Make Digital Marketing Work

Social Media in general and Twitter in particular has a number of ways that people tend to gauge their effectiveness.  Top of this list seems to be the number of followers that an account has.  For most of last year it was the only indication of how reach could be measured.  And every new entrant onto Twitter tried to maximise this number.  If you happen to be a well known celebrity like Stephen Fry then I agree.  He has millions hanging on his every word and if he links to a site, the resultant traffic spike it produces causes the server to wince in pain and vow to take life easier in the future.

A million different tools, techniques, applications and tips sprung up to help users in their pathological search for followers.  Some of these were useful, such as Follow Friday and ensuring that posts  were written to include trending topics with a ‘#’ tag (one of our favourites.).  These worked because numbers of people were drawn to others who shared interests and therefore had something in common to read and write about.  Mr Fry is a topic of conversation in his own right and rapidly became the twittering equivalent of Harry Potter with everyone reading the next instalment religiously.

A lot of the tools which sprung up though didn’t seem to be focused at all on finding and sharing ideas and thoughts with like minded individuals.  They instead were purely concerned with connecting as many people together as possible.  There is still a feeling in social media circles that this is a good thing and we do not agree.

Once you get into the top ten of active users on Twitter, their accounts follow and amass a following of truly staggering proportions with six and even seven figure sums.  On the one hand this looks very impressive but I have always wondered exactly how many of those people they are watching and how many are actually watching back.

Then along came lists and the answer seemed to me to be pretty obvious, it was about quality not quantity.  Lists enable users to create little groups of people that are interested in certain subjects and provide complete user control.  It stands to reason that the more lists a user is included in by other users then the more interest shown by others in the individual user.

I have always maintained that the basic model for the web is a series of villages where people gather and exchange ideas that benefit all concerned, but that it was important to preserve a signal to noise ratio.  Simply having a hoard of people who are not interested in a single word you say is completely useless, and I think if you look at accounts that have high numbers of followers but low numbers of lists that this idea is born out.  In this group are often a million or so MLM followers all purporting to have found the idea that will make everyone millions (but who are still having problems making this month’s car payments), an equal number of life coaches who all want you to adopt their particular flavour of leading an amazing life as well as the affiliates, desperate to peddle products that they make wonderful claims about but would never buy in a million years and the odd escort looking to make your dreams come true for a night for a price (and with an airfare to travel that is completely price excluding for the vast majority of her readers).

Did I leave anyone out?

When we opened up our Twitter account we deliberately stayed away from the ‘breakthrough video tutorials unlocking Twitter follow secrets’ (which are not that secret at all and must be pretty gaoling for the suckers who paid money for it).  Instead we maintained a high signal to noise ratio and made sure we tweeted relevant posts to trending topics.  It worked and the high number of people who listed and followed us meant that gradually as our confidence grew so did our authority.  We are still nowhere near as influential (nor are we likely to ever be) as Stephen Fry but the niche we operate in is a place where we are happy with what we have achieved and look forward to a steady progression.

I was therefore interested the other day when I encountered an apparently ethical follow tool called http://www.twiends.com/

Twiends works by giving everyone who signs up a set number of credits, and then awards more credits for everyone you follow.  It also enables you to earn credits by following other people.  In this way everyone is encouraged to follow and is in turn followed to build up an enormous audience.  There is also the option to buy credits if you want to and this is the revenue model for the site.  I doubt many people will bother to be honest as they make it very easy to en masse follow a load of people which in turn gets you credits which in turn gets you followers looking to do the same thing.

We very quickly attracted nearly 50 new followers until our credit ran out.  As this was an experiment we decided to look at who our new followers were, and sure enough there were a bunch of MLM’ers, Affiliates, life coaches and hookers.  In other words absolutely nobody who we are genuinely interested in following back and people who won’t really find an audience for their efforts in us (or indeed anyone who is interested in what we say or associate with).  More to the point not one of them added us to a list which we think is the true way to see how engaged the audience is.

Which leads us nicely to where we came in.  We think that its best to have an engaged audience as opposed to a dead audience consisting of millions and whilst Twiends.com does let you follow people based on interest, it’s just too easy to scoop up whatever is there in the hope of blindly getting more followers yourself.  It really does seem like the blind leading the blind.

Having said that if all you want is followers then it works, but if you are interested in building up an engaged audience, then rely on your signal to noise ratio being high and do it right as part of an overall digital marketing strategy

There is a campaign that has recently launched that I think highlights many of the issues surrounding marketing at the moment.  It was developed by London Agency Rufus Leonard for Macmillan the cancer charity and features a viral campaign where celebrities talk about their most embarrassing experiences.

The aim is to bring out into the open the embarrassment that men feel about breaking their silence concerning cancer.

These sound bites have been edited and placed on Youtube.  The best one is provided by Ray Winstone who relates a wonderful story of getting drunk with a group of British soldiers during which he agrees to go to Afghanistan.  As someone who has had the pleasure of a drink with his dad (and if the ability to consume alcohol runs in the family) this story conjures up a truly impressive picture of drunkenness, and one which is brought round at the end to an on brand message that facing up to an embarrassment can change your life in a good way.

I don’t know if Ray Winstone was just better briefed or cared more than the other contributors or if they ignored the brief but the other celebrities didn’t manage to relate anything like the same level of interest or a brand message.  Ricky Gervais only manages to say that he has never regretted anything he has said or done which whilst I am sure he is telling the truth is hardly on brand at all (and some might say is completely off brand).  The opportunity was there for all of the others to add to the message but all of them fail.

That leads me to wonder where the viral element for this campaign actually is.  We rely so heavily on celebrity endorsement for much of our media communications now but simply placing a celebrity in front of the camera isn’t enough.  A campaign needs a concept which is delivered, and all good communications include a fundamental truth about the product.  In this case, one part (Mr Winstone’s communication) accomplishes, this whilst the others do not.

Having said that of course we certainly hope that the campaign is a success and the cause is certainly a deserving one.  We just think that with a little bit more thought it could have achieved a greater level of cut through and led to a viral campaign that would have had more life, and more relevance.

The year was 19 days old when the digital marketing industry reported what we think is the first properly significant story of the new decade.

YouTube (owned by Google) has apparently won the rights to stream live cricket matches from the Indian Premier League.  This marks a significant stepping up of Youtube’s activities in an area which has become dominated by Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Broadcasting channels.

Given the amount of bad feeling and mudslinging that has been going on between the two companies, this is unlikely to extract a pleasant response from Sky.

The tail end of last year was dominated on the one hand by Murdoch claiming that Google was a parasite and on the other by Google saying that if Murdoch’s organisations didn’t know how to make money out of the traffic they receive from Google then it wasn’t their fault.  I think many could be forgiven for thinking that Google is teaching a lesson with Youtube on how to make money in a new media world and that the intended recipient of learning is indeed Mr Murdoch.

If Google is therefore interested in broadcast media and has ideas of how to make money, is there anything to stop it from deciding to do the same thing with news media?  Their entire argument is that money can be made, it’s simply that News Corporation doesn’t know how to do it, and whilst Murdoch’s empire has its friends and supporters in high places it is a brave person indeed who could stand up to the weight of Google’s coffers, it’s global reach and it’s board’s unashamed intellectual prowess.

If battle lines are being drawn and warning shots sent across boughs then this going to be a year to watch in earnest  and one that at the end of which media will be unrecognisable from how it is today.

2010 is under way and already I am seeing articles about increased market confidence and expected increased budgets.  It is almost as if the markets have had a magical touch by the passing of time.

If only life were that simple and a clock was capable of changing everyone’s fortunes.  Even allowing for Boethius views on the mutability of fortune in ‘The Consolation of Philosophy’ you cannot set a clock on when fortune will ebb and flow in any direction.  Whilst I do think that we will have a gentler year than last year in the marketing industry I am not ready to raise the flags up the flagpole and declare the recession over.

Its ten years ago since the heady days of the dot com boom when anyone in digital only had to turn up to work to suddenly find the most incredible budgets becoming available for sites.  I was working in New York at the time and I remember promising my board the most incredible quarter that they had ever seen.  I was right, but hot on the heels of that came a slump that created mass unemployment and removed many of the agency names from the marketplace for good.  I can remember then people were displaying the same kind of optimism in the press but budgets didn’t return for another two to three years.  Back then digital redefined itself with the focus moving from not simply creating sites but to driving traffic.  I believe that the current lean times have caused another shift of focus.  This time it will bring the various disciplines together as an overall end to end digital marketing strategy.

Up until now digital has been a series of tactical tools that people have used to supplement the real marketing and advertising activity that grown-ups did.  When digital marketing overtook TV advertising last year it signalled that clients were ready to take digital seriously.  The only problem was finding digital agencies capable of doing the same thing.

This year will see a continuation of this trend with clients wanting strategic digital marketing solutions and many agencies desperately trying to arrange themselves so that they are able to provide them.

We are obviously looking forward to this quite a lot as it is the reason we created the company.  Times may well be lean but we do think that this year is going to be very interesting indeed.

The decade is barely a few days old and already the marketing industry is in full swing.  I read yesterday that display advertising is promoting itself with a series of ads designed to court controversy and prove its ability to cut through.

The ads feature controversial slogans such as “Working women make bad mothers”.  Aside from the fact that my own mother was a working woman and still managed to be the best mother in the world ever (and I am prepared to commit an act of violence on anyone who tries to argue with me on this), I can’t help feeling that the campaign isn’t so much proving how display advertising can cut through and provoke discussion as proving that nothing cuts through quite like controversy in any medium.  This was after all the corner stone that tabloid journalism was founded on and the Daily Mail has proved itself to be highly effective for over 100 years.

Advertising has been known to court controversy as well and achieve enormous cut through.  I am reminded of the print ads and window displays used for Benetton in the 80s and 90s and the absolute storm that the All the colours of the World campaign caused in South Africa whilst the company became the fourth largest in Italy.

The difference between great advertising like that and simply making a controversial statement is that Benetton had values.  There are many politicians that court controversy as well but unless they have values that others can admire the controversy tends to engulf them and damage them rather than lifting them to dizzying heights of success.

I therefore can’t help feeling that the display advertising campaign could have done with a bit more planning to actually prove its point but there again, I and many others are writing about it so maybe it has got something going for it.