Digital Marketing Strategy, Social Media training courses, digital strategy, online marketing, mentoring, consulting
Some stats:
There are now 750,560 people on Facebook in Ireland
512,820 of them are 25 or older (That’s 68%)
334,040 are 30 or older (44.5%)
When Tweetrush launched, Twitter was pumping out over a million messages a day. Soon after it started hitting 2 millions messages a day.
10 months later and now Twitter is pumping out nearly 9 million messages a day with highs of 350,000 messages some hours.
Very comprehensive social media stats for 2008.
Bud tweeted the other day about the numbers game in online marketing/social media.
“Accruing people into one click fan relationships isn’t success”
Get X twitter followers, get X comments, get X Facebook fans. They’re the initial connections yes but not the endgame.
Bud tweeted the other day about the numbers game in online marketing/social media.
Accruing people into one click fan relationships isn’t success
Get X twitter followers, get X comments, get X Facebook fans. They’re the initial connections yes but not the endgame.
So while a few comments on your blog are the very weak connections, something slightly less weak are fans of your Facebook page or YouTube subscriptions. When you update, they get told about it. If you don’t update, they’ll start to forget about it. So you have you connections so you best start looking after them. Add value add value add value.
Photo owned by jennaddenda (cc)
Add value to the 10 you have on Twitter while you still have 10 and don’t go out and follow everyone that mentions your business area. Work with the smaller numbers first. Work the inches first. It’s good for you and them. You’ll learn a lot even with small numbers. Try things out too and see what happens.
Subscriptions mean you have our attention, now don’t screw it up son. Numbers are fine if people don’t know how to measure real value. Numbers describe actions, not the value of those actions. It’s like knocking on 10 doors and converting them all to mormonology and knocking on 100 doors and getting no converts. You have to do more than just gather numbers.
Photo owned by maryatexitzero (cc)
For Twitter:
Interactions with your account. How many people interacted by asking you without solicitation about something? How many people follow these people who interacted on Twitter and so saw that interaction? That’s a better number than your followers number.
How many retweeted your information on Twitter?
How many times are people referencing @yourUsername
How many are clicking on a unique measurable link from your Twitter profile/Twitter messages?
Facebook Fanpage
Attending your event, how many?
Following a unique measurable link from your facebook page?
Interacting with you on Facebook?
How many times are your social ads clicked on in Facebook after someone becomes a fan? What’s the activity like on your Facebook page?
Website:
How many times do specialist sections on your site get linked to from blogs and websites after running a FB campaign for that page?
YouTube:
How many times have your videos been watched?
How many websites have embedded the videos?
How many times have the videos been directly linked to?
How many subscriptions for the channel based on first day of new video, over a week, over a month. Track increase in channel subs just for one video.
Has your video got annotations asking for people to subscribe?
Seeing the value now?
Analysis is like sunlight, it’s a great disinfectant. If something can be measured and analysised properly then it can have a real value. Online campaigns can be evaluated and companies and their clients need to know this. It’s not guess work. It’s not throw fifty grand at something and being told a few comments are the way to see that it worked. MeasurementCamp, the regular meetup of people who want to measure the effect of social media style campaigns now has a franchise in Dublin. Hooray for MeasurementCamp Dublin. Will McInnes is the founding father of the cult of the MeasurementCamp and now we are having one in Dublin and I hear it’ll be in more cities soon. Good.
Unlike MeasurementCamp in London, the “scene” in Ireland is still very much in the gestation period so as McampDublin gets going there will probably a lot more learning and teaching about the basics before we can up a gear. Switched-on PR and Marketing companies in Ireland are the exception rather than the rule but the appetite to learn about all these new areas is ferocious by a significant number of companies involved in communications. One of the main tasks too is to make sure and enforcing by beatings if need be (well maybe not) that people don’t try and do sales pitches. Both developers and PR/Marketing folks. It’s a habit that can be broken. We want case studies of both campaigns that worked and didn’t work backed up with how these case studies were measured. MeasurementCamp is about sharing so those coming along will be asked to give to the group.
The first MeasurementCamp Dublin takes place on May 27th starting at 10am in the Odeon, with thanks to Fleishman Hillard for organising this venue and sponsoring it. There are 30 people signed up fo far, most of them from the dev side of the equation. We’ll hopefully see a rebalance with that closer to the day as the PR and Marketing companies become aware of this. Please sign up on the page above and come along if you’re interested in contributing to making the online PR and Marketing industry in Ireland better.
Photo owned by Todd Huffman (cc)
On this team we fight for that inch. On this team we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch. Because we know when add up all those inches, that’s gonna make the fucking difference between winning and losing! Between living and dying! I’ll tell you this, in any fight it’s the guy whose willing to die whose gonna win that inch. And I know, if I’m gonna have any life anymore it’s because I’m still willing to fight and die for that inch, because that’s what living is, the six inches in front of your face.
Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday.
I’ve been thinking about marketing for a while and what works and what doesn’t work and I wonder if the distance between the marketing and us is a factor. Close and personal marketing is where it really has a positive effect but there are many obstacles and filters preventing this. Good. There should be.
Think about the various forms of marketing and advertising that are there. They’re sent out from people thousands of miles away and made and distributed hundreds of miles away. With old tech the cost of sending a tailored message to one person was huge but a bland message to thousands was cheap. Broadcast. With new tech it is becoming quite cheap and almost free to market to every individual and respond to each and every piece of feedback from every individual.
The Internet can be thousands of miles away or it can be inches depending on who uses it and in what way. It can remove geographical restrictions but at the same time add new ones that can slow sales and marketing. The biggest one is the inability to personally react to a person.
The best form of marketing is all about how close it is to you and how it reacts to you and gives you what you need, not what they need you to do. Long-distance relationships are hard to do.
Consider some of these forms of marketing:
TV and radio – thousands of miles to dozens with Satellite or broadcast from a tower. Shotgun approach to marketing but with advertising as well as TV shows and their content. Barely knows anything about you, they can’t react to you. Tethered to JNLR figures. The online equivalent is a website, the plain old brochureware type sites, splash page or no.
Billboards – Big large posters hundreds of yards away. Can know a little more about you due to your location and from rough surveys. Still doesn’t know a lot about you, not age, gender or interests. “Works in financial district”, oh great. The online equivalent are banner ads (thus the name).
Guy with sign in town – Local but broadcast
50 feet to three feet away. Holds the sign announcing what they do. Don’t know you, don’t make effort to know you. The online equivalent is a website, maybe these are banner ads that guess stuff based on your IP address. These are people announcing crap on their Twitter profile that use it as a one way method to get news out there. While they’re in your local area like the town or twitter, they’re not actively contributing.
Chugger marketing
It’s personal. Some of the nasty creatures put their hand out which many people instinctively respond to by matching it. Then they grasp on and try to sell. These are the people who are conferenes put their hand up to ask a question and instead promote the work they’ve done. “I’ve found when I did X work for a client that”. Online these are the people that respond on mailing lists, LinkedIn, blog comments and Twitter whoring their stuff and not actually giving a damn if they are relevant or not to you. (Pic above from Lette)
Photo owned by markhillary (cc)
Bookstore Recommendations
Did you ever notice the personal recommendations from Waterstone’s staff on little cards on the bookshelves? A person recommending something to you. It has a little more power than just a “buy this book” type card. The online equivalent is a blog of a business recommending products or highlighting a recent product. Amazon tries to do it but it’s automated, cold and misfires a lot.
Online Reactive Marketing:
Google Adwords are a good example of designing ads based on what you want. You tell Google what you want when you enter a search term and Google spits it back to you in the results but it also acts as a guide to commercial companies that want your attention. It in a way reminds me of the very competitive restaurants you walk past in various holiday resorts. You go down the streets hunting for food and the salespeople try and sell you the restaurant’s charms.
Facebook demographic marketing
Facebook don’t know what you want. You’re on a social network, not searching. So they just make the ads on it much more personal. They’re still ads though and as yet are not based on your actions or your wants. They know lots about you but they can’t see your reaction and respond to it. It’s getting personal but not personal enough and is done on Facebook and when an ad is placed on a profile it’s in conjunction with 2-3 other advertisers too. That dilutes the message too. Unlike Google Adwords, the inclination to click on the ads isn’t strong. They do not answer the question in your head or one that you asked a few minutes ago, do they? The offline equivalent of this is loyalty cards in Dunnes or Brown Thomas.
Photo owned by Rachel from Cupcakes Take the Cake (cc)
Value added local marketing – Austin in Bubble Brothers’ shop in the English Market
Austin is two feet away – you have a relationship, communications are two way. You chat about the weather, you bring in local events, you ask Austin about wines and what would work best with what food. You use his expertise, he shares it with you. He’ll recommend a few selections and ask your price range. You know he’s not there to make you pick the most expensive bottle. You’ll come back and he’ll ask how you got on with that wine. The online equivalent is a blog and leaving comments or going on Twitter and asking @bubblebrothers direct.
My friend/my work colleague/my shared situation person
In the office you might ask for a recommendation for a good Italian restaurant or back to the wine idea, you might ask for recommendations on a good Italian red wine. This shared space can be virtual where you can ask in the status update in Facebook or ask on Twitter. You get answers back from the personal network you have. Anyone recommend some wine to go with this? Online you might see Mike from Curious Wines on Twitter reply to that information request and you’ll respect his opinion as he’s the wine expert or you might respect that of an office colleague who knows a bit about wine. Being of use to the wine searcher or to the person the wine searcher goes to is personal marketing. It’s close enough to be reactive and works well enough that the relationship will remain personal over time.
As a company or a marketer, how are you fighting for those inches? How are you getting to know your customers and letting them get to know you?
I’ve just spent the past hour and a half going through Facebook, looking at the various ads targeted to Irish people and getting more and more annoyed with them. The standard of copy, design and actions after clicking an ad makes me want to bang my head against a wall. If badly designed ads are most common on Facebook it means people will pay less attention to them. This is bad for Facebook from a revenue perspective and bad for advertisers who work hard for good copy as people will self-train themselves to ignore all ads due to bad experiences. Here are some tips on what to do and what not do with examples from this evening.
Here are some tips:
Include an image:
This ad is boring plain text. An image would have gotten our attention more.
Target your ads:
This ad asks are you from Ulster. 3/4 of the population that are outside of Ulster also see this ad. Not smart.
Target your copy:
The ad here knows my age so mentions it in the ad itself. You can target deeper than that though. How about my gender, my employment, my martial status?
Have a landing page if going offsite:
These ads sent us to the front page of the websites. Why? Have a targeted ad send us to a targeted page. Make sure the page is designed to ask an action of the person that’s landed.
This ad sends us to a specific product page but it isn’t streamlined or have the same copy as the ad that sent you there:
If sending to a page, make sure there’s activity.
This ad sends you to a page that looks pretty dead:
If sending to a page for booze or other goods, make it legal
14 year olds can become fans of this booze. Not good.
Since the event that the two Ciaras ran in Killarney a while back, I’ve been chatting to some Irish Hotels about online marketing. I’ve shared my thoughts with them and am sharing them again here now.
There are a few ways that a hotel can use online resources such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter to both increase traffic to their website as well as get more people talking about them online and offline. Ranking well in search engines is all well and good but what can you offer if you and a hotel across the road have the same rates and are neck and neck on Google. If your friend recommends a hotel down the road that’s a little more expensive would you be inclined to go to them or at least their website? The real endgame here is getting members of the public to recommend your hotel, even when they never stayed but their friend did. It’s happening and online can make it happen more.
Searching for “hotels in Cork”, “Hotels in Dublin”, “cheap hotels Dublin” will result in you seeing some very competitive placings. Hotels spend well on search engine optimisation but it’s not just about those pages on your website. Do you have a presence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr and other sites that rank very highly on Google? A hotel should do their best to own as much of the front page of Google as they can.
Photo owned by Jim Linwood (cc)
From the mechanics then, to the way the message is relayed. Personality. What way are you communicating with people? Are you fun and friendly? What do you know about the general area and fun things to say? Are you recommending good restaurants and places for tourists to go? Are you encouraging patrons to leave reviews and to blog about you?
Creating a blog about your hotel is good, creating a Twitter profile for your hotel is also good as is a Facebook Fan Page or a LinkedIn Discussion group. People however are not searching or looking to join such a niche community. They want to learn about the half mile to hundreds of miles around it. Why not instead create a blog that while centred around your hotel, also talks about the general area? Become a noticeboard for the community and all their events. Same for Facebook and LinkedIn. You should still however also fully control the usernames for your hotel name too on these sites.
Create a blog:
Creating a blog will give you a boost in search engine rankings but more importantly it will be a way of showing off your expertise on the area around your hotel. What can you offer above other hotels in such a competitive market? A personal experience which you can show off on the blog and also expertise about the area. Tell people what is interesting, what most other tourists might not get to see. Give case studies how you went above and beyond for a client.
Blog Content:
Have a blog that talks about the Hotel and general area.
Use the blog as a noticeboard about events in the immediate and the surrounding area.
Include photos and videos of recent events at the hotel and the area.
Additionally talk about the hotel on the blog. Give some history. Give stats on the hotel. Number of guests each year, ever. No of miles per year visitors travel to get to hotel. No of sheets washed per year. Weight in tonnes of these sheets. No of rashers consumed each year. If you lined them up end to end how many mies is that?
This will create both engaging content for people who look at the hotel website as well as content that will get people talking and linking
Blog offers:
Be known as a “Blogger friendly” hotel: Offer free wifi in the hotel and give a 5% / 10% discount for “fellow” bloggers. Encourage guests to blog about the hotel and their trip so others can read the opinion of guests. Offer them the chance to guest blog on the site and share their thoughts and get a tourist’s perspective on the area. Add a link to the blog link list (known as a blog roll) to all bloggers who have stayed in the hotel.
See here for a list of Blog Installers if you want to install a blog.
Photo owned by jamesdale10 (cc)
YouTube
YouTube is the second most used search engine nowadays. YouTube videos also show up in Google search results. What videos show up now for your hotel name and the general area?
Create video content using a cheap videocamera like the Flip or the Kodak Zi6 (see some of mine). Interview guests. Interview business people. Talk about the history of the hotel. Tag all videos. This will bring people to your content searching for themselves, their friends, the general area, your hotel. Make sure to add a logo or name to the videos. This is not a sales pitch or a sneaky way of making a hard sell. Make sure the content is useful.
Create an account on Flickr.com, the photo sharing website and upload photos of the area and recent events on a regular basis. Flickr is the most popular online photo sharing site in the world. Encourage guests to become fans of the Flickr profile of the hotel and also encourage them to take photos. Run a monthly competition (for perhaps vouchers) that results in the best local photo being on the front page of the hotel website. Get users to tag their photos of the hotel interior and exterior with the hotel name.
An alternate is to use Irish Website Pix.ie to also upload photos.
Create a fan page
Create a fan page for your hotel and import the feed from your blog so new content is being created on the page without any manual work. Also import photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube.
Facebook Events:
Facebook allows you to create events. Create events listings and invite all your contacts to them. Be careful not to send events out too often.
Create a second fan page for your general area
Use this like the section of the blog as a community noticeboard. Use it to inform people of local events and to provide links and information about your local area. Facebook pages show up in Google results.
Create the HotelName account on Twitter to prevent someone else taking it. Also create YourAreaHotels account on Twitter. You can import blog posts into your Twitter account. Do this. Make it clear that the account is that of the hotel. Give out discounts and special offers on the account. Use it once again to share information about the area
Searches on Twitter
Use Twitter to run searches for “hotels in Dublin” “Dublin hotels” or whatever your area is etc. etc. Do not try and spam people about the hotel or broadcast special offers to anyone that mentions these phrases, instead contribute to the conversation. Don’t be a chugger.
Photo owned by garybembridge (cc)
For the blog and website:
Measure number of new links to the website and number of comments on the blog over time.
Measure boost in search engine rankings from this campaign after 1 month, 3 months and 6 months.
Sales measurement:
Have special sales code for Facebook, Twitter and even blog offers. Measure how many availed of this.
Facebook Page:
Measure number of fans of the Facebook page, number of comments left
YouTube:
Measure number of videos watched, numbers of comments left
Twitter:
Measure number of followers, number of replies per day, week, month
D4Hotels introduced a special offer back in January of hotel rooms with free broadband for just over €20 a night for select rooms at select times. News first hit about this on Boards.ie and spread like wildfire online before getting picked up by the tradtional media. It got huge attention when their marketing person appeared on the Pat Kenny show to talk about the offer and with what sounded like a rookie mistake or nerves or perhaps stupidity, she said all rooms were at that price, which wasn’t true.
She got dragged back on air the next day and got roasted by Kenny. Lots and lots of apologies and dozens of complaints. Online however, they not only got the communications right, they upped it with direct interaction with people who booked the offer and people who were considering it. Someone called Pat from D4Hotels came along on Boards.ie and started answering questions. Then switching people to better rooms and following up on stays to see were people happy.
Photo owned by cherrylet (cc)(Not actual pic of hotel)
And when the special offer ran out? Well, with the momentum slowing, they introduced a special discount for those using Boards.ie. (Go here and the code is BOARDS) And the momentum kept going again. The discussion thread on the Bargain Alerts forum on Boards.ie got locked yesterday after 23 pages of interactions and 100+ posts from Pat but not before the hotel set up their own blog to keep the interactions going.
Recognition is deserved for Pat and others in D4 Hotels that did this. More of this sort of thing!
And I don’t mean a god-awful “subsite” for some time-sensitive campaign
I’ve been working with some very different companies and organisations of late and some have identified online communities that they should approach and try and work with. Just buying banner ads is pretty much out as it’s very lossy. What we’ve been trying to do is get these communities to take a look at the products and give genuine feedback on how they should be marketed and even what needs to change in the products. Sometimes though these communities don’t seem to exist or are scattered amongs dozens or hundreds of sites. So I’m trying to get the organisations I’m working with to build a space online for these communities and build them the tools and services to allow them to exchange information and just let them at it. No chugger-marketing (get in your way and face), no spamming you with email updates you can’t opt out of, nothing like that.
An analogy would be a skater shop building a skate park for their community, if that community doesn’t have one already. The old-skool business types would of course plaster such a place with ads, loudhailers talking about the latest offers and demand the kids only wear and use the products they stock. Restricting the freedom of your customers isn’t going to work these days. I remember I saw a show before about some athlete and some kid asked him for an autograph and he told the kid he was contractually obliged to not sign anything with a logo of his sponsor’s competitor. All the kid had was a flyer he got at the event. I’m sure his sponsor was delighted seeing that because they probably thought the kid will know better next time and buy some logofied item to get a signature. Or maybe the kid will find another hero. They’re spare these days since the net can connect us with them all.
Photo owned by Aitor Escauriaza (cc)
If the skater park does exist however, just go along and participate as someone who has something to say. Give advice freely, make recommendations but disclose your bias. Go there to help people out and maybe ask for some help back. Be a skater, be a coach.
In the Forrester book Groundswell they gave the example of a group that built a private social network for cancer patients to recount their experiences and exchange information with each other. From talking to these people they saw exactly how patients chose their specialists and what criteria they used. People didn’t actually spend too much timing choosing who they should go to, they left that to their doctors so the cancer specialist centres then started working with Doctors to let them know of their services.
Of course something like a social network is expensive and Ning isn’t that great so you could just build a blog and use it like a community noticeboard, a central source for everything in your business segment. Mention everything that’s going on. Mention your competitors and talk them up. If you build a space online where the people who you want to market to are coming to every single day, have it in their bookmarks and their news feeds then you don’t really need to do the traditional form of in your face advertising or marketing. Brand recognition and trust is there.
Last weekend I spoke to some county and city councillors about whether they should do the whole online thing and do a blog and join social networks. I think for the vast majority they should have a blog and should use it to talk about local issues and explain their reasonings and take on things. However with the local elections pretty much just around the corner, perhaps setting up one now might be seen as a cynical exercise. Two years ago might have been a better time as it will take a while to get momentum going with these things. A blog isn’t a campaigning tool as such and making it one will probably end in failure, it’s a longterm communications tool for the day to day and week to week issues the public and a politician might encounter.
Photo owned by bob brussack (cc)
So going back to the skating analogy, build your store next to the skate park and be there dispensing genuine advice at the skate park. Yes, it’s going to be a bigger effort and a lot more work but it’s a longterm commitment that in a way ensures a longterm survival.
The second Collision Course is going to be on on Wednesday February 18th, again in the Edelman Offices on Stephen’s Green. We’ll start at 6.11pm and go on for an hour and half. 30 people have stuck their name down so far for this so we’re fairly full. But add your name too as there’ll be cancelations no doubt.
At this Collision Course we’re going to get the PR and Digital Marketing people to mix more with the bloggers who are attending and to share their experiences during the time we have. On the night we’ll split into three groups, each group will hopefully have the same ratio of PR/Marketing people to bloggers and each group will be given a campaign to work on. Each group will then present their ideas on what they’d do. The purpose is to cross-train/cross-share their opinions and insights and in doing so, get to know each other even more.
Last time we all went our own ways afterwards so maybe we should stick around for a while and get to know each other a bit more or head to a bar. Last time some of us went to O’Donoghues. Perhaps we can do the same again?
The next Collision Course is March 11th, again in Dublin. We’d like to try out another venue but to suit everyone, it needs to be in the City Centre. Offers are appreciated. The venue needs to be quiet so we can marvel at the sound of our own voice and needs to hold 30-40 people.
Dell are doing twitter specific discount codes.
EConsultancy wrote up the minutes of the Jan 09 MeasurementCamp. Here they are. (PDF)
Kerry has a list of Twitter tools and toys.
Pew’s latest online survey of adults with a good lock at social networking.
Vans release an iPhone game. Brilliant. Hit up skaters when they’re being skaters during non-skaters time. Get what we mean? 🙂
Channel 4’s iPhone app is damned clever too.
Three ways to better listening.
