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Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

CMO Survey: Traditional Branding is ‘Broken’

Posted in branding, government, marketing, social media, tagged , , , , , on 5 March 2009 |

Broken!

Oh No! Broken!

CMO Survey: Traditional Branding is ‘Broken’.

Survey from Verse Group and Jupiter Research. Key findings:

  • 62% of marketers say that traditional advertising efforts are no longer as effective as they once were in attracting new customers.
  • 62% are seeking breakthrough methods that are more effective than brand positioning.
  • 89% say that marketing is under greater scrutiny than ever before.
  • The top three trends marketers see are a shift to non-traditional media, the need to adopt brand stories and a growing use of design for competitive advantage.

This points back to those graphics I posted yesterday — where “non-traditional” media, i.e. the social web, revealing the disconnect between brand and consumer more starkly than ever before. And as this survey shows, the corporate landscape is well aware.

Opportunity here for governments? We never got branding 1.0 right, so we’re not burdened by these old models as much as the private sector. So can we jump in with a clean slate?

And in the GoC context specifically — advertising is a tightly controlled channel that most government services and programs don’t really have access to. So they could use the social web in an attempt to reach more directly the people who would use those programs and services.

Mucho risks: it’s a largely unknown, untested area, especially for us. So right now, few are willing to try stuff that’s off the usual path. Not to mention being hampered by an outdated web of rules. These challenges are significant, but they are implementation issues — they can (and will, I’m sure) be worked out.

So, potential for mucho rewards:

  • cheap reach — I fully understand that social media for communications takes time and energy, but on the other hand it does not require a lot of high cost or time-consuming “production” overhead (i.e. creative services suppliers, media placement agencies and whatnot). Easy enough to raise awareness of your program or service online via social channels.
  • more effective and responsive client service — this is obviously a more advanced use of social media, but the theory is that empowering civil servants to use social channels can give you highly responsive service to citizens, near real-time even.
  • instant feedback — given the two-way, always-on nature of social media, you can find out what works and what doesn’t really quickly. Ultimately, the social web could lead your stakeholders or customers to become co-designers of your service offerings.

These are just three aspects that I banged out quickly off the top of my head. What are others?

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“The Trouble With Facebook” for Marketers

Posted in marketing, social networking, tagged , , , , , , , on 16 September 2008 |

Spotted in Sunday’s G&M:

Maggie Fox on how hard it is to do market research on Facebook:

“I don’t want to know who, I just want to know what. I don’t need to take it down to the level of what Joe Blow says, I want to know what people are talking about generally. It is almost impossible to extract data from Facebook around who’s talking about what and whether it’s a favourable or negative conversation without doing it manually,” Ms. Fox said.

The marketer in me feels her pain. The research is painstaking! Who’s got the time or the money to have some poor sod sit there flipping through FB profiles and pages…. But the Facebook user in me figgers that “the trouble with Facebook” from a marketing point of view is probably a good thing.

The problem is that there are others less reputable than the Social Media Group who do in fact want to take it down to the level of what Joe Blow Peter Smith says, where he clicks, who his contacts are and what data he’s entering online. Phishing, spamming and all that naughty stuff. Let’s build a widget that secretly scapes all my profile data right?

If it weren’t for these types (and some of them work for companies that I buy crap from, I can just feel it when I go through my inbox or snail mail), I’d be all cool with letting Maggie & her gang collect more data.

In a perfect world, right?

Aside: that quote seems a bit slipshod the more I look at it — at first she says I don’t want to know who, but then she mentions that she would in fact like to know who‘s talking about what — hoping she was misquoted …

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My Twitter Profile Makes the Grade (Barely)

Posted in social media, Web 2.0, tagged , , on 3 September 2008 | 3 Comments »

Stumbled across Hubspot’s Twitter Grader app just now. I’d played around a bit with their Press Release Grader before, so I was curious. So of course I checked my Twitter profile to see what I’d score.

Wow I passed – quite stunning considering I’ve tweeted exactly once in the last five weeks.

Come to think of it, I think my final mark in grade 12 biology was about 58% also – and I seem to remember stretches where I didn’t go to class more than once a month either…

(h/t this rambling post at Mashable)

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Facebook Privacy Complaint: Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?

Posted in social media, social networking, tagged , , , , , on 8 June 2008 |

A little over a week ago, the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa brought a complaint against Facebook to the Privacy Commissioner.

“They say they’re purely a social networking site, but they’re in fact a commercial enterprise that is about sharing and using the personal information of its members with advertisers and third-party application developers,” says Philippa Lawson, director of CIPPIC.

The case was built by CIPPIC law interns over the last four months.

A few months before that, this thought provoking video — about what happens to your data on social networking sites like Facebook — was posted by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.

The video warns of how social networking sites are a goldmines for those who want to use the data shared by users for any number of benign and perhaps not-so-benign ends – so Facebook isn’t about you, it’s about your data.

Here’s an explanation from the blog post that announced the video:

It’s becoming obvious that a lot of Canadians – and others – are signing over their privacy rights to these companies in exchange for access to increasingly popular social networks.

This is a choice they can make, but we would hope that people would take a minute to think about their choices – and how much information they end up handing over to corporations, advertisers and marketing companies.

Idle speculation: I wonder if this video helped to give them the idea for the complaint?

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Facebook Apps: No Good for Marketing

Posted in uncategorized, tagged , , , on 2 June 2008 | 1 Comment »

Crazy list of Facebook appsWas reading a report the other day on some focus testing recently undertaken for the Public Health Agency of Canada on concepts for an HIV/AIDS awareness campaign aimed at males 18-25. Focus groups were held in Toronto and Montreal. For more detail on the testing methodology and what the concepts look like, here’s the report – it’s a PDF file.

A couple of the campaign concepts tested included Facebook applications – so this piqued my interest in both cases, participants in the testing gave the ideas a resounding fail. Here’s the summary for one of the concept’s Facebook application idea (a game called “attack of the drones”):

The Facebook application was not well received by focus group participants in either Toronto or Montreal. Many indicated that they are on Facebook but they do not actively use it, nor would they invite their friends to install or load this application on their page. Participants suggested that Facebook has become more of a tool to keep in touch with their friends, hence the lack of desire to install applications. [my emphasis]

The report also quotes a participant: “I don’t install apps in Facebook.”

The summary for the other concept with a Facebook component (this time it’s a quiz for raising awareness about HIV/AIDS) continues in the same vein:

Once again the Facebook approach didn’t resonate at all with participants. They indicated they would likely not post this quiz on their Facebook page and would not be willing to pass it on to their friends. There were of course some participants that would do the quiz, however, they didn’t see the point of having it in Facebook.

From my own experience of Facebook apps, I have found that they are for the most part annoying. Looks like it’s not just me — even among a core Facebook demographic, there is little willingness to install and share applications on this platform. Facebook apps just aren’t the way to go for marketing efforts.

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