pr-media-blog.co.uk

Even top talent at the head of your online marketing campaign is no guarantee of winning, as delegates at The Future of Digital Marketing event learned this morning.

Keynote speaker, Eric Frenchman, Chief Internet Strategist for the online political agency Connell Donatelli Inc and online consultant to the John McCain presidential campaign, is clearly no slouch in the field of online political marketing. But why did McCain lose?

Thanks to various attendees tweeting from the Congress Centre, London during the speech,  we were treated to an insight into the online machinations of US politics.

Frenchman called search marketing “the great equaliser” and the “one place where you can compete or even beat your competition with less money” - a critical issue in political campaigning where your budget is only as good as the funds you raise. As he told the audience, search is not the sexiest but is the lifeblood of your digital campaign.

But some online tactics can backfire. So popular was the click through rate on a “hippy Hilary Clinton” ad used by the Republican campaign, it had to be switched off for being too successful.

As for Obama, he had 90 staff working on his digital strategy - according to Frenchman - and managed to tap into Facebook and online video in a way the Republicans failed to. Creating useful tools, such as “register to vote” widgets on Facebook helped Obama to reach 3.1m followers against McCain’s 610,000. And the Yes We Can video clocked up 18.2m views, alongside the millions of views for “home made” Obama films - equating to an alleged $40m  equivalent of TV advertising spend.

Frenchmen also voiced his frustration at the McCain campaign’s use of Twitter, which rather than focusing on engagement and conversation erred on the side of broadcast or one-way communication.

Though clearly fascinated by the material, some delegates tweeted their concern about the “questionable tactics” of political search, US campaigning and the presence of Frenchman himself.

James Sandoval tweeted: “Why is Eric F of John McCain’s losing digital campaign marketing efforts the keynote? Does this represent FODM - Hmmm”. Anna Rafferty’s “feeling a bit sick about all the childish tricks used online during the US election” got the re-tweet treatment while the nausea theme continued with Tanya Goodin who mentioned a certain “queasiness” about US political video: “We’re just too cynical in the UK for this stuff to work!” she said.

Despite some clearly brilliant and clever online strategy, the Republicans lacked the most important element: a winning product.

Michelle Goodall noted an earth tremor or floor wobble towards the end of the keynote speech. Was it a tube train or the restless ghost of John McCain’s election campaign?

Thanks to all tweeps above, plus @johnmac71, @thetafferboy, @linusgreg @jake_hird, @cragster.

This is a guest post from David Meerman Scott adapted from his new book World Wide Rave. His previous book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR was a number-one bestseller and is published in 24 languages.  

This debate about social media in the enterprise is just so damn silly. It seems crazy to me to try to regulate technology in the workplace when the real harm (or benefit!) comes from the people using that technology. I’ve witnessed the same phenomena twice in the past two decades: when personal computers entered the workplace in the 1980s, and during the Web and email debates of the 1990s. If you were in the workforce at the time, you might recall when executives believed email would expose a corporation’s secrets, and therefore only “important employees” (often defined as director-level and above) were given computers and email addresses. Years later (beginning in 1994), companies fretted about employees freely using the public Internet and being exposed to “unverified information” that was not written by “real journalists.”

The solution has always been the same: Don’t provide employees with computers. Refuse to provide a company email address. Ban the Internet within the corporate firewalls. Block YouTube, Facebook, blogs, and forums from view. Yet how many companies today refuse to provide a computer to employees at work if it can help them do their job? How many don’t provide company email? How many ban Internet access completely? Virtually none. So why are companies falling into the same old foolish patterns? 

My recommendations to organizations are simple: Have guidelines about what you can and cannot do at work. Hold employees to a measurable standard for performance on the job. But don’t try to ban a specific set of social media technologies. Your guidelines should include advice about how to communicate in any medium, including face-to-face conversation, presentations at events, email, social media, online forums and chat rooms, and other forms of communication. Rather than putting restrictions on social media (the technology), it’s better to focus on guiding the way people behave. The corporate guidelines could inform employees that they can’t reveal company secrets, they can’t use inside information to trade stock or influence prices, and they must be transparent and provide their real name and affiliation when communicating.

As long as your employees get their work done in a satisfactory manner, there should be no need to regulate their minute-to-minute behaviour. You don’t regulate how often people can use the restroom, when they can chat with a colleague in the hallway about their kids, or whether they use a mobile phone for company calls while taking a cigarette break, so why regulate when they can look at an online video? If you have individual cases of people not getting their jobs done in a satisfactory manner, deal with that problem as the “people issue” it really is. If it persists after several warnings, fire the employee, but make sure your expectations were clear from the start.

David Meerman Scott blogs at Web Ink Now

What’s in a name? Well, sufficient for companies to keep the media buying industry afloat right now.

The perils of renaming and rebranding a business are spelled out clearly in this insightful article from the editor of Marketing, Lucy Barrett.

I too had wondered why kitchen paper towel brand, Bounty, had bothered to spend the ad money on its slightly unsettling she-male characters to herald the new name, Plenty. If the brand logo and packaging colour scheme had been ditched altogether, they might have been rightly concerned. But as it is, I wonder how many absorbent kitchen wipe customers will even notice the difference.

As Barrett points out, yet more intriguing is Coca Cola’s use of Welsh soul singer on a bike, Duffy, in it latest campaign. There’s no denying she’s attractive with a bag full of music awards to boot. But what is it all about?

On the topic of fizzy pop, Pepsi has strayed into the powerfully critical gravitational force of Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science column, which tends to bring charlatans and peddlers of inscrutable nonsense down to earth with a bump. If you’ve seen what he does to lazy PR surveys, then you’ll be relieved it wasn’t your rebranding exercise he found.

He greets Pepsi’s “Gravitational Field” document with the jocular “welcome to the science of PR”, before moving on to the more unambiguous: “It is gibberish”. Lampooning the document aside, Goldacre seems more miffed that this pseudo-science is staking a claim against real scientific endeavour.

And Bad Science isn’t the only place that’s stuck the boot in, as here, here and here testify.

Does this harm people’s proclivity to drink Pepsi? Probably not. But does it help the cause of the marketing communications industry to be taken seriously? I fear it just hastens our frogmarching to the firing squad wall once the revolution arrives.

Thanks to blowatlife.blogspot.com for the pic

At the heady summit of social media marketing lies the promise of effective measurement and evaluation.   There is no doubt that twitter is the flavour of the month and a new application called Twittersheep provides a fascinating measurement tool which helps us take a few more steps towards this objective.

I decided to start with the most followed twitter account; that of US president Barack Obama who has close to 300,000 followers.  What Twittersheep does is to make a word cloud from the profiles of all of a user’s followers. Whilst Obama’s following is far from a random sample it is a big number so we might draw some broad conclusions.  Twitter has a high student following. It appears that the male female split is roughly equal with husband and wife evenly weighted in Obama’s cloud.  It also looks like the marketing industry is providing a good proportion of the social networks’ early adopters.

Potentially Twittersheep and similar apps could provide brands that use twitter and build large follower groups with highly valuable insights into both the demographic and psychographic profiles of consumers with an interest in their brand. 

Last night actor, comedian and social media marvel Stephen Fry got stuck in a lift for nearly an hour.   Not exactly headline news I know, but the unusual aspect was that the world (or at least it’s early adopters) were watching.   Fry is the undisputed celebrity prince of the microblog, so when he was trapped in a lift near the top of Centrepoint late in the evening he decided to tell us all via twitter “Ok. This is now mad. I am stuck in a lift on the 26th floor of Centre Point. Hell’s teeth. We could be here for hours. Arse, poo and widdle”.

Stephen Fry is the third most popular ‘entity’ on twitter with over 100,000 followers, only Obama and CNN Breaking News are more popular. No surprise then that his words were seen by a lot of people.  He used an iPhone to take and then post a picture of the cramped proceedings.  At the height of his confinement almost 1000 people a minute viewed the image.  By breakfast time Fry and four other now familiar faces had been screened over 40,000 times.   As midnight approached, Fry and co were freed and champagne was on offer at the ground floor.  Stephen politely declined and headed home. 

Why is this important? Because celebrities are creating communications channels and brands like Starbucks are not far behind.  100,000 followers may not be huge in broadcast terms but it exceeds the circulation of most regional newspapers and it is early days yet. 

.

Cadbury’s broke new ground with the drumming Gorilla, mixing TV advertising, viral and PR.  When you have a great marketing campaign like that there is client pressure and a real desire on the part of the protagonists to repeat the success.  It seldom works.  The follow up to ‘Gorilla’ was a case in point.  The runaway trucks racing on a runway to Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ was nice enough but no match for the simian skin beater.   

However Cadbury’s might just have made marketing lightning strike twice.  Launching on Channel 4 tonight is a 60 second film that is quirky enough to set tongues wagging and destined to be a YouTube must see.  Two siblings perform some serious eyebrow dance moves to a piece of eighties electronica called Don’t Stop The Rock by Freestyle. You need to see it really.

This time the muti-level marketing ducks are all lined up.  They’ve added some good PR lines - publishing a list of top ten famous eyebrows and renaming the second month in the calendar Fe-brow-ary.  They’ve even gone for a shade of branding in the ad by putting the sister in the film in a Cadbury’s trade mark purple dress.

The world is going twitter mad.   Newspapers like The Sun, The Star and The Times have cottoned on to the fact that celebrities (or the Twitterati as we like to refer them at PR Media Blog towers) are micro-blogging to their fans and people are clamouring to sign up for some tabloid tit bits in 140 characters or less.  It’s not just the world going twitter mad, the twitter world is going mad …the latest fad is silent radio, yes you heard me, silent radio.

I can get my head around silent films but music radio without the audio track?  ’Twadio’, for that is its name, is a radio station you can’t hear. Through the magic of Twitter, and with Derren Brown like powers of suggestion, it plants a new song in your brain every few minutes.  According to the website you just follow the Tweejay and it’ll play you the tunes right inside your head.   Every song is a hit… but there’s a get out if you can’t quite remember how the hit goes or you want to hear it again - just click the link in the tweet to play for real.  It will even take you to the brand new Amazon MP3 store.

This might just be a stroke of genius.  Silent radio is perfect for listening to in the office, plus what better way to use the limit of 140 characters than to name a great song and a great artist.  When we have an anthem driving us insane in the membrane which of us will hold back and resist all temptations to part with 89 pence.  Bitter Sweet Symphony by The Verve, “Monkey Gone to Heaven” by Pixies oh and there goes “Dancing Queen” by Abba. Bring it on. This is a new media marketing idea like no other.  

“As 2009 approaches, and the world economy is truly in freefall, what is your secret of success - or survival - for next year?”

 It seemed like a fair question to stick on LinkedIn before the festive bells start jingling and the chestnuts roast on an open fire.

This year has been social media year: as well as developing a serious Twitter problem, finding my way around cocomment and helping to keep this blog bulging like Santa’s sack on Christmas Eve, I’ve found LinkedIn starting to come into its own as a professional online networking community. Not only has it put me back in touch with people -without having to throw food or turn them into zombies, a la Facebook - it’s been a channel for some great ideas sharing.

Following last night’s question, here’s a selection of the best advice to come back so far…

Rob Ewanow: “Eliminating marketing/PR spend is short-sighted…those who continue to market will reap the rewards.”

Mark Shippe: “If you have a good product or service, you will always be busy and in demand.”

Derek Weber: “It is more important than ever to make yourself and your company more visible…this is the time really to go out and try picking up new clients.”

Karthik Mani: “Be visible…communicate your viability in addition to your value proposition.”

Bridgett Gayle: “Find your unique selling point, your special value-added (everyone has one) and lead with that.”

Phil Quimby: “Be indispensable, whether to your employer, or your clients/customers. Works in good times too.”

And, my current favourite has to be:

Chuck Bogardus: “Wait until 20 Jan 2009 when the major media will announce that everything has been fixed.”

That’s like Dallas, when Pam Ewing discovers supposedly-dead husband, Bobby, in the shower. And it was all a dream. 

Unfortunately, there’s nothing dreamy about multi-billion dollar bank bail outs.

Merry Christmas!

More than a nation of dog lovers, the British love their cars. Third largest car in the EU, 2.4m new cars registered in 2007 and 850,000 employed by the industry. But more even than cars, I’d say we love a bargain.And what a bargain online car dealer, Broadspeed.com, was offering this week: £20 grand worth of Dodge Avenger, but not just one - “buy one, get one free”.  Company MD, Simon Empson, speaking in The Guardian, couldn’t have been more understated when he said: “It’s the power of marketing, I suppose.” Amen, came the holy choir of marketeers across the UK.

Serious times call for serious measures. And those measures now include the motor industry calling directly on the Government to orchestrate a funding package to resuscitate the retail motor trade. The Society for Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) signalled the depth of the problem back in August, when reporting that month’s sales as the worst since 1966. At the time the SMMT caught some flak from the trade for “talking down the market”, and the messages seemed confusing, as with a bi-annual registration change the old focus on comparing August sales seemed misplaced.

But the industry’s lobbyists could clearly see the stark words written in the grime of the car market’s chassis. Yet it was probably David Smith, head of major - and iconic - motor manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover, going on the Today programme that added the true weight of the motor business to helping shift interest rates south by 1.5% at the end of last week. So, with potentially more cash slushing around people’s wallets and the prospect of another publicly-funded bail out package, the car industry should be quids in. But, as the BOGOF dealer offer showed, it’s time to be innovative in marketing, with a combination of tactics to drive people through showroom doors as well as giving them a good deal. It’s also an opportunity to test drivers’ brand loyalty - if someone will try a new marque at the right price, that brand might win a new customer for life.

Talking about the situation with my father - a motor business veteran of 50 years - he was remarkably sanguine. Having seen and sold his way out of economic lows across the decades - when even some UK car makers were not just helped by the state, but owned by it - the industry, he said, would get back in gear again.

For anyone growing up in south Manchester who wasn’t a resident of the Garden City of Wythenshawe, the place has always come with some considerable baggage.

The local website for Wythenshawe - a place once dubbed the biggest housing estate in Europe - even devotes a special section to its colourful past. This includes tales of “wanton damage by vandals and hooligans” dating back to the 1930s, a demand from neighbouring residents of “posh” suburb Gatley for a Cold War style “barrier” to keep the hordes out, along with endless reports of arson, vandalism and deprivation; leading a local churchman in the late 80s to call the place “the opposite of a community”.

If there was ever a challenge on this planet, redrawing the image of Wythenshawe is it.

And so a modestly-(by marketing standards) budgeted project called “Real Lives Wythenshawe” has begun to do just that. But, as noted by the typically wry north west media news site, How-Do, you can’t call the initiative a ”re-brand”; it’s an image campaign.

What comes across from the campaign so far is the great pride the area’s people have for the place and the long overdue need for it to be released from its positioning as neighbourhood pariah. For many people who’ve moved to Wythenshawe from elsewhere - without the pre-conceptions shared by nearby communities - the question seems to be “what’s the big deal?”

But not everyone is impressed with “outsiders” getting involved in Wythenshawe’s business. Forum comments on the local Wythit website suggest “shooting all the fancy consultants”, which doesn’t do much for the stereotype the suburb is trying to shift.

Other local commentators seem to welcome the revamp of Wythenshawe’s image as a good thing, though one adds, ironically, “a few extra police might help!”

As a 10-year-old playing on a park near to Wythenshawe, I got duffed up and had my new leather gloves nicked by some local hardnuts. Maybe, as part of the image refresh, I’ll get my gloves back.