5 Top Tips re: Mobiles, Apps, Facebook and Blogs

I must blog, I must blog, I must blog. It’s been there on my list for an age and I’ve made a few stabs, but never posted. It’s an ongoing problem. What’s wrong with me? Is it that I’m using the web less? Eh… no! Not a chance. I’ve become a 24/7er netwise. Maybe it’s the iPhone usage? Well… there’s the thing. The iPhone is so snappy for lookups and sign-ins for social nets there’s not ‘surfing’ per se. But I’m on the net. Amen’t I? Technically, but often appways rather than browsered.

I’m on the social net anyway – and my lookups are constant – never letting a link go un-clicked, or a reference go un-referenced, a fact go un-Googled or a vid go un-viewed (‘sept the flash ones of course which is annoying, but they seem rapidly less prevalent which is concerning). I’m also well podded with Digital planet and buzz out loud and my own penchant for Thinking Allowed.
The faithful (old) Toshiba portégé accompanies me for sit-down work. Hours slip by on comfy seats over lattés or hunched at the office delving my way through big documents before zipping them here and there.

But why not blogging – and this is the point of this blog.

If the web is always with you, as it is with me, you now have to make an active choice to do browser and document work via the bigger laptop screen. This is perhaps where the iPad style device fits in nicely. The trend towards increased access for mid-sized super-light mobile devices with longer battery lives means the capricious nature of much previous net use can now be taken away from work and the office (not the same always) and into the home, the street, the back-room or the coffee bar (I’m in Starbucks right now). The personal and connection work can now stay personal and be dealt with right now, rather than peppered throughout the day when one gets behind a screen.

The other related trend is toward app delivered content. Is it a good thing to have all this content tied up in apps? Well, for some software apps that is definitely true but for other apps I don’t really think so. Many companies really should consider browser delivered services before jumping on the app bandwagon. There are many advantages, such as, you don’t have to keep updating the app, and you can always encourage the ‘add to my home screen’ button to be employed. If the service in question is needed they can find it and return to your site simply with this method. And very quickly, between free and paid for apps, there will be simply too many on the phone – something that iPhone 4 folders addresses nicely. I mysteriously seem to be heading toward my 300th app, having deleted many I don’t use and can do without. Obviously I’m an-typical nerd – but the simplicity and benefits of the app store I, as an early adopter, have found I think will be found by others giving a trend towards more and more apps. Some are really cool. Seriously! But tellingly – several of those on my homescreen are shortcuts to webpages and cloud services. So, the companies in question didn’t have an app, and actually don’t need one for my purposes.

Other apps need to be appified and benefit from being apps. It is the only way that a particular service can be delivered – benefitting from the mobile nature of the service or the iPhone gyroscope thingy. Fair enough. So, an open mind is the best way to go I’d say. Not wishing to dis the client but many want an app without really knowing why – like they want clients to put them in their bookmarks list on a funky new phone. It is always good to have a cost benefit analysis running in the background when you go down this thought cul-de-sac. Functionality and links may be more important to your business than having an app.

Mobile Internet and smartphones mean – to all intents and purposes – that the net itself is disappearing from view. This was always going to happen and has happened with all previous communication technology. The net is now the taken for granted bit that no longer distracts from the content it delivers. Half a billion Facebook users? How did that happen? Quickly and without much effort or worry that it was on the Internet – and now the FB app is so good, it’ll be 1 billion before you know it. If you remove the very young, old or very poor from the world’s population – that starts to look very like 1 in every two people communicates via Facebook – and much of that use will be mobile. Why? Because it’s better.

What this means is that social interaction is now the most powerful driver toward net use and should be the preferred location for engagements of all sorts. The Facebook platform is now most important in the world for social software. If it’s sitting on a MC or PC or iPHone OS… well, it doesn’t really matter.

To close the circle of this conversation and bring it back to blogs isn’t easy. I’m in a funny situation because my work is also my interest and hobby. I was just chatting with another business guy who blogs and we agreed that blogging is important for taking care of the various brands that exist in any business. The CEO is as much a brand as the business brand and that’s important, but also the blog is an important mechanic for extracting insights from the day-to-day experience and bringing them into focus. It’s a process and though it takes a little time (not much), the benefits are tremendous. So, I just have to blog more. It’s as simple as that.

So – time for some top tips:
• Take account of the new way digital media is being consumed in a mobile context
• Take note that the consumption of online content is now often via an app. There are big implications here
• Make sure if you are developing an app – that a browser isn’t be a better way to go – even for mobile devices. The quality of mobile (and iPad browsers) is so brilliant now, and it’s easier to update a website than an app for several devices and OSs
• Use Facebook, and build for it
• Blog for your business and yourself

Sign up for RSS feed from The Tannoy

Countdown to iPhone 4 release date

Countdown To iPhone 4 release

Sign up for RSS feed from The Tannoy

If you want something done…

OK. Time for a bit of a braindump.

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged, and I’ve written a few, but always left them without being published because they weren’t good enough, or big enough, or important enough, or something. I’m not sure I’m out of that head space just yet, but I do want to share some thoughts and questions.

The Tannoy has always been about new technologies and communications, and I’ve tried to track shifts in the way were talk to each other in the digital realm. Since we last spoke I’ve set up a few new companies to address and service these changes. All have a view of digital marketing at their core, but one of these – Pavilion Digital – looks to another development discussed at length by The Economist some months back.

Data.

It’s a word that has lost its meaning because it means so many different things to different people. For me, it is the 1s and 0s of raw code that tell a computer what happened when. Back to the binary coal face! There is more data than ever before, and will be much, much more in future, but what do we do with it?

Pavilion Digital extracts meaning from data. Any and all data. Diverse data sets, market research, server data, tracking data, sales, sales force and CRM of every description. Whatever it is, we can import datasets, analyse them individually or together and extract reports, statistical insights and most of all – value – from what already lies within. We’ve done it in the past few months with some very big clients from the transport and FMCG sectors, and the thing that emerged for me, most of all, was how difficult nay impossible this work is if you don’t know how it’s done, and don’t have the right tools. Few people, in my experience, can get their head around data sets, weighting, imports, exports and then extracting sensible stories from it. Important stories. We have the people to do that, and the best tools, so that’s cool!

In the end of the digital just provides another tool for telling a story. Pavilion Digital gives you the glasses to read it and the directions to understand it.

I’ve also developed and sold some iPhone apps – hardcore utility apps for data gathering and dissemination you understand… not the faddish gadgetry as makes up so much of the 150,000 apps, or whatever it is, that are out there. That’s been real fun. It’s very cool to come up with ideas, get them scoped, scripted and launched, and then someone just has to have them. Very rewarding. When I say iPhone apps, they are actually device and software agnostic, so will work on any smart phone. But more of that in a later blog. I’ll let you all know when the customers launch them and you can check them out.

Again, at the core of these and indeed all digital communication functionality is data.

OK. I sound wishy-washy and half-baked, and sorry for that. I’ll get to the point.
I’m looking at the digital communications industry, and I worry about it, because it seems to me that the whole thrust of internet collaboration is anti agency. Any agency! It’s all about putting people together, directly. Peer to peer not consumer to consumer. And to extend the analogy its about: – P2P, P2B, B2B and B2P.

The internet has taken an amazing toll on the market research space, the advertising industry and the travel space, because it puts individuals in touch with companies directly. And, vice versa, it also puts individual companies in touch with their markets’ individuals too. This puts agencies in a difficult situation… What is left for them to do?

At present, digital ad agencies are broken out by common sense boundaries. Social networks, of course, search and Pay Per Click, naturally. Website builders, traffickers and trackers and em… and, apart from the creative department (part of the website department) and content writers, that’s kind of it. (I’m sure someone will correct me here and feel free.) I know there are bigger agencies which co-ordinate the needs of bigger clients, and there is bound to be a need for these for some time. But then again… the bigger they are…

Market research agencies have a range of other issues including the lack of a requirement for a field force, the slashing of margins, shifting client expectations, the shortening of timeframes and indeed the whole cheapening of the space. Only top quality slimmed down research houses need remain.

The problem for the agency world in general is that any company can do all of these things themselves. Easily. And, if they can’t, they will be able to in a year or so. They probably do some of the things already. In fact, any individual will be able to do them. What’s worse for agencies is that very big companies, who make up the lion’s share of all advertising spend, are taking these functions in house. Why? Because they can, they have control, they don’t get dependent and bamboozled by gurus, and because, well, they just like it. Worse again, hard pressed governments, who used to make up another chunk of spend, are doing it too – wiping out even the larger players in the digital ad space. (The loss of such a contract was a major contributor to the downfall of digital media buying giant – i-Level in the UK.)

The issue for agencies is that buying advertising, tracking it, and optimizing it is child’s play, if you know how. It’s not only all so trackable – it is all so easily trackable. And, you will know how to do this sort of tracing and optimizing – if you want to. It’s not hard, if you can read instructions and can use a computer and the Internet. (If you can’t do either – this blog aint for your!)

The other issue is shifting impressions. Two years ago people used to surf the web now and then. That’s largely gone. That free time has been taken up with surfing on Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter… not on websites – unless you are doing something like research for shopping, or gathering information for health reasons for example. Or buying a ticket maybe. In short, there’s very little actual surfing done these days, so the impressions burned per user on the web as a whole will be dropping. Per user mind, not in total as the number of users is growing. The audience is just hanging out in a different place.

The long tail is getting a hell of a site longer. It has to be. People are visiting much fewer bigger sites, and occasionally wandering out of their social network in response to a link. I heard that 50% or so of Facebook users (350 million of them) are visiting the site daily for over half an hour. That is just phenomenal if you think about it. Well, all of those impressions that 350 million had to offer the Internet advertiser outside of Facebook are lost, unless the ads are in Facebook itself.

So – back to data. The game of business today, as I see it, is in using your existing information, your data, and squeezing every morsel of insight out of it before you spend any money on market research. There’s cash in that there data attic – if you just go and look.

Then, when you are advertising – try and get your head around as much of it yourself as you can, (or get staff to). You’ll save an absolute fortune! Between Bluestreak and Google Analytics you can track the world and his mother as they view your ads placed on networks for small beans. Use social networks. Embrace them. Learn how to target your market with age, sex and location. It’s so wizarded – my Dad could understand it. It’s intuitive, obvious, easy-to-manage and click – you’ve got a campaign going. Website? Use blogging software.

You will need help with logos, and creative, but it is a really, really very good time to do this. (There are free ways of getting them too, if quality isn’t a huge concern.) Then, when you’ve got all your add data, and reports, why not integrate them with your server data, CRM data, sales data, spend, product categories and sales outlets, and analyse them all together. That’s where we come in – because, with the right setup, tools and training, or if you want someone to do it for you and send you the reports – you talk to Pavilion Digital. Again, it’ll save you a fortune.

Slash market research budgets, manage and optimize ad-spend without margins to third parties. Optimize all activities and hone the ideas and marketing plans. This is the best way to give your business the best chance of making the most margin on all sales.

And don’t worry about going it alone. The net is empowering all and it is a collaborative space, so, if you don’t know how, ask, and someone will help you – for free. Just give it a go. You can’t break anything, and everything is reversible. It is tough times out there, so what have you got to lose. No, a better question – What have you got to gain?

Sign up for RSS feed from The Tannoy

Unofficial iPad countdown button

No. I haven’t got an iPad yet. No one does till it’s released at the end of March. Here’s a countdown button so you don’t miss it.

Sign up for RSS feed from The Tannoy

Irish Times Gloriously Missing the Point of Twitter

OK. It’s been a while since I’ve blogged, mostly with the wind-down of Net Behaviour it has been necessary to pass my time setting up new businesses, and this has gone very well indeed. I’ll make some announcements to those who don’t already know when the time is right, and the sites are live etc.

Actually, to tell you the truth, I wrote this blog last week, and didn’t publish it. That’s how busy my life has become. And since then there has been the Chile earthquake, which further reinforced some of the points made here. Anyway. Apologies for the silence if you like this blog, and I promise to try harder in future. So, here it goes.

I’ve also been spending my bloggers muse writing for the Belfast Telegraph and Digital Times, so, I have actually been getting my bi-monthly copy out. I’ll tweet and Facebook links those pieces for those who are interested.

——-

400 words, or a 140 character tweet weren’t sufficient to clarify my frustrations at a recent piece in the Irish Times disseminated by excellent @williewhite. I rarely get into Facebook comments banter, but I couldn’t believe how gloriously a recent Irish Times piece ‘The Revolution was Not Tweeted’ by Mary Fitzgerald missed the point of twitter, of the web even. She even missed the power of word of mouth. Ironically, the reason she wrote the piece undermined her argument considerably. You can read it here.

The logic of suffered from two common Irish errors. Dichotomy and exaggeration – Twitter will change the world for everyone, versus it has does not change anything and the hype was wrong. It also suffered from taking too few examples and not taking a sufficiently broad and historical view of change in the world of media and communications. There was also, I felt, a further typically Irish crime of begrudgery at success and fame, or in this manifestation, dislike of technology driven hype.

It was clear to me that Fitzgerald has missed the tectonic shift in social and political communication that twitter has become, not because it is clever programming but because it is simple, easy to use and it’s so popular.

I’ll ask a question. What does it really mean for a world where you cannot stop people from talking and being heard? The question doesn’t seem to make sense even, but just 30 years ago, it did. That’s how far we’ve come. Gone are the days of the power of a state to control the knowledge of that state and their understanding of world beyond. To mould millions of minds into doing dreadful things such as joining the Nazi party or committing genocide. I’m reminded of the fact that during the Falkland’s war, it took 21 days for the sinking of HMS Sheffield to reach the mainstream media in the UK and Ireland. 21 days! And that was only 1982. It would take 21 seconds today, if that, and it would be near impossible to stop the news getting out.

It is this sort of hype, or in my case, excited enthusiasm, that the Irish Times writer doesn’t like, but the facts remain true nevertheless.

The reasons cited for undermining this point of view was that… not everyone in Iran was on twitter during the recent protests against Ahmadinejad’s ‘election’ and that most of the information shared was carried by word of mouth on telephones. I read this and thought… ‘Oh dear. Luddite alert!’

As I see it, all it takes is a very tiny group of people to have a credible but sharp view on truth, with a picture for example, and the balloon of propaganda will pop. Remember the picture of the naked girl running from the napalm bomb that is credited with bringing an end to the Vietnam war? Can you see the picture? If so, you must acknowledge how sharp was the tip of that pin. Perhaps you remember the picture of the mysterious girl with the green eyes from the front of National Geographic magazine, or the 95 theses (tweets?), or the tale of the girl who refused to leave a bus designated ‘whites only’. Or the picture of the dole queue with the slogan ‘Labour isn’t working’ beneath it that swept Thatcher to power in 1979.

All of these single pieces of information consummated a tipping point in public opinion because they manifested an unassailable truth about an injustice. A truth that a million copywriters and spin doctors couldn’t fix. Job done! Truth out! Game over!

The difference between these images and slogans and acts and twitter is that the news that carried all of these pieces of content was carried on mainstream mass media. They had a ready-made audience and word of mouth, education and re-publishing took care of the rest.

This is where twitter and the re-tweet come in. It does not take everyone to be on twitter, or social networks for these to have an effect on a population or public opinion. That is ridiculous. All it takes is one person to write a slogan, or tweet, with perhaps a picture taking on a smartphone for inescapable truth it contains to be retweeted, and within hours the message can be carried the world over. This happened when the Boxing Day Tsunami hit. The pictures and films were amateur. The mainstream media were absent, or drowned, and amateur news became the only source of truth about the scale of the disaster for the mainstream media, and what it looked like. The rest of the job of sharing news and truth is done by word of mouth. ‘Isn’t it terrible’ conversations over a coffee, or ‘did you hear about so-and-so’ chatter over a pint. Phone conversations, texts and even jokes make news travel even quicker and make it some colour of fact. The same happened with Riverbend blogger during the first Gulf War.

So, I’d like to make the point that everyone does not have to be on twitter for twitter to be a total game changer. Every comment, every sentence, every tweet is in fact its own individual webpage, indexable, searchable and findable on search engines and endlessly shareable with thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions of people. Word of mouth among social chatting, silly and interesting people is the point, not the instrument used for sharing that word of mouth. Word of mouth takes place online and offline of course, but you have to have something to talk about. Twitter can leak that truth, does and did in the days of the Iranian election.

In George Orwell’s 1984 the news came from a centralised location. This made the concept of ‘thought crime’ credible. Now news and information comes from a million points. The objective view of what happened is now contested. It’s no longer about your news source (twitter, irish Times, word of mouth), but how you use the news you get, like I’m doing here. I’ll tweet and Facebook a link to this blog and, with retweets I may reach a small group of perhaps few thousand. If I mention it the Belfast Telegraph, a few more. But how many of those who hear about this blog use twitter? Does it matter? Nope.

If it was 1982, or 1979 when the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran, we’d know little or nothing about what happened during the days of the protests, and it would be as simple as it was then for Iranian spin doctors to hide the facts, and for the police to jail protesters. What is more, the protesters probably would not have had the courage that twitter gave those same Iranians in the past few months. Their actions were tweeted around the world, the riots were seen and Iranian injustice was unmasked leaving it open to sanctions, actions and influence. To the court of worldwide public opinion!

When people believe their story might not be heard and their words could get them jailed or killed they tend to be quieter. But when there is the tiniest breath (140 characters) of the oxygen of publicity, they gasp at it and let a roar. Iranians spoke and the world heard. So yes, the Revolution was Tweeted as all revolutions, large and small will be tweeted from here on in.

Sign up for RSS feed from The Tannoy

Twitter is Bad for Blogging and Maybe Business

Not only does it distract, and endlessly digress, it takes the wind out of your passionate sales. It’s not that twitter is a bad thing, per se, but it can cloud focus on the core variables that make a business work. Closing deals, invoicing and getting paid. This, of course, all comes after creating a product or service, packaging it and selling it.

And this is my beef. So much of the online entrepreneurial zeal is getting lost in a cloud of ideas, messages and directionless digressions that it are not delivering one clear thing that is priceable, and buyable. Consultancy, knowledge, experience and enthusiasm are great but they are hard to take off a shelf and bring to the cash register. If you can’t describe what you’re doing and why and how much it costs, how can someone buy it?

I know there are so many twitter positives for certain types of businesses, but, from my cursory look, these are service business, and more than that, they require a certain type of digital networking element to them. They also often photographic or design in nature!

The difficulty arises when people look at twitter and think they can force any business model down its 140 character throat. Very often you can’t, and you shouldn’t try. You can do more harm than good to your fragile brand. And the last thing you want to do is to expend energy doing the wrong thing well. It’ll look like a hit, but only if you don’t put a value on your personal time, as with a lot of ‘free’ open source programs. Don’t put a cost on 10 years of tinkering and teaching yourself how it’s done by you for nothing and you’ll find most things in life will be ‘free’. I could make my own kitchen furniture if I gave it enough time, but the cost of that time? The quality?

So, what I’m recommending is a mentoring service so that companies can find the right fit, social media wise, for the business needs. Not just the next big thing, or the latest buzz word that sounds like great value, but the right thing that gives the most efficient bang for the buck and doesn’t require of the user/client a lifestyle change on their part, or a similar lifestyle change for their market. And also, to identify the best business that requires the least time for the maximum return on time and financial investment. Clean, efficient and targeted at a real, not an imagined, market that exists today and is only likely to grow.

So I’d say do what works, go where your market goes, but do it cleanly and efficiently, and don’t twitter about it, unless you’ve got a business for tweets. And, if you want me to bend an ear your way and bounce some ideas around, let me know. That’s a tweet DM I’ll answer.

Sign up for RSS feed from The Tannoy

iPhone Saves Lives on Subsequent Saturdays

Two weeks ago, to the day, a viral went around a corner of the web about the Heimlich manoeuvre, and I watched it with some interest as these seemed to be a good thing to know how to do. That evening my Mother-in-law came over to our place, as usual, so that myself and El could pop out for a pint and a bite to eat in our favourite locale. We’re spoilt – what can I say.

So, I’m minding our youngest – Felix, with other various children of various ages clambering over me. Total Wipeout USA is on and this can transfix the kids with slapstick hilarity, which is useful if you’re getting ready to jump ship; or hype them up, which isn’t. It had done the latter. ‘Emmet,’ I hear in cross sounding tones. I consider options and causes. Something has split. Kid has fallen over. Close the clasp on my necklace. There may have been another ‘Emmet’ as I tried to heave my progeny from my belly… but then came a crystal clear ‘EMMET!’ I’m off.

Mother-in-law walking lost and directionless around the kitchen, and then leaning against the wall – lips blue, with a green tinge around her mouth and nose. ‘She’s choking,’ say’s El in a mysterious calm. On auto-pilot, I take over. ‘Kids out… Out! Everyone out!’ I shout, and they leave. ‘Can’t do mouth to mouth, or emergency tracheotomy while explaining why I’m stabbing nanny in the neck to traumatised tiny people’ I say to myself. ‘Not ideal at least’. I spin Mother-in-law around… knot my hands, feel under the ribs, front and side aiming for the diaphragm and say into her ear ‘I’m going to do this… OK?’ She agrees. Two or three violent hoicks later, her feet leaving the ground and I hear the strangled whistle of air through a barely open pipe. ‘You’re breathing now. You’ve got a breath. You’ll be alright now I say…’ She recovers in minutes, and, in shock, pretends nothing happened. We all do. But, on the way to the pub I say to El… ‘It worked. Isn’t that amazing! A simple technique has saved us from a very different Saturday. I watched it on the web, and it worked!’

(It also crosses my mind in true Les Dawson fashion… ‘You had your chance, Mother-in-law choking already. No witnesses. Blew it. You had to turn into Superman… Didn’t you! Then again… Think of the babysitting! She owes me big-time!)

A week later, to the day, El has gone to upstairs after lunch… not feeling well. She comes down and announces. ‘I don’t feel well at all. Look at me! I’m all red!’ And she is. Ears bright red, very flushed, eyes even seeming to bulge a little, and lips a shade of cherry Max Factor would patent. ‘I think it’s an allergic reaction. Anaphylactic shock!’ There was a film I saw a while back where the main actor looked similar and had to be rushed to the chemist I remember, but Ellen had never had anything like that before. Out comes the iPhone, and Dr. Google informs me these are indeed the symtoms, and also the symptoms of an allergic reaction to fresh mackerel which hasn’t been cooled down quickly enough. We had mackerel for lunch. I’m off. Just going to the chemist you need some strong anti-hystamin I call as the door shuts behind me. The chemist tells me that indeed, it sounds like anaphylactic shock, but I’m to get back quick in case the breathing starts to go. The car roars away from the chemist but as soon as I get in the door, I’ve been gone maybe 3 minutes, Ellen tells me… ‘I can’t even breath properly.’ Kids are flung bodily into the jeep, some still in PJs with wife propped in the passenger seat. The lights are with me as we belt for St. Michael’s Dun Laoghaire and I drop her at the door. She hobbles in to safety, an injection, and recovery some hours later. Phew. Typically perhaps I say to El… ‘Isn’t that amazing. Dr. Google had the symptoms. That bloody mackerel.’

Why am I telling you this? It’s Saturday, and I’ve suddenly become quite worried about being any distance from my iPhone and the instant, life saving information it provides. In fact, this week, it’s probably my turn! L

Sign up for RSS feed from The Tannoy

Google Defends it’s Turf from Apps

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Google wants to own the search experience across every mobile media platform, and its latest offering is a universal search box that lets users of Android-based smartphones look for apps, contact information and web content right from the device’s home screens.

Sign up for RSS feed from The Tannoy

10 Digital Attitudes to help your Company Survive the Recession

1)  Big Online Brand Lessons for Offline Brands

The brands that will weather the recession are online brands like Amazon, Google and Pay Pal.  Web only brands, great market share, and they know what they are doing.  They are also flexible, and do not need tonnes of bricks and mortar to do business.  Did you ever see that documentary on Amazon?  Huge warehouses… thousands of miles of conveyor belts, millions of books and almost no people.  All brands have to learn from these and become more efficient, and by efficient, I mean net driven.  A little investment today creates great efficiency and a recession proof path to market.  Not doing digital means not being flexible, efficient, modern or competitive in today’s world of marketing.  No digital front door, no digital communications and a huge limitation on the number of customers.

 

2)  Carrying out your own research

First class of Bus Org in 1984, and Greg O’Conner asked what the most important element of any business was.  He wrote the school books on Bus Org at the time.  No one guessed… The answer? Market research… A lesson I never forgot it… probably because I slept through the rest of the course.

Research online is more efficient than research has ever been.  But, be warned, buying software is no more likely to make you a researcher than booking a hotel room makes your chat with drink softened strangers a research focus group.  Still, I recommend buying the best software you can, not the cheapest, and make sure there’s training and support and you can save thousands on expensive market research options.  Inquisite is good but costs a bit.  Cheap/free software like surveymonkey is just too simple, and will never give you the outputs you need.  Like everything else, you gets what you pays for!  Use other software to research word of mouth online.  Quick, efficient and clean.  Net Behaviour can also help here with our funky new buzz monitor service.

3)  Added Value

More for the same money, especially when services are bundled together.  More impressions, more tracking, more reporting, more data, more customers delivered to the client.  We just have to work harder and we’ll make the same money!

 

4)  Inspiration and the Multi-disciplinary

 

Now is the time for multi-disciplinary people on the pay roll.  The set that can turn their hand to most things, but most importantly have special interests of their own, which constitutes them as experts in one or two sectors.  Someone is good at video games in the office, someone else can blog, another has a keen eye for good viral marketing executions, while someone else can get stuck in the backend of data driven systems and get outputs that are in plain English.  These are the people for today’s marketing team.  Quirky originality and talent is good.  This is the age of the nerd.

 

5)  Packaging and Bundling Reductions

We’re seeking to bundle our services to create efficiencies for our customer base, and think you should do the same.  Advertising, brand tracking, creative and blog monitoring with a single all-in value cost.  Also you should explore such things like content generation, customer relationship management, but above all, make sure that any mix you come up with is innovative and creative and exciting, but simple and buyable too.  Fix a price people can afford above inviting a negotiation which ever increasing costs that will make a customer nervous.  And, stick to the price.

6)  Digital Literacy

 

Without foreknowledge of the scale of the disasters that would hit 2009, I did loosely predict in a previous post that the digital literacy divide would grow, and today staying on the right side of that literacy equation for the modern marketer has become both an imperative for themselves and for their companies.  The most efficient way of doing things is also the best value, and computer driven solutions are 1000s of times more efficient than others… especially for advertisers.  The net is more efficient in terms of time, cost, value, flexibility, effectiveness and consequently gives better ROI.  The super Google PPC bidding system for example has revolutionised ad buying for all media in my opinion and it works because of giant computer silos munching all that valuable search/need data.  What we’ve seen from these guys is only the beginning, but understanding and learning how to get the most from Google inventions is only at the early stages too.  When you hear someone who says ‘I know a guy who knows all that stuff,’ they don’t! No one does.  It is the utterance and wishful thinking on the part of the net illiterate who wants to persuade you they are safely on the digital bandwagon.  

Indeed travelling today’s digital landscape is an ongoing battle to speak new languages and understand new concepts as you progress.  It’s an ongoing exploration of such scale it would have made the likes of Alexander the Great or Marco Polo stay at home and stare at the wall. But then again, these guys were at the forefront of the technology of their time.  Siege engines, war machines, cartography and natural science maybe, but there’s a lesson there too surely.

 

7)  Experimental Marketing

 

With new challenges come new approaches.  Innovation is the cornerstone of successful marketing in 2009, and this means mixing old modes of communication, and coming up with killer ideas which explain the essence of a brand in the modern context.  (Easy to say, hard to do,  has to be done.) There is no time for new marketers to say they don’t understand the net, or don’t believe in digital, because it is just too efficient and turn-on-and-offable to ignore.  People who think this way are as inescapably on the verge of extinction as those who defended the steam engine.  Yes, other things work, and will get you there safely, but if you don’t see it, you don’t get it or don’t want to because you haven’t the time to take to understand why digital is better.  Maybe you’re afraid of going too fast? 

 

From a pure advertising point of view, lessons from the Walkers crisps in recent times show that this could be the most creative and exciting cross mode, including digital, marketing time this century.  I want to taste Cajun Squirrel crisps, to see if they do taste better than my flavour, New York Pastrami and Gherkin and I’ll buy a pack as a result as will about 3 million others in a similar predicament.  That’s clever marketing, and who’d have though it would be for the humble bag of crisps.

 

8)  The Opportunity presented by Needs Must

 

We all must still do business despite the incessant news of doom and gloom, and we just have to be cleverer about it.  And if budgets have been cut, you still have to do something.  In fact, I’d say that those who can’t afford today’s digital solutions probably can’t afford anything… and have probably already gone bust.  But, for those who haven’t… seek and you shall find and who dares wins and other clichés. With digital comes a myriad of opportunities.  Those who were there when the dot com bubble burst and got the net bug knew there were opportunities then despite the almost total lack of business.  Things are infinitely rosier now thanks to broadband, iPhone, Social Networks and the rest of the tech developments that exponentially expand the reach of this most versatile two directional medium the world has ever seen.

 

9)  Cheap Luxuries Mentality brings the Masses Online in Droves

 

An economic truth: when times get tougher people still need to cheer themselves up with luxuries and the cheaper ones grow in popularity.  Pizzas and takeaways replace the restaurant, cans in replaces pub nights out, lipstick and knickers are sold by the truckload instead of that gúna nua. Video rentals also increase.  Well, the net has cheap or free music, video, TV, films, chat, dating, games, Skype, web text and even porn… and all-in for a single cheap monthly charge.   So, this is where your customers are going are spending more and more of their spare time and they’re likely to have much more of this too.  Net use kills time so more effectively than TV or radio, and young hardly ever buy newspapers these days. 

10)      IP Society

And best of all the Internet is a social activity. When you maybe can’t afford to be physically social, virtually social beats solo every time.  TV used to be social, but now people are watching videos in bedrooms, on DVD players, or other devices, so they’re not sitting getting embarrassed in front of their parents when something rude happens on the box in the corner. 

These days, things are much less family oriented and much more solo and this where the net comes into its own.  It’s a physically solo, virtually social networking balance which seems to satisfy the social needs of humans in this progressively solitary age.  Sitting alone at home with a can chatting or playing a game or watching videos with mates on the Internet feels much less sad and lonely than the same evening spent staring at Desperate Housewives, ER and QI. Your mates are home alone with you after all – texting, chatting and calling you for free.

And, for the business man, since your customers are online, you need to be there, or they won’t even know you exist.

Sign up for RSS feed from The Tannoy

Listening to the Blogosphere

Listening, I was taught as a child, is an art.  Quite strange really, for a house where all seven of us kids had something to say that was just so important we all had to say it at same time while getting steadily louder and louder until either the food was gone or someone lost their voice, or tempers frayed and it ended in chaos.  In fact, dinner in the Kelly house resembled less the orderly meal of the model of the civilized South Dublin society than the scene from a Rwandan refugee camp when the UN are flinging rations to the heaving, starving, roaring masses.

That being said… there was a lesson to be learned.  If you want to say something, find a calm quiet forum to say it, communicate it in a clear, calm, consistent manner and if it doesn’t get heard, write it down.  That’s what blogs are for.  They are for writing something down for others to read in their own time.  If readers don’t agree with what you’ve written, they can comment, again, in their own time, and you can reply in yours.  The problem with the Irish blogosphere however is that it is as crowded as the aforementioned refugee camp, and though everyone is writing it down instead of shouting, few are listening. There’s just too much noise.  The quality of what is written varies hugely too.  Few have the time to sift through the good, the bad and the ugly of the thousands of blogs out there to find the relevant and interesting discussions that they’re looking for.  RSS feeds help, but I find with these I still miss out on new blogs and relevant discussions that I haven’t got tagged for my reader.  To be frank, I think the Irish blogosphere is a lot like the Kelly Kitchen to the power of n. Some things never change.

Well, that’s not quite true…  because one doesn’t listen to the Internet, (yet).  One has to search, find and read, and this is what a lot of people do when they have an issue, like a health issue like a child with Down’s Syndrome or a pregnancy maybe.  Or otherwise if they are making a big purchase, like car insurance or a house a house move.  Or alternately if something has made them angry or emotional they may want to find other people in a similar state.  Times like these are when the blogosphere comes into its own.

But what if you are a company and you need to listen to what’s being said about you, your products or services.  Well, this is where you need help.

There are many ways of searching the net for blogs, and finding them… of course.  Everyone knows that.  But there are just a few ways of listening to what is being said on the millions of blogs that live, are born and die every day in cyberspace. 

Net Behaviour has some funky software that helps us do it for you.  We can listen for any mentions of companies or topics of interest, or people, and give reports on the level of noise, or buzz around specific topics or items of interest.  We can then take all the comments about a topic, and categories and organise them into a report for you.

So, if you’re concerned about what’s being said about your company, or a company you represent online… talk to us about helping keep things kosher blogwise.  It is important because it is so easy for a disgruntled employee, or client to mess things up for you in blogspace… or even a sly competitor for the matter.  It’s always better to keep tabs on these things especially if you are planning a clear marketing message.  The last thing you want is for banter on the blogosphere to pull the rug out from under you before you begin.  Forewarned is forearmed after all.  We can help because we know how these things work, and if we know what you want to achieve, we can ensure that if something is going on behind your blog back you’ll know about it and you’ll be able to get your message across.

Now that you’ve read my blog post and seen what I had to say, can you please pass the ketchup?   Sheesh!

Sign up for RSS feed from The Tannoy