Know your RSS from your elbow

I’ve been re-reading David Ogilvy’s “Confessions of an Advertising Man”. This passage stood out for me:

Competition for the consumer’s attention is becoming more ferocious every year. She is being bombarded by a billion dollars’ worth of advertising every month. Thirty thousand brand names are competing for a place in her memory. If you want your voice to be heard above this ear-splitting barrage, your voice must be unique. It is our business to make our clients’ voices heard above the crowd.

Guess when that was written. It’s an accurate description, after all, of the current problems of interruption marketing. When Ogilvy wrote that, however, there were few alternatives available. Interruption was really all there was. Ogilvy wrote that in 1963.

Of course, things have become worse for advertisers, not only because of an increase in the number of competing brands visible through advertising, but also because advertisers are competing against the inherent scepticism and associated ad-blindness of its target audience. People do all they can now to avoid watching, reading, or hearing advertising. For many, it’s got to the point that an advertisement is a sign of a product’s failure. It’s certainly a sign of the product’s manufacturer failure to engage with its core market.

If the product is seriously worthy of spending millions to promote through a methodology that everyone by now surely knows is generating diminishing returns - to say the least - surely it’s worthy of spending a fraction of that amount engaging directly with the very consumers you hope will buy.

Don’t ask your agency to show you their ideas for your next TV campaign. Ask it how it intends to find the consumers that matter and discuss with them how to make your product better, get those consumers to tell other consumers, and how it intends to measure the success of the campaign.

Here’s the choice. Do you want your ad agency winning creative awards for stylish ads where nobody remembers what was being sold or do you want a campaign that delivers measurable results and is spread by consumer recommendation and conversation?

Doritos is obviously a company that has accepted that interruption marketing has no more legs. Well, on Earth, at least. I just received this press release:

Today Doritos makes history, taking the UK’s first step in communicating with aliens as they broadcast the first ever advert directed towards potential extra terrestrial life.

And how are the aliens being interrupted?

The message is being pulsed out over a six-hour period from high-powered radars at the EISCAT European space station in the Arctic Circle.

Can they pick this ad up on the Space Station, I wonder? And what is the call to action for beings seeing the ad out beyond Sirius?

If there remains any doubt as to whether Doritos are taking this seriously or not, the final paragraph of the press release should set minds at rest:

The broadcast received praise from Nick Pope, former Head of the MoD’s UFO project. Nick, a leading authority on UFO sightings and alien abductions commented: “I support this bold new venture in space communication. As humanity reaches out to the stars, this broadcast could lead to us finding the real ET. This is a historic day in our continuing search for alien life.”

Adam and I have both had conversations in the last week with companies keen to talk about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Companies that still needed persuading a couple of years ago that the web would be a key part of the their business future now see SEO as a panacea for all their traffic ills. If only they could find the right level of SEO skills, the phone would ring off the wall, their turnover of widgets would explode, and the company directors could take early retirement. This belief is reinforced by digital marketing agencies hyping SEO: take a look at the ads at the back of a magazine like NMA and you’ll see pages of SEO services on offer. So it must work.

Well, not quite. Skilfully applied SEO ‘magic’ may increase your search engine rankings in the short term but it’s really a question of diminishing returns. Success will always be temporary because it is subject to the arcane algorithms applied by the ranking engine. SEO is really Search 1.0. Let’s face it, publishing a web site without at least some level of applied SEO nowadays is like publishing your company details in the Yellow Pages using yellow ink: you’re invisible. SEO, therefore, is something you build into your site at birth.

Relying solely on SEO, however, is like putting up a billboard and then expending huge amounts of time, effort, and cash to erect a traffic management system that directs all cars past your advertisement. Described like this, you can see immediately how SEO has its roots in the old rules of marketing: make them look at me! We’ve moved on. (And the traffic will soon find a better and quicker route home.) You may get to the top of the rankings but that’s not much use if all your traffic is clicking through from Poland and Lithuania and you only deliver in a twelve mile radius of Manchester.

It’s the SEO experts who benefit
There is an increasing war of attrition between SEO experts and more wonga is probably spent on fine-tuning what lies behind the site than on the content and usefulness of the site itself. We know: we’ve done SEO in the past. This state of affairs ignores the fundamental truth of a successful web site: the most valuable visitors arrive through recommendation and they return because your site is sticky.

Recommendation leads to valuable visitors because they have already taken some self-qualifying steps before they arrive. They know what your site is about and they are either interested in the subject or even ready to buy. It means, for a start, that your home page or landing page can get down to business quickly. Contrast that with a click through from Google based on a simple link.

Bad love
Talk of recommendations raises the question of back links and link love. Google loves links, of course, but it’s choosy in the same way you would be choosy about recommendations. If I’m looking for a restaurant in a new town, I might look for further confirmation if I discover that the first two people who raved about the food and service at “Hank’s Especially Greasy Spoon” were the manager’s son and Hank’s wife.

Staying with the restaurant theme; if the manager shouts loudly enough then people will come. But what if the food’s dreadful, the service appalling, and my partner’s a vegetarian and the chef only does meat? I won’t be making another booking as I leave and I’m not going to be telling friends, colleagues, and family to hurry on down for a meal.

Acquiring visitors through recommendations and positive conversations means there will be fewer disappointed customers. Save the money you may end up spending on SEO and hire a better chef - or at least some bigger wine glasses.

While writing this I received an email asking if I wanted my web site to be ‘top of the Google rankings’. This sort of SEO promise is becoming increasingly like the other spam I get offering to add inches to my manhood - and I guess they’re not talking about my height. To be fair, the SEO offer, however shady the methods applied, might have a better chance of success - but not for long. The problem with using underhand tactics to manipulate rankings is that sooner or later - and usually sooner - Google notices and your site will be penalised. That means it more or less disappears from view. Yellow ink applied by Google.

Find them before they find you
The answer is to engage with customers before they arrive at your site and then, once they have visited, make sure your product or content is vital enough that they keep returning. (Maintaining core content is a subject for another post altogether.) So, less SEO and more CIE - Customer Interaction Effort.

There was a lot of tweeting on twitter today about twiddict. (Try saying that after a late and liquid night celebrating a friend’s 50th birthday.) The premise of twiddict is that it saves your tweets when twitter is down and then posts them when twitter resurfaces. On the face of it, this sounds helpful.

I won’t be using it, however. When twitter is down I get frustrated, like most people. But for me, one of the joys of twitter is the truly ephemeral nature of it. I don’t scroll back through pages of tweets to discover what I’ve missed while I’ve been away from my desk. And I don’t try to make sure everyone I know has seen a tweet of mine by sending them a direct message instead. On top of that, the beauty of tweets are surely their spontaneity. If I’m having to sit and think about a tweet, the only honest tweet I can add to twitter is: “sitting and thinking about a tweet”. And when twitter comes back up, the last thing I want to do is to catch up on reams of tweets that are no longer current.

Twiddict is obviously a bit of fun on the part of its team of Belgian creators. Basing its service offering on the continuing failure of twitter to scale successfully is probably not a long-term business plan. If Twidict becomes an essential tool for twitter users, I suspect that twitter will no longer need to worry about scaling and Twiddict may have to evolve into FriendFeedict instead.

For a slightly more positive spin on twiddict, take a look at Stan Schroeder’s post at Mashable.

We’re big fans of Commoncraft videos here on bpodr and featured one previously about Twitter. Here’s a new one from Lee LeFever and the team on Social Media. It helps if you like ice cream. Of course, I’m one of those strange people that thinks the ONLY ice cream is vanilla. But hey, it’s all about choice.

If there is one concept that best defines the benefits of web 2.0 technology, it would be collaboration. So, whether the terms ‘PR 2.0′, ’social media’, or ’social marketing’ rock your boat or, alternatively, have you heaving over the side, it all comes down to whether you believe your internet presence should involve engaging with others for some sort of mutual benefit.

For companies, in particular, this boils down to the question of whether or not they want to collaborate with customers and partners. If a company believes its customers should form no part of a collaborative effort, then however well-dressed any implemented web 2.0 tools may be, they will add nothing but cost and problems. We can call these ’selfish companies’ and they will eventually suffer for their selfishness in the great corporate playground: nobody will want to talk to them; then nobody will bother to talk about them; and finally they’ll turn up at school reunions and nobody will even remember them.

If, on the other hand, a company recognises the true potential of breaking down the ubiquitous barriers between producer and customer - barriers so often created by traditional PR, marketing, and advertising - then the tools available thanks to web 2.0 provide a flexible range of opportunities for creating a host of mutually beneficial relationships. The playground for them will be a much more interesting place: they may even skip to the head of the queue for the tuck shop.

My wife treated some of her contractors to dinner a couple of nights ago. They all went to a renovated restaurant a few miles outside town where my wife had been a week or so earlier for a birthday meal with friends.

The table was booked for 8pm and they turned up shortly after 7.30 so they could chat in the bar and relax a little before sitting down to eat. Laura went to order the drinks. The barman apologised and told her that it was his first night and that he was finding his way around. Laura sympathised and gave her order. The guy did his best but it was soon clear that not only was this his first night at this bar but it was his first night in any bar. He couldn’t tell wine glasses from tumblers and a house wine from a vintage bottle.

What made Laura frustrated above all else was that there was another barman there who was perhaps meant to be overseeing the new guy’s work but who offered no help at all. When the new barman had wandered off in yet another futile attempt to select the right glass or bottle, Laura approached the other barman and suggested that 20 minutes was a long time to wait for a simple round of drinks for seven people. This is the conversation they had:

Barman: He explained it was his first night.
Laura: I know and I’m trying to avoid making him feel self-conscious but 20 minutes is too long.
Barman: You’re just going to have to put up with it.

That’s it. No offer to help. Laura then told him she had a table booked for 8pm and asked if he could tell the woman at the desk they were here but running late in the bar. She received a grunt in response and the man walked off.

It took another 15 minutes to get their drinks, by which time they had no time to drink them so picked everything up and walked through to the restaurant. More great service. The woman told them she had let their table go because they were late (it was 8.20 and obviously the barman had not passed on the message). Laura stood her ground and the woman told them to return to the bar and she’d call them. A table was finishing up. ‘How long?’ asked Laura. ‘No more than 10 minutes,’ replied the woman.

It was a further hour before they were finally seated. Had the restaurant been in town or had their been somewhere to go close by they would have left but everyone had come by cab and there is nothing along that stretch of road but fields. The food was good (which is one of the reasons Laura had wanted to return) but the whole experience was ruined before anything reached their mouths.

Laura is going to write a letter to the manager of the restaurant, of course, and to the owners. She has since discovered that it (The Arkle Manor) is owned by Landmark Leisure - part of M&B. What’s more important is that Laura’s bad experience became the bad experience of six others that night and that the aggressive and dismissive attitude of one barman and the confrontation attitude of the woman on the desk means that the Arkle Manor will live in their minds for a long time. None of them will return and all of them will relate the experience to their friends, family, and colleagues. Leaving an untrained barman to cope alone (and none of the blame is his) has become an expensive mistake.

Perhaps Laura should have raised merry hell at the time and demanded to speak to the manager. But why should she have to? How would that have improved the mood of the evening? I wonder if the chef knows the excellent food is being undermined by a front of house who obviously couldn’t care.

And the salient point of this little rant? If you provide no easy way for customers to describe their experiences in a forum connected to your enterprise (ie a comments section on your web page), they will resort to whatever uncontrolled medium is available. Word spreads, monitoring and responding to comments becomes difficult, and one customer’s bad night becomes a growing stain on your reputation. Perhaps not tonight or next week but once it’s on the web, it stays there and can come back to bite you on the medium rare rump steak at any time.

Mike Southon, co-author of “The Beermat Entrepreneur”, has a weekly column in the FT. It forms part of the ‘Entrepreneur’ section, which, in turn, sits at the the back of the Saturday ‘Your Money’ section. This obviously involves some newsprint origami before you reach it but it’s usually worth the effort.

I miss it occasionally and yesterday browsed the column titles on the FT web site to catch up with anything that appeared interesting. The title that immediately got my attention was ‘Reputations precede you‘. Southon rarely discusses the internet per se but here was a subject - the combination of entrepreneurs and reputation - that seemed a perfect fit for an examination of how on-line tools can enhance or damage a brand or its owners.

Here is what Southon said about reputation and the internet:

“Your reputation is defined by your case studies, which should be refreshed on your website and in your literature as often as possible.”

That’s it. Seriously. Over 700 words on reputation and entrepreneurs and not a single mention of a ‘blog’ or a ‘forum’ or a ‘podcast’. Not even a hint that a quick check of Google or Technorati (for instance) could show you what your global reputation might be.

Southon’s starting point for his column is a report issues by Coutts, bankers to the wealthy. It appears they have at least 18,000 entrepreneurs as their customers. It would also appear that those 18,000 care little for what an internet-based network of their partners, colleagues, and customers might be saying about them and their services or products. The thrust of the report is towards being in control of your PR by knowing everything about your company and then controlling the messages you deliver to ‘the media’. By ‘the media’, of course, is meant traditional press outlets. This is inevitable, since the report has been written by a PR professional at a top rank PR company with a web site that you can search for a long time without finding any evidence that the internet could form part of any integrated communications strategy.

But that’s by the way. Stuck like this in the world of reacting to the impact of traditional media means allowing your reputation management to turn like an oil tanker when what you need is the handling of a speed boat. The report’s author ends with a Japanese proverb:

“The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of an hour”.

This was from a period before your company’s share price could be irrevocably damaged in the time it takes to watch the cherry blossom fall. The proverb needs updating:

“The reputation of your brand may be determined by the speed and manner of your reaction to a blog post read by a thousand customers.”

When my wife and I bought our first place - a converted top floor flat in north London - it was at a time when property prices were at a peak and interest rates were around 13.5%. We were both working for Reuters at the time and found a mortgage fairly easily but by the time we moved in, we had spare cash for a bed and little else.

On a Saturday morning shortly after we moved in, we took a walk around the area and found a small art gallery on the main road. In the window was a framed print called ‘Fighting Cats’ by Michelle Tippett. Our new flat was bright and the living area had a small mezzanine, which meant there was one side of the room with a large white wall. This picture, with its black wooden frame, looked perfect for hanging in the middle of that space. Both of us immediately felt drawn to the picture but the price!

Reason told us that to buy it was sheer extravagance, that there were other, much more important purchases to be made if our new home was going to function as more than a large waiting room with clothes on the floor. Reason told us that friends and family would consider us not only reckless but also ungrateful for the help and advice we had been given over the previous weeks if we bought a print ahead of a sofa or even some pots and pans.

Reason lost out, of course, and those Fighting Cats were the only thing we took with us from that flat when we got posted to Singapore less than a year later. The print now hangs in its fourth house. No sofa and no pots and pans remain from that Highgate flat.

Every time I enter our house, it’s Fighting Cats that I see first. It hangs in the hall like a welcome memory. Sometimes, reason can stop you making the right choice. Buying that print led to a couple of uncomfortable months but it was our first risky decision taken as a couple and it gave us the taste for more: moving to Singapore, having three children, leaving full-time employment and setting up our own - separate - businesses. And we’re bound more by those cats than would have been possible with any set of quality kitchen tools.

If you meet your own Fighting Cats, don’t turn your back.

We’ve been quiet here for too long. I could make a list of excuses but that’s exactly what they’d be; excuses. The simple truth is that we’ve not been holding up our end of the bargain. We’ve not been talking. It’s time, therefore, to interrupt our interruption. And that reminds me of this video I saw posted first by Chris Brogan. It’s easy to nod in amused superiority but it’s equally easy to fail to see how regularly we can fall into the same patterns of behaviour.