Doing Words

Don’t trust your ad agency with your social media

// June 17th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Advertising

 photo credit: ribena_wrath

“…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?”

From Marketing Magazine

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.

You don’t need SEO from the get-go

// April 8th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Startup

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...]

Your tax dollars at work: Powerhouse Museum promoting Hotmail

// April 1st, 2008 // 0 Comments // Advertising

Email Australia – creating more junk Hotmail accounts
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy

Initially I assumed the Powerhouse Museum’s plan to print out and archive hundreds of the ‘best’ emails from around Australia was just an April Fool’s joke.

After all, it’s never easy to sort the real news stories from the pranks on April 1st. Journalists have too little time between deadlines and too many pages to fill to check all of their facts, all the time. And we in the blogosphere, squeezing our blogging into thin slices of our day jobs and housekeeping, have even less motivation to think before we speak. Meanwhile, those of us with time for mischief, such as the most excellent Darren Rowse, keep coming up with plausible prank stories.

In the end, a lot of April Fools prank stories to go press online these days.

Sadly, the Email Australia campaign, announced by ninemsn, Microsoft and the publicly funded Powerhouse Museum, is not a prank. Even worse, it’s a thinly-veiled marketing exercise for Hotmail, designed to temporarily inflate the user registration numbers of Microsoft’s webmail product.

It seems like a prank because the museum is asking everyone in Australia to send in their ‘best’ emails and enter them in one of eight categories (Life and Laughter, Touching Tales, Family, Love and romance, E-mails, Embarrassing typos, Current affairs and Complaints.)

Wouldn’t that be a fun job, sorting through all the entries in each category to decide which were worthy of archiving, which were the best, and which were least likely to lead to get the original author, ninemsn, Microsoft and the museum sued for defamation? That’s not one I’d be putting my hands up for.

Yes, the terms of the promotion state that you not only take on liability for establishing copyright of the material, but also take on the risk of any legal action arising from, say, using someone else’s forwarded email which then turns out to be a snippet from a novel or something that the subject of the email decides is defamatory. Good luck with that.

You’d expect the Powerhouse Museum to choose the best emails in each category, but no – it’s a ninemsn/Microsoft promotion, and ninemsn gets to do the selection, thanks very much. Here’s a tip for contest entrants: try inserting a few references to how great Hotmail is these days, how much you enjoy using MSN Messenger on your new Windows Mobile phone, and how amazing Windows Vista is these days since they shook out the last remaining glitches. Now you know who’ll be judging the entries!

The final pinch-and-a-punch for this particular first day of the month is the news that all emails must be sent from a Hotmail account. And if you don’t already have a Hotmail account, a handy link is provided to allow you to sign up for one.

So now what might at first glance appear to be a misguided but worthy effort to capture a little online culture for prosperity is revealed as a grubby attempt to artificially inflate ninemsn’s Hotmail subscriptions for a month or two.

Not very many people are likely to use that new Hotmail account for anything other than entering the competition, since Hotmail is indelibly stamped with the spammer’s seal of approval. Even if Hotmail is less prone to spam than it has been in the past, most of these casual one-time users won’t stick around to find out.

How sad to see a major Australian museum involved in such a thinly-veiled marketing promotion.  "Marketing is punishment for a bad idea" said Andrew Hyde on Brian Burns’ blog the other day. How very true. If only it had all been an April Fool’s joke.