Harnessing the commercial power of social media

Published February 8, 2010 News Leave a Comment
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More than two thirds of New Zealand businesses believe social media is a key tool in increasing customer engagement and loyalty, according to a recent survey* conducted by the CAANZ Digital Leadership Group (DLG) and the Nielsen Group.

The survey provided a very useful snapshot of where New Zealand businesses are at regarding the use of social media.

Most telling was that 84% of businesses surveyed planned to allocate less than 5% of the organisation’s marketing budget on social media activities in 2010, at a time when social media is becoming the communications channel of choice for an increasing number of consumers.

Survey results revealed that limited organisational understanding of social media and a shortage of qualified staff were the main barriers to the increased use of social media for marketing purposes.

To assist New Zealand businesses harness the commercial power of social media and provide a platform for change, the DLG, in association with ANZA and AmCham, is hosting a Social Media in Business forum on Thursday 11 March 2010.

The forum will feature local and international speakers sharing their insights and experiences of using social media to drive business success, including:

Andrew Lark, Vice President, Global Marketing Dell
Using Conversation to Drive Business Success
Andrew was the architect of a radically different approach to marketing, embracing participatory social strategies to fundamentally reshape Dell’s business.

Duncan Blair, Head of Brand & Communications Orcon
Flying the Social Media Flag
Duncan put his neck on the line to prove the value of social engagement to his organisation. Going far above and beyond his job description, Duncan became the social media voice of the brand.

Jayson Bryant, Owner The Wine Vault
From Passion to Profit, One Man’s DIY Adventures in Social Media
Embracing social media has led to some unexpected business and personal opportunities for this local retailer.

Chris Chambers, Director of Digital Marketing Tourism Queensland
Lessons from a Breakthrough Social Media Campaign
Chances are you’ll have heard of, and maybe applied for, the “Best Job in the World”.  Chris takes us under the hood of the hood of the campaign that generated unprecedented interest and opportunities for Queensland, while tourism across the rest of the country was in decline.

The Social Media in Business forum is taking place at the Rendezvous Hotel Auckland and is priced at $145+GST for CAANZ, ANZA and AmCham members, and $195+GST for non-members.

*The online survey of New Zealand businesses across a wide range of industries was conducted by The Nielsen Company in December 2009 with an overall sample of 166 New Zealand marketing professionals.

Get in behind!

Published January 25, 2010 Opinion Leave a Comment
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Social media had a big ’09. In 2010, SM is going to be normalised.

In New Zealand, and around the world, the ‘early adopter’ businesses that took their first significant social media engagement strides in 2008 and 2009 will look to blend SM into the rest of their marketing and communications. The days of SM being a shiny, unproven subject of experiment and speculation are ending.

By December last year a range of brands in NZ had got stuck in. Big boys like Telecom, TVNZ, Vodafone and a host of others like V, Monteiths, Orcon, the NZ Army and their agencies, took the initiative. They had some wins and some learnings, but importantly took big steps in understanding how to plan and execute successful SM engagement.

Those learnings, and the growing acceptance that SM is a legitimate channel, combined with the fact that SM is the communications channel of choice for many, will see brands look to normalise SM and give it a more integrated place in their overall marketing and communications.

What will this mean in practice?

It means that doing SM is about to become a bit more boring, at least compared to the exploration phase of the last 2 years. It’s now time to get some processes into conceiving and implementing SM initiatives. The return-on-effort needs to improve so that SM can be more efficiently implemented.

It means that the technology will take a back seat to content and engagement, to doing what’s right to create and build relationships.

It means that measurement of SM engagement will get sharper. Metrics will move beyond internal campaign measures and include standard marketing KPIs, allowing SM initiatives to be compared to other channels.

But don’t think boring and normalised means a lack of impact. The very fact that SM will become a core part of marketing and communications teams’ everyday lives means its scale, and the rate of learning, is going to skyrocket.

There is also growing opinion that as SM becomes normalised it will become more useful and reliable for consumers. This will see it become the number one communications channel for even more people and require companies to ensure their SM activities move beyond brand experience to providing genuine consumer value. This will be a paradigm change in how companies communicate with consumers.

Author: Tony Gardner, Saatchi & Saatchi DGS and Chair, Digital Leadership Group

Taking New Zealand to the World

Published November 18, 2009 News , Opinion 1 Comment
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I thought it was interesting that a recent blog post from Frances Chan on Stop Press titled ‘NZ has no internet entrepreneurs’ stirred up so much debate.

The post was in reaction to the fact that there were no finalists in the ‘Internet Entrepreneur of the Year’ category at the 2009 NZ Internet Awards as the category didn’t attract enough talent. I think the responses to the post highlight some important issues (i.e. the awards weren’t published widely enough and the judging criteria is too strict), however fundamentally I think Frances Chan has a point.  With a few high profile exceptions such as TradeMe and Xero, we are not progressive enough in the digital environment. But, it’s not just entrepreneurs that are needed; we need the entire New Zealand business community to embrace digital.

It’s not all bad and one great recent example was the TUANZ Award winning Pocketsmith for whom Chris Keall from the NBR said, “for anybody who believes that software, as a ‘weightless’ export has the potential to help turn New Zealand’s economy around, it’s an inspiring story.”  We just need more examples like this.

Digital is our country’s big opportunity – our window to the world. As Rod Drury recently posted on KiwiBlog “Broadband and connecting New Zealand digitally to the rest of the planet IS the biggest silver bullet for turning New Zealand around that I’ve seen in my business career”. For New Zealand’s entire history we have struggled with geographic isolation, something the digital era has largely removed. According to Google, 65% of New Zealand’s Internet traffic heads offshore, some of which undoubtedly results in a loss to the local economy as New Zealand users purchase products online from other markets. We know online importation is strong but what about exporting New Zealand products and technology to the world?

Currently, approximately 40% of New Zealand’s Internet traffic comes from international visitors with TradeMe and news, travel and sports sites the most visited – suggesting the eyeballs are predominantly expats or tourists with little visitation to business or e-commerce sites. Despite this our digital development is still largely focused on a domestic audience. Isn’t it time we took a good look at the opportunities the rest of the world present. There is no reason why digital thinking couldn’t become our biggest export. If Estonia with a population of just 1.34 million can produce Skype and Joost*, there is no reason why New Zealand can’t create world leading digital platforms. You could argue that the sale of TradeMe, our leading case study, injected $750m into the local economy with the shareholders reinvesting their earnings into new projects and New Zealand charities. That was three years ago and the subject of significant publicity but it has all been a bit quiet since then.

We need to constantly remind ourselves that it’s not the New Zealand Wide Web; it’s the World Wide Web. New Zealand needs to adjust its ambitions to ensure that not only do we deliver a domestically strong digital culture but grow a digital export economy. We have done it in many other industries and with the right focus there is no doubt we can do it in digital.

*For more information on the digital culture in Estonia that lead to the creation of Skype have a look at this BBC article from 2004.

Author: Robert Harvey, ZenithOptimedia

Taking the time to tell a good story

Published November 5, 2009 Media & Communications Leave a Comment
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With data becoming the new cool, there has never been a more important time to make its interpretation as useful as possible. As a self proclaimed chart perfectionist at the agency, nothing concerns me more than the need for endless PowerPoint, when a well thought through design, using key insights can get the point across in a compelling and engaging way in a fraction of the time.

Okay, so my pulse does rise when the new version of Wired gets delivered and I get to admire the simplicity of conveying a global issue on two pages without endless copy…But when I came across the blog by David McCandless it was great to see someone dedicating themselves to the cause in everyday working environments where data is required and interpreted.

As an “independent visual and data journalist” (and proclaimed pie-chart hater; let’s hope he doesn’t mind Venn diagrams) he certainly makes a convincing case with his clever site, Information is Beautiful.

Click to visit the site

Billion Dollar Gram

The “Billion Dollar Gram” chart. This eye-opener compares billion-dollar budgets—comparisons of, say, the estimated total amount that will be spent on the Iraq war ($3 trillion) and the cost to feed and educate every child on earth ($465 billion). “I’m interested in how designed information can help us understand the world, cut through BS and reveal hidden connections, patterns and stories underneath,” writes McCandless. “Or, failing that, it can just look cool!”

I guess we just all need to take the time to think things through a tad more before we rush to PowerPoint…as Oscar Wilde once said “I’m sorry I wrote you such a long letter; I didn’t have time to write a short one.”

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/

Author: Matt Scott, DraftFCB

Data and analytics are the key to more efficient online marketing

Published October 15, 2009 IT including Software, Hardware & Services Leave a Comment
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As the explosion of new platforms, applications and utilities continues to take hold of the masses; the tools which we use to track and monitor this surge have grown a lot more sophisticated – the output is rich, granular, and instantaneous data, offering salient insight into the behaviours of our target consumers.  This presents great challenges to agencies and clients alike.  Just as many clients were starting to get a handle on the data they generate from their websites and understand how it ties to marketing; along comes a plethora of new technologies with different reporting requirements.

In the old world, the predominant method for tracking the consumer interaction with your site was counting the number of unique users and the number of page views.  At the more advanced end of the tracking and reporting spectrum, analytics have traditionally tracked a linear progression through pages on a site, which is often represented as a funnel diagram that shows where users drop off in a defined path.  The new world has seen significant advancements in data analytics that have made the output both more complex; however, potentially a much more powerful marketing weapon.

Analytics are not a new phenomenon, and the outputs from some of these tools have been used for years by some of the world’s biggest brands to optimise their digital ad spend and create a more compelling online experience for their customers.  Tools and technology have revolutionised data analytics, moving from simple demographic targeting, through to audience segmentation and behavioural targeting, to more highly specify the impact of our messaging and communication.  Behavioural analysis tools for prospective and existing customers, can now give us unique insight into the intent of the site visitor.  These tools accurately deliver a prediction on the likely behaviour of this individual based on previous web browsing and purchasing behaviour habits on the client’s website and others.  Analysing this data then provides a huge amount of learning’s to optimise over time.

With such a competitive landscape, especially in the travel, finance and retail categories, developing a strategy around which messages are delivered to which prospect through multivariate creative testing, can impact positively on sales.  The data and tools are the central pillar to enabling this targeting exercise.  With this continually rejuvenating pool of information delivering a lot of power to the marketing team, clients can finely hone advertising initiatives to optimise existing advertising campaigns thereby attracting a better quality prospect.  As a client’s database of behavioural attributes develops, we can take steps in real time to influence an individual’s activities to increase sales, prevent attrition, and build loyalty.

Webmasters and clients have the choice of a large number of tools and analytics suites.  These range from the free version of Google Analytics, to a full enterprise-level analytics suite from Omniture costing many thousands of dollars.  The analytics industry is rapidly consolidating.  Large analytics vendors are procuring smaller specialist players, to not only add new features and functions, but also expand into broader, qualitative measurements, such as customer experience data.

The granularity and volume of the data being collected by clients is growing exponentially.  With all this data and consumer insight, clients must develop a clear plan as to how they will implement a strategy around it.  Tracking and measurement is one thing, making sense out of what’s being reported is another.   It would be easy for a lot of clients to get overcome with the enormity of this task, as it’s not like they are sitting around all day with nothing to do.  This is where agencies should come into play.  Many have invested in qualified strategic and digital practitioners who understand the tools, the outputs and importantly what the data means to communications planning across all platforms.  Some agencies however are not equipped to offer a solution in the space.  They should think very carefully about the specialist competition that will be sniffing around their big accounts.

The football field is no longer level.  Clients who embrace a data strategy early and leverage this skill base, will, without a doubt, gain significant advantages over their competition.

Author: Chris Riley, OMD

The world’s largest Monopoly participation game ever played

Published September 20, 2009 Leisure, Entertainment & Recreation 1 Comment

What an intriguing couple of weeks for Hasbro it has been. The learning they have gained during this time is more than most brands would gain in a lifetime of interactive marketing.

Hasbro launched on September 11th a massive multi-player online version of its popular board game Monopoly called Monopoly City Streets. This brand participation program uses Google Maps or Open Street Map as the “board”. Hasbro in the pre campaign promotion dubbed it “this will be the biggest game of Monopoly of all time” and said it would allow gamers to buy “any street in the world.”

Monopoly City Streets Monopoly City Streets

On registering to the program you goal is simple, become the richest property magnate in the world! Players start with 3 million Monopoly dollars. When you start it seems very tempting to go looking and buying and owning the very street you live on. Then your friends’ streets, your neighbourhood, your town, the world. Well that’s what I have tried to do! You can own any street across the globe. Build humble houses or spend more money and put skyscrapers on streets. You must check out how College Hill looks in this virtual world.  You have to be clever and sabotage your friends before they know what’s hit them. I don’t epxect to own my streets for very long.

Once players own the land, they can build buildings that will generate rent income. Those buildings sit right on the map, making it possible to erect a skyscraper where your neighbor’s house used to be. This is where the social side of the game comes into play. Players can sell and trade their properties amongst themselves.

Chance cards are here in the virtual game as well and allow players to sabotage their neighbours’ property by building wind farms, prisons or garbage tips on their own property. This reduces the value of the neighbour’s property. Like the real world board game version the game is very addictive and fun.

I truely admire Hasbro and their agency Tribal DDB London for this idea. This is a follow up to the 2005 Monopoly Live campaign that won a Gold Media Lion and was Runner-up for the Titanium Lion in Canne in 2006.  The Monopoly Live version of the game used real taxi cabs fitted with GPS driving around the streets of London to create the biggest version of the game ever played. You registered at the website and while mostly automated was a huge campaign event. Hasbro has been using innovation in marketing for a few years now.

Back to Monopoly City Streets the enthusiasm for the new camapign in the first twenty four hours was even more overwhelming then expected. It’s being talked about all over Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other social networks. The game even has a dedicated blog of its own, which stated that initial statistics show 1.7 million unique visitors to the gaming site on the first day.

Maps Maps

But building an online empire doesn’t always come easy and challenges will always arise when you have a lot of particpation. When the game was launched the massive influx of players caused the servers to crash. And that’s when the griping began with the game players. Many users called for a reset, complaining that players on opening day were given an unfair advantage and choice properties were already taken. Sorry I couldn’t help it :)

In fact, so high was demand that the result was, in Hasbro’s words, ‘compromised data’ on its servers – the consequence of which is a total reset of the servers was required one week into the campaign. So last Friday just gone a reset took place and all players previous data was wiped, allowing all to start from a clean slate. Previous users will have to re-register. The downtime also allowed for some improvements to be implemented, addressing many of the bugs users had reported in the early phase.

Any as I said it’s interesting times when you create a real-time, engaging and involving brand program as you need to respond, adjust and participate alongside your customers twenty four seven. I wish Hasbro and Tribal DDB London all the best for the remaining four months of the campaign. As always the future belongs to the brave.

http://www.monopolycitystreets.com

Author: Adam Good, Clemenger Group

Look…but don’t buy?

Published September 8, 2009 Textiles & Apparel Leave a Comment
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Japanese clothing manufacturer Uniqlo have done it again. Let me qualify that; have nearly done it again.

Consistently at the forefront of digital innovation, any new campaign from them is always well worth a look. This time they’ve created a virtual runway show to highlight the new looks of the season.

Uniqlo

Uniqlo

The beauty of this site is the ability for the user to view the entire range, pick out the specific looks they like, then break them down into the component parts. This level of visual impact and interactivity is a far cry from the static catalogue image treatment so prevalent in New Zealand e-commerce sites.

While the video component is beautifully handled, both with the models en-mass or individually, I thought the ability to drill down into product specific details (and ultimately online ordering) was curiously absent.

I really wanted to do more with this site, and ultimately found the experience a little superficial. They did all the right things to make me want the product, but then made it too hard for me to get it. The lesson here is that no matter how creative you want to be, the fundamentals of user interaction shouldn’t be forgotten!

So, in my opinion this site came close to the quality of their previous world-beating work, but failed at the final hurdle – definitely a case of style over substance. Take a look and see if you agree:

www.uniqlo.com/collection

Author: André Louis, Publicis Digital

A local business with an outstanding web presence?

Published August 28, 2009 Financial, Insurance, Legal & Consultancy , IT including Software, Hardware & Services Leave a Comment
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Xero. Billed as the world’s easiest accounting system, the site is also a study of what can be achieved with enough time and skill, and the right people.

Xero

Xero

The company is very impressive with their passionate pursuit of doing exactly what their customers need and want, with almost no limit to the ends of perfection in their execution. We should admire, and try to imitate, their design and development process in producing this merger of business tool and user experience.

Great things Xero have done:
• They released early and release often. Releasing the site early to users has allowed Xero to receive feedback and make rapid changes to their plans.
• They are making full use of all communication channels to promote and support their business.
• Much like Google and TradeMe, their first thought in everything they do is for their site users. This can be contrasted with sites like Yahoo and MSN where generally their first thoughts are for their advertisers and partners.
• It’s interesting to note the number of times Xero uses the word “you” or “your” (rather than “we” and “our”) compared to their competitors or other B2B websites.
• They blog, they Tweet, they comment and they contribute to other’s blogs and discussions. They have a conversation with their customers rather than talk at them.
• They ‘walk the talk’ by providing a simple, elegant and responsive user experience – much like their product – practicing the usability mantra of removing as many elements as possible from interface design.

This sort of elegant and overwhelmingly usable product and user experience design suits the New Zealand mindset. We’ve always been good at making things work and in the last 20 years we’ve realised our creativity is world class. All we need now is to trust ourselves and produce more like this.

http://www.xero.com/

Author: Tony Gardner, Saatchi & Saatchi DGS

Will the user pays revenue model work for our publishing companies?

Published August 11, 2009 Media & Communications 3 Comments
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With the balance sheets of most publishing companies taking a hammering in recent times, the latest thought is that a “user pays” content or subscription model might offer some hope to fledging revenue.  Getting users to pay for content sounds like a simple remedy for publishing companies to shore up the bottom line, however, the single biggest issue with this idea, is that, unless the content is unique and offers an inherent value to the user (WSJ and FT are good examples of this), consumers would almost certainly refuse to pay.

The most recent organisation to be talking about a “pay model” is News Corp.  Mr Murdoch has reportedly said he is “absolutely looking at a user pays system for some of News Corp’s British news websites”, which include The Times, The Sun, The News of The World and the Sunday Times.  The jury is out however, as to weather the content offered on these sites is content that users will actually pay for.  If I was a betting man – I’d say not.
There is no doubt that publishing news and television content is an expensive undertaking for media vendors. It’s now just becoming clear that much of this content is simply not going to have adequate underwriting through advertising for many of the publishers.

One could say their current predicament is their own fault.  It’s been a topic of wide debate for years, that news organisations and television companies in particular, have been slowly tightening the noose around their own necks, by offering content online to the masses for free.  Traditional newspaper businesses have seen their cash-cow classified business regressing for years, as it’s migrated to the web (with revenues probably never to return), so this issue has hardly been sprung onto the publishing companies overnight.  There is little doubt that the present situation has been greatly exaggerated by the current economic downturn, but unfortunately, it could simply be too late for many of the publishers to change consumer perception and habit.

Our generation has now has come to expect to have content freely available on the internet.  We’ve become way too accustomed to this model – thus significantly inhibiting the opportunity for publishing companies to successfully move to subscription, or pay-per-view models.

Only time will tell if the model will work.  It may be that publishers will be forced to change what content they offer to make the pay model work.  One thing is for certain, it will be very tough going for the publishing companies.  After all, how much “value” does a consumer place on something they get for nothing?

Author: Chris Riley, OMD Digital

Don’t fall into the trap

Published July 3, 2009 Retail, Mail Order & Household Leave a Comment
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As NZ retailers start to gear up for online e-commerce, they need to beware of an easy trap to fall into. 

le

Lands End

Big Retail sites can take up to two years to build. As a result, what we see now in many big US sites is the product of thinking and approach of several years ago. Big is beautiful. Build and they will come, etc etc.

We will fall into a trap if we build what overseas retailer sites look like now, rather than what they will look like in the future.

Most big retailer sites in the US for instance have been a product of the mid 1990’s, with some add ons and upgrades over time.  Just like the stars in the sky that show us light that may have actually been extinguished long ago, many websites today represent thinking and structures of years past. Times have changed. One example is the massive rise of social media, to the point where 3 of the top 5 sites in the US are all now social media. Sites that didn’t exist when these big monolith US retail sites were conceived. 

As we are behind overseas markets, copying what some big retailers are doing might seem like a good idea. But it’s not. The rules have changed, and will continue to change. Big is not that good, speed are flexibility are.  Being unique isn’t good, being connected to high traffic sites is. Having strict boring templates and consistent navigation is OK, creativity and flash are better.

One good site that we can learn from is this new development for Lands End. Not a catalogue or masthead navigation (or rule book) in sight.

http://aka.landsend.com/lp/swimwear-getaway/#/island/ 

Author: Darryn Melrose, AIM Proximity

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