Canadian Marketing Association (Manitoba)‘s Digital Day 2011, Fort Garry Hotel
Thursday, Oct 20, 7:00am (jeez) – 5:00pm I know this one’s in October, but I had to include it! I was asked to speak at it, and though I decided not to, it’ll be an amazing event featuring Amber Mac! You’ll wanna be there!
Ever try to buy yogurt “quickly”? The dismayingly large selection takes some serious navigation.
As Barry Shwartz demonstrates in ‘The Tyranny of Choice’, studies show that greater choice is actually psychologically difficult for people.
The more alternatives there are, the deeper our sense of loss [at the items we didn't choose] will be and the less satisfaction we will derive from our ultimate decision. Scientific American Mind; 2004, Vol. 14 Issue 5, p44-49
Those are some serious objections to overcome! How can a retailer offer the product selection people expect, while making the decision process less overwhelming?
This grocery store handles it by merchandising yogurt like a website. The main menu provides navigation and product features. Further “into” the “site”, colour coded “subpages” direct you to your section.
I have a soft spot for point of sale marketing. I started my design career making big, glamourous printed POP for a streetwear line, and went on to design ePOP (digital signage) that worked with RFID for a multi-million dollar garment manufacturer. You literally picked up an item, and the RFID chip told the signage what commercial to display. Nuts.
Anyways. Smirnoff impressed me with a very simple point of sale branding tweak on their Smirnoff Ice product. Presented in popular infographic style, “Create the New Smirnoff Rocket” presents a simple recipe (1/2 beer, 1/2 Smirnoff Ice) that gets at the heart of two consumer objections to its product:
It’s too sweet.
It’s too girly.
The Rocket Recipe combats both these objections deftly. Too sweet? Beer will cut that sugar content down for you. Not manly? But, now it contains beer!
Why do they always have guys in the smirnoff ice and mikes hard lemonade commercials? Like really??
I think they should have went with @TheLC as their Twitter handle, though. Does anyone call it The Liquor Mart?
Interestingly, interactive plays a role in our new liquor paradigm, with
“enhanced product information and public interaction through an upgrading of the MLCC website”. —Bruce Owen, Winnipeg Free Press
MLCC, I realize the hilarious location-based drinking games practically program themselves, but if you need any help strategizing drunken public interaction fun, give me a dingle. I’m an expert.
See this awesome drive-through sign? It does something amazing.
It predicts and circumvents confusion about what to do next. It eases the purchase path.
Usability like this gets people in the groove of buying products (or whatever) from you. It makes it painless, removing the sting of noobishness. It says “hey, you’re doing it right”.
Use every opportunity to instill confidence in the user. They’ll feel cooler, and that’s a brand attribute you want to encourage.
Not because they were squatting on a popular event. While unsubtley markety, it was also pretty smart marketyness. My irritation stemmed from my loathing of the suggestion brides should—nay, must—slim down for their “big day”.
But if “loathe” was the response, perhaps I wasn’t the target of this ad!
Lol, then, at the next in line for the throne on the #RoyalWedding tag: Magnum Ice Cream.
Marketing message: It ain’t YOU, so let yourself go!The already-married message, picking up the demographic Slim Fast missed. Kinda genius. Kinda sad.
Postscript: And the “scan resolve”, if you will, of Magnum’s ad dollars? Just a visit to their site.
Lo! And behold! In the parking lot at Superstore I encountered this Peak of the Market potato tag featuring a QR code campaign.
Recall the simple yet salient scoring system from Voir QR, & let’s evaluate Larry’s latest with a 3-point score: Mobile site? Interesting? Useful or valuable incentive?
Frontsies: We’ve got a custom QR code, replete with illustrated potato & helpful info about the scan resolve: Ye shall receive potato recipes!
Backsies: Handy instructions and the timely suggestion to pick up all the ingredients necessary to rock your potatoes. That explains why I’d want a recipe on my phone—it’s a mobile shopping list. Clever!
[No points deducted for the vague direction to consult "the internet" if I don't have a QR code reader. If I don't have a reader, I need a little more help than that, but let's not quibble.]
Scoring:
Interesting? Why yes, since I’m buying food right now. I’m laser-focused on the whole menu thing, so your message is completely welcome in this context. 1/1
Useful? Totally appreciating you helping me not forget chives. Thanks. 1/1
Mobile site? Literally, yes (m dot…). But what I get upon scan is not optimized for, well, anything that’s happening between me and my touchscreen right now.0/1
Grade: 2/3, B minus.Pretty good idea & confident print presentation, yay; not very shopping-listy mobile experience is a big boooo. But I still love potatoes, and I’m giving points here for Peak crediting Manitoba shoppers with knowing what to do with a QR code.
Digital billboards are proliferating in the Winnipeg environment, and you can’t help but notice despite their power consumption, they’re distinctly old media. Pushed out of our home by PVRs, the intrusion of irrelevant, unhelpful, blatant-to-the-point-of-gauche ads now have to reside just outside our homes, jumping for our attention like puppies (but a lot less cute).
Even in this existentialist poem about social media written by a robot, marketers come out on top.
If you want to bring your “A” game to social media marketing (ie, if you have a product or service to move and need to show results), market research is critical. Having actual data can be quite a revelation, and applying it will lend direction to your social efforts if you’ve been flying sans strategie.
You might benefit from knowing:
What your competitors are talking about
Who’s interacting with them
Do you share any enthusiastic fans?
Where is your network from, who are they, and what gets a rise out them
What do they like, what do they share, & with whom?
Which tools can actually provide this kind of information, though? Which ones survived the boom of novelty Twitter development & aren’t languishing in a buggy perpetual beta twilight? Which ones deliver something more than a nebulous, inactionable percentage of supposed influence?
Here are the Twitter metrics tools I’m actually using that let you mine usernames for public data that, in aggregate, painstakingly copied into columns of a Google Doc (go on, click “graph”! It’s rewarding!), and scrutinized late into the night will yield a few nuggets of demographic gold.
Usefulness of data: Informative. Enlightening, almost.
Tells you what’s trending (being talked about the most) in your city. Good for identifying influencers (by username) and hot topics (by keyword or hashtag). If you chart this over time, patterns (genres) will emerge. This is 14 karat information if your market is 100% local.
Usefulness of data: Crucial if you need to export to Excel. Boolean search, OH YES.
I like the Archivist. It looks great and the development team reply PDQ to email & seem super cool. More importantly, you can do a boolean search (like “@username + special keywords”) and on the desktop app you can export the whole shebang to a spreadsheet (which sometimes, lets face it, you really need to do).
Update: As I wrote, the ability to export was being removed by the Archivists in order to comply with Twitter’s ToS . My copy of the desktop app continues to provide this functionality, but shhh. Note to @Twitter: Think of a way to make exporting ok. People need it to build their own spreadsheets for thorough metrics, and to track stuff like tweeted contest entries. Help us to help you.
Tells you exactly what tweets got you (or anyone else) followed or unfollowed, so it’s pretty darn helpful for tweaking your wording/subject matter on a minute level. May cause uncomfortable cringing as you reread your most boorish, follower-shedding tweets. Can lead to paralyzing narcissism.
A location search (“loc:yourcity”) will give you a ballpark of the size of your market. You can sort by follower size, if schmoozing the influential is your bag.
Good for identifying influencers and dominant subject matter (hashtags, topics). Track what’s being talked about most by specific people (influencers or comepetitors). If a user is in conversation with a few of your competitors, you’ve got yourself an industry mover & shaker with whom you might want to get friendly.
Have to log in? No. So you can see competitor‘s info?Yep.
In a (marketing) meeting the other day I referred to the way we expressed an idea as “semantic”.
The reaction to this was as if I had belittled a distinction as “just semantics” (something people say when they think you’re quibbling over words that don’t really matter). Dictionary.com’s own usage example includes this common derogation.
On the contrary, semantics matter a lot, especially to marketers. A linguistic theory called the “Sapir Whorf Hypothesis” states that language affects the way people think. Words colour your concept of a thing & its potential.
Not to be all Seth-Godin-state-the-bleeding-obvious, but isn’t that theory talking about the very cultural encoding marketing seeks to affect?
We try to “own” categories, to “rank” for keywords, to “brand” the way people talk about us. We reiterate, restate and cleverly dictate (advertising) what we want people to think about us, and try to lead the discourse in brand categories (semantic domains). We’re using adjectives, superlatives, vocabulary to dominate “mindshare”. The biggest marketing revolution in __ years is about starting & managing “conversation”.
Semantics win hearts and minds. Semantics matter. A lot.
I finally got the ‘make Facebook your home page’ notification (did I just call an ad a ‘notification’? Like some kind of “important message brought to me by Facebook”? Semantics matter, folks).
I grovel—nay, weep—at the fine marketing techniques employed in this humble (Humble? It’s anything but. Let’s go with “simple”) banner ad.
Note the clear, unjargony, friendly instructions: just drag, no big deal. And it’s not about some technical, possibly virus-inducing (who knows?) “home page”. It’s about seeing what your friends are up to faster! And look at those little thumbnails…those are your friends! Your interesting, interesting friends!
Facebook already accounts for 1 in 4 pageviews in the US, so for some people, setting Facebook as their home page might be kinda useful (as opposed to sinister). I’ve always used Google (redundantly, because it’s in my address bar too) because “it loads fast”, but lately I’m feeling like it’s a real brand stand.
If we were acquainted when I was furnishing my baby’s room, you know my deft eBaying and Amazoning abilities. You also know my fury when confronted with absurd shipping charges and companies that “can’t” ship to Canada.
Online shopping is the lifeline of people in comprised retail situations (cough, Winnipeg, cough). And with Twitter flattening culture, Canadians (and I assume the world) are absorbing holidays, events, and national moods on a level never imagined by the CRTC. We’re basically going to do Thanksgiving twice this year because, I mean, why not?
When a giant American event like Black Friday goes down, the global marketing machine unavoidably affects the rest of us. And nothing ticks off a customer more than when major brands offer deals to some folks and not to us. (I’m talking to you, Best Buy. Shame on your $30-off iPods).
To combat the strong dollar’s pull on cross-border shoppers, some Canadian outposts are offering online Black Fridays. I expect this custom, along with double turkey days, the ability to enter contests, and watching tv online (yeah, we still kinda don’t have that) will only grow as online consumer’s dismay at being left out of cultural events—amplified by social media—becomes a customer service problem for big brands. We can hear everything you’re saying, guys.
Part of interactive marketing is the subtle influence of design cues that help people notice, click and share links.
When you post a link to Facebook—say, to your brand’s blog—it’s because you’ve worked hard to create some great content or curate something perfect for your fans. You’re also affecting the delicate “do we post too much?” balance. A lot rides on how fans perceive this link.
If Facebook drags in a weird thumbnail, a senseless page title (a great way to tell if your have sad SEO), and a page-long jumble of javascript where a jaunty blurb should be, you’re posting something that will get ignored at best, and could even get you unliked.
However! You don’t have to just sit back and let Facebook uglify your precious link! You can whip it into sexy, clickable shape by modifying most of it yourself. Thanks to the original Weekend Warrior and Fishmeister General Scott Sime for showing me this tip.
What you see is not what you have to get
So you’re about to use up some precious fan goodwill by intruding upon their news stream. You’ve pasted the link in, and it’ll work and everything, but it just doesn’t shout CLICK ME.
Write a nice lead-in where I’ve highlighted the green—a meta-comment in the voice of your brand that explains why the person would want to check out the link.
Supertip:Copying and pasting here will very often bring in some weird line breaks that you won’t see until you post. Don’t take the chance. Retype if you want to use someone else’s headline.
So far so good. Now, what about all that unmarketable stuff underneath?
Hover over the headline, and you’ll see your cursor turn into a hand—the telltale sign that you can modify a field!
Click and you’ll be able to type something wittier, more informative, or reinforcing your headline’s message.
Alright. Now what about that nonsense below taking up precious real estate? Sometimes you’ll find a repetitive synopsis or copy of the headline in this space. I smell a potential sales tool! Mouse over & it too will become clickable, just like the headline.
Write a secondary headline that adds something your original comment doesn’t. It can be more factual if your personal headline was a teaser, or vice versa.
Now, about that graphic. The visual can really sell the link. A boring, irrelevant, or absent image is a missed opportunity to convey the awesomeness that’s just a click away. Use the little arrows under the post to scroll through all the available images.
Supertip:occasionally no image at all will appear, despite there being a big fat glossy photo on the page you’re linking to. I don’t know why. But I do know that if you abandon the link (you’ve to to physically leave the page, by clicking the Facebook logo or otherwise refreshing and getting your cursor the heck out of that field) and paste the link in again, eventually the image will show up. It may take a few tries, but don’t let Facebook link weirdness strip you of your eyeball-attracting image!
And we’re done! You’ve marketed the link to the best of your ability, attending to every detail/opportunity to persuade. You’re spending your audience’s patience and your content creation efforts wisely by giving your link the best possible chance of being noticed, clicked, and shared.
Facebook’s social search is rolling out, displaying news stories in your search box based on friend’s likes. The Facebook Web Domination Plan Team is aiming at “likes replacing links”—that is, people finding more personal relevance in news stories their friends have given the thumbs up.
Google already kinda does this, according to Graham Blake:
Google crowd-sources very deep, real-time, and context-specific information about page relevance from the way people respond to a set of search results for a specific query. They can track how quickly a specific link is clicked for a specific search query, when a user returns to the search results (presumably due to a clicked link’s poor relevance to a specific query), second and third links clicked, when a user stopped clicking results (and presumably found exactly what they were looking for).
Those are just the most obvious ways Google is already crowd-sourcing from their search results. Further, with sites using Google Analytics – and most major websites do use it – Google can track what users are doing after they click on a link, how long they spend on the site, how deeply they interact with the website, and even track what search terms were used to reach specific sites from *other* search engines.
There is a huge amount of context-specific crowd-sourced data mining going on there. What this all means is that Google is already way ahead of the curve on crowd-sourced link relevance ranking.
The distinguishing factor in Facebook’s far less sophisticated implementation of social search is obviousness. They tell you directly, through interface design, who among your friends thought something was cool, and if you trust that person’s opinion, you’re more likely to check it out too.
People may find this fun, and I totally do*, but I’ve already cautioned that this approach to newsfinding will make us stupider. Our networks tend to be made up of people much like ourselves, and receiving information from so close to home can limit new perspectives and reinforce biases and stereotypes.
Serendipitously, I just saw this wonderful expansion on that idea from Harvard researcher Ethan Zuckerman at TED.
Accidentally useful analytics
I’m a Facebook page admin, and Insights—Facebook’s puerile analytics—drives me nuts. The new social news search, however, turns up some useful data on sharing that I actually haven’t been able to find yet (I’m still getting familiar with Insights, though, so this info may be totally somewhere I haven’t seen yet.)
Check this out: I can see the last two links I shared, what site they led to, who among my friends shared, and how many other people shared—all in one tidy spot. Handy!
Facebook is giving you this info as social proof that these links (and thereby, Facebook itself) is totally worth your time.
This new popularity aggregate highlights the value of asking your staff and friends to like and share as much as possible. Certainly the weight of approval will drive stories to the top of search, earning more exposure for your brand/content. Explain this to people.
*If Facebook can tie location in to social search, there might be something uniquely useful here, especially for small business and local events promotion. Say, a restaurant my friend loves opens a new location near me.
I’d feel really good about myself if you’d subscribe to my blog. Interactive & social media marketing insights served piping hot!
Whether your goals are advertising, informing, galvanizing advocates or garnering Facebook ‘likes’, the QR code is ready to link up your audience to convenient, tailored, local, on-demand info, interactivity, and reasons to think you rule!
Artists
The crafty artist might link:
from your band’s gig poster to an mp3 of your best track, or a secret remix/accoustic jam
from your opening’s flyer to your portfolio
from your art’s title card to your online store
from your ad to your represenation
to tickets for your showto a behind-the-scenes video of your process or installation (visual artists), live show (bands), movie shoot (filmmakers)
to a trailer for your next film
to a map of your street art installations
from your poster to your eBay auction
from band t-shirts to your music on iTunes
from your band’s gig poster to your online t-shirt store, with 15% discount
from street art to your manifesto
from stickers to social critique
from show flyers to your work on Flickr
from posters to your Facebook fan page
Self-promotion/branding
The schmoozy future star might link:
from your business card to your Facebook profile
from your business card to your Twitter stream
from your business card to your Linkdin account
from your business card to your blog
to a video interview with you (talent show!)
from your avatar to your blog
from your power point to your preferred social profile
from your t-shirt to your blog’s RSS feed
Business advertising
The savvy business might link:
to a coupon for %10 off the first visit
to a contest
to a useful branded app
to your in-store card to allow payment at checkout
from a sign in your window to reviews of your establishment
to a video testimonial from a happy customer
from an ad to your 1-800 order hotline
to a Google map to your nearby locations
Products
The intriguing product might link:
to a coupon for a freebie/sample
to a video product demonstration
from product to a fabulous recipe, cooking demo, or glam serving photos
from ads to mobile shopping
to clues for a treasure hunt
to comparison shopping among major retailers
to a gallery of stars (or the not-so-famous) caught using your product in public
from your product to your customer service line
from properties/items ‘for sale’ sign to a sales agent
from product packaging to a mobile registration site
to read/write a review
to a mail-in rebate
to nutritional info, drug interactions, or material safety data sheet
to order refills online
link to a video of your product being destroyed in a hilarious manner
to a survey about your product (with a reward, natch)
to your inventory, so you, your staff or your customers knows what’s in stock
to a customer service or fan forum
Non-profits
The community-connected non-profit might link:
to a donation page
to an interactive map of your org’s work throughout your city
to an augmented reality view of your city’s issues
to sponsorship opportunities
to a video of a successful user of your org’s services saying thanks
from notable landmarks to informative videos of your city’s history
to mobile updates on disaster situations
to requests for supplies and volunteers
to a petition
to contact your government about an advocacy issue
Content. The iPad was designed for you to “consume” it. The big brands that are rushing to animate their brochures so you can consume them on the iPad are sorta philosophically stealing your human agency of creation and replacing it with mind-numbing broadcast. That’s not very 2.0.
5. to undergo destruction; waste away
6. to use or use up
Social tools allow us to create, contribute, and pass along. Different people have different levels of interaction with content—knowledge, information, art—but we value highest the most creative minds: people who create content with a grain of truth in it, be it music, images, mashups, curations, stories. He who creates something beautiful or elucidates the truth through syntopic analysis is celebrated by other humans, and rightly so, as having an intellectual gift.
The iPad has the capability to serve up those creative objects, but the high cost of entry means that marketing messages have the loudest initial voice.
Jeff Jarvis tells us that the mythic social media influencer—whether they exist or not and however useful in spreading ideas they may be—is merely the mouthpiece of broadcast. Marketing strategy dictates locating the widest reach for the lowest cost. Unfortunately for marketers of “content”, the quality of the message dictates it’s spread, not the follower count of the spreader.
Jeff also posits that all actions online—liking, fanning, uploading, commenting—are content too, and they are, to Google and Facebook. Who add their own powerful aggregations by connecting your social graph and your activites—and selling it to marketers.
The meta layer that Facebook ads to our actions is being created for only one thing: to make money. See how Pete Warden’s recent attempt to use ostensibly public data from Facebook to create something a little more meta–and how quickly he was nearly sued into oblivion by the web giant. (Pete was trying to use the content in a way that commented on society, showing interesting correlations like where the most fans of Glenn Beck live and what pages they’re most likely to fan).
Even as broadcasting and passive consumption refuse to die, Umair Haque takes us beyond the social media channel with the idea that organizations should develop a social strategy, using the new tools of connection for a more meaningful place in the world, producing more meaningful stuff (content, if you will—if relationships, voice, and ethics are content).
The tools can do nothing short of connecting people, and we’re squandering them on product placement: the one positioning opportunity you can’t TiVo.
The most important thing to ask about any technology is how it changes people.
—Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
That’s the same as Umair’s explanation of ‘medium is the message’. The iPad paradigm, consumption, and the advertising-orchestrated conviction that every bit of personal data we give up—I like this, I fan this—is valuable content has an impact on us as we conceive of ourselves.
We might be letting the algorithms of marketing conversions dictate our thinking when we equate liking a brand to creativity. This situation was created by us, but not to serve the greater good. The humanist perspective places people at the heart of meaning.
Meaning comes from truth. Expose, expand, spread a truth and you are truly creating content.
The motivations that used to work on people have to be acknowledged on some level, however subconscious, to inspire action. But what if we can’t admit our wants and desires because we’re afraid they’ll be catalogued and later exposed?
Let’s look at fear and the need to belong. The fear that you won’t belong, tribalism. Conformity. That’s the force behind a lot of product marketing: deodorant, makeup, toothpaste.
Wanna fit in? Sure we do. And oral freshness is key! So here’s a YouTube ad (or “promoted video”) that’s supposed to light up our social acceptance sensors and inspire a click.
We’re talking about some intrinsic psychological factors here. Second from the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, is, you guessed it, self-esteem, confidence and mutual respect. All of which perishes in the face of stinky breath. It’s practically vital that we check out this video and discover if we’re going to be outcasted social pariahs or what.
BUT…what if we were scared to? What if everyone found out we clicked that link? What if Google, who is totally writing this stuff down, spilled the beans and let the world know we’re stinky breath checkers?
Isn’t that more embarrassing than the problem it’s supposed to be solving (which might or might not exist)?
The motivation to fit in by not getting caught clicking embarrassing videos is actually stronger than the motivation to fit in by being Scopey-fresh. We’re pretty sure our breath is ok. But we have no idea what’s going to leak out of “secure” places next.
Who wants to own their insecurities? Ick!
This kind of exposure of our base intincts interferes with persuasion. It might be paranoia, but if the perception exists that my attention is being monitored, I’m not going to click.
Umair Haque recently advanced a hypothesis that social media is a bubble, and that when it bursts we will see that we were not brought meaningfully closer together by the growth of social communication.
I don’t want social media to be a bubble, because I like it.
First, let’s define a bubble. We mean an economics-style bubble, like the dot-com bubble or the housing bubble. In this sense, a bubble is “trade in high volumes at prices that are considerably at variance with intrinsic values”. So lots of new relationships that aren’t worth very much. I think Unmair was saying we’ve been placing undue value on the relationships generated by social media, both from a personal standpoint (these aren’t real friends) and a marketing standpoint (these aren’t very devoted ‘fans’).
Here are the reasons I feel the shiny, soapy dome of social media’s bubble should be left alone.
The flowering of human creativity
“Thin relationships” are not a new phenomena to society. If we rechristen these friends “acquaintances”, you might recognize them better. Aquaintances are certainly not without value.
Clay Shirky’s SXSW keynote touched on the evolutionary impetus to share and to cooperate, calling it “spiteful” not to pass on information when it’s very little effort for you to do so. This is the link economy in action.
It’s easy to share links to interesting content. It’s fun to add to the conversation by commenting on blogs and liking updates. It’s gratifying to contribute content to the collective by taking photos, writing essays (blog posts), illustrating, designing fonts and photoshop brushes, and shooting funny videos. It’s meaningful to lead culture and capture the zeitgeist by giving birth to memes, defining ideas, pushing for human thought development.
The more the merrier
Thin relationships, or “weak connections” make these upper-Maslow interactions possible. You don’t need a high level of investment in someone to trade ideas. Their input is valuable precisely because they come from a different perspective, and aren’t bound by politeness or concern for your ego. I’ve mentioned the findings that novel input from new friends sparks more innovative, creative solutions. The more the merrier.
Marketing soap
From a marketing standpoint, I hate to put the idea out there (there being Google search) that we’re overestimating the worth of social media and it’s practitioners. It could sour corporate decision makers who ponder how much to invest in newfangled media.
This isn’t about protecting our jobs, it’s about making them better. My firm belief is that all marketing, communication, PR, customer service and sales efforts (not to mention internal communications) can be enhanced and made more worthwhile and productive by conversing instead of broadcasting. I don’t think organizations have a choice, because public expectation of brands/services/orgs has changed.
This being a nascent revolution in the mainstream, still, I don’t want to throw the word b-word around. I want to work to show that teaming up with customers to get them what they want is going to succeed.
Do you start your work day with Facebook and a coffee? Drop a tweet or two after lunch? You should. And your boss should eagerly foot the bill, because your social life lines can (positively!) affect his/her bottom line.
A recent study found that nearly 2/3 of employees hang out on social sites during work hours. These “time wasters” are thought to cost billions ($2.45 billion CDN, it has somehow been determined) in lost wages or revenue. Well over half (and some count it up to 70%) of employers block social network use at work, presumably to stymie these loafing time bandits.
