Skittles on the Intranet

Posted by adi on Mar 8, 2009 in Default

Skittles made a bit of a splash in the media world recently with a relaunch of their homepage that essentially created an overlay for their various web properties, starting with a Twitter page displaying all tweets mentioning the Skittles brand name.  You could also check out their Flickr photo gallery or their Facebook fan page.

Nice enough idea, but I suspect it will enjoy its five minutes of online fame before falling by the wayside.  However, imagine such an approach is used internally on the corporate Intranet.  The single great feature of the so called web 2.0 applications is that it puts you in touch with customers as never before.  The problem generally is that those customer voices are generally only heard by the web savvy people within a company.  The overwhelming consensus still seems to regard Twitter as an oddity that will have nothing of use for them.

Blammo, this would shoot that down instantly.  The modern marketing credo puts the customer at the very heart of everything the company does, it’s not just enough for marketing folks to care about the customer, it’s something that each and every employee should care about.  But unless you’re customer facing it’s often difficult to know what your customers are doing, what problems they’re having and generally how they’re finding your products.  Now that can change.

The Skittles website will probably fade into obscurity within weeks, if it hasn’t already done so, but by jove it doesn’t half offer up a great opportunity for how to put social media into the faces of each and every person in your company.

Tags: Brand, Facebook, Flickr, Marketing, Skittles, Twitter

Don’t tell the news, tell a story!

Posted by adi on Nov 14, 2008 in The world of the web

I’m currently reading Godel, Escher & Bach: An Eternal, Golden Braid (again) and the book makes excellent use of stories to help get across what are pretty weighty topics.  The book begins with the Zeno Paradox of the Tortoise and Achilles (you can read about the paradox here if you havn’t come across it before).  Douglas Hofstadter then re-uses Mr Tortoise and Achilles, with the odd cameo from Mr Crab and various other characters, to illucidate each chapter with a dialogue.

I’ve been a big fan of storytelling since university when John Seely Brown took on cult proportions during knowledge management lectures.  Seely Brown is the chief scientist at Xerox and has long advocated the use of stories in communicating ideas and sharing knowledge.

Ten tips for using stories in your brand communications

1. Stories come directly from the brand. If your brand has a great reason for being then making a story from it will be much easier.  Apple for instance have a great brand and regularly tell great stories with it.
2. Open your ears. Great stories are all around you.  Listen to your customers, your suppliers, your employees.  They’ll all have great stories about your company.
3. Amplify your customers. Once you’ve found a great story, make sure it’s nice and simple, then give it all your marketing support to get it out there.
4. Integrate your marketing. It’s one of those things that sounds so simple but is often neglected.  Each and every piece of marketing you do should reinforce the brand and tell a mini story of its own.
5. Get in touch with your inner child. As mentioned earlier, the art of story telling often gets lost once we enter adulthood.  Reconnect with your inner child and delve into stories to understand what makes them so special.
6. Don’t forget the purchase. The aim of the story is to get people buying so don’t forget the end goal.  For this you need to ensure that your story “ticks” the age-old behavioural triggers like emotion, contrast, egocentricity, the power of beginnings, etc.  Use them, and people will respond.  Avoid them at your peril.
7. Engage your body as well as your brain. Actions speak louder than words, as the saying goes, and it’s important that your actions toe the story telling line just as much as your words do.  Marketers often fall into the trap of focusing purely on acquisition but ensuring that customers are well serviced at every touch point is just as important (if not more so).
8. Leave some intrigue. People love a bit of mystery in their stories so don’t feel compelled to tell all of your company secrets.  Leave a little to the imagination and you’ll encourage people to try and solve the riddle.
9. Empower the customer. It might seem scary but once the story is out there it can often take on a life of its own as your customers get their hands on it.  Encourage this process as the more customers talk about you the more it shows they care.
10. Don’t forget to be real. It might be tempting to create a story that fits the message you’re trying to communicate, but people tend to have a pretty good bs sensor, so resist the urge to fabricate and stick with the stories that truely represent your company.

Tags: Douglas Hofstadter, Johann Sebastian Bach, John Seely Brown, Marketing, story telling

Should companies utilise white papers more?

Posted by adi on Nov 13, 2008 in The world of the web

Image by Cati@ via Flickr

I don’t know about you, but white papers come with an expectation of jargon laden technical reports that aim to solve some sort of complex problem.  If you consider them as a simple piece of content that solves a user problem however and they are an excellent marketing tool that could (should?) be used by all manner of companies.

That is certainly the conclusion drawn by a report released today by TechTarget (pdf).  The report draws a number of fascinating conclusions into how people look to solve their problems and the part white papers play in that process.

Evaluating the problem

The report found that 59% of people used white papers to help solve their problem.  This trumped other tools such as webcasts and trials.

White papers are hugely popular

It was also discovered that those that use white papers tend to use rather a lot of them.  The average white paper reader ploughs through 5 or more over an average 3 month period.

Whitepapers go viral

In an era when linkbait is a much used tool in the search engine marketers tool belt the report also had some good advice for search marketers out there with news that some 41.6% of respondents having sent a white paper to a buddy in the recent past.

How to write better white papers

From an authoring point of view the report also had some insights, with the main turn-off being that the white papers were too product focused rather than consumer focused.  Remember that the whole point of a white paper is to solve a consumer problem.

So make sure it’s solving a customers problem.

Secondly make sure it’s not too long.  The web typically strips out the fluff and boils a problem down to its key points.  Users expect white papers to be exactly the same.

1. Solve a customer problem

2. Make it succinct

3. Enjoy the road to nirvana

Tags: Consumer, Internet marketing, Marketing, Web search engine, White paper

The recruitment process

Posted by adi on Nov 6, 2008 in The world of the web

I was reading an interesting message by Seth Godin today that asked why companies will often spend an awful lot of time and money to market their products, yet when it comes to trying to attract the best people for new positions they do the bare minimum.

I’ve had some experience of the recruitment process recently and many things do stand out as obstacles to the process of hiring outstanding people, a few of which I’ll discuss below.

1. Hiding the company. I regularly see adverts that contain openings such as “our client, a leading name in xyz industry is looking for….”.  Presumably this is done to protect the recruitment agent from people applying direct to the company, which may sound reasonable enough from their point of view.  From the point of view of the hiring company however I fail to see how this helps at all.  Surely it is in their interests to attract candidates that not only want to work for your company but can also then provide an individual response to how they could benefit your company.
2. Failing to sell the story. Storytelling is without doubt one of the best ways to sell a concept to the reader.  Each of us grows up with stories yet they so often stop when we reach adulthood.  All of which is unfortunate because they still hold an awful lot of power.  In a job advert for instance, why not paint the scene of a day in the life of your new role?  Explain about the jobs you would be doing, the people you’d be working with, the company culture.  What seperates your company out from all the others in your industry?  Changing jobs is one of the more stressful things a person can do so sell it to them, make it sound as exciting as possible to be joining your company.
3. Not taking the time to do the recruitment yourself. I’m sure the use of recruitment agents has many benefits but I can’t help but think that in a modern service economy, where the workforce is the principal asset that recruitment is one of the main roles.  Yet increasingly it seems that agencies are used to fine tune candidates on their clients behalf.  It’s akin to a football manager hiring someone outside the club to suggest players for them.  I remember Jack Welch used to say that human resources is the most important department in the company, and if recruitment is outsourced to such an extent it begs the question how hands on that company will be once you start working there.  Retention is after all just as important as recruitment.

Anyway, a few things that have perked my interest in the past few weeks.  Your comments and thoughts are always welcome.

Tags: Employment, Human resources, Marketing, Recruitment, Seth Godin

Reviews and word of mouth come up trumps

Posted by adi on Oct 23, 2008 in The world of the web

I wrote on Tuesday about the importance of reviews and word of mouth after a survey came out in support of email to communicate with the younger market out there.  Lo and behold today has seen a study by Rubicon Consulting bestowing the virtue of reviews and word of mouth in your marketing campaigns.  Some of the key findings of the study were:

• The Web is the #2 resource for customer support information, after user manuals. It ranks ahead of calling the manufacturer or asking a dealer.
• Website categories that get the most daily usage are search, social communities like MySpace and Facebook, general news websites like CNN.com and NYTimes.com, and online banking.
• The websites that Americans value most are (in order), Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Facebook. Although Yahoo’s financial challenges have generated a lot of press attention, it continues to have a very large and loyal following.
• Young people (age 22 and under) are much noisier online than their elders. They account for about half of all the content and comments posted online.
• Facebook appears to be ahead of MySpace in terms of number of users in the US, and perceived value of the site.
• Despite extensive publicity, the community sites SecondLife and Twitter reach only a few percent of US Internet users.
• Democrats are more active online than Republicans. Democrats are more likely to participate in online communities, and say they are more heavily influenced in their voting decisions by information they find online.

Of course to do well in these areas requires both an excellent product and a good deal of time and effort to liase with the communities in your industry.  Unfortunately many marketers want a short cut when interacting with communities and cannot resist spamming at the first opportunity.  The following steps are a good start for those wishing to use communities as part of their marketing strategy.

1) Lurk, work out how things are done.
2) Respond to posts, share knowledge.
3) Start posts on topics of interest.
4) Discuss with the admin/owner any way that you can help them.

Tags: Facebook, Google, Marketing, MySpace, Twitter, Yahoo, YouTube

So email works better than social networking

Posted by adi on Oct 21, 2008 in The world of the web

A new study by ExactTarget and Bail State University reveals today that email marketing is more effective than social networking for reaching the 18-34 age group.

“. . . 18- to 34-year-olds claim they are more likely to be influenced to make purchases based on e-mail marketing messages and direct mail than marketing messages on social networks,” said Mike Bloxham, director, insight and research, Ball State University’s Center for Media Design. “It is too easy to assume that the media consumers choose for their own news, information and entertainment are, by default, the best media to use for marketing messages. This is a dangerous assumption to make in a time when consumers are becoming increasingly aware of their level of control over their media experiences.”

It’s an interesting conclusion and quite a shock I would imagine for the social networks that are making tentative attempts to monetize their traffic.  What is of note however is that a number of studies in the past 12 months have revealed how word of mouth is an important aspect of the purchasing decision.  Back in July for instance Online Research Company revealed that 61% of respondants consult user reviews and other consumer feedback before purchasing.

A further study by Big Research revealed that 47.0% of those who regularly search online say they frequently offer others advice about products and services they have purchased, versus 29.4% of all adults.

All of which makes for an interesting contrast.  On the one hand people seemingly don’t welcome advertising in the social networking environment, but on the other hand people appear more than happy to share their experiences with other people.  All of which does seem to emphasise the importance of providing an outstanding service to your customers to give them every incentive to talk to their friends about it.

Of course that may not help the social networks themselves to monetize their traffic, but it should at least provide marketers with some comfort and the encouragement not to abandon social media as a marketing tool.

Tags: Advertising, Ball State University, Direct mail, E-mail marketing, Marketing, Social network