“…advertising agencies have used social media for people to create relationships with the brand only as long as it happens in the three months that their campaign is running.
… why do advertising agencies think it is okay to do this in social media?
Although you may think it’s a great idea to run a MySpace/Facebook page for a fictional character from your advertising campaign, what happens when the campaign ends?”
Great opinion from Julian Cole, one of the new marketing bloggers I’ve added to my daily feed reading this week. It’s true: advertising agencies are set-up to manage campaigns, and a campaign by definition has an end date as well as a beginning. Once you step forward into social media, there’s no stepping backward without damaging the relationship with the customer relationships you’ve built online.
Unless, of course, your advertising agency hasn’t built you any new customer relationships online. That too can happen.
Getting an agency to drive your social media can work if they understand social media, but their work needs to be delivered on a retainer basis, not a campaign basis. Otherwise, while they’re pitching you the next campaign, your customers are becoming disaffected and walking away from the online relationship you’ve created.
Another tip of the hat to Julian for this great basketball long shot from YouTube, which Julian uses nicely in an analogy on his blog.
English is a tricky language – so many words that sound alike but mean something very different. A spellchecker is no substitute for a proof-reader, since “inane” was spelt correctly; it was just the wrong word.
In this case, perhaps the graphic of a big neon tunnel sucking everything in is very appropriate?
My favourite louche photographer, Mike Walsh, has a great new post up on the shaky future of broadcast television amongst a YouTube generation. I couldn’t agree more: the broadcast television companies were corporate giants for the last fifty years, but they will be media minnows in another five to ten.
While the television industry has been focusing on delivering ever-higher resolution and more channels of sound, the new web audience is already proving they don’t care – they are quite happy with the web’s low-res, low-frame rates and crap sound.
Choosing what you want to watch, and when, having it recommended to you or bookmarked by friends, choosing the kind of device you consume it on: who wouldn’t choose that over traditional TV programming in HD?
A big cash investment in a large HD LCD and all the components necessary to provide the HD program input and sound/vision output is something that the >35 generation will do for the bragging rights alone. The <35 generation shies away from spending that much on anything, much less something that can only do one thing – deliver television.
Few of them even aspire to own the home containing the room featuring the wall such a system might be hung on. It makes much more sense to them to also use their laptop as a TV, or their phone.
When I demo my iPhone or my AppleTV to friends – particularly young adults – it is the ability to watch YouTube on it that excites them much more than being able to purchase and watch broadcast programming, even great shows like This American Life, which I predict is about to sweep the world and be as well known outside the US as The Office has been outside the UK.
Broadcast TV will continue but its margins will shrink as big brand budgets continue to move online in order to have more of a targeted, interactive relationship with their customers. That shrinking of margins will force the networks to reduce the average cost of production, reducing the quality of programming, which will in turn drive more users online.
The only way to save a broadcast media company is to admit this is unstoppable and start producing content for the new medium first and foremost, using your broadcast network primarily as a marketing tool to drive your audience there – flip the current network strategy on its head. If you do it first and execute well, you might build a bigger business than the one you have now.
But you won’t: the immediate revenue loss is too hard to justify to shareholders and the ongoing investment in broadcast infrastructure is an oil tanker that takes years to turn around.
So in the future, free to air broadcast television will hold about the same position in the minds of marketers and consumers as talk-back radio does today. Not gone, but not quite the powerhouse it once was. A medium of SMS-to-win single-camera gameshows, of $1,000 giveaways between programs to try and keep you watching, of a thousand insta-celeb lives all trying to out-outrage each other. All these program types are on broadcast now, some of them even in timeslots that were once premium programming. But in the future, they will be all there is to watch on broadcast TV.
Brian Burns and I have recently discovered each other and are both excited to learn there’s someone out there doing the same kind of thing: helping startups build not just better products, but better stories about who they are and why their product matters. I may rave about his insights more than once in the next few weeks, and I apologise for that, but wherever possible I’ll try to extend on his work and maybe even argue a point or two to the contrary.
It’s not just me – you’ve got to love a guy who pins his heart right out there on his sleeve and declares something as bold as “startups don’t need SEO in a post like this one. He’s going to attract a lot of reactions.
I think Brian’s right about this, to a point: a new tech startup doesn’t need SEO for the first phase of growth.
For most startups, the first phase I call the “buzz phase” of growth, where you’re trying to find taste-makers, mavens, pundits, bloggers, journalists and geeks to try your product out and talk about it.
Loving the buzz phase right now? Feel like you can ride that Techcrunch love right on into Series B, trade sale or positive earnings growth? Sorry, but the buzz phase does end for most startups, usually when enough early adopters have judged it and found it cool or lacking something (or both). Sometimes it ends quite suddenly and irrevocably.
Be prepared for that to happen when you least expect it. And unless you’re building a product that’s only for the <10,000 people who make up the startup community, for success you need to have growth beyond the initial buzz.
Sure, a handful of startups go straight from buzz to broad consumer adoption or get acquired with no further investment in marketing. I’m certain if you were able to get the founders of those companies to talk honestly about it, they’d admit that it was none of their doing – it was a minor feature of their product that they never expected to be the killer app, they just happened to be in a space that one day Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft had to have a piece of, or suddenly it became cool for mainstream consumers to act a little geekier than normal in some respect, as in the current tulip mania for Twitter.
If it’s mainstream consumer adoption you’re looking for, after the buzz starts to fade, there are a few ways to pursue continued growth:
If there’s even a hint of a zeitgeist about your product, use alt-PR and event marketing to try and convert your niche tech buzz into mainstream consumer buzz. Here I’m thinking of the way the founders of MySpace, YouTube and Digg ‘accidentally’ became rock stars overnight. Yeah, like that really happens.
If you need to fundamentally change consumer behaviour (say, if you’re Netflix or Monster.com) guerilla advertising and smart TV ads may work best. Go talk to your backers about more cash.
If you’re just trying to get consumers to switch from the product or service they use now to your product or service, keep consuming pageviews and growing time-per-month, sadly, you can’t beat ugly, dirty, sh*tty, boring, may-i-outsource-this-please SEO.
I hate SEO as much – or more than – the next guy, but it does work. They’ll show you the graphs (stretch) and detailed spreadsheets (yawn) to prove it, if you give them half a chance. Goodness me, is that really the time? [gets up and runs for the door...]
photo credit: ribena_wrath
