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As we mentioned yesterday, getting the marketing mix right across the different social networks can be a bit of a minefield and, for many, it is still a brave new world out there. However, there is one place that has not changed, be it from getting your message heard when the Town Crier sang out “Oyez, oyez”, through print newspapers, to TV and radio, to websites, to social media.
It really is not about numbers in this game, but for far too long that has been the metric. How many “hits” (Don’t say hits!!) your website has, how many followers on Twitter, the number of friends on Facebook, my Klout score is higher than yours etc.
Far more important is having people engaging with you who fulfil your goals because you fulfil theirs. If you have 2million new followers and yet your sales turnover has only increased 1%, something is wrong.
Understanding the difference between, say, Twitter users and Facebook users is very important, and the stats in the Social Break Up report from Exact Target show that Twitter users are less likely to stop following a brand (41% versus 55% on Facebook or 91% on email). However, on Twitter people expect valuable content, not marketing messages. So, links to interesting posts from your sector are of more interest than another press release about your product or yet another chance to enter your latest competition.
In fact, this highlights one interesting thing about Twitter that people who don’t use it often miss. The common (mis)perception about tweets is that they are all about what someone had for breakfast. However, some of the most avidly followed users of Twitter are those who speak not about themselves at all, but who provide links to valuable content across a sector, industry, subject matter or product set.
The aggregators and curators of content find themselves with a loyal and engaged audience. Whilst some of these are indeed industry magazines/news sites, there are others who are businesses providing their followers exactly what they are looking for – valuable content. Intersperse these messages with a little shameless self-promotion for your own products, and you could be on to a winning mix.
Twitter users, whilst still far below the number of global consumers of other social media platforms, are amongst the most connected online. So, whilst you may find you have fewer Twitter followers than Facebook friends, these are potentially your most lucrative target audience because they know what they like and are “influencers”.
Quite often, reaching these influencers can be far more effective than a scattergun approach of marketing messages across social streams. Your marketing message, once treated to a critique or blog post, and then shared/tweeted out to their friends and followers takes on a more subtle hue. It is less direct and carries the invisible watermark of a Friend’s Recommendation, which is difficult to buy and almost impossible to fake.
Many Twitter users do not bother about Follows or Unfollows. Analytics does take time, and sometimes: what does it actually prove? Short of trying to track down each and every person who has unfollowed you and asking them “Why?”, much of it is guesswork. Instead, the great Twitter people just concentrate on being good at what they are good at, as well as being polite. Sending out #FollowFriday tweets to show that they too have been reading content produced by their followers, a thank you for a Retweet, a Retweet on behalf of a follower – all these little touches mean that a Twitter follower refuses to hit that Unfollow button in a hurry.
Whilst for a minority (20%) brand tweets are too ‘chit chatty’, for others this can make all the difference between untouchable and approachable. It makes it personal, in other words. A follower actually feels there is a human at the other end of the brand. With a sense of humour, compassion, or sharing a link that may be of interest. It does not matter how small (or short!) the tweet is, far too many brands have a stock of corporate type responses which are off-putting in the extreme, especially when there is a problem to be resolved.
So, in summary, stop worrying about numbers. Understand your audience. Craft messages for each 1/4 of your audience and balance the marketing messages with content. Offer deals and follow up so people have some say in what offer you might make next. Get to know your audience. Have you been to their page, wall, website? You expect them to come to yours!
The Guardian is reporting that Apple have toppled Google as the biggest brand in the world.
Just before this puts the world into a spin on Monday morning, I’d like to look at how real this thinking is. OK, it’s only one list, but this is going to be big headlines, as no doubt the researchers, Millward Brown, knew when writing their press release.
Obviously, the world revolves round money, stock markets and brands, (or the world that makes news does) but in reality much of this is very nebulous. Millions of dollars can be wiped off a company’s value (and hence brand) over night often for seemingly spurious reasons.
Is Apple a better brand? There are, of course, the Apple fanboyz, just as there are for Open Source, or Marmite, or thousands of other brands. But is the estimated market price of a company a true reflection of its value? After all, surely the consumer is the best judge of value? And should brands seek purely to increase perceived market value rather than customer satisfaction?
Consumers, as we know, are often forced/persuaded into purchase through sophisticated marketing and advertising techniques. That is what many in our industry do for a living. But, to date, the largest brands have seemingly failed to be penalised in such assessments or valuations for poor ‘after sales’ service, and are judged purely on sales figures ie money in.
What would be most interesting, is to see how many people have forked out for an expensive Apple item, and then never bought from Apple again…. for instance. Where is the satisfaction index?
Here’s mine. Our Apple satisfaction index is very low.
Our Mini Mac (now quite unloved) stopped working properly within less than 2 years of purchase, and despite a long trip away to an Apple repair shop, it now does only the barest minimum. And that whilst making the most horrendous noises.
Then, thinking those who espouse Apple, and whom I respect, must be right and that the MacMini experience was a mere blip, I recently acquired, against my better judgement, an iPhone. I was travelling, my 3 year old handset gave up the ghost overnight, and I needed a phone to get hold of the people who I was supposed to be meeting that day. This iPhone has, to date, driven me up the wall (even more so than the Nokia N97 it replaced) and really, if I lived nearer to an Apple Store, this latest handset would also go the way of the previous one – for replacement or refund. (THAT is a whole other post over the fact that handsets now last less time than your mobile phone contract).
The last iPhone had zero battery life and was replaced after 3 weeks (would have been much sooner but I couldn’t get to a store).
This one refuses to connect to a network, of any flavour – GSM, wifi etc – most of the time. It is bordering on useless for every reason I got it – phone, online, wifi. It is right now as much a smart phone as my cat is. The only thing that does work well is the camera but I can only share my photos if I go through a mind-bendingly tedious process to remove and share them. Whilst plugged into my attached-to-a-landline computer, which means the word ‘mobile’ is bordering on anathema to my iPhone.
From what I can see, the vast majority of apps in the AppStore (ditto the Android store apps according to the BBC) are not really worth the time their developers’ have spent on them, although there are some glorious gems such as Photosynth which has solved a problem I have had for years – stitching a panorama together. But that comes from Microsoft! (And of course, I can’t view my final attempts on the Net as that requires Silverlight, which Apple does about as well as Flash).
Let’s be balanced though, considering the headline – there are days I dislike and distrust Google too, as part of my general distrust towards big business vs small business, consumer and community interest, but looking at what has been achieved by Google for the customer – gmail, maps, search, and so on – I feel more comfortable in assigning a value to Google for services, than I do to Apple for products.
I am though quite concerned that the two biggest companies in the world, as of this morning and a single assessment (let’s make that clear!), suffer such a major #fail when it comes to those that matter most – the people who buy their products. Google will not answer questions in their forums; yet, there seem to be hundreds of thousands of people with problems that affect their daily lives, businesses etc. Apple suffers similar issues – the AppStore is full of them. My iPhone problems were only solved after I drove 200+ miles to a store – which now makes this device the most expensive I will own in a hurry.
But I cannot afford to be without a phone for the x days/weeks it takes to replace this one, which hasn’t worked properly since the day I got it. And as to my MiniMac problems – it’s now a very expensive box on the desk I should probably tidy away, into the bin.
So, in conclusion, whilst the money markets may make the headlines, and encourage other brands to aspire after those wielding the highest stock prices, is that what you should be doing with your brand?
I don’t believe so.
It comes down, I believe to a slightly different approach to assessing brand value. Social capital sells, as well as Quality Goods. Which. Work. Rushing to market to get the headlines and hence these type of valuations are all well and good, but personally, I may buy a PlayBook which is late to market but probably does what it says on the tin rather than an iPad. How will that decision be reflected in the news?
Traditional business values often bring you longer term value than any shiny quick wins. Many of the most successful businesses are not hitting the headlines of WSJ, NYT, or any of the British broadsheets this morning. They just keep on delivering, day after day, to a happy customer base who will support them through generations.
THAT is value. But it ain’t news. And sadly, those hard-working valuable companies will be written off by the meeja and thrown to the wolves by newcomers’ shiny claims. Leaving us with an ever-decreasing QUALITY for consumers in the rush for the headlines and the stock valuations.
Have a great week! Your comments are as ever welcomed.
The 10 UK search terms for the 4 weeks since Oct 19th 2009 show that UK searchers still don’t comprehend how a browser works.
The top 10 search terms include Facebook, Bebo, Youtube, Ebay, Argos – all major brands with basic TLDs eg argos.co.uk, facebook.com and so on. What this implies is that users are not using the location bar to directly enter the domain name or URL of a site, even when it is a global company with a simple and recognised name, such as Facebook.
Therefore, even if you have picked an obvious domain name for your widget company, such as widgets.co.uk, the majority of users don’t even have a stab at guessing the domain in the location bar – they use a search engine instead.
This snapshot of search behaviour should indicate to many businesses that one of the most important terms they need to be optimising for is their business name and brands, in order to show up in the search engine rankings.
It is surprising how few companies get this, and insist on putting their business name in a pretty logo invisible to the search engines, and giving the index page of their site a page title such as “Homepage”.
Whilst it is not necessary, nor desirable, to scatter liberally across every page the name of your business and brands, to the point where users can’t see beyond those terms to actual quality content, it is vital to ensure that they are included in visible text and indexable content. This includes alt img tags, reference tags, H1 and H2 and so on.
Check your website today and see how many instances of your business or brand names occur on your site, and how many are indexable. Searchers may be researching the availability, price, existence etc of a product they desire, and not know the names of companies who offer it, many more will be searching directly for you if your advertising and marketing is working as it should. If they can’t find your company even though they know the name, they will resort to researching the product/service type instead, and that is where deeper optimisation on many more keywords is essential.
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The rise of Facebook is difficult to ignore and the latest trend appears to be joining Just For Fun groups that are utterly pointless. For instance, I hate the little triangle that is never wiped by the windscreen wiper, Trying to turn on the lightswitch with your head whilst your hands are full, Sometimes I mentally narrate my life as though I am in a novel, When I realised the word “bed” looks like a bed, my mind was blown and so on, pretty much ad infinitum.
If you are a fun loving company looking to raise brand awareness, all you need do is sit down, come up with 20, 50 or 100 equally pointless but fun groups, create a Facebook group page for each one with your branding on it, and start joining and promoting your own groups.
Make sure that the link to each group goes on the news and live feeds, and sit back and watch your branding reach an audience of potentially millions.
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It’s strange but even in 2009, some companies seem determined to hold their customers and site visitors at arm’s length, making it nigh on impossible to contact or communicate with them.
Whether the customer has an enquiry, a complaint, a business proposal, or just wants to say how fab the product is, if you do not provide multiple routes to communicate, and then MONITOR points of contact and respond to anyone and everyone endeavouring to reach you, you are going to lose business.
Obviously, if you are a major brand, the damage to reputation caused by a single person whingeing on a forum about the fact they can’t reach anyone at your company may have a minimal impact on your branding. But when people type onto forums, Twitter, Facebook etc and that comment is then pushed out to multiple, interlinked sites, asking “Does anyone have an email address for a real person at XYZ?”, the implication there is that you have little interest in your potential and actual customers.
The facts need not even be known.
How many attempts at contact have already been made? How important is the query? Is it life or death? Have repeated attempts to reach a human been met only by automated messages sent by autoresponder? Are the phones not being answered?
None of us in reading the request for an email address need to know the answer to any of those questions. The implication is clear. XYZ company are difficult, nay impossible, to get hold of by the normal routes. So, Mr Desperate of Acacia Avenue has decided to put it out on to the blogosphere, twittersphere, to everyone he can think of to find a way to reach XYZ.
Whether it was a completely trivial reason to ask, or a vitally important one threatening a multi-million pound business venture, none of us are likely to ever know. But, when any of us think of XYZ company in the future, our perception is likely to be tainted by that one question. And the assumption which goes with it, which is that XYZ don’t know how to operate a business where customers matter.
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In ye olde days, that was a given. But now, with social media and networking on the increase, the answer has changed.
Whilst you may spend hours carefully crafting your marketing messages and adverts, designing campaigns, implementing and monitoring your branding, your customers can take apart all of this within moments in the social networking sphere.
One example recently is Habitat, who have spent years and years building their brand, but all that hard work was potentially undone in moments when an intern decided to post for Habitat on Twitter. The actual posts wouldn’t have been such a major problem if it wasn’t for the Twittersphere leaping on the issue, and making it huge rather than just a minor glitch in Habitat’s social media marketing learning curve.
Whilst those posting in the Twittersphere may not have been actual customers of Habitat products, the impact on potential customers when considering the brand for a purchase could be long-lasting.
This is a case where the loss of ownership came from in-house, but in many instances, brands are losing ground to user generated content, reviews, forums and so on. Especially when anyone can set up a blog or Twitter channel in a matter of moments that can become home to consumer comments and complaints, become the de facto source for information, reviews etc on a particular brand, and take over search engine rankings for specific search terms quite easily.
Corporates and companies need to accept that marketing is not the game it was, and fit around the new consumer/prosumer model that is developing rapidly with social media and networking. Otherwise, we will see the same problems the music industry has had to learn to adapt to with music downloads. By burying their collective industry head in the sand, or by employing corporate lawyers to chase down the offenders, the problem actually escalated. Until one day, the music industry woke up and realised it had to change the way it worked, the age old business model and consumer control it had enjoyed no longer existed. It had been taken apart by the consumers and was actually threatening the revenues which the industry had so long taken for granted.
The same is true of brands, large and small, who are endeavouring to stick to the olde worlde model. Consumer control of your brand is inevitable and you need to accept that and develop strategies which fit the new model.
The problem is neatly summed up in this short video:
