Tag Archives: blog

Why historical Quality Score matters

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When all of the search publisher metrics available are considered, Quality Score always seems to receive the most attention; yet it’s also the metric which search marketers have the least amount of visibility into. It’s difficult to know how to effectively improve it and assess its impact on performance. What we do know, however, is that every time a user conducts a search that triggers ads, a Quality Score is calculated based on a number of factors, including:

•           The keyword’s historical click-through rate (CTR)

•           The display URL’s historical CTR

•           The account history

•           The quality of the landing page

•           The keyword/ad relevance

•           The keyword/search relevance

The first three factors here on Google’s list reference performance history, despite the history of a keyword’s Quality Score being unavailable within the AdWords interface. Rather than showing different Quality Scores across time, Google displays a single Quality Score that provides an estimate of that keyword’s overall quality.

For the most part this is adequate – search marketers analyse Quality Score at specific moments in time to understand keyword relevance and performance issues. However, this one-off-style approach to analysing Quality Score fails to provide insight into how search marketers’ ongoing efforts to optimise campaigns impact upon Quality Score, either positively or negatively.

Whether it’s testing brand new creative or introducing additional negative keywords, improving a keyword’s Quality Score can lead to a lower cost-per-click (CPC) and a higher ad position. Changes in these two metrics can subsequently impact upon CTR, costs and return on investment (ROI), among other things. Unfortunately, the influence each of these best practices has on keyword Quality Score is frequently lost with time, especially within larger accounts. Imagine having to record the daily Quality Score for two million keywords affected by new creative messaging.

To understand the impact of optimisation efforts on Quality Score, search marketers need the ability to trend historical Quality Score, against other performance metrics, over time.

For example, by trending Quality Score and average CPC over a 3-month period, search marketers can understand the exact impact on cost that comes from an increase in Quality Score from 6 to 8. Trends that include other metrics like ROI and conversion rate highlight the indirect impact that Quality Score has on conversion and revenue goals.

The rise of paid social media

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Social media is an excellent way to build relationships with your target audience and customers as well as amplify your marketing message. Paid options offered through a variety of social media platforms mean businesses now have the opportunity to be even more targeted with their social networking.

A recent survey by Vizu found three out of four advertisers surveyed used paid social media in their marketing strategies, and 64% of respondents planned to increase their paid social media investment during 2013.

Paid social media options include promoted posts and ads on Facebook, LinkedIn ads, promoted tweets on Twitter and sponsored blog posts.

How paid social media works

Facebook ads – can be used to promote a new business page, an event or to direct traffic to your website and boost sales. These can be targeted via location, demographics and even interests so you can ensure you’re reaching the right people. Ads are charged on a cost per click or impression basis.

Facebook promoted posts – appear higher in the news feed than organic posts, so that means more people will see your post. Use Facebook Insights to see what your followers respond to most. You set a budget for the lifetime of the post and Facebook will estimate how many people that will reach.

Twitter – promoted tweets can be used to gain more followers or direct followers to a sales page. They are charged on a cost per engagement basis, with engagement meaning a retweet, reply or a click on the link.

LinkedIn – ads are positioned on pages throughout LinkedIn, such as profile, home or search pages, with businesses using them to promote services and products. Again, you can target by location and demographics, plus title and industry. You pay for the clicks or impressions received.

Sponsored posts – many bloggers now offer sponsorship in the form of advertising, or product giveaways and reviews. If you know the blogger connects with your target market, these posts can be used to build your brand and direct traffic.

Pros of paying for social media

Paying for social media can get quicker results in the target market you’re looking for. It works well if you’re aiming for these objectives:

  • Starting conversations – paid social media can allow you to specifically target your potential customers and speed up the conversations you have with them online.

  • Lead generation – drive traffic to a specific platform or URL to build followers or entice customers with a special offer.

  • Brand awareness – Facebook and LinkedIn ads can both help with brand awareness because you can pin-point interested potential customers who want exactly what your business offers. This is a great strategy to build an audience initially or increase your market reach with a particular segment of the market.

  • Social media promotions – if you already have an active social media network, a paid promotion for a new marketing campaign or competition can really ramp up your results.

Cons of paying for social media

As the cost of paid social media is usually based on performance through click-throughs and engagement, it is fairly low risk, but there are some things to consider before jumping into a big commitment:

  • Alienating your networks – in the same way that we often find something else to do during ad breaks on television, paid ads on social media can make people switch off your brand. Make sure any social media advertising you do is part of an overall marketing strategy so the ads aren’t the only time your networks hear from you.

  • Hitting the wrong target – do your research before investing in any paid social media because even though the campaigns are measured on performance, if you get the target audience wrong it will be a waste of your time.

How to measure paid social media

Click-throughs, extra followers and engagement are often used to measure ROI of paid social media advertising, however other metrics also include sales and increased brand awareness within the target market.

Social media is here to stay, and more paid options will become available as these platforms find more ways to help you amplify your message.

Market and Social Research – not broken…just bent

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I’m getting a bit tired of endless inward-looking discussions in the research industry about why market research and market research professionals are not valued more by business, not to mention the predictions by many pundits of the impending death of market research.

Well, here’s a message to the doomsayers:  if market research was dying why are companies such as Google, Facebook and IBM trying to break/buy into market research? I read, I watch, I learn about business and I still do not see a better way to grow a business than to invest in frequently understanding your customer. The opportunity for customers to change business has never been greater so market research should be growing.  But the traditional measures say that we are not. Why?

Because market research is only bent, not broken.

So how do we unbend it? How does business learn to love market research again? Technology. Technology that has the potential and ability to change everything.

The digitisation of advertising has transformed the ad industry. It has dramatically impacted the margins, the speed and volume of work, the output and skills required by agencies big and small.  It has changed the way budgets are prepared and allocated, and demanded new thinking and process.

So what have we been doing in research at the same time? Yes we do more online, and use mobile surveys, yes big data is here as are social media listening tools and they are all making noise and challenging us, but are we adapting fast enough? In my humble opinion the answer is ‘no’.

I don’t need the CMO or marketing director to understand market research or what we do. Why? Because it’s time for CEOs themselves to fall back in love with customer input.

You won’t be surprised to hear that the most impressive change I have witnessed is how an insight community allows clients (and CEOs) to connect with customers more often, more cost effectively and much, much faster.

This means more issues, more policy and more new products can now receive some form of consumer or constituent lens prior to decisions being made.

In the recent Greenbook Research Industry Trends Report (which has a bias towards North America), the two most used and emerging technologies under consideration by companies are online communities and mobile surveys.  Put these two things together and you have mobile communities.

Well managed and populated mobile communities are the future of research, I am sure of it.

I see this as the digitisation of customer connection and I see it as the future of market research. I see the end of the long form survey coming, it simply won’t work on mobile and mobile will be everything.  I see the liberation of research and buyers of research, real time 24/7 availability of data, interesting engagements, moving from interruption to enjoyment, research interactions that create positive word of mouth and a real want to get involved and tell your friends about.

It’s not qual or quant, its listening, asking, observing, passively collecting and then distillation of all of these into knowledge.

Quality, professional standards and privacy will continue to govern what we do and should always be table stakes, not the premium offer.  We need to ensure new players in professional market and social research adhere to these standards – but we need to bring them into the tent, not fight them off.

Welcome to the digitisation of customer connection, a world where we are working towards a new market research paradigm that will encompass a raft of evolving elements including: customer and consumer feedback that is always on; shorter surveys (six minutes max!); iterative learning; profiling knowledge stored and reused instead of asked again and again; shorter, sharper, longitudinal learning; mobile or Facebook enabled; making good use of valuable open ended responses (especially in B2B); treating customers and consumers like people not a sample source; forming mutually beneficial partnerships between agencies to leverage technology and expertise; leveraging what humans and computers do best; continuous learning not custom research; fewer research ‘projects’ and more exploration of customer needs; real linkages between advertising and sales; agility and most of all…making it all about them, not us.

This is a world that CEOs will find value in. This is a world that they will value what you and I do.  This is a business tool that they will invest in.

Our industry has a great future, one that is healthier and stronger, but only for those who choose to adapt.

How advertisers can use social TV to their benefit

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How advertisers can use social TV to their benefit

A world-first neuro study has served up some interesting facts on social media interaction and the first screen, writes Sebastian Rennie. The most important impact will be on when and how advertisers manage their in-program messaging.

Australians, like everyone else in the world, are watching more screens, more often and in more places. The concept of the second screen, or even multi-screening – engaging with more than one screen simultaneously – has been around for some time now.

Nielsen statistics show that the percentage of Aussies participating in multi-screening has been relatively static at 60% for the past five years. Conventional thinking, within and from outside the industry, assumes that if viewers are spreading their attention across more than one device, then TV must be suffering. According to such thinking, the second screen must be distracting viewers, resulting in diminished levels of engagement – a concern for both broadcasters and advertisers.

Eager to answer these concerns with some empirical data, MEC partnered with the Seven Network and Neuro-Insight to undertake a neurological study of social TV viewers and their live social interaction between the first and second screen. Good news – the study shows that social TV viewers’ engagement levels rise.

But first, here is an explanation on how we conducted the study. We recruited four different groups of social TV viewers and invited them to the Neuro-Insight lab. These participants watched a live broadcast of the Seven Network’s reality show X-Factor, while wearing equipment to measure their neurological activity. We left them to their own devices as they watched the broadcast and interacted on social media.

Neuro-Insight developed a bespoke methodology and technology for this task, enabling us to contrast the different behavioural states to measure the neurological change before, during and after social interaction.

Our goal in conducting this world-first study was to determine whether social TV is a threat or an opportunity for broadcasters and advertisers. With millions being spent annually on TV sponsorships, clarity around viewer engagement is crucial for both parties.

The study highlighted the rise and fall of the participants’ engagement levels as they interacted with the first and second screen. Of the 153 social interactions measured, there were on average four tweets per participant, with a high of 14 and a low of two.

The results challenge the conventional wisdom that second-screen usage during TV viewing negatively impacts audience engagement. In fact, by the end of the 30-minute show (and a number of second screen interactions), the cumulative engagement levels of the participants had increased on average by 23%.

The results offer some guidance to broadcasters and those advertisers integrated into a program. Producers can introduce triggers to involve social TV viewers earlier in the program, while brands that are fully integrated in a TV show can capitalise on the higher intensity of engagement, improving the effectiveness of their marketing investment.

Even more relevant to advertisers was the discovery of two memory states in the minds of viewers. The first is a “global memory”, where people store imagery, jingles and brands. The second is the “detailed memory”, where more detailed information around products, price points, website addresses and the like is stored.

After social media interaction, people’s detailed memory is higher than their global memory – this usually occurs towards the end of a TV show. That means social TV viewers are more likely to pay attention to and retain details on products and special offers than the average TV viewer.

This represents a powerful new piece of intelligence in the ongoing battle to improve advertising effectiveness. Advertisers can use this knowledge to improve the effectiveness of their program sponsorships and integrated advertising deals.

For example, they should serve up brand messages at the beginning of a TV program, when viewers’ global memory is more receptive, and push product specifics, price points, promotions and offers towards the end of the program when the detailed memory kicks in to better exploit viewers’ heightened receptivity to details.

Multiscreen usage is only likely to increase in the future, so this discovery comes at the right time to enable advertisers and their media agencies to manage the timing and content of their messaging during a TV program.

The results are certainly positive, but just because we are seeing engagement levels rise with social TV (with an average of four interactions over 30 minutes) there isn’t going to be a linear increase in engagement as the social interactions increase. In extreme cases, where viewers turn to social media every couple of minutes, I doubt they would be paying an awful lot of attention to the program.

January social media stats: Facebook, Google+ down; Twitter, LinkedIn up

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Social Media News’ January compilation of social network visitation in Australia reveals drops in account numbers for Facebook and Google Plus and increased use of LinkedIn and Twitter.

Over the past month, a number of social networks saw increased activity on the previous month as the interruption to traffic caused by the Christmas break returned to normal.

However, as editor of the news site, David Cowling, points out, the impact of the December holiday period plays out differently across the different social networks.

Business-related networks, such as LinkedIn and WordPress, saw declines in December but noticeable rises in January as holiday makers got back to work and their usual blogging cycles.

On the other hand, some sites used primarily for socialising with friends or for personal interests saw a drop following the holiday season. Facebook declined by 24,000 users, down to 11.8 million active accounts, although the social media giant is believed to have culled spam accounts during December and January.

Similarly, Tumblr dropped by 200,000 unique Australian visitors (UAVs), but held onto its position as the fourth most visited social network with 2.9 million UAVs.

Google Plus was down by 30,000 users to 340,000, according to Cowling’s research.

Youtube remains consistent at 11 million visitors, as it did for most of last year, and Twitter users appear to be up slightly.

Sites ranked by active monthly members where possible (by UAVs where not)

1. Facebook – 11,784,460 Australian accounts (down approx 24,000)
2. YouTube – 11,000,000 UAVs (steady)
3. Blogspot – 3,400,000 UAVs (down 100,000)
4. Tumblr – 2,900,000 UAVs (down 200,000)
5. WordPress.com – 2,700,000 UAVs (up 200,000)
6. LinkedIn – 2,400,000 UAVs (up 300,000)
7. Twitter – 2,200,000 approx Australian accounts* (up 60,000)
8. Instagram - 990,000 approx Australian accounts*
9. Flickr – 830,000 UAVs (up 10,000)
10. Pinterest – 660,000 UAVs (up 10,000)
11. Google Plus – approx 340,000 (down approx 30,000)
12. MySpace – 320,000 UAVs (down 20,000)
13. Yelp – 220,000 UAVs (steady)
14. Reddit – 165,000 UAVs (up 15,000)
15. StumbleUpon – 100,000 UAVs (steady)
16. Foursquare – 56,000 UAVs (up 1,000)
17. Digg – 41,000 UAVs (down 4,000)
18. Delicious – 33,000 UAVs (up 3,000)

* Social Media News estimates Twitter and Instagram user numbers by taking the percentage of Facebook’s global user base that is Australian (1.1%), and assuming the same proportion of each network’s global user base is Australian. In January, Twitter had 200 million global users and Instagram had 90 million.

Source: Quantcast, Comscore, Google Ad Planner tool, Facebook Self-Serve advertising tool, Vivid Social Research Division.

Compiled by SocialMediaNews.com.au (CC BY-ND 3.0).

Blogging for the pharmaceutical sector

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Client: Huthwaite Asia Pacific

Background

Huthwaite Asia Pacific’s business is sales performance improvement.

A pioneer in the application of behavioural analysis to benchmark sales excellence in the field, the company combines empirical research with world-class training to improve the effectiveness of professional sellers. Simply stated, it makes salespeople better.

But, while the company boasts a strong client base in industries such as banking and finance, information technology and manufacturing, its numbers in the lucrative medical and pharmaceutical sectors were far less impressive.

One year ago, Huthwaite was generating zero medical and pharmaceutical leads. Not only were the company’s existing databases for these industries small, they were also outdated. Huthwaite needed new contacts, so that it could start to build a profile and market its products to these sectors.

In order to establish itself as the thought leader in sales performance for the medical and pharmaceutical industries, Huthwaite had to drastically increase the amount of tailored content it had for this vertical.

So the company hired Izzy Wakeling.

Formerly the general manager for Asia at eyeforpharma, a company specialising in conferences for senior sales and marketing executives in the pharmaceutical industry, Wakeling brought a wealth of industry knowledge and experience to Huthwaite.

A big part of Wakeling’s previous role was to position eyeforpharma as a thought leader in the pharmaceutical industry in Asia. She achieved this through conferences, blogs, articles, seminars and reports on ‘buzz’ topics such as emarketing, patient compliance and a new commercial model

in pharmaceuticals. This experience, particularly the use of blogging as a marketing tool, would prove invaluable in her work on the Huthwaite campaign.

Objective

Huthwaite recognised that quality content production was the key to generating medical and pharmaceutical leads and reaching sales managers, marketing executives and general managers in these industries.

Wakeling was tasked with applying her knowledge of the medical and pharmaceutical industries to produce a wide range of tailored content, including a high-quality blog focusing on key issues affecting the industries. Huthwaite also sought to establish itself as a thought leader in sales performance for the sectors.

The challenges facing Wakeling were numerous. As mentioned, Huthwaite’s lead generation for the medical and pharmaceutical industries was nonexistent and its databases small and outdated. Wakeling and Huthwaite’s marketing team had to build new contacts and databases from scratch.

She also had to find time to write the blog and other content while prospecting and bringing in sales for the company.

“Coming up with new ideas for blogs wasn’t always easy. It required keeping your mind open and spotting trends and ‘hot’ topics when talking to and consulting with clients,” says Wakeling.

Strategy

While Huthwaite has a successful track record of producing authoritative whitepapers and surveys on sales performance, blogging was identified as an easier format to produce content quickly and increase website traffic and downloads from the untapped medical and pharmaceutical industries.

The fluid, informal style of a blog could be anything from 30 to 300 words in length. Blogging also helps build up a base of content that is indexed by search engines.

“It’s a bit like being a popular author in a book store,” says Wakeling. “The more books you have on the shelves, the more chance someone is going to stumble over something you have written and pick it up. If your content is engaging enough, the reader will hopefully buy your book or, in our case, download one of our whitepapers or register for our mailing list.

“Once you capture your readers on your email list or social media platform, you can then push further engaging content to them,” she adds.

Producing more detailed content was also part of the medical and pharmaceutical campaign. Wakeling rewrote several existing Huthwaite whitepapers to be medical and pharmaceutical industry specific.

Huthwaite also started a LinkedIn group for those in the medical and pharmaceutical sectors and sought to actively spread its content onto other LinkedIn and social media groups.

The marketing team also produced an industry specific survey to poll sales staff in the medical and pharmaceutical sectors, with the aim of generating content and statistics for publicity and future articles.

Execution

Wakeling wrote more than 30 blog articles, delving into topics ranging from the difficulties of pharmaceutical product launches to increasing face time with doctors. These topics were often drawn from conversations with clients in the industry.

“It wasn’t uncommon for one client to discuss the same challenge as another client and I used these common threads to help me to ignite an idea for a blog,” explains Wakeling.

“We also made sure that whatever blog topic was being chosen was in line with our marketing strategy and how Huthwaite wanted to be positioned in the sector.”

To generate traffic to the blog, the content was optimised for Google and focused on longer keywords to ensure rankings.

Wakeling also turned to LinkedIn to spread the blog content, utilising her own profile and various medical and pharmaceutical-focused groups. She made a habit of posting comments that were controversial or posed questions to the reader to generate intrigue and make them click through to the blog.

The blog posts themselves generally included a call to action encouraging readers to click through and download one of Huthwaite’s whitepapers.

Wakeling rewrote nine whitepapers to include a focus on the medical and pharmaceutical sectors. Gated content, these whitepapers require user registration before they can be accessed and are thus a key tool for Huthwaite to build new contacts and databases.

Huthwaite’s blog also directed readers to the company’s first pharmaceutical-focused survey. Posing questions about sales targets, forecasts and challenges to sales and marketing staff in the pharmaceutical industry, the survey was another important resource for obtaining new contacts.

Once in the Huthwaite database, contacts were nurtured with an email campaign providing more content and encouragement to return to the Huthwaite website, re-engage with the company and consider its products.

Results

In less than a year, Huthwaite went from generating zero medical and pharmaceutical leads to nearly 1000 leads. And this growth shows no sign of slowing.

Wakeling’s blog articles have produced a 34% average conversion rate (visit to lead) and are helping to establish Huthwaite as a thought leader in sales training for the medical and pharmaceutical industries.

One of her articles, titled ‘What is the pharmaceutical sales force for?’, even climbed into Huthwaite’s top 10 viewed posts with more than 600 views in a three-month period. The article (http:// blog.huthwaite.com.au/bid/56123/ What-is-the-pharmaceutical-salesforce-for) is a prime example of why the blog was such a success, showcasing Wakeling’s less formal, chatty style and fondness for drawing on her own personal experiences. Thanks to the blog, Huthwaite is also now generating traffic and leads for 73 medical and pharmaceutical related keywords.

The nine pharmaceutical-focused whitepapers have produced more than 970 leads to date, while the LinkedIn group has grown from 0 to 154 members and counting.

Wakeling attributes the campaign’s success to the quality and consistency of the content produced. “We made sure we had something new up on the blog every month and the quality of content was strong and relevant to our potential customers,” she says. “The aim is that this content will continue to generate leads for Huthwaite for years to come.”

cmw13

SEO and the backlinks buying conundrum

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Content providers, be warned. Backlinks can be bought, but they can end up doing more harm than good for your brand

Stomach tucks, executive office furniture, even – God help us – penile pustule removal… all of them can be found on the backend of many a blog. They are the comments awaiting approval, the scourge of content providers and the most irritating element to not only generating content, but also, crucially, getting that content out there.

So why are they there in the first place, and what should you do about them?

Here’s a scenario content providers large and small are familiar with. You’ve created your blog through WordPress or another format. You’ve invested time and money on it. You’ve worked hard to create content that you think will appeal to your target audience. You’ve made good use of images, you’ve utilised video and yet the engagement you’re after doesn’t seem to be forthcoming, because although you know you’re getting reads, you’re not getting that proof of engagement  in the shape of comments you had been hoping for.

The importance of user-generated content

User-generated content is one of the holy grails of social media and content marketing. It’s a way for companies to spark conversations and then be a part of that conversation, while also allowing customers to have their say. Done well (for example, Coca-Cola on Facebook or über-blog The Huffington Post), it gets people talking – and drinking and reading and buying.

But those sorts of super-success stories are the exception rather than the rule. In most cases, generating user-generated content through posts and comments can seem elusive to the point of being impossible.

There are a number of reasons why. It could be that your content simply isn’t as engaging or as well-presented as you think it is. But chances are, it owes a great deal to the ‘1% Rule’. Put simply, the rule states that for every person actively creating and/or uploading content, there are 99 others who simply receive it, read it and may even act on it, but they don’t add to it.

Which means that while your message may well be getting across, you have no tangible evidence that it is reaching your target audience.

Of course, in this day and age of measurables and an all-consuming need to be able to demonstrate return on investment, that isn’t enough for some organisations. So, almost in desperation, they turn to buying backlinks as a means of spreading the word.

What are backlinks?

Backlinks are now more important than ever when it comes to search engine optimisation. As we explain in this Tick Content white paper, Google’s algorithm changes favour links from other sites when it comes to improving the search ranking of your own site. So some companies will happily pay money to ‘backlink farms’ that essentially spam other blogs with links.

The problem is that such an approach will almost always backfire. As every email account holder knows, spam is a massive pain in the proverbial and the chief reason why the ‘delete’ key is the most-overused on the old keyboard. The same is true for blog providers. Although everyone would love to be able to list dozens or even hundreds of comments for every story, do you really want to be promoting stomach tucks in the process?

Didn’t think so. So what do you do?

Create a targeted backlink strategy

The answer is to spend the time (and associated monetary costs) creating strategically targeted backlinks. Do your research to find blogs that operate in a similar field to yours (competitors exception, of course!) and write thoughtful, intelligent comments that have a legitimate purpose and reason for being there. In time, chances are those blogs will return the favour – and your search ranking will be boosted as a result.

At the same time, use social media to syndicate, syndicate, syndicate! Tweet about your latest story (you can do it two or three times without annoying your followers), use Facebook to drive traffic to it and adopt new social media platforms like Instagram to spread the word.

It may take a little longer, but such an approach will pay dividends. And, thankfully, there won’t be a penile pustule in sight!

Customer service is not a joke

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Sue Barrett, Marketing mag’s very own sales guru and founder of Barrett Consulting poses the question: If customer service is sales 101, then why are we not delivering?

There is a strong slump in Australia’s retail industry and things are not looking to pick up anytime soon. Not only are Australian consumers hip pocket conscious, but there is also the competition of online shopping, with consumers actively sending the strong Aussie dollar to secure purchases overseas.

Although these circumstances are more than enough reason to send the retail industry into a decline, perhaps there is more to the failing industry than just economic factors?

The retail situation gives us an interesting case study to consider about customer service. Online shopping portals have a hard task to provide shoppers with the “shopping experience” despite not having face-to-face customer service.

One of the reasons why salespeople may be lacking in customer service motivation is that customer service can sometimes be seen as a lesser role, a “servant’s‟ role, a role where you are required to put up with abuse and bad behaviour. As well as this, I too often see customer service being undervalued by businesses and trivialised as “fluffy‟ and being overtly nice. This is not the case.

Customer service is not the vendor who ‘sells stuff’ or taking the “customer is always right‟ approach. It is a ‘hard to substitute’ Business Consultant who adds critical value to their customers choices and pays close attention and understands their customers needs and wants. Here are a few facts to consider about the customer. People who stop buying from or dealing with a particular business do so because:

- 1% die

- 3% move away

- 5% seek alternatives or develop other business interests

- 9% begin doing business with the competition

- 14% are dissatisfied with the product or service

- 68% are upset with the treatment they have received

Customer service is crucial. Businesses need to start aligning every aspect of sales, marketing and the whole of an organisation around their customers. We all need to change customer’s perceptions around the type of relationship salespeople have with them, and the value salespeople bring to their decision making process.

When starting to put the customer first, listen and be aware of the dialogue you are having with your customer. If nothing else, start to put customer service first and deliver this in the correct way by following four basic rules:

1. Misunderstanding – correct it

2. Doubt – resolve it

3. Limitation – compromise or put it into perspective

4. Question – answer it

Customer service is the back bone of any business, driving home our values, messages, vision and the state of our relationships with each other and our customer community. Let’s take customer service seriously.

 

Geo-location to save mobile marketing

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In issue 14’s editorial of our magazine Comunicas?, I quoted one of Shakespeare’s characters in the classic play Henry IV. The character is called the Rumour and his line goes: “Making the winds my post-horses…”

I have used this line several times since then to illustrate my point on corporate reputation in current times. “What would Shakespeare say”, I went on writing in that editorial, “when word-of-mouth does not use traditional means of transportation anymore, but blogs, social networks and specialized forums? And what happens as that communication turns mobile through Smartphones, and subsequently, becomes geo-located?

That is a great opportunity for marketing purposes. Since writing that editorial at the beginning of 2009, only one year and a half later, I am observing that winds are multiplying at an exponential pace: August 2010 was a crucial month in our country. That month, Spain’s number 1 mobile phone company Movistar stopped being the exclusive iPhone provider. iPhones have since spread everywhere. It is all promising and points toward an explosion of mobile marketing and its investment figures in our country.

Investment figures are rising

A year ago, different surveys by Nielsen already showed that the figures related to social media were growing at a spectacular pace. Time spent in social media by internet users had multiplied by three (17%). Advertising investment had increased by 119%, and 15% of this was for social media (twice the figure of just one year before). The entertainment industry had increased its online investment on social media by 812%, the travel and leisure sector by 364%. 

In addition, the global traffic to social networking sites grew by 82% between December 2008 and December 2009 (three hours to five and a half on average). Still in December 2009, unique audience of social media sites amounted to 142 million in the US, 20 million in Spain, 30 in the UK, and these people spent an average of 6 hours online.

In June 2010, the top ten sectors in share of US Internet time was led by social networks with 22.7%, (15.8% in June 2009). In April 2010, more studies by Nielsen showed that advertising on Facebook was effective. The research studied the answers of 800 000 users about 14 different brands, and issued a lot of valuable data that backed common-sense beliefs (you’ll be more likely to buy from a brand your friends follow, or, managing communities around a brand will ease your commercial efforts). The study also drew less common-sense conclusions. It showed, for instance, the value of hybrid approaches to social media, when combining a brand’s own space with its space in social networking sites.
In still more surveys, now by Emarketer, we find that worldwide advertising on social networks are expected to hit $ 3.3 billion in 2010. This is a 31% increase compared to 2009 ($ 2.5 billion).

Phones on the map

Let’s go back to the Shakespearean image of the post-horses for a bit. What changes are Smartphones bringing in? According to a blog post from Flowtown, people using Facebook on their phones are twice more active than non-mobile users; Facebook mobile access grew by 112% on the last year and Twitter’s grew 347%. What does this mean for business?

Yet another recent Nielsen study shows that regardless of the platform (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry or Windows Mobile) the most common applications among mobile internet users are about friends (Facebook), the weather (The Weather Channel), music (Pandora) and local information (Google Maps). This makes the customer’s location a very important feature, despite another and disappointing finding: In all age groups, nearly 90% of mobile internet users do not pay attention to the ads on their small screen. 

How could we reverse that situation? In my opinion, considering the fourth main searching interest is local items, a good way to overcome mobile internet users’ “blindness” is to make an ad geo-intelligent.

Geo-location, an opportunity for businesses 

The possibilities of geo-location start with customers finding you on the map and letting their acquaintances know that they are at your place (by checking in online). As read in Mashable, several application makers are making the checking-in experience more passive and implicit.

So opening a business profile in Google Places is a first step. As we know, there are more directories of places including AOL’s Patch, IAC’s Citygrid or Foursquare. Instead of writing a line or two on Foursquare, you better read the excellent account of a fellow Marketing Mag blogger. In addition, people who visit Fourwhere (mash up of Foursquare and Google Maps) will read the comments left by Foursquare users in the places they visited.

Furthermore, Foursquare’s fearsome competitor, Facebook Places recently arrived in the battlefield with the clear intention to involve advertisers. Facebook wants businesses to understand the benefits of being in Places.

Its how-to guide explains: 

“Places creates a presence for your business’s physical store locations- encouraging your customers to share that they’ve visited your business by “checking in” to your Place. When your customer checks into your Place, these check-in stories can generate powerful, organic impressions in friends’ News Feeds, extending your brand’s reach to new customers.”

…and we need not remind the reader that Facebook users hit 500 million last July.

The future of geo-location and mobile marketing

Having an enormous amount of geo-located customers is not only an opportunity for shops and small businesses in a neighbourhood. Customers who check in at businesses related in some way to your own could also receive advertisements, news, comments about your products and services. Customers who visit the city trendy (or residential, or commercial, or financial) area will be much more likely to respond to a certain kind of advertisement, comment or piece of news about you.

Social media has given us much more insight into the customer’s habits and interests. Geo-location allows us to have one more crucial bit of information about the customer, which is relevant to virtually any kind of business out there, and opens a wide field for marketing innovation.

Kleenex cleans up where Huggies left off

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Health and hygiene product company Kimberly-Clark Australia is hoping to repeat the success of its Huggies website, with a new dedicated website for its Kleenex brand of tissues.

Kleenexmums.com.au has gone live and offers a free ebook (‘Mum’s the word: A survival guide for the modern mum’), blogs, promotions, ideas for family meals and activities, and links to dedicated kleeexmums Twitter and Facebook accounts.

The move is in part an effort to keep the audience generated by the Huggies website, as their babies and toddlers grow up, as well as attracting a new group of mothers with older children.

Kleenex surveyed 4000 Australian mothers with children aged 0-12 to discover some insights about how the demographic engaged in online communities. The survey found 46% of mothers read blogs regularly, 23% would comment on a blog, and 13% of the target market wrote blogs themselves.

“Kleenex Mums provides a great platform for us to communicate and engage with Aussie mums – the vast majority of whom are now online,” Kleenex’s digital marketing and community manager Melissa Gassman said. “We hope that the community will become a valuable resource for mums, a place where they can not only seek information and advice, but also share their own experience and perhaps even find some online therapy.”

Gassman told Marketing magazine the website will assist sales by growing the brands relationship with mums.

“I guess it’s building on the relationship Kleenex has with mums, making life easier for mums,” she said.

Gassman also said Kleenex will experiment with many promotions online and will be looking to open up the website to longer-form user generated content rather than just blog comments.

“Soon we’ll have a ‘share your story’ functionality, at the moment we’ve got a mixture of everyday mum bloggers, with established mums who already have blogs out there… but every mum is an expert on something and has a story to tell, so we want to tap in to that very soon.”

Social media still misunderstood by brands

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Big Australian brands are investing time in social media but are not quite following through with what is needed in an ongoing capacity, according to a report from Burson-Marsteller.

According to the PR firm 40% of the companies surveyed have at least one Twitter account, but 44% of these Twitter profiles are inactive and many are not updated frequently.

The report also found that 50% of the companies surveyed have established official Fan Pages within the most widely used social network in Australia, Facebook, however 15% of these pages are inactive.

The study looked at online stakeholder engagement via corporate blogs, official Facebook Fan Pages and Twitter, examining 20 companies identified by Interbrand in its ‘2009 Australia’s Best Brands Report’.

“The study revealed a lot of inactive accounts, which could suggest ad-hoc efforts with no clear strategy for online stakeholder engagement. Only 20% of the companies surveyed have a corporate blog… (which) provide businesses with a controllable and direct form of communication – it’s therefore surprising to see the relatively low levels of adoption in Australia,” said Daniel Young, director of Burson-Marsteller Australia.

Despite these findings Young indicates are some leading lights within the 20 companies that were studied. Companies such as Telstra and Billabong were cited as examples of big brands using social media in a meaningful way.

“Many of the companies surveyed have focused their efforts on one social media channel suggesting that Australia is still in an experimentation phase when it comes to online engagement and digital PR programs,” explained Young.

The study builds on another study ‘Social Media Use by Fortune 100 Companies’, published by Proof Digital Media and Burson-Marsteller in July 2009.

US Government seeking blogger scalps

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Yesterday, 6 October 2009, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published its updated and final guidelines for governing endorsements and testimonials, with several changes to the outdated 1980s version. This update has been discussed in various posts on a number of popular blogs for several months but most commentary seemed to play down the width of the guidelines and whether they even made sense. While this guidance will not likely yet effect everyone, the move will probably guide other countries to reconsider their outdated media laws in order to keep pace with the US.

It needs to be examined; can the FTC pass laws that effect the entire internet? There is the concept of net neutrality and this sweeping guidance cannot be a good path to follow for any government department. US media outlets are already screaming murder as these rules potentially violate bloggers free speech rights under the First Amendment.

The bigger issue not yet discussed is the location and hosting of many popular social media services and blogs: they are located in the US and would likely be covered by these new guidelines.

While cash and payment in-kind to bloggers and websites for links has long been a source of pain for search engines, who consider such practices a violation of their terms and conditions, it wasn’t illegal. The rules don’t appear to be targeting specific issues, just a broad disclosure guidance on anything public including celebrity endorsements.

The rules covered a few specific examples where the blogger received a free game console and then posted a review, but didn’t cover the potentiality the company read his blog, liked it and sent a gift. If this were the case, once you received that gift do you then have to go back and update your post to disclose the gift?

These laws are intended to help advertisers comply with the FTC Act and are not binding laws themselves. To ensure the laws are not draconian, the burden of proof is on the Commission to prove the bloggers or celebrities conduct violates the FTC Act.

The biggest problem is that these new rules now have a far-reaching influence over the general public and extend deep into your personal media channels – Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. It seems that these laws are built with double standards: news organisations’ writers are covered, but citizen journalists are not.

If you are thinking of giving your employer a glowing review online you could get yourself, or your employer, in hot water for failing to disclose the relationship. In addition, the FTC must now keep an eye on whether companies uphold the extra requirements to now monitor their staff’s public statements. This guideline seems to have been made without regard to the sheer volume of blogs and bloggers.

The new rules are in effect from 1 December 2009 and include an $11,000 fine per violation.

This guidance does create a massive increase in requirements on advertisers to disclose everything and can make some current social media and search optimisation campaigns too risky to continue beyond 1 December.