von Roland Hachmann | Jun 10, 2007 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Online Advertising, Social Media Marketing
Pete Blackshaw and Max Kalehoff have put together a list of 10 principles for ad campaigns leveraging consumer generated content, which are, in short:
1. Connect The Program To Larger Business Goals
2. Keep It Authentic
3. Be Transparent
4. Encourage Advocacy
5. Empower Syndication
6. Tap The Long Tail
7. Capture The Moment
8. Be Consistent
9. Embrace Criticism And Deprecation
10. Move From Campaign To Platform
You can find details to each point either here or here.
I particularly liked the points about making sure that whatever you do fits into a wholistic strategy, as well as making sure that you take the possible long term effects into consideration. With all the hype around this topic, I sometimes fear this tends to be neglected…
von Roland Hachmann | Mai 8, 2007 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Culture, Digital News, Marketing, Marketing Trends, Mobile Marketing, Social Media Marketing
While I am still unsure about the real value of Twitter in marketing, Rohit Bhargava mentions four ideas of how Twitter can be valueable. I still ain’t convinced completely, but getting there…
Capture the live pulse of an event
This is one of the most popular marketing uses that I have seen for Twitter, where it is used to offer a visual display of conversations happening around an event. More and more interactive events have this, and I suspect other non-Web related events will start to incorporate it as well to offer participants a visual way to track the pulse of an event and determine where to spend time.
Undoubtedly, this could work. The question is: who is the target audience? If it is all those people at the event, who subscribe to one twitter feed about the event, it could be brilliant to let everyone know what is happening elsewhere within the event. If it is for people outside the event, the whole twittersphere of the event will sound like 140-character long gibberish to those not present, I suppose.
Deepen a static experience through live commentary
I saw an interesting story last week about how Fox is going to be using Twitter to promote their new show Drive by having the director provide live updates and directors commentary via Twitter throughout the show. We will definitely be seeing more of this type of marketing in the near future.
This could be nice, but only if the show is live, too. Otherwise, we’ll be reading tweets about stuff that we know nothing about until we see it a few months later on TV.
Facilitate collaborative watching
When it comes to watching video content online or on television, Twitter can allow you to watch something „alongside“ anyone anywhere by sharing your impressions and reading impressions from others as a program unfolds. This is a powerful new method of sharing feedback and ideas
This won’t work, if we truly believe in the end of programmed television. If people are not watching things at the same time, because everyone can watch „on demand“, then how can you share your thoughts with other viewers via twitter? Unless there is a „twitter group“ for that particular movie or series – and I just underestimate the scale of randomness: the fact that for some shows, there will always be somebody, at any given time, watching the same show as myself…
Add a new dimension to promotions
Scavenger hunts, user generated content campaigns, and other reality based marketing promotions are growing popularity as ways to encourage interaction from customers. Twitter can offer a way of encouraging dialogue between promotion participants and adding an „instant message style“ dimension to a promotion without the privacy and contact acceptance barriers normally associated with using IM for marketing.
This, I think, could be a fantastic use for twitter. A connection of customers in Twitter groups during promotions, enabling „swarm intelligence“, as we call it here in Germany, would be a brilliant setup for all sorts of ideas for promos, alternate reality games, real life social games or gatherings, etc.
So, in general, I start to like the idea of using Twitter for marketing, having been sceptical a few weeks / months ago. But I do think, that we still need a lot of refinement to make sure it’s not just a gimmick, but does actually contribute value to campaigns.
von Roland Hachmann | Mai 1, 2007 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing, Digital News, Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Online Advertising, SEO / SEA, Social Media Marketing
I am a big fan of Joe. I regularly read his blog and I really enjoy his podcast, listening to it while driving to work (it is really motivational and inspires me a lot, which I enjoy in the morning!).
And I have (finally) read his book. I am very late writing about the book. Why am I writing about it nevertheless?
More than a year ago, Joseph Jaffe came up with a concept he called „UNMTPNM„: Use new marketing to prove new marketing. He launched this idea in order to promote his (then) new book:
Life after the 30-second spot
Energize your brand with a bold mix of alternatives to traditional advertising.
I decided to take part, as I liked the idea of how he wanted to start word-of-mouth this way. Now I want to write the review. It’s late, but I thought better late than never. And this way, Joe gets a new mention during a time, when everyone is already writing about his new book, which should be coming out some time in the middle of this year. Which, by the way, extends on one of the thoughts what new marketing can look like in the future. So here is my review, apologies, again, for it being so late.
His main conclusion throughout this book and his blog and his podcast is always the fact, that traditional advertising is by far no longer as useful as it used to be. Or as he puts it: the 30-second spot has outlived its usefulness.
So what’s in the book? There are 3 main sections:
Section I – The Problem
In this section Joe describes the current state of the media landscape. How mass media are dying due to the fragmentation of media and increasing consumer resistance towards clutter and power of media choice.
This chapter lays out the foundation for the rest of the discussion. By now these things are common knowledge and widely discussed everywhere. Yet, in 2005, when the book was printed, these points were heavily debated everywhere. (And, by the way, in Germany these points are still relevant, considering the fact that we’re usually lagging some time behind.)
Section II – The Solution: Re:think Four Fundamentals of Marketing
In this chapter, Joe is Re:thinking four main areas that need, well, rethinking. These are: the changing consumer, branding, relevance of advertising and the agency/client situation. These chapters are a „theoretical basis“ for the approaches in the third section and . A nice idea: you cannot read chapter 10 within the book. You will have to download the pdf or the mp3 file (to listen to Joe read out that chapter for you).
Section III – 10 Approaches that are transforming the marketing and advertising games
The approaches expanded on in this section are: the internet (of course…), gaming, on-demand viewing, experiential marketing, long-form content, communal marketing, consumer generated content, search, music – mobile and things that make you go mmmm, branded entertainment. In essence this covers examples for all the buzzwords, that companies have been experimenting with in the last couple of years.
Comments on the Contents
The first chapter is rather preaching to the converted and sometimes a bit over the top. The facts might be true, but sometimes you get the feeling as if the world is going to stop, the way Joe writes about the end of „old“ marketing. For anyone reading the book now, the first 60 pages are common knowledge (or should be!). But as a summary on the situation it is not bad.
The second section is the one for me, that had the most juice in it. Purely because these are the backbone thoughts on how to think about marketing in the future. And – in contrast to the third section – these thoughts are more likely to be relevant even in a few years time. The third section covers many examples per approach, but even looking at them now, some already seem antiquated (which doesn’t make them less true).
Comments on the Style
His style of writing is rather conversational. One of the many examples:
„… in a survey conducted by the consultancy Emergence, a grand total of 0 percent (that’s zero, none, nada, squat, zip, nil) of those quizzed…“
That makes it awkward to read sometimes, especially considering it is a book, not a blogpost or a podcast. It is almost, as if he dictated the script for someone else to type it. But, speaking of which: keeping Joes way of talking in mind, you can almost read the book and hear his voice saying these things.
So should you buy it? I think it was Joe himself who once said: buying a book these days is like getting „the t-shirt“. An „I have been there“ thing at times when content itself is readily available everywhere… You could follow Joe’s thoughts through his blog, his podcast, by going to crayonville, etc. But this is the one source that best and most complete summarises what Joe thinks, writes and says about new marketing.
So while the book will not completely stay relevant in the next couple of years, I think it is a very valuable basis for re:thinking marketing and advertising. For anyone who read about the changing media landscape, wanting to find out how to possibly react (and not having had their agency recommend things already, which they should have done), read the book. Skim-read the first section, this should be no news to anyone by now, focus on the second section for strategic visions and get some ideas of what new marketing can look liek from the last section.
Don’t forget: you can order it online. (Any commision amazon might yield will go to Joe, as I copied this link of his website.)
von Roland Hachmann | Dez 4, 2006 | Blog, Digital Marketing, Digital News, Online Advertising, Social Media Marketing
Micro Persuasion points me to a piece of research about the fact that:
The online world is just as important as the real world, feel a large portion of internet users in the United States. […] 43 per cent of internet users who are members of online communities „feel as strongly“ about their virtual community as their real world community.
I wonder if those figures are similar in Germany or Europe in general. What also means, especially for us marketers: build a strong community around your brand (in any way possible: blogs, forums, etc.) and you should – in theory – reach a certain level of relevance and „feel strongly“-factor for your brand.
Wo ich sonst so bin...