So you’re at the museum, and deep down in the sub-basement right next to the restrooms you happen to discover an enormous machine that looks like it was pulled from the Aliens II movie set. And then you notice you can insert a dollar, and suddenly the machine whirs to life and pipes hot, neon green plasticine into a mold in front of your very eyes as you inahale noxious fumes. Within moments you’re in the possession of a bona-fide neon green submarine, a memento of your visit to the museum that smells strange for days. Be Your Own Souvenir by Barcelona-based blablabLAB is just like that, except a trillion times more awesome. Using custom software developed using openFrameworks and openKinect, visitors film themselves in front of 3 kinect sensors for a full 360-degree scan and within moments a 3D printer known as a RepRap machine spits out a little army guy version of themselves. Every museum in the world should have one of these in their sub-basement, though they can probably install this by the front door. (via vimeo)

You asked for it Arnold and 84 others (so far). So I'm gonna talk about marketing.

I believe that marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks or when you make so much profit on every marginal customer that it would be crazy to not spend a bit of that profit acquiring more of them (coke, zynga, bud, viagra).

A very experienced and successful entrepreneur came into our office a week ago to pitch his latest company. At the end of his pitch he showed us some numbers. Normally for a raw startup we see almost all product and engineering expenses (headcount). But his plan had a monthly budget for customer acquisition. After he left, we talked about his plan and my partners focused on the customer acquisition number. It bugged us. It felt wrong.

So a few days later, I called him. We talked about what we liked about his plan and pitch and what we didn't like. I brought up the customer acquisition line item at one point in that call. He said "every company needs a marketing budget." It seemed like a strong reply but in truth not one of our top performing companies had a marketing budget in their initial business plan.

Zynga has spent millions on customer acquisition and continues to do so. But in the beginning, when Zynga was three or four people and they launched Texas Hold'em on the brand new Facebook Platform, they didn't spend any marketing dollars. That was the beauty of that time and that plan. The Facebook Platform was free distribution. Zynga rode that free distribution to millions of users, profits, and additional games. Only then did they start marketing.

In my talk at Harvard Business School, I said "Early in a startup, product decisions should be hunch driven. Later on, product decisions should be data driven". I've seen that line tweeted a thousand times since then. Clearly people like that rule. Here's another.

Early in a startup you need to acquire your customers for free. Later on, you can spend on customer acquisition.

So if you need to acquire customers for free early in a startup, how do you do that? There is no one right answer, it depends a lot on who your customer is and how hard the sell will be (consumer/enterprise and free/paid). I'm not an expert on enteprise focused SAAS businesses. I am not going to address that part of the market here.

For the consumer/free part of the web, there are some obvious things you will want to do:

1) Twitter - so many entrepreneurs have asked me "how did you start a company before Twitter?" Twitter is that free distribution that Zynga got on the Facebook Platform. You can and should get the word out about your product/service on Twitter and Facebook. You should encourage your friends to post about it, retweet about it, and encourage people to try it out. The digerati hangs out on Twitter and will see the tweets and RTs and many of them will try it out.

2) Social hoooks - Your product/service must be social. It must encourage your users to invite others to try it out. Hooks into Facebook and Twitter are obvious. Email invites are another obvious feature. The product should allow people to express themselves in it. Profiles, personalization, etc will allow the users to feel ownership of the product and tell others about it. Foursquare's adoption of a game dynamic when it launched is a particularly clever implementation of a social hook. Games are the most social of all things on the web.

3) Find entry points - MySpace launched in the holywood crowd that were friends of Tom and Chris. Twitter launched in the SF tech community that were friends of Ev and Biz and Jack. Tumblr launched in the "roll your own blog" avant garde community that David was part of. Quora launched in the Facebook alumni community. Facebook launched on Ivy League campuses. You get the idea. Find an obvious group of like minded people who know each other and launch into that community. If they like it, it will spread throughout that community and eventually beyond.

4) Events - Find live events to launch at. SXSW is famous for breakouts. Twitter and Foursquare are the two most talked about examples. I worry that SXSW has become so big and so many companies are planning to breakout there now, that it can't happen anymore. We will see. But there are many live events that you can attend and galvanize users at. GroupMe did a version of that at the Austin City Limits music festival. I've heard of companies breaking out at Burning Man, The Democratic National Convention (Airbnb), and the Sundance Film Festival.

5) PR - Do not hire a PR firm to do your free marketing for you. This is a core capability you must own. You can and may want to hire a PR firm to supplement your efforts, but that's a different story. The best companies know how to become the story and work it. Being in NYC helps a lot. Foursquare is a great example of this. You can laugh at Dennis and Naveen doing fashion shoots but think about how many new users they got for doing that. It was a stunt like any other stunt they've done. And they have done hundreds of them. The media eats it up as they always need something to write about. Twitter is another example of a company that owned its PR. Biz is a master. At the same time Biz and Jack were iterating on the product, Biz was thinking about the brand, the story, the bird, the logo, the meaning of Twitter in the world. And he got out there and started telling the story. He is an evangelist and he did it so well. Twitter would not be Twitter without that effort. If you don't have a Biz or Dennis on the founding team, find someone who can do this for you. But I will say that the best PR centric startups have the "media DNA" in the founding team.

6) Search - It is not first on the list for a reason. I don't think search driven businesses are interesting. Live by SEO, die by SEO. Don't be a google bitch. But you will notice that many of the top consumer web brands are higly SEO'd. Try searching on a person's name who is active on Twitter. I bet their Twitter feed will be one of the first five results. It is for my name (if you take out dups). Flickr did this very well. So does LinkedIn and Crunchbase. SEO is something that takes time to pay dividends. But you should build your product day one to be search friendly and keep at it. You can break your SEO with product changes and be careful not to do that.

7) Developers - I've said many times that developers are the new power users. Twitter is the iconic example. By launching with an almost totally open plaform and a dead simple API, Twitter got thousands of developers to build products that had "Twitter inside." Those developers and their products pulled Twitter into the market. Soundcloud is another great example. There are a ton of apps that people use to create music and other audio experiences that have "soundcoud inside." Each and every one of those apps is a distribution channel for soundcloud. They are pulling Soundcloud into the market. So build your product as platform from day one. And once you get traction on your product, do things that will cause it to become a platform, Foursquare is doing this well. They first got millions of users and now they are developing a vibrant ecosystem of third party developers. They did a hackday this past weekend that was very successful.

8) Build a great product - I'll end with a return to where I started. Marketing is for companies who have sucky products. If you build something that is amazing (think Flipboard or Instagram or Instapaper) people will adopt it because it is amazing. And you won't have to do much marketing, at least at the start.

So that's what I got on marketing Arnold. What do you think?

Guest author Peter Yared is the vice president and general manager of Webtrend Apps, a platform used by top brands to engage their customers on Facebook, iPhone and Android. He has has an extensive background in highly scalable Internet infrastructure and tools, and has authored patents on fundamental Internet infrastructure including federated identity and data marshaling.

They do not like to spend 20 or 30 minutes on a single brand's page, unless they are consuming innovative, funny, or exclusive content. So a travel site looking for a long time spent on a page should not put up a treasure hunt on a world map where you invite your friends and can together find great prizes after exploring cities. Sounds good in a pitch meeting, but it results in abysmally numbers of active users.

Facebook users are very sophisticated, and there is no way a single campaign is going to compete on game mechanics with CityVille. If you want to build CityVille, it might work. But, even Netflix pulled their Facebook app. You're better off putting up a bunch of funny videos from around the world and leave it at that.

Lots of Apps on One Tab Don't Work

It is easy to think of a Facebook tab like a Web page, and throw a bunch of features on it - such as a poll, gifting, and some videos - all on one tab. However, most users do not show up on a Facebook tab like they do on a Web page. They are usually coming in by clicking on a page's newsfeed posting ("What kind of traveller are you? Take the quiz!"), a friend's newsfeed posting ("I'm a cranky traveller! What kind of traveller are you? Take the quiz?"), or a Facebook ad ("Find out what kind of traveller you are!").

Now, if after clicking on one of these links a user is dropped into a Facebook Page tab with eight different things on it, they are not going to see a quiz immediately and move on. There should only be one engagement feature per tab.

Sweepstakes Don't Work

After an initial onslaught of Facebook sweepstakes promotions, marketers are learning that sweepstakes have very low conversion rates and almost no viral uptake. We're also learning that they attract unengaged users who are there for the prize rather than a relationship with the brand.

Facebook users like to click around and look at stuff, and absolutely do not like filling out forms. We have run highly promoted sweeps campaigns for major artists that included things like backstage passes and a limo ride to the show that had abysmal conversion rates. There is absolutely no incentive to make sweepstakes social.

Why would you invite more people to join a sweepstakes? It reduces your own chances. Have you ever seen a "I just entered a sweepstakes and you should to" posting on someone's wall?

One attempt to increase viral spread in sweepstakes is to offer more prizes when there are more entrants, but all that does is confuse users with conflicting agendas. There is a disincentive to invite people since it reduces your chances of winning, but if enough new people join up perhaps you can win something else... "Ah, too confusing, I'm going to watch videos instead."

Photo and Video Contests Rarely Work

A lot of brands like to do photo and video contests, but unfortunately they do not have the user base that likes to submit photos and videos. Travel and photography brands? For sure. Mobile carrier? Beverage brand? Not likely. Even clothing brands can't pull this off.

Uploading a photo or video is a big investment on the part of the user, and they do not expect to do it for the vast majority of businesses. These campaigns also require the labor to moderate the submissions. If you must run a photo or video Facebook campaign, the best way to do it is actually NOT in an app.

Instead, have users upload the photos and videos to the brand's page, and moderate them there. Then have users get their friends to Like the photos or videos. This way, the campaign leverages all of Facebook's viral channels around photos - when the user uploads the photo, when they Like the photo, when their friends like or comment on their photo submission, it is all highly likely to show up in their friends' feeds, drawing traffic. The great thing about this is that it is easy to do for free, since using all of Facebook's photo and video features are free, and users get to use the known Facebook photo and video interface, which increases conversions.

Next page: Like Blocks Rarely Work; Extended Permissions Rarely Work

Page:  1   2  Next  »

See Also

• Facebook Could Change Telephones Forever
• What if Facebook Bought Twitter? The Companies Have Talked About It, Report Says
• U.K. Police Will Use Twitter to React to Protestors
• The Gates Foundation Invests in a Facebook App for College Students
• This Week in Photos: Phones, Facebook and Revolution

Really good set of insights and principles - that would be unnecessary if brands on Facebook just started off by Thinking Human.....

I don't usually reblog random rants from outdated forms of communication here, but as this one is locked away behind a login wall that takes about 8 steps to sign up to, I don't expect anyone would follow the link I posted to it. So I've filed it away here. Anyway, great response/riposte from @theginisin here http://bit.ly/dTk4JQ

New Digital Emperors

Tim Forbes has worked for The Whisky Exchange since 2003 and looks after the company's online presence including The Whisky Exchange Blog.

The sudden democratisation of whisky criticism – whereby anyone with a laptop and an opinion can shout the odds about whatever annoys them – presents whisky producers with new problems. The bigger they are, the harder it is for them to present themselves well on the digital stage, which paradoxically favours the smallest bit-part players ever to find themselves with a global voice in a multi-billion pound industry.

Digital technology has long been regarded within the industry as an expensive inconvenience, and is paid only lip-service by most companies. Consequently, the majority of official distillery websites are an unfortunate mix of the bland, the twee and the utterly cringeworthy – unwise, considering the potential damage to brand image an inept digital marketing strategy can inflict.

My suspicion is that the vast majority of malt drinkers are happy with the blurb on the back label of their favourite dram, and remain blissfully ignorant of the vitriol, inanity and shameless bootlicking prevalent on the majority of whisky blogs, many of whose authors have clearly realised that a bit of self-publicity goes a long way in the brave new bubble of internet whisky content, and are frantically making hay while the sun shines.

The big company nightmare goes like this: Imagine you’re a brand exec for Glen Thingy.

Your company has spent decades building relationships within the trade, and millions of pounds on your global marketing campaign. But when you Google your brand name, top of the page is the notorious whisky misanthrope, Billy No-Mark, loudly declaiming to the world that ‘Glen Thingy is Sh*t’. He’s a web-savvy nerd with almost no whisky knowledge, but he’s nursing an epic grudge. He might be a part-time security guard living with his mum in an Alaskan bunker, but he reads Search Engine Optimisation manuals in the bath, so he’s on Google page 1 for all your brands. Potential new customers looking for Glen Thingy are going to find him slagging off your whisky on his snazzy website. Your multimillion pound brand is at the mercy of a socially inept geek with a vicious inferiority complex.

One has to sympathise a little with their plight.

Only a few years ago there were only a few people to keep happy: a long-established coterie comprising a handful of 5-star hotel managers and a few highly-qualified specialist journos.

But how long can this go on, and where does it all end? After all, 90 per cent of industry output goes to blends – a type of whisky that paradoxically has not a single blog anywhere on the internet.

Why is this crucial category so ignored? The answer is simple: blends by their nature strive for consistency, so there’s nothing to write about, besides, blend-drinkers are some of the most fiercely brand-loyal consumers in the industry.

Despite the temporary inconvenience of a global financial meltdown, the core blends are basically bulletproof – and there’s little demand for new information from people who have already found exactly what they like.

The other good news for the big companies is that as the number of whisky blogs increase, their relative importance is proportionally diluted – in the end, they’re all competing against each other for a spot on Google page one.

Also, history suggests that most blogs have a limited lifespan – many of the first whisky blogs have already died out and several second generation efforts are wilting as their authors take jobs in the industry or succumb to the more attractive demands of having a life.

Some of the more self-important whisky bloggers would do well to remember these facts, and conduct themselves with a bit more awareness as to their actual position in the fundamental pecking order.

It’s only a matter of time before the major companies realise how few clothes the new digital emperors are actually wearing.

 

• By : Tim Forbes
• In : Columnists
• Issue : 90
• Page : 11
• Words : 646

Great response/riposte from @theginisin http://bit.ly/dTk4JQ

...most of which were also things to watch in 2010, but hey, there are 100 of them....

Animation giant is attempting to interest females in science fiction through the two timeless attractions of shoes and jewellery

Walt Disney is trying to persuade more women to enter the macho world of science fiction by wooing them with two timeless attractions: shoes and jewellery.

Almost 30 years on from the original Tron film, the world’s biggest media company is tapping into the growing female market for “geek chic” with a range of high-end Tron-themed accessories ahead of the release of the sequel.

With Tron: Legacy opening in US cinemas on December 17, the studio has launched an unusual marketing drive to target adults who remember the original film. Among the merchandise unveiled by Disney yesterday was a “Tron icon” pendant necklace made by Rotenier and priced at $2,600 (£1,266).

Meanwhile, a pair of spiked chrome platform sandals inspired by the film and designed by Jerome C Rousseau is expected to retail at $795.

“The demographic we got to speak to for this film was a young adult and the adult consumer who happened to be around for the original. We knew we had to be creative,” said Pamela Lifford, an executive vice-president at Disney.

Sean Bailey, the president of production at the company, added: “Our thinking is to play a lot broader. We have the digital whiz-bang wizardry that gets the men in.” The clothing and accessories range is part of Disney’s strategy to make films that can be exploited across its franchise, with television, games and theme park spinoffs.

The company is also releasing a video game, entitled Tron: Evolution, while a graphic novel and animated television series are believed to be in the pipeline. Tron: Legacy cost an estimated $177 million to make and could fetch as much as $255 million in its opening weekend.

So the Times were kind enough to send me an access code to the website that they have safely locked away from prying eyes. And I'm wondering if i can still use all the normal ways of reading, storing and interacting with it. So here goes....

2010 has been an amazing year for technology. We’ve seen an explosion of tablets, the rise and rise of Android, the saturation of location-based services, not to mention set-top boxes from Google and Apple, 3D TVs, Microsoft Kinect, and the first mainstream movie about a website, The Social Network. Mobile technology also continued to race forward at light-speed, with many advances in mobile payments, augmented reality and high speed networks.

But don’t expect it all to end there. 2011 is already holding some intriguing and exciting possibilities.Let’s take a look at some the technologies and gadgets in store for 2011.

Desktop computing:

• Google’s Open Source Chrome OS.
• Apple’s OS X and the much anticipated Mac App Store.
• Oracle’s Solaris 11 Unix operating system.
• Intel’s next generation Core processors codenamed “Sandy Bridge” for desktop and laptop computing.

Mobile Phones:

• Near Field Communications technology to make credit and debit cards obsolete
• Embedded SIM cards that can be activated by software and work on any carrier
• The iPhone 5 and the hopefully (mercifully), the white iPhone 4
• Android 2.3 Gingerbread handsets such as the Samsung Nexus S
• New phones from HP running WebOS
• The Playstation Phone
• Multi-core phones such as the dual-core LG Star thanks to dual core Qualcomm Snapdragon, Intel “Moorestown” and NVIDIA Tegra 2 CPUs
• 3D smartphones such as Sharp’s autostereoscopic 3D Galapagos
• MeeGo OS based phones from Nokia
• High quality cameraphones such as the Android based 14 megapixel Altek Leo, and Sony Ericsson using the world’s first 16.41 megapixel cellphone sensors

Tablet computing:

• Multi-core tablets such as Research In Motion’s hotly anticipated 7-inch PlayBook.
• New WebOS based tablets from HP
• New tablets running Google’s new tablet specific operating system, “HoneyComb”
• The iPad 2, rumoured to run on both GSM and CDMA networks with a front-facing camera
• MeeGo OS based tablets from Nokia
• Powerful, low powered tablets thanks to Intel’s “Oak Trail” and NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 processors

Device Interfaces:

LightPeak, the high-speed optical cable interface designed to connect peripheral devices at 10 Gbit/s and could replace SCSI, SATA, USB, FireWire, PCI Express and HDMI interfaces

Highspeed USB 3

Super enegery efficient Bluetooth 4

The WiGig and VESA effort to push wireless DisplayPort gear that will connect PCs and handhelds to monitors, projectors and HDTVs without cables

Gaming:

• The PlayStation Portable 2
• Nintendo’s 3DS for 3D gaming without the need for 3D glasses
• Nintendo’s Wii HD

E-Books:

• Colour E-Ink
• Copia’s Social Reading platform, that plans to be a social network for books
• The New York Times’s plan to launch a bestseller list for e-books

Displays:

• More widespread use of flexible and transparent display technology such as AMOLED and OLED displays from Samsung and Sony
• Low-power color display that looks great in bright sunlight such as those from Pixel Qi and Qualcomm
• USB-powered desktop PC monitors such as those planned from Samsung
• Silicon film from Artificial Muscle that expands and contracts with an applied voltage could provide a real sense of touch to touchscreens

Wireless Networks:

Wider roll out of HSPA 21 Mbit/s networks

Next generation LTE and Wimax 2 networks running at 100 Mbits/s and upward

TV:

• 3D-TV without glasses in 2011 such as those from Toshiba
• Worldwide release of Google TV, Apple TV, and the use of set-top boxes as app platforms
• A growth in 3D-broadcasts of movies, television series and sport events
• 30-inch and larger OLED TVs

Web:

• Firefox 4
• More widespread use of HTML 5
• If you listen to Apple, Flash will battle for relevance, but it might find a safe harbour in tablet UIs like the one of RIM’s PlayBook

Photography:

• The Panasonic GF2
• Sony’s NXCAM HD Super 35mm camcorder

Cars:

• Electric cars such as the Nissan Leaf, Chevrolet Volt and BMW’s Megacity EV
• Electric motorcycles such as the Brammo’s Empulse, and electric bicycles such as the M55 Beast Electric Bike
• In-car computer operating systems such as Microsoft’s Windows Embedded Automotive that makes it easier for car manufacturers to create their own in-car computer interfaces
• OnStar that expands smartphone control for monitoring stats like tire pressure and oil level from your smartphone
• Plans for the Volvo S60 to feature pedestrian tracking and provide automated evasive maneuvers

Peripherals

• The extremely cool looking Microsoft Arc Touch Mouse

Miscellaneous:

• Berkeley Bionics eLEGS exoskeleton that aims to help paraplegics
• More advances in wireless electricity for gadgets thanks to the Wireless Power Consortium
• Commercial space flights thanks to Virgin Galactic
• Battery-less remote that gets its power from button presses

Facebook's social inbox: an engagement tool like no other?

23 November 2010 | By Joe Fernandez

It was perhaps only a matter of time before Facebook upped its offerings and gave brands even more engagement opportunities. Its approach to advertising has often been hailed as the ultimate way of leveraging brand equity and exploring the innermost thought patterns of customers.

Indeed Syzygy Group’s Unique Digital claims it now represents over an estimated 30% of its UK inventory already and Phil Stelter, its client services director, says roughly 75% of fans report becoming a fan as the result of an invitation or advertising from that brand.

“It’s clear that the campaigns are effective in encouraging those affiliations and drawing the attention of fans…an undeniable tide pushing agencies to reconsider their approach,” he adds.

With the upgrade of Facebook Messages, it seems that Mark Zuckenberg and co have realised the potential of its platform to become the main resource for online users to engage in social discussions and relate to their favourite brands.

Its terminology - it is offering a “social inbox” and not an e-mail platform - further proves that it is intent on being the online hub for consumers - a place to escape the elitism of the office and have complete control of your social persona. For advertisers, the prospects are mouthwatering - but filled with challenges too.

Simon Mansell, CEO of TBG Digital, explains: “The challenge is understanding the need for tailored, personalised adverts and adapting your approach to keep your offer fresh. That requires a blend of technology, the right tactics, a savvy team and a culture that is open to new ideas and ways of doing business.”

It’s no secret that most brands are already utilising this power available to them on Facebook. What will become much stronger now though is a brand’s ability to communicate directly to their fans in their “social inbox”. At the moment, brands can only post “updates” and these are not always so easy to find on an already busy home page.

Ben Clapp, creative director at Elvis, warns that to make messages and not updates a success, then brands “will need to learn to be less formal, engage in dialogue, stop interrupting – or get de-friended.”

Facebook’s opportunity is made all the more plausible by a gradually declining usage of email, compared to Facebook’s continually increasing usage numbers - it currently reports 500 million active users, 50% of who log in at least every day.

Dan Thwaites, planning partner at Crayon comments: “The ultimate aim will be to build always-on relationships with the audiences, to be accessible and relevant, when they are ready.  The challenge for the brand must be to earn the right to be on their audience’s inner circle.”

Facebook engineer Joel Seligstein, says in a blog, that Messages will now “feel more like a human conversation” based on what the user wants to share with their Facebook friends - who those friends are is completely up to the user. The aim is to make the service “more like a conversation and less like e-mail”.

Phil Harvey, chairman of JPMH says: “A driver for this is likely to be the desire for real time and location based communication, against which email delivers poorly.”

Unlike e-mail, which continues to be plagued by spam problems, it means that brands will have to prove that it understands the customer individually and is offering them what they want to hear about. Effectively, brands using Facebook Messages will have to replicate the intelligence much beloved of personalised e-mails from Amazon.

Steven Ledgerwood, client service director at e-mail marketing firm Emailvision, says the ultimate challenge for companies “will become much more focused on keeping their emails interesting with relevant topics to lure their customers to the email accounts on a daily basis.”

Yet marketers can see the potential for this development to change the face of e-mail in the long term, especially amongst younger users who “like” brands almost every day on the site.

James Kirkham, MD of Holler, says: “By weaving in such a coherent and seamless email client within their platform it means an even less clumsy and more fluid experience for the user.”

However, he warns that brands will have to think more carefully about how they treat social media: “It throws up a whole new set of rules and etiquette, which haven’t yet being properly understood or explored.”

Successfully mastering this will be reliant on brands creating more rich content experiences, which are interesting, entertaining, and which can be shared - effectively advocacy marketing. Whilst negative comments can never be fully ignored, brands have to take responsibility for their own presence online.

Nick Gill, planning director at integrated agency DCH, says: “For brands, it’s another large step on the road to a socialised brand architecture. One where you need to have customer intimacy; where the normal conventions of batching responses and speaking when you deem it necessary is gone. Instant is the new mantra.”

Yet, instant hasn’t taken off in the way it should have done in previous attempts. Martin Harrison, senior social media planner at TMW, suggests Facebook’s move is too similar to the ill-fated Google Wave. because email is firmly embedded in people’s everyday lives.

“Its role is defined, people know their way round it and despite the odd chap out there who still thinks their bits could be bigger people are very, very comfortable with it.”

According to recent research by e-mail marketing firm eCircle, there is an overlap between email and social media communication. In the UK, 56% of fans and followers of company/brand social media profiles are also reached by email newsletters.

Phil Storey, the company’s creative consultant, says: “With this new initiative, Facebook is simply giving people what they want:  all their multichannel conversations in one place and the chance to manage all their personal admin in one, convenient place.”

Dan Northover, digital design director at Partners Andrews Aldridge, adds: “Facebook’s social inbox will be the significant step towards the convergence of email, SMS and social media messaging. This will mean brands will need to work harder to create compelling content and develop useful services, therefore earning the right to have a relationship. Email marketing will continue to have a role for a long time but needs to be considered as a part of a wider Social CRM strategy.”

Tying such advertising content in to the Facebook Messages system will be key to its success, in the same way as Facebook Pages have become effective ways of having an ‘opt in’ relationship around content and products, using both sponsored ads and the news feed as an advertorial tool.

Ben Ayers, head of social media at Carat, suggests: “Perhaps the biggest opportunity around messaging could be the potential for Facebook to sell targeted ads based on conversations within the messaging system, a la Gmail, plus make use of the associated data. But Facebook have shown that they don’t always take the obvious path at first, opting instead for being a brilliant utility – and then monetising.”

He adds: “The other issue is one of trust. How much will users trust Facebook to keep their conversations private and secure? That level of trust needs to be earned which I think it another reason that unified messaging on Facebook won’t be killing web based email just yet.”

Yet if digital is loved for one thing above all else, the one-to-one relationships that can only otherwise be achieved through face-to-face contact would be it. Potentially, Facebook Messages could centre all such engagement onto one page.

As Christina Lemieux, strategy director, TBWA, concludes:  “The Social Inbox should allow brands to humanise themselves and initiate truly one-to-one social conversations versus just broadcasting messages to consumers.”

 

smart analysis and new stats

The Marketing Agency world continues to change and evolve.

Just the other week, news broke that ZenithOptimedia UK will be going through a restructuring. There are rumors that Starcom MediaVest Group may also look to change things up in the UK. With every passing week, we hear more stories about Marketing professionals coming and going, departments being shifted, removed or created, and consolidation is a common practice when big brands meet big business.

What's it going to take a for an agency to make it? What's it going to take for a brand to find the right agency for the job?

Last week, MediaBizBloggers, had a post titled, The Agency of the Future is Now the Agency of the Past, by Uwe Hook. As the Marketing industry continues to mature, and as new channels and platforms enter the fray (mostly due to technology), it's important to think long and hard about what a real Marketing agency  is going to look like. Instead of hacking together a quick Blog post to respond/elaborate on Hook's perspective, I took the week to think, take notes and push some of the ideas to an edgier edge.

This is what the agency of the future might look like... 

• It won't be small. It won't be big. Many pundits thought that the big agencies with multiple disciplines would rule them all, while others thought that it would be the boutique shops that can pay more attention and care to the brand that would win. It's probably going to be somewhere in the middle. The more likely solution will be an agency with a solid core group that can accommodate both the size of the brand and the scope of the work. One that can scale as needed and detract when the needs are less imminent.
• De-centralized. While geography and understanding the "people on the street" will still be important in terms of cultural relevance, the agency of the future will be more de-centralized. That core unit (mentioned above) will be working with more freelancers that are both physically present and those that are anywhere and everywhere in the world. While great creative comes from great collaboration, the tools that enable us to collaborate are getting us to the point where the realities of leveraging a Digital Nomad workforce will become more prevalent and cost-effective.
• Chief Marketing Technologist. Marketing and IT are going to have to come together in a much bigger way. I made the case for this, right here: The Time Is Ripe For A Chief Marketing Technologist. If technology (and living it) is not core to your Marketing agency, you'll never make it out alive. Start looking at how many full-time tech people you employ versus creative and client services, and get that ratio working better.
• Content. Most brands don't see themselves as publishers and most agencies don't have a lot of people creating value-added content. This is going to change. Whether it's because of Social Media or the sudden growth of branded content, more and more agencies will have amped up content departments that will look, strikingly, like the creative departments of today and yesterday.
• Community Management. While many brands are hiring community managers to deal with the many online conversations, they are are going to struggle with the scaling of this role, and it will be encumbent on the modern agency to act as the community manager for many of these brands. More and more consumers are starting their conversations with a brand online and a handful of people within an organization managing this back and forth won't be a viable long-term strategy.
• Strategy lead will come from the Digital side. If more and more people are having their first brand interaction at a search box and more and more brands have the online channel as the primary point of contact for consumers (or the first place a consumer goes with a query), the current landscape of the traditional agency leading the communications program is going to have to change and shift. If the majority of consumers are starting with a brand online, that's where the strategy lead needs to take place as well.
• Advertising shrinks. We tend to forget that advertising is a sub-set of Marketing. Marketing is going to become the primary driver and advertising - while still being a critical part of the marketing mix - will play a less significant role. The jewel in the crown of an entire Marketing campaign won't be the 30-second spot or the billboards. It's probably going to be many jewels from many different parts of that marketing mix (and the majority of them will be digital).
• Non-integrated. Brands think that an integrated solution is best, more cost-effective and cohesive to messaging. This is going to be the biggest and most dramatic change. Integrated won't work. Multiple disciplines working together is where the gold is going to be. We're not just talking about your digital shop sitting at the table with your corporate communications and general advertising agency - it's going to be deeper than that. There will be micro-specialists (like search engine optimization, analytics, etc...) all brought in (as needed) to make things flow. Even the current slew of agencies that claim full-integration have silos so wide and deep that they may as well be non-integrated.
• Mobile is Digital. As much as those micro-specialists will be critical to a brand's success, the digital aspect needs to think with one-line of connectivity. Having an online strategy and a mobile strategy is not going to work. Consumers are simply connected, and whether they are doing a search on their smartphone or at their desktop, they're not thinking of it as two very different or unique channels. The agency of the future shouldn't either.
• Analytics. The beginning, middle and end of success will be the analytics and metrics. Real metrics. Real insights and real reactions. None of this will be possible without a heavy analytics department capable of not only slicing and dicing the data, but working with the creative and client services department to help their brands see what others cannot.
• The new creative. Creative will not just be about "the big idea." Creative will be much more about many big ideas done in many different channels. This is going to force the hand of the current slew of creatives to re-think how they structure, present and produce great creative. It's not about shifting from 30-second spots to banner ads, and it's not about making a billboard work in an email. The core role of the creative department will extend and expand well-beyond it's current incantation.
• Storytelling as a department. Storytelling may be part of how this creative department will evolve. Whether it's transmedia or the growing popularity in having a non-linear story being told by a brand, the core idea of making a brand a better story-teller (through content, analytics, social media and various other media channels) is going to change the org chart in a major way.

That's my side, what's yours? What does the agency of the future look like to you?

By Mitch Joel

Related Posts:

• Maybe It Is Time For Marketing To Move Away From "The Big Idea"
• 7 Things That Blogging Does
• Is Social Media Right For Every Business?

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best summary of 'what has changed and what to do about it' deck that i've seen

UK figures sound on par with the Guardian's predictions