I’m With Gary
August 4, 2010 at 9:21 am
Tags: return on investment social media
No I’m Not Dead….
July 29, 2010 at 1:25 pm
You may well have been wondering where I’ve been? I’ve been existing in a world where time is divided into blocks of 2 hours. Night and day merge into one another. A tiny person who weighs only a few kgs consumes my attention and affection. A mere flick of his eyelash lifts my heart. And now that he’s started smiling, it’s like the sun coming out on a grey day… 
I have been reading though and am interested to see how Facebook is coming to terms with policies for dealing with members who die.
It will be interesting to see what Twitter does with Ivy’s page, she was the oldest Twitter user and died the other day aged 104. RIP.
Normal service will resume on this blog in September. Hope you’re all having a good summer. In the meantime, here’s a shot of my beautiful smiling boy! What? On a business blog? Yes because I’m now a Business Mummy Blogger!
Tags: facebook death policies
Measuring Social Media ROI
June 1, 2010 at 11:08 am
A hot topic all round and one I’m going to do my thesis on … but the problem I’m finding is that it’s SO cutting edge, there aren’t really a lot of academic peer reviewed articles to include in a lit review. If you find any – please let me know.
There are lots of blogs and Youtube videos available – this one is pretty good for starters. We’re doing pretty much all of these for our clients. Are you?
Tags: measuring return on investment, return on influence, social media roi
Proactive Use Of Twitter – Careful Now!
May 10, 2010 at 4:53 pm
I’m a firm believer that Twitter, when used correctly, can be a great customer service tool. For example, Tourism Ireland has notched up plenty of successes from engaging with people who tweet about coming to Ireland. Imagine this – you’re sitting at home in Washington and you comment to your mates that you’re looking forward to your vacation in Ireland. Next you get a tweet from Discover Ireland (who have checked your profile, see that you like hillwalking) suggesting some ‘off the beaten track hill walks’ that you might be interested in. You’re pleased. You respond with a question about them, and so a conversation begins.
This is how to do it.
In response to a tweet about ‘9 days in Ireland in June’, read from bottom to top:
Here’s how not to do it!
Read this from the bottom up…
Sorry eircom! While it’s to be applauded that you’re using social media, I think your team need a little more training in what steps to take before actually engaging. It’s not a numbers game where you tweet to as many people as possible. It’s important to read the person’s profile on Twitter, click the link to their blog/website and get a feel for who they are. If you had done this, you’d know that Jon Handelaar is a very tech savvy person indeed who would not respond well to being marketed to during his busy day.
Tags: proactive twitter, twitter fail, twitter for marketing
How To Get Followed On Twitter
April 13, 2010 at 9:29 am
Apart from the obvious – quality tweets – here’s what I look for when perusing follow lists and deciding whether or not to follow someone on Twitter:
- Location - fill it in, tell people where you are.
- Your last tweet will display when browsing lists of other people’s followers. I just followed someone whose last tweet was “can you tweet from prison?”! It kind of grabbed my attention. Similarly, if your last tweet is “duuuuddde…..” it’s unlikely you’ll get followed (by me).
- When was your last tweet? If it was more than a couple of days ago I don’t want to know you.
- Avatar - I’ll glance at. If your avatar is a default Twitter one or a potential porn merchant I won’t follow.
If I’m looking at you on Tweetdeck, I’ll click ‘view profile’ and have a look at all your recent tweets.
- If you use hash tags all the time, I don’t want to know. Useless filling up of space and irritating for your followers.
- If you only Retweet others I might think you’re a bot, so no thank you.
- If you only ‘open the conversation’, ie. do not reply to people or generally chit chat, then I’ll think you’re a PR company tweeting on behalf of your client (but one who doesn’t really get it… ) – then I’ll choose to just take your client’s RSS feed. After all what’s the difference?
Generally I’m looking for someone who has something to say, is there and is not hawking a product.
If this sounds like you, and I’m not following you (check it out here) - please tweet me using @maryrose and I’d be delighted to meet you! The only reason I’m not is because I turned off the ‘alert me when someone follows me notification’ a long time ago, so I fear I’m missing out on lots of potential new Twitter friends.
Tags: get followed on twitter, twitter followers strategy
Why Social Media Is A Lot Like Sex…
March 29, 2010 at 1:33 pm
… As a teenager!
There’s no disputing that social media is sexy. But a client recently made a very astute remark that social media is a lot like sex when you’re a teenager.
- Everyone’s talking about doing it – but nobody’s too sure who’s really doing it right
- We’ve all heard it’s great – but we’re not sure how to get started
- There are a lot of people giving talks about it (think of these like Sex Education in school) – but they’re all talking about the what and none of them get into the sticky details of the how!
Brightspark’s Approach To Sex Social Media
- Consider us your coach. We’re doing it alright and we are happy to share our expertise with you!
- There are so many positions one can take – think of us as your partner on the sidelines urging you on, recommending on how you might change your position and alter your strategy to get best results.
- And this year we’re seeing big demand for advice on how to make a process of it. People are enjoying what they’re getting from it so much, they want to do it every day and not just for specific campaigns. We’ve got some great programmes available so you embed your social strategy as part of your everyday marketing activity and not just something you get lucky with on special occasions!
Tags: social media strategy
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
