Multi-Click Marketing

When one click just doesn't cut it. Brought to you by Ensight

[multiclickmarketing]

Using memes to make connections that last

One of the oldest marketing tools in memory The one thing that seems to elude many marketers is the ability to attain - and maintain - customer's interest in their brand over time. It is one thing to get customers to read one's copy and click over to a website, respond to or forward an email to one's friends, and Like, or Follow the brand message - it is much more difficult to maintain the interest going forward.

One of the oldest marketing tools in memory is word-of-mouth. The Word-of-mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) defines (PDF) word-of-mouth as “[t]he act of consumers providing information to other consumers” and word-of-mouth marketing as “giving people a reasons to talk about your products and services, and making it easier for that conversation to take place.” But how does word-of-mouth marketing work? According to WOMMA, “Word of mouth marketing empowers people to share their experiences. It’s harnessing the voice of the customer for the good of the brand. And it’s acknowledging that the unsatisfied customer is equally powerful.” One way to try to understand Word of mouth marketing is to follow the way memes operate. A meme is an information pattern. It is held in an individual's memory and can be copied to another person’s memory. The science of memetics studies how memes replicate, spread and evolve. Advertising uses memes constantly by releasing catchy strap lines like “Just do it” and “Finger licking good”, pop culture has memes like “All you need is love”, “Sorry seems to be the hardest word”, and politicians use memes like “The War on Terror” and “Yes we can!” Over the last ten years, says American scholar  Kristen Lacefield, many theories of marketing communication have been based on a memetic perspective on information:  “[v]iral marketing, buzz marketing, brand genetics, word-of-mouth marketing and connected marketing are all terms that describe essentially the same thing: the treatment of a product or brand as something that can be spontaneously passed on across a population with minimal further effort on behalf of the marketer after the initial infection." One of the most successful applications of marketing memes is the competition. Competitions are what Seth Godin terms a “soft innovation” which is, he says “what you, the marketer, see. If it catches on and becomes something the consumer sees, it is now a free prize. A free prize […] has two key characteristics. First, it’s the thing about your service, your products or your organization that’s worth remarking on, something worth seeking out and buying […] Second, a free prize is not about what a person needs. Instead, it satisfies our wants.” Obviously, free prizes are the kind of stuff that ‘goes viral’ and gets transmitted via word-of mouth. For Martin Oetting, research director at WOM experts trnd competitions carry a strong gaming aspect - - "[w]hat if you could get an audience to interact with your brand for weeks by connecting on the Web then travelling and seeking out locations and unravelling hints that you are giving them while trying to solve a mystery?"  “Crack the Safe with a Tweet” as a memetic competition A competition needs a few defining features, in order to become memetic. Firstly – it needs to punt a large, attractive prize. Secondly – it needs to combine both a challenge, and ease of use. Thirdly – the competition must have a thick layer of intrigue and mystery. Boosted – described on Facebook as “[t]he Samsung + Intel power union (that) exists for one purpose: to boost technology past the standard and to blow it past the mundane.” In their latest project - Tweetcracker - the latest Samsung Series 9 Laptop, which comes with Intel’s Gen Core i5 processor and $10,000 in gold (and a third, mystery prize yet to be announced) are locked inside a safe and punters are invited to Tweet the suggested number combination required to crack the safe’s lock and open the lock. Each participant has three daily chances to crack the code – and Tweetcracker offers hints that can be used to find the right combination. This clever marketing ploy has all the ingredients of a viral / WOM / Buzz marketing runaway campaign. The attractive prizes are what Godin means when he talks about soft innovations that cater to our wants. The memetic triggers – ease of use (tweeting), scalability (Twitter is a social network; it is built to make it easy for participants to enter their codes and call on their friends and followers to do the same), and intrigue (the safe, the lock, the complex combination and the even more complex hints) are all there to bolster responses over time, return usage and forwarding of the competition details. Boosted uses a multichannel approach, with the website offering competition information and updates, and Twitter as the ‘port of entry’. In addition, the hashtag – #tweetcracker facilitates data entry and allows the organisers to follow and analyse the incoming traffic. Facebook and Twitter (@boostedtweets) are also used to drop hints and to offer ongoing encouragement and support, as well as spot-prizes. Overall, the channels Boosted uses allow people to participate in a project that offers interest, intrigue – and great prizes through easy entry. The channels also enable users to share their experiences with their peers – thus creating a memetic wave. Lastly – it uses the specific characteristics of each channel to the campaign’s advantage.

[multiclickmarketing]

10.7 sources of pre-purchase information per shopper

Consumers look for their own reason to buy Traditionally, marketers create and offer an attractive, often seductive 'reason to buy' and use a variety of channels to make sure that the voice of their brand is presented to,  and noticed by, customers on their journey to the Point of Sale (POS) or the shelf. If all goes well (from a marketer’s point of view), customers would choose the advertised product at the POS or off the shelf. In 2011, the average shopper used 10.7 sources of information before buying - says Jim Lecinski, Google's Managing Director, US Sales & Service. This means that additional processes have inserted themselves between the brand message – and the point of purchase. In a freely available eBook, Lecinski coined the term "Zero Moment Of Truth", or ZMOT, to describe this emerging phenomenon. Customers are now able to learn much more about the product (specifications, vendors, prices, accessibility and availability, suitability and so on) before they actually commit to buying it.  In addition, says John Ross, CEO, Shopper Sciences - an increasingly important aspect of the decision to purchase is customers’ desire to learn. Shoppers say "I want to be smarter, make better choices while also saving some money", says Ross. Saatchi & Saatchi X have recently conducted a study to understand the emotional benefits that drive and influence shopping behaviour, says CEO Dina Howell. They found that "[s]hoppers today want to explore and think about how products can improve their lives. They do reconnaissance to gain the insights they need, and they’re driven to bond with others and enrich relationships as they learn. They are motivated by a desire to take charge of their own identities and the well-being of their families and homes." While almost all product research begins with search, customers indicated that they use more that 10 sources of information before buying. Multi-channel information resources used 64% of the UK population have researched products or services online within the last 3 months. 78% of consumers used two or more channels and 30% of consumers used three or more channels to browse, research and make purchases. The data is not limited to online shoppers only -- nearly 45% of European Internet users say that in the past three months they have researched a product online and then bought it in a shop. By 2014, 53% of total retail sales (online and offline) will be affected by the Web, as consumers increasingly use the Internet to research products before purchasing. Facebook, blogs, Twitter and customer reviews are considered the most effective tactics for mobilising consumers to talk up products online. Customers use websites to… •    Find and read consumer reviews (which, according to the study, are nearly 12 times more trusted than descriptions provided by manufacturers). •    Check for availability of product ratings and for  user-generated or consumer product reviews;  •    Find the best price and compare brands. Customers use social networks to… •    Recommend companies and/or products (Twitter) •    Announce their intention to buy the product  (Twitter) •    Find information about products and companies (Facebook) •    Make purchase decisions about various categories of products and services •    Receive advice relating to a product purchase from friends and followers Customers who used email … •    Felt that email newsletter advertising increased their disposition to buy •    Thought that, when email offered a good value proposition, they forwarded good newsletter promotional offers and product reviews on to friends •    Talked directly to other customers through email •    Read information in an email received from a brand/manufacturer •    Watched a video shared through email •    Read information in an email received from a brand/manufacturer or a retailer/store (PDF). The various stages of the purchase process In his book "The Psychology of Marketing: Cross-Cultural Perspectives" Gerhard Raab lists four stages that underline the purchase process – •    Unfulfilled needs and desires (“I need this product” or “I want this product”) •    Increased tension (“why should I buy this product?”) and corresponding drives (“I do have a reason to buy this product”!) •    Learning processes (“I'd like to know more about this – and other available, similar products”) resulting in completing cognitive processes (“now I know this product really well!”). •    Lastly- the goal or needs are fulfilled and the tension is reduced Naturally, customers need an external reference system in each and every stage of their shopping journey. In "Consumer psychology for marketing, Volume 1" the authors argue that customers consider decisions about brand choices “up to the moment of purchase”. As customers straddle channels in their search for the first buy, marketers have ample opportunities to find touch points where customers can be reached and offered relevant brand information.

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Marketers can use their brand expertise to break through the clutter

Digital marketer Eric Anderson argues that "[c]onsumer empowerment through social media is inevitable and permanent, irrespective of the specific channel or technology." This is mainly due to the sense of freedom that people feel when they rely on - and turn to - peers for information.  As a result, he says - "[t]he criteria for successful social media participation by marketers will become more stringent, not less, as demand on consumer attention increases." At the same time, marketers who overstep the mark in social media face persistent consumer backlash that "will gradually evolve a set of norms for that participation."

This is a main reason all marketers are becoming multi-channel marketers. Social media has been the catalyst that has finally driven marketers away from the comfort of their websites and into the land where the consumer dwells. Here, consumers own the land and marketers are just visitors. This uneasy position has put marketers on the back foot: how does one take control of the conversation where he’s the unwanted guest?

According to Seth Godin, American entrepreneur, author and public speaker, interruption marketing is all but dead (video), "you are busy yelling at people about a problem they don’t think they have. If they don’t think they have the problem – they will not listen, there’s simply too much clutter…"

The reason interruption marketing doesn't work in social channels is that, while consumers are only too happy to be interrupted when they are receiving value from a 3rd party contributor - and pay for this value with chunks of their attention, the entire value chain is based on the fact that all parties give away their value for free (or in exchange for similar value from others). This puts the onus on marketers to find another way to be seen and heard.

Disillusioned with interruption marketing, Seth Godin coined - and champions - the term "permission marketing" and defined it as "the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them."

The answer is brand-expertise

In his book Attention!: how to interrupt, yell, whisper, and touch consumers author Ken Sacharin compares attempts to grab the attention of consumers to trying strategies for getting attention in a crowded room. The one person who always gets noticed in a crowded room is the expert. Why do experts enjoy such special social privileges? Japanese philosopher Shunryu Suzuki saw expertise as an extended exercise in focus: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few", he said.

As they set out to make purchasing decisions, consumers (those denizens of crowded rooms) need specific – specialised – information. While they may not be keen to hear the voice of the marketing department, trying to make a sale, they are more than likely to want to hear a piece of good advice. Offering real-value advice is a sure and tested way to get one’s undivided attention. This offers marketers the opportunity to set themselves up as experts in particular topics. Marketers should therefore establish a centre of knowledge, positioning themselves as subject-experts.

Tom Kelley from IDEO - the international design and innovation think-tank consultancy - coined the term "T-shaped individual" when referring to people who "enjoy a breadth of knowledge in many fields, but they also have depth in at least one area of expertise." Marketers’ broad knowledge may make them good conversationalists and increase their popularity, but their in-depth brand-knowledge will ultimately help them to make a sale.

When you're the best source of information available, your customers will come to you.

[multiclickmarketing]

A marketer's multi-channel dilemma: everything to everyone, everywhere

Avoiding the trap In his book Marketing in the 21st Century: Interactive and multi-channel marketing, Marketing Professor Bruce Keillor offers four interrelated components that constitute eCRM campaigns. Firstly, he says, eCRM programs aim to use the Internet to understand the customer. Secondly, eCRM helps marketers to match products with the ‘right’ customers. Thirdly, eCRM sells to customers on - and off - line. The fourth – and the most important – component, according to Keillor, is that eCRM aims to provide customers with the service they need. 

Keillor does not mention Mckinsey “'3E' trap”: Mckinsey Company's research team coined the term as a warning to marketers – the “'3E' trap” means trying to offer "everything to everyone, everywhere." The '3E' trap has special ramifications concerning marketer’s focus – both strategic and financial.  As the number of marketing channels swells, marketers are faced with an ever-increasing drain on their time and budget. Marketer’s best bet is to work across available channels, leveraging and balancing resources. According to crmbuyer.com "[t]he main purpose of cross-channel marketing is to coordinate efforts across channels to drive a consistent message for a marketing campaign [….]  It ensures enhanced ROI by optimizing the channel usage, ensuring higher interaction among the channels at regular intervals." But how can marketers decide where to focus their time, attention and resources for the best return on investment? The answer is to first start by implementing proper measurement across each channel. Measuring as a subtle art of mix-and-match Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw argued that his tailor was, by far, his most sensible observer – "he took my measurement anew every time he saw me, while all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me."  The same principle should apply when marketers wish to implement channel-specific measurement: on the one hand, a singular metric is required so that the results from each channel can be measured consistently. At the same time - marketers need to be aware that each channel is a unique communication, integration and transaction track. Channels have addressable, unique identifiers: email has an email address, each mobile has its own telephone number, social sites have account "identity" and websites use cookies – while these are useful identifiers, marketers could clearly benefit from a consistent, centralised identifier that maps customer interactions across multiple channels. The fusion between profiles – as a consistent metric – and each channel’s unique identifier facilitates the assignment of weightings and values to these profiles, enabling marketers to determine which channels are most effective. The Internet Encyclopedia defines user profile as "Information that describes a particular user”. It relates to user’s preferences, needs, goals, and expectations. Previously, we have discussed personalisation principles, including the fact that user profiles can be behavioural ("what they do") and factual ("what they tell us") and that data may be collected explicitly, through forms, questionnaires, product rankings or surveys filled in by the user, or implicitly – on the client side, through collecting cookies, for example, or on the server side – through log-analysis. A paper (PDF) discussing techniques involved in the personalisation process, argues that personalisation enables a channel (in this case, a website) to use past knowledge on user behaviour (or behaviour by other users with similar profiles) to make recommendations that are based on past purchases, devise marketing messages that are based on user interests, and adjust prices and products according to user profiles.  Even if no additional information exists, "by simply assuming that user actions in the past are repeated in the future, we can predict a user’s future interactions". Such predictions can then be fed back into existing user profiles. According to the paper, building a model of the user is "[c]entral to this task of learning to personalize.” Each action taken by the user is done in the context of a specific task, “and the main question is what information is available so that the process of predicting the future can be maximally informed by the past." The ability to utilise profiles, to focus on specific user tasks and information from the past, improves a marketer's ability to identify the most effective channels, and -- through personalisation -- to improve user experience, preserve precious resources and allocate them more effectively to relevant channels. 

[multiclickmarketing]

Thinking like a recipient

Consider recipients 40 years ago, in 1971, computer engineer Ray Tomlinson invented internet based email and, for those who wonder – email is very much alive and is going strong. According to eMarketer (quoted here) 93% of online consumers have subscribed to receive permission-based email at least once a day. 83% check their email at least once per day, while 70% say that they always open emails from their favourite companies. Up to 30% of email is opened on mobile devices.  The email carrot is that, whichever way email is delivered, it is an extraordinarily powerful form of communication, while the stick of email-based marketing is that it risks death-by-click: 91% of respondents on the eMarketer study unsubscribed from at least one mailing list recently. Is there a way to avoid the drop? When sending out email campaigns, marketers should consider recipients, and the type of relationship recipients are expected to form with the brand.  The problem is that recipients are inundated with messages that overrun their mail boxes.  According to computer and telecom market research firm Radicati Group, an average person sends out 8 emails per day and receives 31 back – that’s a yearly turnover of 14235 solicited (non-spam) messages per person. Assuming that – as stated in the eMarketer study mentioned earlier - recipients of these wanted missives open the message and read it – they will find that each of these messages wants them to take some sort of action: click a link, fill in a form, take part in a poll, share with a friend or forward-on, buy something, “Like” on Facebook or “Follow” on Twitter. Recipients’ limited attention-span is challenging marketers Facing this info-clutter, marketers should strive to ensure that their brand has access to two major aspects of their customers’ attention span. The first aspect is customers’ Share of Mind.  According to the Brandchannel.com Glossary, Share of Mind (sometimes known as ‘Top of Mind’) “measures how often consumers think about a particular brand as a percentage of all the times they think about all the brands in its category.”  Market researchers ascertain a brand’s Share of Mind by asking a question like “what is the first brand name that comes to mind when I say ‘toothpaste’?” Share of Mind points to the brand’s popularity and indicates the extent to which customers are aware of the brand. The second aspect of customers’ attention is known as Share of Time. Late last year, global measurement and information specialists Nielsen set out to address people’s share of time. This is how they defined their task: "If all […] Internet time were condensed into one hour, how much time would be spent in the most heavily used sectors?" The top five players were social networks/blogs with 13 minutes and 36 seconds, games – occupying 6 minutes and 6 seconds, email – taking up 5 minutes, search, using 2 minutes and 36 seconds, and portals (and other non-blog websites) with 2 minutes and 26 seconds of people’s Internet hour. The need to gain access to customers’ Share of Mind and Share of Time challenges marketers to find innovative ways for their brand to stand out amongst other brands, and to do it within tasking time constraints. Limited access is better than none A possible way to respond to customer attention-span challenges is to consider the multi-channel approach. Marketers can consider four of the top five channels (social networks, email, search and websites) as different avenues for a comprehensive marketing and communication strategy. Firstly, this approach offers a time-window of about 30 minutes, within which marketers can access customers across channels. Secondly, exposing the brand in various ways across several channels helps to increase brand-awareness and contribute to brand presence within customer’s Share of Mind. It is important to remember that activities within the ‘time window’ discussed here are not necessarily arranged in a consecutive order – a customer may check her email, come back to her computer an hour later to search for something, and visit a website a few hours later. This lends importance to the use of multi-channel digital signals that are based on behaviour, conversation and engagement, in order to gain access to customers’ attention. Time is a priceless commodity. Customers’ time should therefore be seen as a crucial factor when planning and executing a brand communication strategy. Providers of financial services, such as short term insurance and loans, have made time their best USP by assuring customers that they can be fully insured or receive a loan in a just a few minutes. The same principle is used when marketers want customers to take action, for instance, following a link, answering a few questions, and ‘Like’ or “follow’ a brand. The advert strapline and email subject line can offer a reward within a set period of time (“Receive a 30% discount on your next [brand] purchase in just two minutes!”). Lastly – time is a form of currency. Just as retailers have learned that 998 is perceived as attractively cheaper than 1000, customer may consider 1 minute to be an insufficient amount of time to complete the task and consider 3 minutes to be – literally -  a waste of time. Here, too, marketers can use behavioural clues to gauge the optimal amount of time to ask for. British historian E. P. Thompson argued that time is a precious commodity and that one needs to see to it is not wasted - "not the task but the value of time when reduced to money is dominant. Time is currency: it is not passed it is spent.” Marketers would do well to help their customers to make good use of their precious time in the hope that, in return, customers will allow them access to their precious attention span.

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Knowledge gained through digital signals offers marketing value

From Information to Knowledge Traditionally, information-reliant industries such as marketing, seek to assess the inherent value of the information they own, acquire and use. Resolving that, essentially, information can be considered a commodity, marketers apply a formula based on Return on Investment (ROI) – defined simply as “the amount of profit …. from an investment made.”

Economics guru and Noble laureate George Stigler, the person credited with birthing the science of Information Economics, turned this argument on its head -- according to Stigler (PDF), it is knowledge, or the way information is applied – that influences market behaviour. Stigler argued further that the amount and accuracy of available market-knowledge are critical to this process. As far as marketers are concerned, knowledge is derived from one of two sources:

What they know about their customers, and

What customers know about the brand

Traditionally, marketers know about customers through CRM and direct marketing, while customers know about a brand through its branding. Still, George Stigler observed that the consensus used to be that traders and investors knew a great deal, while customers knew little.  This state of affairs has all but vanished in the 21st century Social Networks-driven economy. Today, customers can search and access information that is needs-based, rather than product-based. They use search engines and peer-generated information on social networks to compare an entire range of products that are offered by various manufacturers, and reach an optimal purchase-decision, based on a host of criteria, such as application specifications, price, value-for-money, re-saleability etc.  The knowledge customers derive from such comparisons is valuable to both customers and marketers because both buyer and seller seek positive ROI: consumers can save money as they purchase and use the product, while brand owners can make a sale. “What they tell us” vs. “what they do” Marketers derive value from two types of knowledge-tracks:  the explicit track is based on knowledge customers pass on to marketers by for example, answering questionnaires and surveys, filling in forms etc. On the other hand, the implicit track relies on actions taken by customers, for example, using search engines and clicking – or avoiding clicking – on links.  As they plan the details of the campaign or message they wish to disseminate, marketers can use multi-channel digital signals that are based on behaviour, conversation and engagement, to follow the explicit and implicit knowledge tracks, ascertaining – for example - how customers shop, which products they prefer and what form of information they need at each stage of the decision-making cycle. According to MarketingSavant's Dana Van Den Heuvel, engaging customers in conversations involves some – or all – of the following steps:

Using search engine analytics, email, search engine alerts and feeds to identify brand-relevant keywords

Identifying relevant conversation through mentions in Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. LinkedIn and other social sites.

Ascertaining which conversations are relevant

Deciding on the voice, tone and manner to use (for example - guiding, reflecting, challenging, enlightening, educating)

Engaging, sharing and targeting

As they learn about the way customers influence behavioural change through engagement, marketers find new ways to drive-through the kind of messaging that may ultimately change behaviour patterns in their market.

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Between a rock and a hard place: how should marketers deal with new channels?

The four attitudes One of the most astute assessments of the relationship between humans and technology appears in the glossary of "The Handbook of Technology Management" under “Technology Readiness” which, according to the book, is the “propensity to use and adopt technologies for accomplishing goals in one's personal and professional life.”

People’s technology readiness (or lack of it) manifests through four possible attitudes: some users feel optimistic about technology; they have a positive view of the control and efficiency that technology offers. Innovativeness – the second attitude – helps those with the tendency to be a technology pioneer. Some users, on the other hand, experience discomfort – at what they perceive as lack of control over technology and tend to feel quite overwhelmed by it. Lastly – some users experience plain insecurity, involving distrust and scepticism in relation to technology. Clients, customers and marketers are bound to experience any one – or more – of these four attitudes: they may feel optimistic, innovative, experience discomfort – or feel insecure about technology. Marketers may therefore find themselves wedged between a rock (the clients or brand owners) and a hard place (the customers, as potential brand users). On the one hand, marketers are expected to identify, assess and recommend emerging technologies that may be useful to their brand – that ‘next big thing’ that could guarantee an explosive uptake by customers. On the other hand, the industry is awash in new applications, platforms and services that bell-and-whistle their way in, only to fizzle out and disappear. Which new technology should marketers follow and where should they hedge their bets? It seems that the prevailing reaction is to bet on an ever-growing number of new ideas as marketers scramble frantically to get their hands on anything new for fear of losing the competitive edge by being ‘the last one there’. Fight-or-flight response to Google+ The main question marketers ask themselves each time a new technology appears is – should one wait until the new platform settles and shows its worth, or does one commit resources to learning about it and start using it immediately? In a recent article, eConsultancy’s Matt Owen considers the huge media hype around Google+: “Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past week” he says, “you’ll be aware of the huge buzz (no pun intended) surrounding Google+, the search giant’s latest foray into the world of social networking.” We all know that Google’s previous forays onto social networking failed quite badly, yet - reading about Google+ across various social networks (even Facebook), “you’ll be hearing the great and the good praising the new platform, telling us how great it looks, how useful it is […] If you’re on Google+ then hey, you must be an influencer right?” Owen is overly cautious about the question (consider the title to his article: “Google+ : Early access doesn’t mean early success.”)  - he says “it’s simply too early to tell what the platform is or how it will be used once Google opens those invitation floodgates.”  Reading this, every marketer is likely to ask himself what happens once Google+ reaches 5 million members, then 10 million and then soon 100 million? Must he adopt Google+ now, or should he wait and see? American doctor Walter Bradford Cannon   coined the term Fight or Flight Response to describe the range of potential reactions that humans face when confronted by imminent danger. Considering their conflicting options (stay and fight or run for one’s life?) at an instinctive level, humans and animals often simply freeze – opting to ‘playing dead’, as it were.  Looking for the bigger picture It appears that marketers are expected to manage an ever-growing number of platforms and channels with an increasingly fragmented audience. Should they accept the challenge and adopt Google+, or should they keep working on existing, successful social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube? Anxiously, they ask themselves, isn’t a “wait and see” response an act of freezing, of procrastinating, of not doing anything? Clearly, what is required is a wide-angle view – the ability to asses the larger picture of the situation. Marketers would therefore do well to take their time before rushing in to take-up, sight-unseen, new channels. An important rule of thumb here is that each channel evolves with its user base. For example - Twitter members introduced re-tweets, hashtags and other elements of what constitutes today’s Twitter experience. Marketers should therefore look to embed themselves in the channel as users would, and experience it as their customers do. Once they learn the lay of the land, so to speak, marketers are likely to find it much more effective, and easier – to use the channel for promotional purposes. It is important to note that “embedded” marketers are not inactive – they monitor the channel‘s growth and look out for commercial opportunities. As such opportunities present themselves, marketers are well positioned to move in and take early mover’s advantage.

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Harnessing the immediacy genie

The need for Immediacy underlines brand-communication Research shows that, increasingly, customers have replaced values linked to individualism, freedom, reason and globalisation with values such as community, authenticity and – notably - proximity. This means that marketers need to be as close as possible – both in location and time – to their target market, in order to deliver an effective message to, and to receive effective feedback from, customers.

No one lifts an eyebrow anymore when hearing that social networks have an uncanny ability to perform powerfully as immediate live-wires when newsworthy events unfold. It is now a known fact that social networks offer immediacy – but does this powerful feature of social networks dovetail with other marketing channels, and, if so, how? 

Marketers can harness the immediacy genie and initiate customer-response triggers in various ways across all marketing channels. In these cases, immediacy manifests through a swift reaction to information entered by customers or obtained through a variety of behavioural triggers. SEO and SEM help brand-owners to drive context-sensitive adverts in real time, literally nullifying the time-lag between an event (customer using certain keywords or a behavioural trigger being set) and the corresponding contextual advert.  Behavioural targeting is used to offer promotions, publish special announcements and to present real-time adverts that are based on customers’ previous searches and purchases. Amazon.com’s “people who bought this book also bought…” and LinkedIn’s “Viewers of this profile also viewed...” features proved to be extremely successful. Amazon.com also makes extensive use of context-rich email missives, in conjunction with its website, while LinkedIn use social signals to push what they believe to be relevant, as does Facebook, through its EdgeRank and other algorithms. “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once”, said Albert Einstein. Assume that the same can be applied to behavioural targeting and that there are various levels of immediacy --

First level of immediacy: context-sensitive adverts are presented as user enters content, while searching or visiting a social site. This is already an existing feature on Google, and one can expect to see it on Facebook soon

Second level of immediacy: cookies used by websites record previous purchases and searches, enabling marketers to offer behaviourally targeted promotions and messaging, presented as soon as the user returns to the site

Third level of immediacy: data collected through past search and web activity could be used to drive relevant messaging, and message response can be used further to drive more relevant on-site experience.

The three levels of immediacy enable marketers to use data collected and analysed across various channels – such as social networks, email and the web - in order to achieve maximum impact. Time-sensitive decisions are made frequently in various industries. In retail, for example, marketers have limited time to trigger a basket-reminder email before the opportunity lapses. Similar constraints apply to the travel and hospitality industry, where flights and accommodation bookings have time-limits.  Combining immediacy and proximity Nowadays, marketers can use social networking, email, the web – and the combined knowledge of customers’ history - to generate a meaningful dialogue. According to Les Tapolczai, Toronto, Ontario based director of marketing & planning at Henderson Bas Kohn, the convergence of mobile technology and social networking enables lightening-speed sharing. The fact that all channels are available through mobile devices means that marketers can now communicate with ‘customers on the go’ – getting their message across wherever customers might be. Developments in location-based marketing add another dimension to the concept of offering immediate brand-knowledge to customers at an optimal speed and in optimal proximity. Marketers can use this formidable triangle that includes mobile technology, location-based marketing and multi-channel platforms, and benefit from the way these platforms drive immediate messages to, and solicit immediate response from, customers. Marketers should seek, expect and anticipate the effects of immediacy at every stage of a campaign, and across every channel. When, for example, marketers send out an email campaign, they should anticipate responses on social networks as well as via email. They should therefore monitor all owned and earned media, and have resources ready to respond -- if need be. This also means that marketers need to establish and maintain message-consistency across multiple channels. It is important to remember that immediacy is a double-edged sword, enabling quick real-time access to customers, while narrowing the margin for errors. Since these channels serve as catalysts in the relationship between brands and customers on-the-go, marketers will need to keep an eye on the immediacy genie and harness the power it affords, while doing their very best to keep it well locked in its bottle.

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Marketers need to pierce though filter bubbles

Personalisation, old companion and sidekick Personalisation has a long and distinguished history among marketers. Direct Marketing personalisation techniques range from the simple “Dear [FirstName] It’s Your Birthday!” to complex database extrapolations allowing for an automated letter to include customer purchase history (“As someone who purchased 3 of John Grisham’s books in the past…”)

With the advent of Internet Browsers, personalisation became more intricate, allowing marketers to collect detailed information about customers’ behaviour and choices online and to subsequently display context-sensitive matching adverts. Eventually, growth in personalisation capabilities ushered the SEO and SEM age – allowing marketers to pinpoint customers according to their geographical location and using specific keywords extracted from content they consume and exchange.

Early December 2009, pioneering online organiser Eli Pariser read a post on Google’s corporate blog. It didn’t look like a ground breaking or life changing post and many readers probably missed it, among Google’s various daily administrative announcements.  Pariser, and a handful of others, did notice the post – and it got them thinking. The headline said - “Personalized Search for Everyone.” Investigating further, Pariser found that as of that day, Google would use fifty-seven ‘signals’ in order to learn about users, including where they logged in from, which browser they were using, their search history – notably the page-links they opted for on their search-results, and page-links which they’ve rejected. Redeveloped, this last facility (hiding behind Google’s age-old “I Feel Lucky” button) serves to predict which pages users are likely to choose to visit in the future. In turn, this ‘prediction’ is used by the engine to serve pages users are likely to want to see. Introducing filter bubbles “Most of us assume” says Pariser in his book “ The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You” “that when we google a term, we all see the same result [...] Now you get the result that Google’s algorithm suggests is best for you in particular – and someone else may see something entirely different. In other words, there is no standard Google anymore.”  Pariser argues that the Internet is quickly becoming a personally identified-and-consumed world in which people’s personal experiences are defined by automatic, independent machines, which he terms "filter bubbles". As companies and organisations try to match their products and services to customers’ wants and needs, customers become trapped within a bubble of content in which all information that is not deemed of interest to users is filtered out. The danger in this system – says Pariser – is that we only encounter information that does not challenge our views and opinions. The filter bubble, he says, introduces three dynamics we’ve never dealt with before. Firstly – we’re along in it, it is a single person’s bubble. Even if we share beliefs with others, the bubble is filtered specifically to our own needs. Secondly – the filter bubble is invisible. Users have no idea why Google shows them the results they see.  The third – and most intriguing dynamic, is that users do not choose to enter the bubble. When people switch on a news channel or read an online newspaper, they are “making a decision about what kind of filter to use to make sense of the world. It’s an active process” says Pariser. They do not make the same kind of choice with personalised filters, who simply “come to us” so that we have no way to avoid them. Filter bubbles – Like or Dislike? The most pertinent question for marketers is, naturally, how filter bubbles affect the relationship between customers and their chosen brands. Will customers become suspicious and untrusting; will they keep looking constantly behind their digital shoulders? As it often happens, not everyone thinks – like Pariser – that filter bubbles spell doom for people’s free choice online. Blogger James Samuel, for example, argues that – once people know that their searches may be biased in any way, it is up to them to find new ways to look for information. “Knowing [about filter bubbles]”, says Samuel “it behoves us to broaden our scope and actively search for news and information that stretches us beyond […] those that match our current world view.” Samuel and others believe that, far from manacling customers’ ability to find and use the product information they require, filter bubbles may in fact force them to become more discerning as product users. Current regulations are likely to come in handy for customers wishing to assert control over the information they see online. These regulations enforce, for example, the insertion of an “AdChoices” tag to indicate that an advert is based on behavioural data. Other regulations – like the European Union’s "EU Internet Cookie Tracking Law" effectively requires that users give permission for cookies to be inserted in their computing device. These – and other regulations – will necessitate a major re-think regarding advertising and SEO issues, as they affect all industry players, from giants Google and Facebook, to the world’s smallest content carriers.  What type of “filter bubble bursting” methods can marketers use? Knowing the limitations they face, marketers will be called to expand the reach of the dialogue they have with customers. As they aim to address their target market, marketers would do well to remember that every channel has its own filter bubble - email has spam filters, Facebook has EdgeRank and Google has PageRank (and a few hundred other algorithms). It's no longer as simple as choosing a channel and sending a message out. Ideally, Marketers should find new ways to speak directly to their users – If, as the popular saying goes, each marketing device – be it an advert, link, image, insert, article, email missive, interstitial etc. – is positioned “one click away from extinction”, then it is up to marketers to up their game and add to the message they deliver a deeper sense of commitment to, and responsibility for, the people for whom the message is intended.

[multiclickmarketing]

Looking for influencers on social networks

High hopes for trendsetters Wishing to address people who may – or may not – buy their product, marketers deploy techniques that may – or may not – gain them access to customers’ decision making mechanisms. They conjure ad campaigns, devise attractive strap-lines, follow their subjects as they go about their daily lives and pin all their hopes on a single opportunity to gain even a few seconds of quality access to customers’ very busy mind. During each and every stage of this interaction, marketers operate through a complex, creative and potentially efficient set of tools. They never get under a customer’s skin, at best they’d access her iPhone or his Golf Club. Even so-called ‘Direct Marketing’ is practiced through remote communication. Communicating indirectly does not bode well for brands’ relationships with their customers. To quote Groucho Marx: "Just imagine how many armies were lost, how many empires fell, how many businesses collapsed just because a busy so-and-so sent a second so-and-so to a third so-and-so and said 'Tell him I sent you...' " … Which is the reason why one of the most enduring – and endearing – concepts in modern marketing is that of the person who has the ability to influence others and get them to follow his lead.  The first known influencer The search for people with influence started in the United States almost 60 years ago. In 1960, John F Kennedy got Frank Sinatra to sing a special version of his hit "high hopes" (Video) in support of the campaign. Kennedy looked for people – like Sinatra - who had the ability to influence others. These as-yet unnamed people had no title, just a crucially important function – to influence. In 1962, communication sociologist Everett M. Rogers came up with the name “trendsetter” – and it stuck. Rogers looked at the way consumers got to know brands and argued that influence moves like a wave and undergoes a process of what he called “diffusion”. Rogers defined diffusion as "the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system."  Rogers identified five successive groups that adopt innovations. The first group are Innovators (socially adept and popular, playful, vibrant – and financially flush) which are then followed by Early Adopters (powerful opinion leaders, these people consider innovations and decide on the ones they wish to adopt).  The next groups are Early Majority and the Late Majority, who make-up the bulk of Rogers’ brand-adopters model (68%) – they follow leads, mostly from Early Adopters.  The last sub-group, which Rogers called the Laggards, picks up the curve as it comes down even further – Laggards are risk-avert, promotion-seeker type consumer, and they wait until all risk potentialities have been eliminated before taking the plunge. Rogers, and others who followed up on his work, believe that there is a way to harness the diffusion process in order to increase sales: find the innovators/trendsetter/influentials, get them to buy into your product – and you’re in the pound seat.  Of course, not everyone bought into this model. Dissenters – like Yahoo’s Duncan Watts, agree that influencers exist, and that they can affect product-adoption, but – says Watts (PDF) - “we find that predictions of which particular user or URL will generate large cascades are relatively unreliable. We conclude, therefore, that word of- mouth diffusion can only be harnessed reliably by targeting large numbers of potential influencers, thereby capturing average effects.” Generating a Mexican wave Ignoring naysayers, marketers dream of capturing Innovators’ imagination or, at least, Early Adopters’ love for exclusive brands, and their ability to generate a commercial Mexican wave.  Influence goes through a linear process, and is ushered in by key players who grab a product as if it were a baton in a 4 x 4 relay, run with it and pass it on to the next group. Marketers believe that if they can get to ride the crest of diffusion, they’ll cause a snowball effect that would ensure their brand a phenomenal success. This belief is, in truth, not totally unfounded. Consider – for example - the series of Apple campaigns, pushing a consecutive host of new products, one by one, and running the full race, literally uninterrupted or challenged.  Reflecting on Apple's marketing strategies, strategic marketing pioneer Regis McKenna- who provided intellectual guidance for the now legendary Macintosh launch – felt that influencers are key, then as now: “consumers are weary of advertising, and trustworthy, neutral parties are very important to helping communicate the value proposition of the product. As secretive as Apple is, it still has a powerful grip on the high tech media because of its long tradition of nurturing relationships with them, and it has fanatically devoted users who are powerful influencers in their own right.” Because they reflect on the relationship between customers and the brands they adopt, diffusion model are not platform specific. Principles that applied to “above the line” and “below the line” marketing of yore are easy to adapt to the reality of Social Networks.   Recently, Ed Keller and Jon Berry  coined the term “Influentials,” which they define as “opinion leaders and trendsetters with their friends and neighbors” – in this model; influence is the sum total of the relationships within the community explored. Using technology to find influencers Technology enables Marketers to find influencers. Klout, who described its founders as “obsessed with the idea of influence on the social web” offers the Klout Score, defined as the measurement of one’s overall online influence. Other measurements are True Reach (the size of one’s engaged audience as a factor of one’s followers and friends who actively listen and react to one’s messages), Amplification Probability (the likelihood that one’s’ messages will generate actions), and Network Score (how many top Klout Scorers think highly about One’s content.) Applications like Peerindex look at influencers from a different angle. Peerindex considers one’s “social capital” as a manifestation of one’s authority online. Authority is derived thorough algorithms that calculate how many people think that one’s content is worth commenting on, sharing, retweeting etc. These days, marketers can use Klout Scores and Peer Indices to identify opinion leaders, people whose authority may be helpful in getting products to market. Even if Duncan Watts is right when he says that diffusion of influence is a random process, having access to numerous social authorities is a sure way to get one’s brand out, quickly and effectively. But using tools and analysing social network interactions is only the tip of a very large iceberg. At the end of the day, it appears that the best way to identify and engage potential influencers is to use – in addition to technology - the same age-old principles found in successful eating establishments, where the restaurateur, pub owner or chef, recognises regular patrons, engages with them discreetly, and anticipates their needs and wants. Future marketing strategies will need to take into account that influencers do not use a single channel of communication, The ability to link Klout Scores and Peer Indices data to people’s email correspondence, web and blog presence and social network interaction could provide an effective, meaningful marketing platform. ------------------------- Notes:

*.Numerous adoption models have subsequently been built on Rogers’ initial thinking. Malcolm Gladwell’s cult book “The Tipping Point” has three players in the process: Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen.

*.Duncan Brown and Nick Hayes’ book Influencer Marketing: Who Really Influences Your Customers?   offers a model involving a larger number of sub-groups (Idea planters, Predictors, Trend setters, Proclaimers, Aggregators/communicators, Scopers, Recommenders, Persuaders, Negotiators and Validators).

*.“Diffusion models” are based on the premise that there exists a discernible process involving the adoption of new products/brand. It starts with a few unique thinkers who identify exiting new products, who are then taken up by people who are opinion leaders and, as a result, all other, slower-to-react customers follow suit.

[multiclickmarketing]

Is CEM the tail that wags the big dogs at ad agencies?

Customer Experience Management, or CEM, sets to see the interaction between brand and customers from the latter’s perspective. The view that customer perspective is key to the success of brands is returning, yet again, to spur strategic marketers to action: "CEM takes into account everything”, says Yankee Group analyst Sheryl Kingstone – “from brand to product and services, the channel, delivery and operations — and considers it from the point of view of the customer."  [More].

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Companies create in-house social networks

Many see social networks as systems that are inherently “out there”, these dominant communication platforms are governed by social rules set by the platforms as well as by the comprising communities. Increasingly, however, businesses are adopting social networks for the workplace as an internal platform, or Intranet.

A number of corporate companies even offer it to their customers - some do it for free, others charge a fee per user. [More].

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Marketers struggle with multichannel customer interactions

Multichannel marketing challenges senior marketers, according to a recent report. Marketers struggle to manage customer interactions and campaigns across multiple technology platforms — a challenge made even tougher by new data streams from emerging channels such as mobile and social media.

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Mixed news about email across all industry sectors

It’s good news on email deliverability and unsubscribe rates, but keep an eye on those open rates, says dmnews.com’s Juan Martinez. According to the recent Harte-Hanks report,  overall delivery rates across all industry sectors increased in 2010 by two percentage points to 95%, while 2010 unsubscribe rates decreased to .19%, and bounce rates averaged 5%, down from 2009’s 7%. On the down-side, average 2010 open rates were 17% , down from 26% in 2009, and the 2010 click rates remained unchanged. This is mostly attributed to “inbox competition”. [More]

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Customers give thumbs up to retailer Tweets

Merchants should go on Twitter. This is the clear message coming out of a Compete Online Shopper Intelligence Study that tracks cross-channel shopping behaviour. The study suggests that consumers are increasingly using Facebook to enhance their shopping experience and engage with brands online.

25% of consumers now visit an official Facebook page for a retailer or consumer product at least once a month, and 56% of these say they use retailers' Facebook pages to keep up to date on sales and promotions. [More] 

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Facebook launches a new interactive ad unit

A new Facebook interactive ad unit will allow brands to initiate conversations with consumers by posting photos, videos, links and status-updates onto the social network.  Consumer responses to each post will be displayed as “Sponsored Stories” ads on the right-hand side of the walls of users' friends.

Facebook’s manager of corporate communications Elisabeth Diana says that the agencies' brief was to create an ad unit that is inherently social.  [More]

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Marketing automation: B2B mission-critical system that requires some human intervention

Clickz.com’s Anna Maria Virzi finds that automation does not mean email marketing on steroids. In fact – it’s a multi-channel communication platform that involves social media, SMS, direct mail, face to face, and webinars. [More]