IP were keen to use WordPress, thanks to its ease of use for content publishers. The finished site bears testament to the flexibility of the WordPress as a CMS and provides an excellent showcase for how far it can be pushed beyond a simple blogging platform. The original site content was re-architected around good, clean, search-accessible  HTML markup. Elements of the original flash design were retained (to be used as animated backgrounds), with other transitions and animation added through Javascript. Of course, the site was designed to degrade gracefully for non Flash-supporting browsers to ensure a rich user experience across all devices.

The result is a site which accords with accessibility and SEO best practice and is fully manageable by the brand, without sacrificing any of the visual slickness of its predecessor.

London 2012 will be the social media Olympics. Obviously we are 4 years on from Beijing with 4 years of advancement, but this time there will be official integration of social media assets with the Olympics. Plus athletes and competitors will be online, tweeting their experiences (where they are allowed to of course) and part of an Olympics online hub which showcases all the athletes and promotes their Twitter and Facebook pages. 

This will enable audiences to have real-time text chats with competitors. Get insight into the preparations before the games as well as any Olympic village party after the London Olympics.

Twitter will be the perfect supplementary media to watching the games on TV. For Europeans who will be at work during many of the events Twitter will be deluged on a daily basis with Olympic related trending topics, especially as some of the big stars enjoy over 10million followers.

TV audiences too are obviously expected to increase above and beyond Beijing which enjoyed 4.3 Billion viewers in 2008, with 2 billion watching the opening ceremony alone. (source Nielsen)

Evolution of Olympic coverage:

Print and Radio to Facebook and Twitter via The Wall

When we are all old and grey and watching BBC17′s “The Best Things of the 21st Century” the year 2011 will probably be highlighted as the year Social Media really hit the mainstream.

Everywhere we look there are representations of social media (and told about how big it is). And it’s no real wonder, half the population is on Facebook and it is due to be floated for an eye-watering $100billion in 2012 (already giving Bono $800m profit). Social Media really isn’t new any more, it’s here and it’s absolutely massive.

Social Media and Politics

2011 saw social media have a real impact on global news as well as on the worldwide lexicon. At about the same time that The Social Network was winning Oscars and Golden Globes the countries of North Africa and the Middle East were starting to call for regime change in what has become known as the Arab Spring. Social Media outlets such as You Tube, Facebook and Twitter were utilised to make these calls, highlight the plight of the people and gain media momentum from Tunisia, Egypt and Libya through to Yemen and Syria.

Because of this, Libya became the fastest growing country on Facebook for the second half of 2011.

2011 also saw the release of Wiki-Leaks which spread rapidly through social media, this placed as one of our favourite campaigns of the year.

London Riots and Social Media

Here in the UK we had our own mini-uprising. Violence, looting and riots took place on the streets of London, Manchester, Bristol and beyond. The blame by some was put conveniently at the door-step of social media, many of those same observers felt that social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook should even be switched off in times of emergency. Yes social media is an extremely useful way to get information to a large source quickly, but you can’t blame a communications device for social ills. These extraordinary knee-jerk arguments were quickly put into perspective when social media was used help with the clear up of the riots as well as belittling some of those that were involved.

Social Media for Sky1 Got To Dance

For IP we had an amazing start to the year offering 24-7 live social media interaction for Sky One’s flagship show Got To Dance. People would tweet or make comments on Facebook and seconds later the IP team were feeding the information through to the show’s presenter Davina McCall. It was an extremely rewarding and innovative experience.

That experience in part got me, Sam Silverwood-Cope, invited onto the BAFTA jury for Digital Interactivity award, which Davina won with Million Pound Drop.

Since working on that show and others for ITV, we have kept a close eye on TV and its presence in social media. It seems to be everywhere. Every primetime show has a “Follow Us” on Twitter or use “The Hashtag”. If you saw Kirsty’s Allsop’s Homemade Home show, a social media call to action came up every 5 minutes. Our hints and tips were also used in Broadcasting magazine on this very subject in response to the Twitter COO.

Social Media in 2012

Hopefully in 2012 Social Media will mature a bit, get over the amazement of how big it really is, and get on with making quality dialogue. High level campaigns will excite us all and really aid business growth at the same time. This year has been a bit of a land grab amongst agencies, with little understanding or real explanation.

We predict that Facebook will continue to thrive but businesses may move on to something new. Plus watch out for the ever-powerful blogosphere, they are the new media giants – Facebook may be the blue whale but the blogosphere is the great barrier reef.

Best Online Campaign of the year?

Andrew Mabbott: Best online campaign of the year? Didn’t notice any. Good start.

Daniel Titterton: Nationwide social media shaming of those caught on camera looting, fighting,bullying and stealing during the London riots. Exposes how accessible social media has become in the way it was used to coordinate a riot with a collection of users who were not bright enough to understand the self incriminating evidence they were creating.

Sam Silverwood-Cope: Wikileaks – a coordinated effort between Julian Assange and the liberal-leaning newspapers of the world. I loved it. It was political gossip and intrigue at its finest, supplied in a beautifully searchable database on the Guardian, something no other British newspaper could’ve handled. I especially liked hearing about Sarkozy being a grumpy old so-and-so with his staff continually trying to avoid outbursts.

Jon Earnshaw: I haven’t got a favourite campaign so here’s my take on the worst. Not wishing to single any individual agencies out, as most of the larger ones are at it, but this year I have seen dozens of organic search campaigns built almost entirely upon the acquisition of barely relevant links pointing to poor quality content. With Google slowly beginning to realise that its organic results are increasingly being polluted with what are effectively ‘paid for’ positions; when it penalises the sites (not the agencies) and cleans up its results the only ones who will benefit are Google as people switch to PPC for position and the agencies who have their clients money in the bank. At least Dick Turpin wore a mask!

Andy Francos: Can I say one of my own? Intelligent Positioning have helped Commercial Acceptances to achieve an 80% increase in organic traffic from 2010 to 2011, a great achievement.

Best new website or redesign or the year?

AM: Can’t think of any new sites except one that we’ve built. Maybe 2011 wasn’t a year of innovation, or perhaps new sites just don’t happen the way they used to before the web became so dominated by the big players.

DT: BBC home page – in beta for most of the year and now fully live. It performs well from tablets to pc and provides fully accessible in- depth content. Very brave of the BBC to try something quite different, the reward is it’s a better interactive experience than all the competitors.

SSC: Rarely do I say “Wow” when I see a new big-corp broadcasting site. But the new BBC Radio 1 site – WOW. It’s phenomenal and miles better than the BBC homepage (Dan and Jon?). There is updated content going up on the main banner every few minutes, with huge amounts of links to social media, recent tunes and additional content based on what you just heard on the Radio. All sites will now strive to be as good as this. You must take a look.

JE: Can I say best update? In which case it’s the new BBC home

AF: In terms of style, I love the classical redesign of the BBC website. I also love the new Twitter interface and from an SEO perspective – it has to be www.seroundtable.com; but then that’s not really new in 2011 is it?!

Who’s winning Facebook or Google?

AM: Facebook is definitely winning in the area where Facebook and Google are actually competing. Google is throwing everything at creating a social network and it hasn’t worked. Facebook has 850 million people who think it’s their friend and Arab revolutionaries holding placards bearing its brand-name. But Google will win eventually – Google owns search (still the entry point to the web for most people) and plenty else we can’t live without, giving them the platform to keep pushing their ideas until something sticks.

DT: Google, way ahead. But risks doing too many things sub (it’s own high) standard. Facebook keeps it simple, but is still a linear media model.

SSC: In terms of trust, neither. In terms of arrogance, it’s a close race. Both companies infuriate, but continue to dominate. Both have fantastic, free, but hugely flawed analytics packages. Both launch new features continuously that put sites like Yahoo and Bing to shame. But you can pay either company £10,000s and still not get a salutary email from a human being. Which one would I leave first? Facebook, which has made more mistakes this year. I love Chrome so I will say Google wins by a nose. BTW, Bebo and Yahoo are not winning.

JE: I hate to say this but Google is losing out in terms of the quality of its results. Too little focus on its organic search roots and getting it’s algorithm right. Too much focus on building new things that are too complex, don’t work or there is no actual need for.

AF: At social sharing, interaction and dependence – Facebook, but for everything else Google. Both companies have mass privacy issues, something that was inevitable considering the personalisation route that we are heading towards. Google’s decision to launch its own social networking platform speaks volumes, along with the failed Google Buzz, as Page, Brin and Schmidt aim to tap in to the needs and requirements of the 2011 user. Although I am a Google Plus user, the platform is miles away from being a serious contender to Facebook in terms of key metrics and unique users. Yes, Google have attempted to integrate Google Plus within their navigation (and even pushed it so much to include a massive blue arrow pointing to the option) and you can now “+1” search results – but I can’t see users jumping the Facebook ship just yet.

Best new product in the market (hardware or software)?

AM: Majestic SEO for doing one thing and doing it better than everyone else. Also being there at the right time as Yahoo gave up on site explorer.

DT: Knight’s Corner one teraflops chip – one trillion calculations per second. Hello A.I.

SC: I’m not an Apple geek, but the updated Ipad2 has impacted upon the media industry like no other product. Then, as a knock-on from that, those media-types have created websites, apps and even whole pay models that are based on the hardware’s offerings, screen-size and usability. I even told my grandma to get one.

JE: Without question – iPad 2, closely followed by Kindle

AF: IPad 2 – can’t live without it.

Dead as a dodo?

AM: Flash. No matter how much Steve Jobs didn’t like Adobe, Flash’s incumbent status, platform neutrality and developer community allowed it to muddle on as the de facto language of the interactive web – until Adobe announced it would no longer produce a player for Mobile OSs. IE6 finally (pretty much) stopped being used outside China, Nokia killed Symbian by opting for Windows. Firefox started losing ground to Chrome (and has nothing to sustain it).

DT: Flash – Still great for my children’s maths games and Moshi Monsters, but even my children are getting frustrated that it does not work on the iPad.

SSC: Digg. Those nice people at Digg used to deliver millions of hits to major sites. Then they changed everything and their users obviously didn’t like change. Stumbleupon (with your new logo and branding) watch out. Second place Yahoo – with site explorer now gone, I doubt I will visit them ever again. Third place, and this may come back to bite me, Google+.

JE: Yahoo

AF: HMV’s online strategy. At the end of the 20th century it was the place to go for music, DVDs and the rest – now, it has fallen so far behind the likes of Amazon, Play and EBay – it looks like there is no way back. I’d also put Yahoo! in there as well.

Alive and kicking?

AM: Android continues to grab market share and the Ice Cream Sandwich release unifying the phone and tablet versions sets the stage for more growth next year.

DT: Email marketing – While Social Media claimed to pinch the email marketing domain, mobile devices and user set-ups are still built around email clients. This helped somewhat by Groupon reminding people why email marketing can be quite exciting.

SSC: The Blogosphere as a media outlet. You can get your product in front of the same amount of potential customers, more easily and cost effectively than the old fashioned media companies. We love bloggers.

JE: Apple, even with the sad loss of SJ

AF: Twitter. I love it and as a massive football enthusiast, it is great to see so many old school press journalists – who once looked down on digital – using Twitter for interaction, comment and promotion. I always thought that Google would make a move for Twitter, especially considering their philosophy on speed of results over the past few years.

Buzz word of the year?

AM: HTML5 – everyone’s talking about it, even if they don’t know what it is. Ditto Cloud Computing. Geolocation is everywhere. QR codes are mainstream. People talk a lot about privacy.

DT: Three letters. R.O.I. Things are going to get harder so R.O.I. will remain in the spotlight. If you don’t know what it means to you at the various levels then get reading and thinking.

SSC: Social Media / strategy/ campaign/ training/ events. I get more emails about social media than I do from fake Rolex sellers. It’s becoming a little spammy, but still hugely important, if explained appropriately. Second place “Content Strategy”.

JE: Connected Online Ecosystems – and we started that one!

AF: Surely, it HAS to be Google Panda?! ‘Panda proof your website’ became a common phrase in the SEO community, although I have to admit I was a little frustrated by some of the “advice” given out. There is no doubt that people are trying to help others but advice like “Just get rid of your low quality content” is simply like saying “just get more links” or “earn more money”. Obviously a company or individual doesn’t want to give free advice, but if it is worthless, why say it in the first place? It reminds me a bit of Matt Cutt’s comments on keyword rich domains and stating that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – all of which do not have keywords within their domains – gets a lot of traffic and you should try and build something like that. Thanks for that, glad you’re here.

Biggest mistake of 2011?

AM: Google’s Chromebook for futility. It’s a netbook with the browser as the Operating System – in other words it can do anything anyone can already do with Chrome on a PC, but it can’t do anything else. Who is it for? Secondly, the EU cookie law for fundamentally challenging the way we use the Web without proposing any viable alternative.

DT: Big brands consolidating agency services – in tough times businesses need niche experts, not margin accumulators.

SSC: Facebook for changing too much too quickly and not listening to concerns about privacy of their 800 million users. Facebook will continue to grow in the emerging markets, but the established, rich markets such as the US and Europe are beginning to switch off. Was 2011 the point of decline? Probably not as we wait to hear more about their $100 billion flotation.

JE: Anyone putting PPC in front of a solid organic search strategy.

AF: Well – looking at it from an SEO point of view – I don’t think Google or Microsoft came off very well following the accusations that Microsoft were copying Google’s search results. ‘Bing sting’ as it was coined was an embarrassment for Microsoft as they’d spent a small fortune trying to position Bing as an alternative to Google, a decision engine. Commercials, Yahoo! integration – all trying to help Bing gain market share on Google.

What are we going to hear a lot about in 2012?

AM: IPv6 – 2012 is surely going to be the year we’ll finally have to face up to the fact that we’ve run out of IP addresses. SSL – more sites will follow Google and Facebook in pushing people toward encrypted browsing (with all the implications that brings for analytics). Maybe @font-face will finally go mainstream and we’ll see more sites using typefaces other than Arial next year. Plain old Web apps will make a comeback to displace platform-specific applications as people realise it’s cheaper to make one version of something than four. Mobile user experience will come under more scrutiny as platforms mature and conventions are established.

DT: Content strategies and content delivery. Those without relevant, engaging, timely content will be digging deep into pockets for old school media.

SSC: Obviously the Ipad3, Iphone5 etc. Facebook share price. Yahoo buy-out. Google messing with their search results. Firefox decline. Social Media.

JE: Google cleaning up its results with the search public finally realising the natural search results are not actually that natural but are in fact in many cases paid for indirectly through link acquisition.

AF: For me, I am going to keep a very close eye on Netflix and Google TV (due to my work with blinkbox) when launched in the UK. Netflix will no doubt a massive competitor in the movie streaming sector, so it will be a challenge – but a welcome one!

We want your thoughts…

Leave your comments below, we’d love to see what your response would be to the questions.

Without Trust a Business is doomed for failure

There is both a business and moral requirement embedded in being effective and efficient. It ensures that a company’s stakeholders and customers are served well and that their needs are provided for. Trust is inextricably linked to the delivery of a promise. If a company promises one thing and delivers another it is doomed to failure.

Trust is also about building relationships. Can a company be insightful by seeing people as just data, segmented into crude groupings with superimposed attitudes and behaviour? Is this the way to build relevant and rewarding relationships? Many companies do and build successful brands. However, is loyalty compromised through this objective relationship and how much more successful can they be by building an emotional relationship between the company, the brand, and the customer?

Understanding customer needs is Central to a Brand’s survival

People are emotionally connected, responding to transparency and honesty. These qualities build trust and engender loyalty. Take the case of Unify, published in a Forbes magazine article. The software company based in Sacramento, California, was a hair’s breadth away from bankruptcy in 2000. A former CFO, Todd Wille, was called back into the company and had 90 days to fix the problem before the money ran out.

Wille put the focus not on budget slashing, though that had to be done, but on building staff and customer confidence through a dialogue that was built upon integrity and honesty. He appointed the head of customer service to the position of Sales VP because customers knew him and trusted him. He encouraged the sales team to call customers every week to hear their concerns and to ask for patience and to reassure them. In addition he asked his development team to produce new products based on customer needs gained from those sales conversations. Wille knew that understanding customer needs was central to the company’s survival. He turned the company around by listening to staff and customer needs and forming solutions tailored to satisfying them.

The resulting actions built a company that is now three times larger and has been rated as one of the world’s most admired companies.

Creating Dialogue through Social Media

At the centre of Wille’s strategy was an understanding of the power of dialogue, of getting people on side through engagement. He empowered people, staff and customers alike, and created an environment of trust.

I have no doubt that today Wille would have employed social media techniques to help him in his dramatic turnaround. He would have benefited from listening to the Internet traffic on Twitter and sent reassuring Tweets. He almost certainly would have posted a video to his customers creating a direct personal link, building integrity and authenticity, like Arnold Schwarzenegger did when Governor of California, in a shirt sleeved, unscripted video, to thank his followers for sending tweets on how to reduce government waste. This is the power of body language.

Building Brand Trust through Social Media

In a Mashable blog by Greg Ferenstein, he recounts how he sat down with the psychologist Professor Judy Olson to discuss the essentials of building trust with digital communications. Olson found, through her extensive research, that responsiveness is the key. In email, Linkedin, and Facebook messages much of the markers of trust, such as voice intonation and body language, are hidden. Olson found that when only text is used, participants judge trustworthiness based on how quickly others respond. For example, acknowledging a Facebook message quickly is better than waiting to respond more fully later; wait too long and you will be deemed to be unhelpful.

Social Media = Trust. Trust = Loyalty. Loyalty = Greater spend

When expectations are not met, it has a direct effect on customer spending and a powerful impact on trust. The need for transparency, honesty, and trust is essential if brands are to retain customer loyalty.

We know through experience and hard data that during times of economic hardship customers are less brand loyal. They will seek out lower priced brands with a return to their original brand choice uncertain, once economic conditions become more favourable. With a loss of loyalty comes the loss of referral.

In the 2011 Temkin Trust Rating, 6,000 US consumers were asked how much they trusted different companies. From the data 143 companies across 12 industries were rated. After the publication of the rating Temkin decided to “run the numbers” and analyse how trust relates to one element of loyalty: the likelihood to recommend. He found that consumers who trust companies are likely to recommend those companies, but they won’t recommend those that have not earned their trust. (See chart below from temkinratings.com).

Customer Trust by Industry Sector 2011 USA

In the Social Media era building trust is a multilayered process and depends upon the mindset of the company, its desire to anticipate need and with that its focus on customer satisfaction. The foundation for lasting success of any company is building trust between its customers and its brands and services. Dialogue is central to this, as Todd Wille demonstrated at Unify, as is the important adjunct to dialogue, responsiveness, as uncovered by Judy Olson.

These are the qualities that make social media a tool for our times, a democratic channel for a relevant and insightful dialogue. For many companies, it may be that dialogue is the only trustworthy currency in this turbulent economic climate.

Because of this attention deficit customers become increasingly impatient. As a consequence conventional means of connecting with your customer such as paid for advertising are placed under increasing strain. Costs rise through an increase in the available media leading to a diffusion of your target audience and uncertainty that they are paying attention to the message. Do they read, do they listen, do they make a connection with your Brand? Are they connecting by accident or by demand?  Are they real customers or perceived ones? Do they stumble upon your message by accident or are they deliberately seeking you out? The former is neither an effective nor efficient use of time or money. The latter provides an efficient Return On Capital.

This raises the point of effectiveness, doing the right thing, and efficiency, doing the thing right.  You think you know who your customers are but maybe they are not who you think they are. Are you engaging with the right analytics? Can you afford the analytics to find out? With Intelligent Positioning you can.

Targeting and understanding your customers.

Our Web based targeting is about understanding who and where people are connecting with a brand. From this analysis the brand’s communication with its target audience can be improved by deeper understanding of the targets’ mindsets, tastes and behaviour.

“Context is irrelevant. Remember that behavioural targeting is about reaching groups of people with similar interests, not pages containing specific content.”
Paul Goad, Managing Director, Tacoda

Engaging in the web more fully may be the answer to many of your pressing business problems.  The Web is a tool of revelation, uncovering important evidence that can change your view of a market, a sector, and the people within it. It can expose cultural diversity and diverse mindsets. It can create speed of information, depth of insight, and create a dialogue so rich that it can move you to destroy business models and build new ones that would have seemed eccentric a short time ago.
From atoms to bits.

Look at the example of Amazon. They moved from storing physical products to virtual and distributed inventory. Amazon built a business that kept inventory not as atoms but as bits by creating a print-on–demand system. Books stay as digital files until they are ordered through Amazon’s website. They are then printed on laser printers that look just like high quality traditional printed books. This shift in business model means that the cost of holding inventory is zero. This opens up the potential to print any book that has ever been written without ever holding it in a warehouse. The economic effectiveness and efficiency of this is clear.

These technological improvements have not only allowed Amazon to lower the costs of connecting supply and demand but have also increased Amazon’s marketing power through greater choice, provision of satisfaction to niche interests, and fast delivery times, all at competitive prices.

A similar business model shift took place in the music industry through i-Tunes where a vast selection of music is stored in bits, sampled, bought, and delivered on demand through the i-Tunes website. Netflix has created a similar model with a vast inventory of DVD’s stored on a server and delivered on demand. As Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine commented “ Increasingly, the mass market is turning into a mass of niches”.

The age of dialogue.

This is the magic of the web and of the long tail. To make it work you need an open mindset, an ear for listening, and the courage to engage in a constant flow of innovation and originality. You also need to know who you are talking to and why.
This truly is the age of dialogue between the individual and the group; enabling understanding and satisfying the mass and the niche at one and the same time.

The web has many virtues and key amongst them is its ability to provide an insightful way to anticipate need whilst satisfying it in a democratic and choice filled way. This is why you need to engage in it because the opportunities are endless, the rewards specific.

Garry Titterton, March 2011

Globally, Facebook has experienced rapid growth. There were only 150 million registered users in January 2009. Today there are more than 500 million registered users (we go in more depth here: Facebook usage by country) Twitter in comparison currently has over 100 million registered users worldwide,
Foursquare has around 7 million and MySpace at its pre-2008 peak had over 100 million global users making Facebook the most dominant social network by far.

In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and Chief Executive, said it was “almost a guarantee” that the site would hit one billion users.

Fast Facebook Facts:

• Launched at Harvard in February 2004.
• People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on the site.
• An average user has 130 friends.
• There are over 900 million objects in total that Facebook users can interact with, such as community pages.
• The average Facebook user is connected 80 pages, groups and events.
• The average member creates 90 pieces of content each month.
• More than 30 billion pieces of content, like photos, web links and news stories, are shared each month.
• About 70 per cent of Facebook users are from outside of the US.
• It took five months for Facebook to attract an extra 100 million users, from 400 million to 500 million.
• The site has yet to become the leading social network in Russia, China, Japan or Korea.
• Goldman Sachs valued the site at $50bn earlier this year.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/8357243/Facebook-in-numbers-how-it-dominates-the-competition.html

The whole point of social media is to understand what the customer is saying about brands and life in general. Try to stifle the dialogue and your brand will be the lesser for it.

Embracing anarchy

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google said “The internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had”. It is precisely this great experiment in democracy that is so invaluable.

No longer do marketing executives need to indulge in expensive and often fatally flawed focus groups to get insights into what people are thinking, feeling and how they are behaving. They just need to click onto the social media sites and forums and read. This is not fool’s gold. This is the real deal unencumbered by intermediaries with an agenda.

The power of word of mouth

Customers’ word of mouth has always played an important part in the development or decline of a brand. Hoteliers for one have discovered the power of customer advocacy through websites such as Trip Advisor which has en-powered customer opinion.

Fiat engaged customers through the web to help design the Cinquecento, and Comcast to improve their service. If you have a cable problem in the US, Comcast use Twitter to ask customers “Can I help”. When customers respond, Comcast send out their Field Support Teams to solve the problem.

Through this process of finding customers to help, Comcast develops a reputation for pro-activity in customer support, reinforced through relevant and timely interaction with customers in need. This experience produces a word of mouth endorsement that is another powerful dimension of social media.

Word of mouth sells

Indeed the experiential, word of mouth, advocacy is the primary factor behind 20 to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions according to McKinsey: “Its influence is greatest when consumers are buying a product for the first time or when products are relatively expensive, factors that tend to make people conduct more research, seek more opinions and deliberate longer than they otherwise would.

And its influence will probably grow: the digital revolution has amplified and accelerated its reach to the point where word of mouth is no longer an act of intimate, one-on-one communication. Today, it also operates on a one-to-many basis: product reviews are posted online and opinions disseminated through social networks. Some customers even create Web sites or blogs to praise or punish brands.”

Adjusting to a new paradigm

Marketing professionals need to adjust to this new customer democracy. It will take the savvy marketer on a wild and exciting journey that is more far complex than conventional channels of communication where dialogue was absent or paid lip service to. It is a journey where the marketer can win friends and just as easily lose friends. In many cases the marketing effort must change: from less focus on brand advertising at the initial consideration phase to developing internet properties that help customers gain a better understanding of the brand when they actively evaluate it.

This may mean that a process change is necessary from pushing a brand message onto customers, to providing information, support, and experience of the brand (even if just a virtual one) that engages the customer in a dialogue so that they can make their decisions based upon their authentic experience or that of others.

This is the power of social media’s free speech and experience exchange. Embrace it and learn to let its freedom to express an opinion help to sustain and develop your brand.

Garry Titterton , Intelligent Positioning, April 2010

Today we are at the beginning of a new renaissance, exploring the ways in which customers are behaving in the new world of Web2.0. In the context of this media revolution, life will not be the same for you, or your customers again.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO said, “ The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”

This “experiment” as Schmidt referred to, is fundamentally about democratising information. Simply put, it moves the focus of communication from the media to you, the individual. It is not a one-way process anymore. It is an environment in which a dialogue takes place between the brand owner and the customer and between the customers themselves.

This will shift your marketing strategy and implementation in significant ways.

The one-way process

One of the most important objectives of marketing is how to gain the attention of relevant customers and where. These touch points traditionally have been through mainstream media such as television, radio, press, poster, and also through direct marketing. Behind this was a Push/ Pull Strategy, pushing a message onto the target audience, in the hope that they would like the message and Pull (buy) the product.

(Chart 1) This strategy created a process of decision taking that encompassed: awareness, familiarity, consideration, purchase, and loyalty.

The problem with this is that it is a one-way process. It is not a dialogue.

Creating a dialogue.

Mark Pedowitz, President, ABC Studios said, “Digital Media has levelled the playing field, opening doors to anyone to have immediate and unlimited access to an audience. But content must evolve with the platform”.

With the advent of technology and the use of the Internet, not only has a new media been created but also so has a new process of interaction with the customer.

We now have a dialogue that is both immediate and relevant. The content must be engaging and in many instances subtler than the previous broadcast media approach of pushing the message. As Ezra Pound the poet once said to an aspiring writer, “ Don’t describe the thing, describe the halo of the thing.” Pound knew that by describing the quality of something rather than its features, will engender greater intrigue and involvement. Describing “the thing” closes down the conversation, describing the “halo” opens it up.

This approach underpins sales and finds support in recent research by McKinsey. This study has revealed a new process of engagement and decision-making by the customer.

Source: McKinsey

(Chart 2) It is a circular process with four primary phases: initial consideration; active evaluation, which is the process of researching potential purchases; closure, when customers buy brands; and post purchase, when customers experience them.

At the post purchase point customers are increasingly likely to
discuss their satisfaction or dissatisfaction online. This dialogue will trigger other customers’ future purchasing decisions. What is essential is to have a pro-active online reputation management system in place. We will discuss that in more detail and its effect on how the customer moves from initial interest to after sales satisfaction, or otherwise, later in this whitepaper.

Dialogue along the customer journey

Marketing professionals need to adjust to this new customer journey. It is a journey that is more complex. It is a journey where the marketer can win friends and just as easily lose friends. In many cases the marketing effort must change: from less focus on brand advertising at the initial consideration phase to developing internet properties that help customers gain a better understanding of the brand when they actively evaluate it.

This may mean that a process change is necessary from pushing a brand message onto customers, to providing information, support, and experience of the brand (even if just a virtual one) that engages the customer in a dialogue so that they can make their own decisions.

The importance of the Web 2.0

The Internet is crucial in this new process of dialogue. To exploit Web 2 .0’s benefits requires an open mindset on the part of the marketer, one that moves from media buying to developing properties that attract customers: this shift in mindset encompasses websites that discuss products and services; programmes that encourage customer engagement; and systems that tailor advertising by understanding the customer as an individual with unique tastes, rather than as a statistical grouping.

(Chart 3 ) It isn’t just the customer you need to engage in dialogue. There is a hierarchy of people who engage with the Web.
At the bottom of the involvement pyramid we have Watchers and Sharers. These are the people who are the most active in their involvement of watching on line, reading blogs, and downloading material.

Next are the Commentators who rate products and services, comment on a blog post as well as write in a discussion forum.
An example of this is the advent of Trip Advisor for the traveller, which has underpinned the power of customer opinion.

The Producers write blogs and upload videos while the Curators are special to the company in that they are the guardians of the experience, moderate forums and edit Wikis to ensure their accuracy.

The people at the bottom of the pyramid, the Watchers and Sharers are the most active by volume and the Commentators have a great influence on opinion and influencing purchase.

So why do people share? Well, recent research from Share This Survey concluded that 81% of people share online to help someone who will benefit. 42% said to give back something, such as photographs, jokes, information, and third was to inform others about products or services.

When I first came into advertising and marketing, the giant share of marketing spend was on television. It was megaphone marketing.

Our target audience for brands was not segmented by social groups or income or even psychographics. We had no engagement pyramid. The audience was defined as universe. In other words, everyone, because everyone watched television. In short, the old marketing had Van Gogh’s ear for dialogue.

Integrating the customer into the process.

The available media drove this crude perception of people and their potential motivations. It was pushing a brand statement.

It worked through expensive repetition of a message like rote learning in uninspired educational establishments. It was not inclusive because there was no opportunity to question or engage in feedback.

As Confucius said: I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.

With the democratisation of media we are able to create a dialogue, shifting the emphasis of seeing the customer as a target to viewing the customer as a partner and collaborator in the marketing process. This is a necessary pre-requisite for sales success.

Take for example, Fiat.  When they launched the new Fiat 500 they created a website that that allowed potential customers to gather around their common interest, cars.

In the initial stages of the brand creation, Fiat embarked on creating applications and functions on the website that enabled the potential customer to create their own car, allowing them to customise different elements.

In addition, the potential customers were invited to join a creative laboratory where they could enter their own design contributions as well as create their own jingle for the website.

Mothers and Mothers-to-be were also invited to make their own contributions and were encouraged to share photographs of their family and newborn babies as well as enter a lottery to win one of the new cars.

By building a sense of involvement and personalisation into the website and the whole creative process, Fiat strengthened the potential customer’s sense of co-authorship among both males and females.

This underpinned making the Fiat 500 the customer’s brand.

Things are evolving…

Five years from now all media will either be completely digital or well on its way to becoming intangible.

Steve Rubel Ad Age December 2008

The Internets success is not just down to the immediacy of its information but also the relevance of that information.

Marketers need to help the customer with relevant information.

Take Comcast for example. If you have a cable problem in the US, Comcast use Twitter to ask customers “Can I help”. When customers respond, Comcast send out their Field Support Teams to solve the problem.

Through this process of finding customers to help, Comcast develops an image of pro-activity in customer support, reinforced through relevant interaction with customers.

The Comcast example demonstrates the effectiveness of pro-active engagement by seeking out the customer and ensuring that the brand blends into the context of the website or social media forum. It provides relevance and integrity.

A further example is Hyatt Hotels’ mobile reservation and check-in. Microsoft’s Bing powers Verizon Wireless mobile search. When consumers search for Hyatt and click on the result, they get redirected to Hyatt’s mobile website.

Through Verizon, Hyatt can reach 86 million subscribers and by taking advantage of this subscriber base, Hyatt can get customers to book rooms, check in and out, get travel tips, and access general information whilst on the go using Verizon’s Mobile Web service.

The synergy between search and mobile display resulted in a 350% increase in ad recall and 125% increase in brand recall through the inclusion of mobile search ads.

In this new engagement world, brands need to be mobilised to provide and deliver greater customer involvement through greater immediacy, anticipation of customer needs, quality of product and service, relevance, context, and value.

We are social.

People are social creatures. We, as individuals enjoy discussion, sharing information. We love to share our experiences and not just about the brands we buy or the car we drive or the Hotel we stay at. We also enjoy publishing our thoughts as can be experienced through Facebook, Twitter, and lots more social media sites. Those private thoughts made public can then be seen around the world not just on the social media website but through the long tail of media recognition of what you have to say.

So, Social Media is fast becoming a significant part of the fabric of society. The way to make it work for your brand is to have something meaningful to say and something relevant to offer. People go to a website for a reason not by accident. It is an envelope with an address on it. This can be a great advantage to the marketer. It can also be a nightmare if you fail to create a dialogue with your target audience and are unable to convince your customer and prospect through poor attitude, inadequate product, and poor service.

Social Media Chart Source: Intelligent Positioning Ltd
An example of pro-activity in this are is RS Hotel in New York. The Roger Smith Hotel may be the most media savvy hotel in New York, if not the world: there’s a blog; a Facebook fan page; a You Tube Channel; over 3,000 Twitter followers; a Flickr photostream.

The two young guys behind this family run independent hotel have turned it into a digital force to be reckoned with. They have made sure that the staff are tuned in to new media opportunities that can provide a dialogue with current guests and prospects with the objective of providing a great environment and service.

One example of their pro-activity was when they saw a blog on the Internet from an out of town blogger and responded to his question: “Where do people stay in New York?”

Because the hotel staff was active in the blogosphere they were rewarded with a sale. This connectedness rewarded the Hotel in not just the sale of the hotel room but with further blogs that recounted the experience and promoted the pro-active nature of RS Hotel’s mindset and prompt service.

Social Media Maintenance

Source: Marketing Professionals

(Chart 4) To keep your social media activity current and relevant, like the RS Hotel, you need to have a thorough maintenance programme. If we look at the chart we see how such a programme encompasses monitoring and renewing content across the relevant social media. Done competently, this will help to keep you ahead of your competition.

Whatever your brand is, whether it is a Hotel, a cable service provider, or a car, it is wise to remember that the brand is not yours. It is your customer’s.

A good social media maintenance programme linked to good online reputation management will help to strengthen that bond between the customer and the brand. Online reputation management combines marketing, public relations, and search.
The first objective is to gain visibility for your brand. Research shows that rarely do customers go beyond page two on the search engine rankings. The second objective is to create a positive interactive experience that will lead to sustainable engagement and sales.

To be effective, reputation management should not be passive to the discussions online but to be involved, constantly fuelling positive engagement. Good reputation management seeks to analyse, monitor, and influence your brand’s online presence, always seeking to be a relevant and stimulating part of your customers’ decision-making journey. As a marketer if you don’t like what is happening to your brand online, do something about it. And do it without delay. It is not enough to have proactive reputation management and a well maintained, attractive, website where there is a relevant dialogue and where the key evaluation element of the new decision making process takes place. The challenge is to be seen.

So what are the tools that will enable you to get your site onto page one, as well as tell you where your competitors are on the search engine hierarchy? It is highly likely that your prospects are using search and social media to evaluate potential vendors. The key question that you have to ask yourselves is, “Are we doing enough in those channels to demonstrate our expertise?”

How to generate clicks on your site.

Artificial Intelligence is increasingly a significant element in search by expertly examining customers’ online patterns to predict their tastes, desires, and future needs.

Broadly there are two types of search: Organic and Pay Per Click.

Simply put, PPC is bought traffic based on key word auctions: the concept is that marketers bid for their ads to appear on certain keywords, the higher the bid and more relevant your content, the better the chance of getting the top position. This can be expensive.

Whereas, Organic Search is a tool, if expertly used, that will help you to get your site onto page one and keep you there, through site analysis, key word relevance, and content refreshment. Traffic, unlike PPC is free.

(Chart 5) Two types of search: Organic and Pay Per Click.

There is a definite preference exhibited by users for organic results over PPC.  Of the two types of listing it is organic listings that currently generate the most traffic as you can see from Google’s Golden Triangle (Chart 6) but that does not mean that PPC has no place in a well rounded search engine marketing strategy.

PPC can provide a tactical boost to the more strategic organic search. The two are very effective if used together.

It is also worth mentioning that Organic has the additional benefit of producing a better return on investment.

How to measure social media effect.

“The tools we use to create digital content are increasingly powerful but decreasingly expensive. And we can show our work to a potential global audience. There is no analogue in human history for this development.” This is a quote from Dan Gillmor’s book, We the Media.

It points to the cost effectiveness of Web2.0 and the social media model. But the return on investment is only high if the tools and the message are executed correctly.

Measuring and managing Customer Lifetime Value is the key to sustaining a competitive advantage in the market place.

First you must determine what to measure:

There are three basic elements to measure:

1. Output objectives:

How many people read your blog?

How many people comment?

How many people download your whitepaper?

What is the quality of your discussion?

2. Out-take objectives:

How does the social mediasphere position your brand and people?

What is the perception of your organization?

3. Outcome objectives:

Financial. Traffic. Relationships.
These will lead you to a lifetime value calculation of your customers.

To effect this, it is necessary to invest in software to enable customer data gathering. This data will provide you with the information that will assist you in managing and growing customer value.

Source: Marketing Professionals

(Chart 7) Lifetime Valuation of your customer can be defined simply as : transactional value plus network value. That gives customer value less customer acquisition and retention costs. These values form the basis of the Customer Lifetime Value Equation.

The benefit of retaining and growing customer value over their lifetime is one of the most efficient ways of growing your business.
Remember that happy customers tell others about products and services that they like. Then your company’s potential for greater profit from Lifetime Customer Value is brought into play.

Conclusion.

In conclusion, we are moving towards an age of media democratisation. We have no history of this to help us. The Web’s history is in the future. But what we do know is that we as marketers need to understand the new rules of engagement:
involve the customer as an individual and as a partner in the process of brand development and sustainability.

This will generate greater profit and customer loyalty for your company.

I will leave you with three thoughts from Albert Einstein:

1. Out of clutter, find simplicity.

2. From discord, find harmony.

3. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.

For further information about maximizing your customer contact email Garry Titterton on: garry@creative-mindset.com or click onto www.ip-seo.com or www.creative-mindset.com

The big news agencies such as Sky, Fox, CNN, and the BBC have all been relying upon the ordinary people inside Iran creating reports and filming breaking news events on mobile phones.

The old media model of third party interpretation and “tell me what you think” has been shaken to its foundations by this new media model of immediacy and “this is what we filmed, make your own mind up.”

Twitter and YouTube have been the big beneficiaries of this. The power has been transferred into the hands of people in the street creating their own reports, albeit more subjectively than some of the main news media would have broadcast .

This social media immediacy and subjectivity transfers into everyday life things such as football transfers, opinions on politics, products used and liked, gossip, and humour. In fact all the things that interest and affect consumers from all walks of life and ethnic groups. Social media not only challenges conventional media but also the legitimacy of conventional market research.

Tuning in and listening, really listening, to these people is a much more accurate gauge of what people think and how they behave. Engaging in a dialogue with them through their chosen means of communication can be a much more insightful and ultimately profitable experience for the marketer.

Talking Appropriately and Directly to a Social Media Audience

It means that through social media, the marketer can go direct to the consumer without intermediary advertising media. Take for example, beinggirl.com from P&G. Directors of Intelligent Positioning have had direct experience of working on this site at its inception in Asia.

They know that ads speaking directly to a thirteen year old girl are difficult to construct in the language of a young girl, in different cultures, without sounding patronising and parental. So the P&G strategy was to use social media by creating a site, beinggirl.com that produced an indirect approach to feminine health care. The site talks about what it is like being a thirteen year old girl and discussing issues involving parents, relationships, music, fashion, health etc. It connects in subtle ways and P&G responds to the feedback.

P&G have found that talking about people’s problems allows them to talk with more authority about helping to find solutions.

Has it worked? Well, P&G say that it is, by dollar criteria, four times more effective than traditional advertising.

Moving from teenage girls to a financial audience, Bloomberg have devised a new marketing strategy that communicates through the screen of the mobile phone. Why? Well, to people who want to be informed on the gyrations of the financial market and news that could affect investments from hundreds to trillions of dollars, it is more effective to communicate through a tool that is with you all the time, and is more immediate and discrete for people on the move than a TV screen or computer.

Some of the world’s largest companies are seeing social media as the way to more immediate and effective dialogue with consumers. Learning directly about their behaviour and actions.

Events in Iran have brought a focus to this.

Author – Garry Titterton, CEO IP-SEO