The Works Blog

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  Return on confusion - Social Media, ROI and stupidity

  September 30, 2011 By Jon Holloway

  Where do I start with ROI and this obsession with social media monitoring, measurement and proving ROI. It is a real mindmash! Ok, let’s start at the obvious:

  Most brands are not measuring or proving ROI on any media, channel or marketing spend. It is kind of a myth. How many brands spend $2 million above the line and have no idea on the ROI? Interesting…

  So why the obsession with social media ROI? Simple, because you can, because it is digital, the general feeling is that if you can measure it and prove it, that you should. Worse than that we all suddenly need new metrics to prove social media works, why does everything have to be revolution rather than evolution?

  Evolution, not revolution

  First of all I hate this obsession with social media as a whole, it’s a part of what we need to do, it is one of those ‘digital moments’ we have with our audience, but it isn’t the be all and end all of communication. It is certainly useless in a vacuum away from integrated digital campaigns, if you are in that mindset of, ‘let’s do social’, have a rethink, get to ‘let’s do useful communication’.

  Secondly, why new metrics, what has suddenly changed? I am totally amazed that we all think that there is a new magic formula to work out if what we are doing is working. It is mind-blowing.

  What we need to measure hasn’t changed!

  1. Effect on the bottom line – Aligning all spend with business strategy is key, are we achieving growth in line with what we expect based on marketing spend?
  2. Retention – Are we keeping all the customers we need, are we doing everything we can to make sure they are happy and feeding back in to our business? Are we harnessing negativity?
  3. Buzz – Are we doing everything we can to get our customers and audience talking about us and sharing everything we do? Advocacy also fits in here.

  How are those metrics any different now than they were 10 years ago? It is bunkum, the ways and things you can measure are different, but the actual top line metrics are easy.

  If there is any brand out there who can tie; how much have we sold? How many customers have we retained? & How noisy are they being? Back to any marketing spend then they would be super over the moon happy.

  Simplify everything

  How to think simply about social media ROI:

  1. Don’t put it in a Silo! That sucks and will ultimately create confusion for your team and management.
  2. Measure the effect on bottom line, how many people take the action we want them to. Make this your #1 metric.
  3. Understand your customers. Make sure you have a robust digital layer that captures everything from social, to phone to email and put that data to use to improve what you do. Then involve your customers in decision-making.
  4. Understand the spread of your message, socially, digitally, WOM, PR etc. No silo here, just add the social metrics to the mix.

  Don’t focus on social

  If you focus on social media in any aspect, you will be doomed to confusion. People to focus only on the social world, so why should you? In fact don’t focus on anything apart from data and the understanding of that data. Make sure you have a clear and robust digital layer that gives you the information you need from all contact points and then just talk to your customers in whatever channel THEY see fit.

  It’s not about what you want or believe, it’s about where they are and what they believe.

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  Negativity rocks - The customer is always right!

  September 27, 2011 By Jon Holloway

  Customer, customer, customer, we hear it over and over, daily. We need to focus on the customer and what they want, because the customer is always right. Today, right now, that is even more true, not only are they always going to be right, but they are also going to make sure they tell everyone they know instantly.

  Everyone in the marketing world will have had it drummed in to them to focus on the customer, to put them at the core of everything you do. How many times will you hear; know your customers, find out what they like and give them what they need? 1000 times a day, its the bedrock of standard marketing theory.

  The age old ‘customer is always right’ will always hang true and now it is being amplified by the ability to make that opinion known to a big open network. Sure the customer is not always right, but as far as they are concerned they are, and with a voice and network to influence others, what can we do?

  Simple, it is not about giving customers what they need, that should be baked in to your business. We need to evolve and get customers involved with the brand, we need to sew them in to the brand DNA, find every opportunity to embed them as part of the communication mix.

  If we take ‘the customer is always right’ as the premise, then we have to make sure that we know what each and everyone one of our customers thinks ‘right’ is.

  There is no blanket anymore, we need to get in to personalisation and this means an intelligent use of data. None of this is complex when you get in to the data, it’s just about getting the wrap right. The digital layer between your business and the consumer is the key to making sure that when the customer is always right, you can just say, yes sir and that is what we think to.

  5 steps to yes sir, you are right.

  1. Analyse your data and find the top 30 customers based on length of custom, number of purchases and value.
  2. Get in touch with each of them and invite them to be part of a special customer group aimed at making the business service better. Incentivise this involvement.
  3. Utilise this group to find true insight as to where you are missing out on the ‘digital moments’ with your customers.
  4. Get the digital layer right. Call it what you want (apart from social CRM). Make someone in your business responsible for understanding the trends in customer satisfaction and actioning that back in to service and marketing.
  5. Encourage negativity in as many ways as possible. Focus on negativity, you have to understand the journey from negative to positive in terms of customer contact. The ability to ignore the negative is a recipe for failure. A huge proportion of great business innovation comes from the negative. Encourage it, make it the thing to do, complain and we will love you.

  Out of all those 5 tips, the negativity one is the easiest to do, even if you have to incentivise it. Your customers know more about the holes in your business than anyone internally, embrace it and fix it. That is real customer evolution.

  Don’t focus on loyalty, focus on disloyalty..

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  Brand thinking - Think like a theme park

  September 26, 2011 By Jon Holloway

  On friday I put together my thoughts on the Facebook changes and what that means for consumers as a whole. In summary, your brand is going to be competing on a whole new level of entertainment, with consumers having the ability to turn noise up and down and get access to amazing things at their fingertips.

  If you take Facebook as a representative of the real world, you are now competing with things that people really care about. The message from your friend saying she has just had a baby, will take priority over your brand advertising, that amazing Red Bull video is going to swamp your mediocre content, well you get the picture. Life just got super hard and it is time to evolve brand thinking to align to a new world of ‘cool sh*t’. People have to care about what you are saying to turn that volume up.

  Sorry to use that profanatory, but it’s true, we all share cool, we all talk about cool and we all want to be perceived as cool. It’s very 80’s but it works for this analogy. Cool should be your new ethos, you can define it how you want but for me, cool is about being useful, relevant, fun, educational and entertaining.

  An easy way to start thinking cool?

  Act like a theme park (Disney, MGM, Dreamworld etc)

  You may think I am mad, but step back and have a think about the theme park experience. These parks are amazing, they tell a story from start to finish, everything is entertaining and fun, some of it is personal and there is nothing like telling your friends all about it. Theme parks are by definition ‘cool’.

  Your brand is now a theme park, forget thinking like a publisher we are at a whole new level. Go be a playground, create a map and become a theme park for your audience:

  1. Get your story straight - The greatest theme parks in the world are based on a great story. A true and credible platform that drives why they exist. What is your story, what is unique to you?
  2. Define your theme – The theme is vital, if you take an park, you will see a core, something that everything spans from. It makes it easy for the audience to get at every point. If Red Bull was a theme park it would be Energyland. What can your theme be?
  3. Understand the ‘digital moments’ – The world is a complicated place, like a theme park, you have many opportunities to have a moment with your audience. Think about the journey your customers take, how can you create ‘digital moments’ that are based on contagious experiences?
  4. Create experiences. Every step on the journey through a theme park is an experience. They develop opportunities for you to engage, interact and more importantly spend some money, which is inherent. How can you take that thinking and turn it in to brand communication?
  5. Data, data, data. Theme parks understand the value of data. They analyse everything, every moment is stored, looked at and improved. What is the digital wrap that is the buffer between you and your clients? How can you put that in to focus to drive action and communication?

  Tweet me your theme park ideas to @socialvation

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  The Facebook Ultimatum

  September 23, 2011 By Jon Holloway

  So here we are on the day after another revolutionary announcement from a social platform. Facebook has delivered a set of updates and plans that takes another step towards their ‘window to the digital world’ strategy.

  The most interesting thing about the announcement yesterday was not what was said for me, but the effect of what will be delivered on consumers. You will probably have read a piece about ‘thinking more like a publisher’ over the last 12 months and probably dismissed it just as quickly. Well it is time to pick it back up as the two elements that Facebook has focused on is going to give your audience a shake and will leave brands no choice but to just get more interesting and focus on doing ‘cool sh*t’.

  Take away the platform updates and what Facebook is delivering to users is 2 pretty simple, yet powerful things:

  1. Entertainment - Shareable, customisable and integrated music, film, books, information and more. Competition for attention just got serious. If your marketing is not centred on being entertaining, unique and with a real connection to your consumer, you have just lost.
  2. Ultimate personalisation - You can now switch people and information on and off. This is nothing new, but what is new is the ability to turn up the noise from certain people, content and brands to get a real personalised feed. To me it looks like a ‘reader’ for digital information that will change and mould the consumer.

  There is nowhere to hide

  There we go, in one big slam, brands have nowhere to hide anymore. If you are not being entertaining, interesting and allowing that value exchange with consumers, you are dead, you will get lost in the noise.

  Not right now, not this instant, but soon, very soon. There has always been this underlying feeling that consumer adoption to having ‘power over brands’ has not been as quick as the prophets keep saying. Well believe me, that adoption has just had a massive kick up the ass; this is adoption on steroids.

  Forget the platform; focus on ‘digital moments’

  Although Facebook is driving this adoption, don’t focus on it. There are so many ‘digital moments’ that you now have with your audience you need to be ready at anytime to make that moment entertaining and personalised. If you focus on Facebook you are only taking in about 15% of the actual engagement with your audience, take it in, understand it and then think about how you can push that thinking to the other 85% of your communication.

  A big problem for media of all kinds

  I have no doubt that what we are going to see is another tier of consumer evolution and education, Which causes a problem for all media. We have all learned to switch of to messaging, advertising and noise, what we have here is a platform pushing this story very hard. As we all get more used to doing this with content, entertainment and brands, that will evolve our interaction in the outside world.

  How long before we all want TV that we can choose to turn noise up and down, magazines that are built for our own interests only and experiences design specifically for our needs? Sound familiar? It is happening now and we are now going to go through a steep learning curve that is going to infect the masses.

  It’s time to get media agnostic and start the process of understanding the journey map of your audience. More to come on monday with the a plan to tackle the ultimatum.

  If you want to know what was said.. This is a good summary.

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  Tagged in: Brand | Digital | Marketing | social media

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  Brand Story DNA...

  September 15, 2011 By Jon Holloway

  Last night at the Creative On The Forefront (#COTFF) event over here at The Works we looked at the ‘Brand Story’ idea and how this resonates with a consumer who is rapidly evolving. When talking about Brand Stories I always refer to this video from Asics, the running shoe brand.

  Watch ‘in pursuit of perfection’

  A story that changed my view instantly

  This is not only an amazing creative piece but it sums up how powerful storytelling is in the modern world or marketing. Everyone who talks about hard hitting brand stories, brings up Nike, Red Bull and Apple, but this story is personal to me. I never got what Asics stands for, in fact I could go as far as saying I would be negative about the brand when it came up in conversation. None of their communication had infected me with the real truth of the brand.

  After watching this video, my next pair of running shoes will be Asics, we have to put aside the video and get in to the ‘story’ that is being told, rather than the mechanism that tells it.

  Brand Story DNA

  When you dissect this kind of video piece it gives you what I call Brand Story DNA. It’s a simple, yet powerful formula.

  • 

  In no particular order, every part of the equation is as important as the next, for me, focus starts with Why and Product. Get those right and the rest will be easy pickings.

  Why - if you haven’t already go watch this video from Simon Sinek at TEDx. Defining why you do what you do, above and beyond making a profit is the key to opening up your story.

  People - A mixture of the founders, staff, customers and the audience. People give life, give view point and have the ability to engage.

  History - I don’t mean ‘established circa 1890’ this is a combination of where you have come from and where you are going, history is always evolving. What happens tomorrow will be history the next day.

  Personality - Brands that lack personality, die. A combination of people, buzz and how you feel as an organisation. Take the internal culture and give it a voice.

  Credibility - What do we do, above and beyond the product to prove that we are a credible force in what we do.

  Product - The core of your brand. Product or service, it makes no difference. It has to be something that adds value, that fixes a need and does it with a product truth, not marketing spin.

  Truth - A story with a core of truth will be timeless. It allows people to unite and breeds passion and confidence in to every single person in the business. Truth will definitely set your brand free.

  Tell the story to everyone who will listen

  When you have a real story, that evokes everything that makes you who you are. It makes marketing, simple, fun and engaging. It empowers everyone within your business to get involved and it takes marketing outside of the marketing team (product, sales, service etc..) to be able to make communication work.

  Forget content, think experiences

  Another post will be coming soon, with a short webinar. In short, I hate the word content, it brings up all sorts of wrong definitions. We have to take the step now towards ‘Experiences’. Brand experiences, goes beyond content, transcends channels and allows you to tell your story in a cohesive way, that the new ‘individualistic’ customer can engage with on their terms.

  Story corner

  First steps? Get everyone in your business to submit a story. A story about what they do, their experiences and how they see your brand and business. Take these, read them, colate the information and look at the DNA of your people. From their it is just a matter of facts, truth and great products. Simple, isn’t it :)

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  Big Shiny Badge theory

  September 13, 2011 By Jon Holloway

  What is the definition of a super brand? You would happily go out with a big badge with that brand on, for everyone to see, not the product itself, but a big shiny badge. Think about the likes of Apple, Red Bull and Nike. How many people clamber over anything to wear that badge in as many ways as possible, outside of the product itself?

  I am a surfer, and when you look across the beach on a sunny morning, there will be 10 or more boards with an added Red Bull decal on the topside. How many people do you see with Apple stickers on books, bags, even on PCs. Why?

  Simple, people engage with the story of the brand, it has created a belief in the brand as a symbol and it reflects what we personally believe in. The great thing about stories is that they are infectious, they bring people together and they create this amazing belief in what you as a business are doing. Communicated well enough, this becomes iconic, transcends from product in to life, which is the definition of badge theory.

  Ask yourself a few questions:

  • What is our brand story?

  • Is it believable, truthful and iconic?

  • Why would anyone wear a badge with your brand on?

  • Can we communicate this in everything we do?

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  E, F, M-Commerce or WTF-Commerce?

  September 5, 2011 By Jon Holloway

  Nothing like a good label, or is that the label that defines the agency community. We like a good label, second post in under 7 days about crap labels for simple thing, sorry but it gets to me!

  First we had e-commerce, which is essentially buying stuff online, then came m-commerce, which is essentially buying stuff on your phone, then came f-commerce, which is essentially buying stuff on Facebook. I assume s-commerce exists as well (yep, just google’d it, social commerce, see f-commerce for description).

  Ok, draw a straight line through all the BS and you get buying stuff, so at the end of the day we are talking about shopping.

  For me it seems that brands and agencies haven’t caught up quite as quickly as consumers. For consumers it is just shopping, it is retail and all they want is to have the same experience whenever, wherever and whatever means of access they decide to use.

  Hands up if you have a retail(store) strategy, an e-comms strategy and a m-commerce strategy? Enjoying those buckets of strategic planning? Does it have any relevance to your consumer? No. Simple, they just want stuff, they want a great experience and with 99% of brands, that is not what they are getting.

  If you take a step back from the channel of purchase and think about the purchase experience it will change your mindset. What do you stand for as a business? Simplicity, style, speed, what is the one thing that every purchasing touch point has to have? Start with that and work in to your customers lives, what are they doing? Check your stats, do some research, find some insight and then create a ‘shopping experience’ that embraces the channels, rather than being dictated by them. Try buying something yourself across all the channels, could you take the brand off and still know who it was? Food for thought?

  Thoughts? Tweet me @socialvation

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