphone has risen, the actual usage of such apps drops off very quickly after the first day. This surely attributes to the inability to gain revenue through advertising to match that which paid apps can generate.

Mirror Mirror On The Bus Stop, Who's The Prettiest Prive Winner Of All

A few months ago I wrote this post about the blurring of lines between outdoor and digital, with a few examples of outdoor using X Box Kinect technology to create some interesting engagement experiences for users in overseas markets. 

A simple but effective execution has been put into market by Spark to promote the Samsung Galaxy release via Vodafone.  Vested interest disclaimer here – yes, Spark are our traditional media kin folk, Vodafone our client.

Simply stand in front of the bus shelter ad shel, the camera reads your movements and reflects  them in the form of an astronaut in space in the digital screen, highlighting the prize offering that Samsung are offering up as part of the launch promotion, a trip into space.  Includes projecting your face in the astronauts helmet to give you that greater sense of winning.  By the photos and video we’ve seen (thanks AdShel, the media owner partner) hundreds of pedestrians of all ages have been engaging in the piece, dancing and carrying on like a carefree 6yr old (including even a big bank brand Marketing Manager that we spied in the video, and we know how tough it is to make them happy).

In place until mid July outside Britomart train station, so have a tutu with it if you’re in that part of town.  Or catch a train and go there specially.

Google Penguin Update

On April the 25th Google released an update that rivalled both the Panda and the Florida updates.  The Penguin update, initially called the ‘Over Optimisation Update’ by Google wreaked havoc amongst the SEO fraternity as the update was rolled out across all of Google’s global indexes.

Matt Cuts, Google’s ‘Top Dog’ at fighting web spam, announced Google’s intent to target over optimised websites earlier in the year however very little was known about exactly what the update would target.

Six weeks on and the Penguin update appears to have focused on:

• Comment spam;
• Content spam;
• Links from blog networks (blog farms);
• Paid links;
• Site-wide links from footers or sidebars;
• Anchor text spam (unnatural anchor text links);
• On-page keywords stuffing.

Although Google sees this update as a positive step towards reducing web spam, it did come, initially at a cost to the user and some unsuspecting webmasters.  Google’s mantra has always been to provide a quality product, relevant search results.  However, there were several instances where the quality of the search results had been negatively impacted. Searchengineland.com wrote an interesting article comparing search results before and after the Penguin update but by most accounts, the NZ results have been largely unchanged.  

Innocent webmasters were also affected by this update with many respectable sites experiencing a drop in organic traffic.  An example of this is WPMU.org a highly respected developer resource and a distributor of free WordPress themes. Organic traffic to this site dropped from 8,590 visits per day to 1,527.

      Image supplied by webpronews.com.

The Sydney Morning Herald interviewed Matt Cutt’s about WPMU.org’s situation and was told by Cutt’s that backlinks from questionable sites linking to WPMU.org may have been devalued and thus damaged the sites rankings.

This has led to the fear of ‘Negative SEO’ attacks where competitors could hire Blackhat SEO’s to spam sites.  Aaron Wall from SEO Book wrote about this in length and provides a case study where a website owner experienced a negative SEO attack.

Been Hit By the Penguin Update?

Matt Cutts pointed to two very specific videos in recent interviews that people should watch if they want to clean up their sites and recover from the Penguin update.

What Media Multi-tasking Really Means

I stumbled across this interesting chart on warc today:

'Screens to the nth – What People Are Doing and Why' IAB

There has been a lot of talk about media multi-tasking and how new technologies are driving efficiencies for consumers, but what this demonstrates is we are just trying to fit more into less time.  We are working more, we are consuming more media and somehow finding more time for leisure but because a day still is only twenty four hours we are doing it all at once. 

This begs the question - with our attention so divided how effective are we being?

Furthermore, as marketers, we can never count on having consumers undivided attention.  This poses an interesting challenge - how do we capture consumers attention in such a distracted world?