Posts Tagged ‘conversation’

Deciduous marketing is a big barrier to authentic brand conversations

March 14th, 2010 by Daniel Young | 1 Comment | Filed in Advertising, Public Relations, Social media

Deciduous TreeMarketing Communications is analogous to a conversation.

It is particularly true today.  The Internet has empowered consumers to challenge, advocate and interact with the companies of their choosing via readily available and inexpensive forms of mass media.

Marketing conversations were largely one dimensionl pre-Internet.  Regular and hopefully relevant messages were filtered via various marketing channels and disciplines to the end customer.  They were generally self serving:

Look at this new product!
Take up this offer on this new package!
Here’s what we think about this. Aren’t we smart/committed/interesting?

The conversations were intermittent and short lived – more often than not the communication existed to drive sales, acquire new customers or build a brand image.  Budgets and marketing finance decisions were similarly focused on near-term outcomes.  Business priorities  were identified at the beginning of the year and then in quarterly planning cycles.  Dollars, Pounds, Rupee, Dinar etc. would be allocated.

Most companies still manage their marketing programs in this way today.

At the end of the fiscal year, if the marketing department has done its ‘job’ properly, all of the dollars are spent.   Like a deciduous tree all of the leaves have fallen off and the tree remains bare for a period of time .

The conversation goes on hold.

This isn’t a problem if the company is continually talking about itself but if the company has been successful in initiating a conversation, then consumer’s will notice – unhappily.

Many well established marketing practices are no longer relevant or useful in the context of social media, including traditional approaches to budgeting.  Social media demands that brands commit fully to the online conversation – you can’t pull in and pull out when it suits you.

One way for companies to tackle this issue is to embed social media engagement (and related costs) inside standard business process.

Ford has a plan to have 2% of its workforce telling the story of their lives at Ford via social media.  This combined with a dedicated resource for social media strategy and measurement allows the company to engage in authentic conversation over the l0ng term.

Failure to identify the necessary resources for social media engagement is one of the main reasons why projects fail to get off the ground, in my experience.  Lack of resources is one issue but cultural and procedural structural barriers to the long term view are another.

Senior marketing professionals need to adjust their mindset, and that of their organisation, to the new dynamics of social media and continuous conversation.

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Ad:tech agenda dominated by branded competitions rather than conversations with brands #atsyd

March 11th, 2009 by Daniel Young | 10 Comments | Filed in Social media

It’s day two at Ad:tech and we continue to hear examples of consumer focused campaigns run by advertising agencies (in the main) which are generating ‘engagement’ between brands and consumers. What’s surprised me about the conference is the focus on projects or campaigns as opposed to long term stakeholder engagement programs. This fact highlights a key point for me and this is that the advertising industry is culturally aligned with campaigns with a start and an end point while social media strategists and the PR industry are focused on building and managing relationships with influencers over time.

The fact that no-one seems willing (or able) to define Influence or Engagement is further evidence to me that the content of the conference is very project focused, which is reflective of an industry which is not ready or able to put the stake in the ground when it comes to qualitative measures. The Smirnoff Experience case study was interesting and compelling (original, not so?) – the team talked about the ability to turn on and turn off the community.

My second observation, which supports, the point made above is that many of the campaigns projects are focused on competitions or contests, which involve a prize (7:Eleven – free Slurpies), (Vodafone NZ – 10,000 prizes plus $10,000 cash prize for the winner); (V – $100,000 in prize money). In a sense this is a form of sponsored conversation between the brand and consumer – if it represents a conversation at all.   

This is a theme that Mark Jones picks up on here.

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Getting back to blogging

June 2nd, 2008 by Daniel Young | 2 Comments | Filed in Blogging

It’s been a while since my last post. There are numerous reasons for the pause, which I would like to carthartically (sp?) list here:

1. Time, time, time and lack of time…

2. I kind of hate this template…. it doesn’t look good. I am the sort of person that can’t start a PowerPoint presentation until the template is sorted and looking nifty and appropriate to the project.  

3. Little or no response… i.e. low readership figures. Proven using Google Analytics.

4. Lack of focus and purpose… probably impacting by the above, not to mention the more than 70 million blogs out there.

5. Little engagement with other bloggers… I had been writing on issues that affected me personally as opposed to trends that affect or interest others.

6. Serious concerns about the All in One SEO Pack – does this work?

Things I am going to do to address this moving forward:

A. Trust my instincts a little bit more and shoot from the hip to increase the regularity.

B. Introduce more humour, god knows I have plenty to share around, eh?

C. Stalk a few well known Australian bloggers and converse.

D. Stick to my knitting… focus on one clear topic, which will be ??? (wait and see)

E. Set targets (secret)

Thanks to the three people that have loyally logged on every day during the last month or more. Thanks to the three spam comments that made it through Akismet and to Laurel Papworth for being a recent visitor.

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