Crystal Ball Gazing (2009-2014)
December 13, 2009 at 1:48 pm
What better time to cast our minds into the future than coming to the end of the year? Forrester’s US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2009 – 2014 makes an interesting read. The US has always been a couple of years ahead of Ireland in online terms. That gap had been narrowing and anecdotal reports from Google Ireland were that the gap had narrowed to about 2 years. Recent economic conditions and the resulting freeze on investing in new and emerging technologies here has seen the gap widen again to about 3 years. However, with the focus on the “Smart Economy” who knows what changes that will bring?
204 US marketers were surveyed in March 2009 by market research company, Forrester, about their marketing plans from now until 2014. I’ve taken the time out to read and absorb the report. Here is my summary with own opinions included (of course!):
Wholesale shift in budget away from traditional to interactive
60% of marketing budgets are moving away from traditional advertising. Kimberly Clark Worldwide Huggies campaign bypassed TV completely to invest in digital media where new moms hang out. Expect to see more of this kind of thing.
What’s been hit?
What To Look Out For
Interactive marketing spend will reach $53 billion by 2014. Where’s this money going to be invested?
Search Dominates Spend
Accounts for 59% of online budgets. It’s expected to grow at 15% per annum to $32billion by 2014. It makes sense – 85% of online consumers search from their desktops at least once a week. If you’re marketing online, search is the first port of call for being found by a wide audience. Mobile search expected to increase – 11% have searched from their mobiles in the first three months of 2009 alone. The search market is growing through expanded keyword search strings. E-Consultancy noted in its Best Practice Guide for Search that as we become more used to search, we are searching using more and more keywords. So the supply of search is also growing.
Email Marketing Continues Healthy Growth
97% use or plan to use email marketing this year and this will continue to grow. Email is enjoying something of a renaissance as marketers grow lists with the promise of ‘green marketing’, as money is shifted away from direct marketing to email marketing, and as effectiveness is improved with linkages to other channels such as user generated ratings and reviews. Sovereign Bank in the US increased its email marketing spend from 10-15% in 2009, and completely skipped the DM piece in its student campaign.
Social Media Fixed Firmly in the Mix
Poster child social media shows the steepest growth of any channel (but remember it’s coming from a lower base) to 34%. Forecast spend on integrated campaigns and agency fees will top $3 billion by 2014. Social media is growing into an established part of the marketing mix – 64% of marketers already build social media apps and another 22% will by the end of 2009. When 42% of online adults and 55% of online youth want to engage with their favourite brands through social media applications, the demand is clearly there. It’s still early days yet for social media in terms of types, tools, metrics and benchmarks. Expect to see more engagement in the coming years and not just reach. Forrester foresees that portable identities will enable users to move their social profiles from site to site. So anyone engaged in that space is on to a winner.
Display Ads – Rich and PPC
Recession minded marketers prefer pay-per-click buy over impression-based ones (58% of budgets). Expect this trend to continue even after recession. But we’re still loving our rich media formats which are currently accounting for one-third of budgets; expect this to grow to 45% by 2014. (That means more of those annoying eircom ads where the ‘actors’ wave at us and annoyingly distract us as we browse).
Online Video
Pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll are sold in exactly the same way, so you’d expect the old television-centric agencies to shift their focus into online video anytime soon. With awareness and recall of nearly 300% being achieved by P&G for Charmin pre-roll ads, it would be strange not to see trad agencies dive into this space. The 2007 Forrester forecast predicted widespread adoption of online video and mobile marketing by the end of 2009. This hasn’t yet happened – largely due to the recession and resource-constrained marketers not wishing to trial untested media. But Forrester (2009) predict that online video will kick off big style in mid 2010 following by mobile marketing in early 2011 as marketers emerge from recession. Does that mean that the gap will widen ever more between US and Ireland if they come out of recession first and we lag even further due to the endemic nature our woes?
Mobile Marketing
Reminds me of Smithfield in Dublin – we’re still waiting for it to happen! Mobile marketing is one of the most anticipated, least adopted channels. Why? Complexity around metrics, marketers and carrier relationships, plus limited use of data by consumers have all put the skids on mobile to date and stifled adoption. When the recession is over and marketers are spending on newer channels again, Forrester expect mobile to take off.
Why? There will be increased use of data as devices improve, apps proliferate, and mobile operator competition brings data prices down. We’ll see more strategic apps and less of the gimicks that tend to crowd out the app store currently.
Forrester say that mobile maturity will see some efforts being made at introducing standards – but I don’t think so. We’ve had email for close to 15 years and are nowhere near standards amongst email clients (which is why I support the Email Standards Project and you should too!) – I don’t see the disparate mobile providers and handset manufacturers working together on standards as easily as Forrester expect. But I’d be happy to be wrong!
So What Does It All Mean For Us?
The main lessons I’m taking from this is to continue as we are. First step to promoting your business online is to invest in search and make sure that your business can be found by thge 85% who use search to look for your product. The report refers to US marketers investing more heavily in SEO as PPC gets expensive. I’ve been banging on this mantra for quite some time now. While PPC is great in the short-term, the click costs can be quite high – when you add up what you’re paying Google over a year or two, it makes more economic sense to invest in a listing on the left hand side.
Email marketing continues to bring great results. Whether it’s driving traffic to your site for a sale or promotion, or simply brand-building, keeping your business in front of their minds – it works! It’s been the most regular producing, low risk retention strategy for years. It makes sense as majority of people have emails. Emails are not dying out as had been predicted. In fact, we should soon be seeing the growth of the Social Inbox - fusing the best parts of our inbox as we now know it with control and immediacy of social media apps. Long live email marketing!
Early days for social media – my perception of it in Ireland is that 2009 was indeed a year in which many jumped on the bandwagon – or at least familiarised themselves enough to be ready to jump in 2010. But the message I’m sending time and time again is that social media is for life, not just for Christmas. We’ve all been to the seminars on the amazing results that can be achieved, some of us may understand that the creative costs aren’t that high compared to other media. But it’s the ongoing resourcing and dedicating of time to engage with the people we’ve tried so hard to reach – that’s the bit that costs money and that, sadly, is missing in many cases. Don’t just take my word for it. Seth Godin puts it like this:
Dating is a process. So is losing weight, being a public company and building a brand.
On the other hand, putting up a trade show booth is an event. So are going public and having surgery.
Events are easier to manage, pay for and get excited about. Processes build results for the long haul.
Tags: email marketing trends 2010, internet marketing trends 2010, social media trends 2010
Customer Service 2.0
November 30, 2009 at 9:04 pm
A good post from Darragh Doyle last week has got me thinking more about customer service and how big corporations can use social media tools to solve it. Darragh’s been spending some time with eircom’s online customer support team recently, sharing some of his wisdom about how to engage online.
This isn’t rocket science
It’s saying ‘hello, I’m here to help, can I?’
He wonders if eircom management actually look at all the call centre logs and email queries and identify problems that need to be fixed, then throw their weight behind getting them fixed? (Sadly I think not).
He makes a good point that to engage successfully using Twitter or in the broader sense of online, it requires a shift in metrics – not to measure the number of calls that were answered, but the number of interactions to get things done.
This reminded me of a post by Seth Godin who imagines a new type of customer support. One in which asynchronous results are not guaranteed, but one in which senior management are hired and fired on their ability to solve problems. It requires a new approach to customer service, but it makes a lot of sense to me:
1. Customer service problems go into a system and work their way up the customer service pyramid. Each person who touches it either takes responsibility for solving it thoroughly and completely, or passes it up the hierarchy. Any problem not solved within 20 hours goes to some senior level executive who gets it solved or gets fired. (I’m serious).
2. At the end of the month, there’s an easy trail to follow. You can see who solved the most problems. Who’s passing the buck when they should be grabbing it. You can identify the delighted customers and what delighted them.
I guess what it boils down to is ownership and transparency.
If customer service teams are incentivised on number of problems solved, rather than number of calls answered, it will push a new ownership mentality into teams.
If corporations continue to embrace social media tools as they are, then there will be transparency as we can all see if problems are being addressed or not.
The two go hand in hand.
Tags: customer service, Social Media, Twitter
Always Remember Kids – Facebook Isn’t Private
November 20, 2009 at 11:02 am
Unless you’ve got your privacy settings turned ON. Here’s the now infamous case of the young one giving out about her job on Facebook and her boss’s stunningly worded reply:
Tags: Fired on Facebook
LinkedIn Tip To Save You Time
November 18, 2009 at 8:33 am
If you’re on LinkedIn and you’re in groups, then you like me will be well used to receiving the ‘high class spam’ that comes daily to your inbox. Lots of it is repetition; same people starting the same discussions on different groups. Increasingly, I’m noticing spammy ‘get rich quick’ schemes being posted in their CAPITALISED GLORY promising FREE STUFF. It’s too much. I resent the time and energy it takes me to delete it from my inbox.
LinkedIn Tip: remove yourself from all updates
Log in to LinkedIn. Click on groups. Select a group that annoys you a lot. Click on More/My Settings and deselect all the contact settings:
Now you’ll still want to keep up with what’s going on right? Simply diairise it to go in and have a little look around. I don’t live on LinkedIn as much as I do on the other social networks. In order to remind myself to keep my profile up-to-date, I add little reminders to my Google Calendar that send me to LinkedIn. Now I go in once a week and check out all the (in)action I’ve been missing out on by removing the daily emails.
It works for me. It might work for you too.
On a similar note, last year I deactivated the setting on Twitter that notified me whenever anyone was following me. I did this when I was at around 500 followers. Now I’m on more than 800. That’s 300 emails of no substance I’ve removed from my consciousness!
Again, you’ve got to make sure that you’re not missing out. So I have a custom landing page for people who are checking me out on Twitter. It asks them to say hello to me on Twitter and that way I’ll know them and follow them. It works for me. Might work for you too.
Tags: LinkedIn tip, Twitter tip
The Intention Economy
November 6, 2009 at 8:36 am
If there’s one thing you do before knocking off for this weekend, read this: Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet), by David Gillespie (Aussie in Canada working for McCann Erickson. Found by way of We Are Social.
I believe we’re getting ahead of ourselves, confusing the growth of the Internet with it growing up, but I also believe we’re doing some amazing things..
Reminds me of this comment from Euan Semple:
There is something else going on here that is to early for an ism but that is really interesting. It is about small people loosely joined. It is small and personal in essence but powerful in combination. It is not about people being insignificant but about being unassuming.It is not about being individualistic but about being loosely joined.
If I tell my Facebook friends about your brand it’s because I like my friends, not because I like your brand.
- Mike Arauz
Tags: Intention Economy, Social Media
Thoughts On Ning
October 14, 2009 at 3:43 pm
I was recently involved in a discussion about Ning. Create-it-yourself social networks. Sounds impressive (you too can build your own Facebook in just a few clicks). Works really well, requires absolutely no technical ability to get a social network set up. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
That’s my conclusion anyway. Now, here’s how I came to that:
Advantages of Ning:
- You can have your own social network up and running in a couple of minutes. You can have video panels, forums, members, chat all going on. And it’s free (if you go for them hosting and having ads on your network). But the key to success on the web is always content. Getting a clear message out to the right people about your service is what you want to do. Ideas and content rule, technology is merely the conduit that facilitates the message.
Disadvantages of Ning:
- Why would you want to create a social network away from Facebook which is where all the people are? Given that the population of Facebook is the size of Brazil, why would you want to restrict your social network to something the size of the Aran Islands? One of the many benefits of Facebook is that when new people join your Fan Page, their friends can see when they do. This can encourage friends to join, which increases your numbers. If your subject matter is interesting enough, this viral effect can spread fast. If your social network is on Ning, you are limited to directly inviting people to join. But there isn’t anything like the numbers browsing Ning like there are on Facebook, so it’s automatically limiting your potential.
- All the elements you get on Ning, you get on Facebook. Only difference is that it’s easy to style Ning to make it look more gorgeous than the corporate blue and white that is FB.
- What if you went ahead with Ning and then found that your members or your audience just aren’t into it? Then you’ll look a bit silly with a Ning network and no-one coming to talk to you. The risk here is that organisations will go out and build wholly inappropriate Ning networks just because someone has made it easy to do so. The social network for consumers of dishwasher powder anyone? No I don’t think so.
All of this leads me nicely on to:
My Top 5 Tips For Getting Started With Social Networking
- Start off with a device for getting your key messages out - a blog can work extremely well. Or perhaps your message is better communicated through video? In which case, you can easily set up a channel on Youtube and use that to publish your messages. A content plan is key. Whether you’re blogging or youtubing, it’s a good idea to work out who your audiences are, then consider what your main themes are. Then sit down with a calendar and fill in what you’re going to say and when, then stick to it. Here’s a whole post on blog content planning.
- Then get to work. Write your blog regularly. Read other’s blogs. Comment. Take part in the conversation, because you can’t really expect people to want to talk to you if you’re not talking to them, now can you?
- When you’ve got some momentum in your messages (and even some alliteration!), then look at how you’re going to re-package that content and get it out on the social networks. You can include your blog feed in Facebook and LinkedIn so once you’re regularly blogging, you can be sure that your message is getting republished out there. Consider Twitter as a way of alerting people that you’ve just done a blog post.
- Don’t fall into the trap of using Twitter merely as a place to post your links. While research has found that men are more likely to post links then women (who are more likely to write emotively… yes I know Laura, I absolutely love love love it as well… ), organisations that use Twitter as another form of RSS are failing! Twitter is conversation. If you’re going to be on it, get chatting. Follow people. Take part. If someone asks a question and you have an answer – be helpful, share your knowledge. If someone makes a comment about how much they like Wispa’s, and you do too, then say it. That kind of thing builds rapport. And the charming thing about Twitter is that it celebrates humanity. So what if relationships are being formed about 1980’s chocolate bars on an online space?
- Remember that all of these things require a mindset switch to get it right. It doesn’t work when you allocate a half hour to Twitter and the first Friday of every month to write your blogs. Taking part in the conversation online is an ongoing thing and must be regarded as a organisation-wide change in how we do things around here. There’s no point in having a summer intern do your Twitter for you only to walk away and leave it to languish. A lot of people I hear have fears about the amount of time it’s going to take. If you do it right, it shouldn’t be something that you quantify. It’s just an extension of how you work.
What do you think? You can post your comment here. Or you can go off and set up a Ning social network to do the same thing – but all alone, somewhere else…. !
Tags: Ning, Social Networks, Tips on Social Networks
Remove Twitter Anxiety Now
July 27, 2009 at 7:32 am
Countless articles have been written in mainstream media about Twitter; some journalists love it, others hate it (or don’t get it?). Numerous discussions on LinkedIn, many self proclaimed ’social media experts’ give seminars on how to Twitter. Even my 76 year old mother knows about it – God forbid she asks me to set her up with an account!
I believe that all this hype is putting pressure on business people about Twitter. I’m asked at least 5 times a week, “should we be on Twitter?”.
The best person to answer that is yourself.
Why don’t you have a listen to what’s being said on Twitter about you, your business, and your industry?
- If there’s a lot of talk, and you feel you have something to say, then get on Twitter. Set yourself up with an account and take part in the conversation.
- If there’s not a lot of talk, you’ve had a listen and put your fears to rest, so next time you read about Twitter you can salve your fears by knowing that you’ve had a look and it’s not for you.
One of the best applications I’ve come across recently for listening to Twitter is Twilert.
Twilert is a bit temperamental; I wouldn’t rely on it. I have searches set up for IKEA and I get about half of them.
The reason I like it is because it sends an email (at a frequency selected by yourself) with a summary of what’s being said on Twitter. It fits in with the email mindset that most corporates still hold. What I really like is that you can set it to monitor a specific geographic location. This means you can monitor the buzz in Ireland only, or UK, or the whole world if you wish – or even within a 5km radius of where are.
How To Set Up A Twilert
- Register on Twilert. It’s free.
- Once in, select the ‘advanced settings’ button under the main box:
- Type in the words you want to track. It’s a good idea to set up different alerts for your name, your company name, generic keywords relating to your industry, product names, competitor names, and any other ‘need words’ you come up with. By ‘need words’ I mean words that people would type when they need your product (they just don’t know it yet!).
- Select the frequency of send. You can even choose a time of day. I’d recommend mid afternoon so you have time to respond to any tweets on the same day if you want to.
- To limit the results to Irish-only buzz, type in your location under Places – make sure you type “Dublin Ireland” so you’re not stuck with that other Dublin in the US. Then select what radius you want. For all of Ireland, select “within 500km”.
- For this first raising of the periscope, let’s listen to everything. Later you can limit the results to positive or negative, or even asking a question. You may choose to set up separate alerts that get sent to different parts of your organisation, so that ‘asking a question’ tweets go to sales, ‘negative’ tweets go to customer service. But that will come later.
- Hit “Create A Twilert” and you’re done.
What You Can Do Now
- Shortly you will receive a Twilert in your inbox. This will show you all the mentions of your keyword in your specified location over the past 24 hours.
- I set up one using the keyword “eircom” just to see what people are saying. Predictably, it’s not all good:
- Click the links to visit the Twitter profile of who’s doing the talking (or tweeting).
- If you were eircom and you were using Twitter properly, you could be using Twitter in so many ways. Reputation management, sales, customer service. What do you think Ann Donnelly’s response would be if eircom tweeted her with a special offer to keep her business? I think she’d be bowled over. Vodafone Ireland is already using Twitter very effectively for just over a year now. Check their profile here.
Very quickly you will be able to decide if Twitter is a place you need to be.
It’s like blogging. When I’m doing blogging training, I make the point that before you set yourself up with a blog and start writing, it’s a good idea to first read blogs, comment a bit, and then go. By reading and commenting on blogs you are taking part in the conversation. And that is what blogging is. Therefore you are a blogger even before you get your own blog.
Similarly, with Twitter, you can listen and watch first before you jump in and set up an account and take part regularly. Adding Twitter to your communications mix does require commitment and resourcing, albeit nothing too onerous. My advice is to go ahead and have a listen. If you find your customers are on there talking about you, then get in touch and we can have a chat about the next steps for you.
Tags: buzz monitoring, twilert, Twitter
