Hill+Knowlton Strategies

In an entertaining post on his Strategic Public Relations blog, Kevin Dugan highlights the benefits of mobile marketing.

Not the annoying text messages you get in the middle of the night asking your permission to infiltrate your personal communications space for the rest of eternity, or that bloody Jamster ring tone, but (auto)mobile marketing.

It serves as a healthy reminder that the Internet isn’t the only way to connect directly with consumers.

The wags down at Crispin Porter + Bogusky have done themselves proud with another viral for Burger King, called the Sith Sense.

While the concept is nothing revolutionary, the execution and timing are excellent.

Much of the humour is found in the taunts from Darth Vader as he attempt to guess the object in your head: ‘Your mind reads like a childrens novel’ and ‘This is a battle of wits and clearly you are unarmed’.

While finding the right formula for a viral is elusive, this does tick many of the boxes:

• assets: making use of existing assets and adapting them for the internet and the audience you are trying to reach, e.g. their big budget retail outlet Star Wars tie-in
• timing: no explanation needed here (if there is, welcome to planet earth)
• humour: don’t take yourself too seriously
• spoofs: in-joke takes on the familiar
• low-key branding: BK clearly gets viral and generally gets the balance right between entertaining and promoting
• data capture: while they do have the ubiquitous challenge (summon) a friend they could be missing a trick here by not offering people the chance to opt-in for the next viral
• great idea: as with all good communications, it needs to start with a great idea

In his latest article for Digital Web Magazine Dirk Knemeyer urges us to “completely re-think” our conceptual model of Web design because we “mired in a dystopian Neverland” where our current level of execution is “collectively dreadful.”

Given that there there is a finite number of people types using the web to achieve a limited set of objectives, it’s a wonder he argues, that we all start by developing a customised user experience solution. “Each site owner is making a one-off investment in design direction. Why do we need this layer?”

The alternative is to hand over most of this design and development layer to the browser, or even reducing the role of the distributed Web to the connectivity that powers any number of desktop applications such as Apple’s iTunes, which feature “faster, denser information displays.” Site design would become “a process of content collection,organisation and creation, with a minimal amount of visual design and assembly…it makes perfect business sense.”

Er, is this really the same Dirk Knemeyer who last year declared the end of the usability paradigm which has populated the Web uninspiringly samey websites and its replacement by a more innovative, design-led approach?

Amongst the issues that can be taken with his argument, these stand out:

• “There are millions of companies and individuals each trying to solve similar problems anew. That is wasteful and shortsighted.” Yes, but a pool of variations and a selection process involving criminal levels of wastefulness is the the basis of what we call evolution.
• Is Dystopian Neverland just a way of describing the general and actually quite useful messiness of life? The Web isn’t broken, it just isn’t a single well-structured and fixed thing, and nor should it be.
• Imagine that every similar store in Oxford Street was based on the same architectural and design template with the only real differentiation on pricing and service. Would that really make for a better shopping experience? Just because our everyday experiences don’t work well for everyone does not necessarily imply that they fail to satisfy anyone.
• The iTunes Store works because people accept the need for a desktop application to manage their music libraries and handle file transfers to their iPod. This doesn’t mean they would want to download separate applications for Amazon, eBay etc.
• He mentions “tipping point” twice.

Still, if Knemeyer had cared to adopt a less melodramatic tone, he might have made more of his contrastingly solid ideas about the inclusion within the browser controls (and future Web design standards) of optional settings tailored for specific personas or environments pre-optimised for certain user categories and behaviours.

A quick skirt through my Bloglines favourites backs a growing sense of circularity within the Blogosphere. For example:

• Steve Ballmer downplaying RSS (5 mentions + this one…)
• The Pitbull PR method (4 mentions)
• And finally, yes, I had heard there’s a Star Wars film out (too many to count)

Is much of the Blogosphere a mutual exercise in back slapping or has it truly become the conversation it is held up to be? It’s fair to say that the ever growing number of bloggers doesn’t necessarily convert into equivalent original material.

Yes, people do get their daily fix of digital information in different ways. Some through news aggregators, some through search engines, some through particular bloggers… Aren’t bloggers just helping people find the key stories of the day?

My worry is that the Blogosphere sometimes spends too much time pushing the same information around without adding enough value to it. Can the desire to post overcome the need to?

Or have I heard this argument somewhere before?

With the launch of surely pre-doomed Blogebrity and Bloglines announcement that they are working on a speed-search tool that will leave Technorati and Blogpulse panting and snivelling at the dusty roadside the race for global bloggregation appears to be heating up. The snag is that switching aggregators is more like changing mail clients than jumping from Yahoo to Google. Bloglines lost me to Newsgator late last year because the latter had a slicker browser interface and offered a plug-in for Outlook. I might end up using Bloglines as my weblog search tool of choice, but for the time being Newsgator’s grip on my RSS archive is a secure one.

“Blogging aint going away. The conversation is going to go on without you. Be there or be square.” Steve Rubel defiantly taunts the blogbashers. For a more reflective approach, see why lit-blogger Scott Esposito (“little spouse“) decries the association of his chosen habit-forming hobby with “mindless subservience” to micro-rubel rousing.

I recommend a read of John Scalzi’s essay (and its extensive third party glossing) about the piratical implications of Amazon’s Look within the Book feature. It raises all the interesting issues about IP in the digital age.

Scalzi argues that pirates fall into two minority categories, the can’t pays and the won’t pays. Whilst the latter are irredemable “dickheads” the former are potential customers once they extricate themselves from poverty. “I think of it as I’m floating them a loan“, he observes charitably.

Will technology swing the balance decisively in favour of the cheats?  Scalzi argues that scanning a book and capping and OCRing Amazon’s screens are equally difficult and pointless, but one commentator suggests that a tech-savvy copyright thief could easily write a script to steal the content from its online home. Will these sort of skills remain the prerogative of a “specialised minority” that IP owners can ultimately discount? What if piracy becomes genuinely effortless?  

Another issue raised in the Comments section is whether reference books are inherantly more likely to be pirated than fiction. “What motivation..does a person have to buy a reference book when they can simply read whatever part of it they please online, any time they want?” The responses to this include the suggestion that almost every piece of reference material is already available on the Internet somewhere, and that sometimes the “treeware” version is more convenient. Another reader relates how she often ends up buying a copy of a book she’s already read after borrowing it from a library. “It’s a weird possession thing“.

Scalzi claims that he has avoided online book buying himself because he hasn’t been able to open the covers and read some of the text. He’s now prepared to make all of his novels perusable on Amazon because he thinks he can grow his readership that way. “I’m not going to punish the people who are likely to buy my book on the off-chance that I might temporarily inconvenience someone that won’t.”

Now, chances are that Scalzi writes the kind of fiction that will benefit from the Web’s Long Tail economics. Do the creators of literary and musical “hits” have more to fear? Surely not all successful authors will warm to the idea of “littering the Web” with their short stories to build a bigger readership.

Should it be left up to the artist (and/or his marketers) to decide how generous they should be? And will the cheats be contained when the vendors of legitimate digital content come up witb cleverer combinations of price, format and range? Part of the problem at the moment for writers like Scalzi is that is it is the channel, in this case Amazon, that makes the decision for them.

For me the most important question is this – are “dickheads” a distinct demographic or do we all have a little dickhead inside of us? In other words have we all learned to be more flexible about the social and economic contracts we carry around in our heads? As consumers are we sitting on the hill watching the bloody public goods battle between Web, radio, discs of plastic etc. and all the different kinds of artist, waiting for the best deal to emerge?

Most people of a certain age have dabbled in digital piracy and many of this group will be able to anecdotally exculpate themselves by pointing to the extra purchases they made as a result of this “sampling“. The big question is whether this flexible behaviour in the mainstream will expand enough to undermine the current economic model for artists of all kinds. Forseeing this eventuality, one post imagines future economic circumstances in which an author could release part of his book then request micro-donations  in order to publish the rest.

Another concludes perceptively that “some people are getting screwed“. The argument that people that can afford things will buy them fails to address the fact that there is more and more content chasing comparatively finite disposable incomes. We are making choices and some individuals and firms are inevitably going to lose out.

First a bit of marketing theory. There are said to be four crucial steps that each customer makes before the transaction is complete – AIDA.

A-wareness
I-nterest
D-esire
A-ction

It is also said that 80% of sales are clinched after the fourth contact between seller and customer. The trouble for many direct marketing campaigns is that they aspire to get the prospect from the first A to the last A on first contact. The Web channel has some clear advantages over DM in this field, but many online marketers end up missing some of key ingredients of a successful production.

Over the last weekend my wife and I were reviewing a number of websites selling specific services for visitors to her country. Each of these sites is clearly attempting to put on a compelling performance of AIDA.

Now one important feature of this particular sector is that the product in question, rather like a live operatic performance, is likely to be purchased just the once by most of the customers. This means that a degree of over-hyping is less likely to affect long term business in quite the same way that it will for propositions that depend on repeat custom.

The Web is also probably the only chance that these organisations have to cost-effectively register at least an “AI” before the prospect leaves their own country. Indeed the owners of these businesses ought to be aware that their customers will tend to do more actual research, comparing the various offers like-for-like, at the online stage than after they set off, so a website that can consistently deliver a resounding “DA” will most probably represent a major long-term competitive advantage – provided that it reflects an integrated approach to marketing and customer satisfaction.

The trouble with the absence of severe penalties for spin is that they all end up telling essentially the same tallish tale. Indeed most of the sites we reviewed read like CVs. It’s rare to find a feature or a service that isn’t offered as part of every pitch.

As a potential customer you will be looking to the Web for one additional, over-arching pyschological hit – Reassurance. You might find this in the qualities of the online documentation. But as someone that knows the facts on the ground pretty well, I can confirm that there is in this instance, no clear correlation between the production values of the various websites and the likely overall customer experience typically being delivered by the correlating services.

Whilst positive differentiation may be rare, there are however a few notable examples of negative differentiation. About half of the websites fail to make it even to the first A by:

• choosing an unmemorable, index-unfriendly URL
• formatting content to further deter search engines like Google
• not getting themselves included on highly visible sites that provide listings of all similar services in the region

Those that pass on Awareness often stumble on Interest.

Minimise your footprint is the most common piece of advice offered to would-be web-writers and many appear so keen to follow usability guidelines on concise, scannable text that they end up purging their copy of substance. Even if most of the content is a shotgun blast of a features list, surfacing the most important information and the key differentiators and crafting these into an interesting story will foster engagement - which will form the all important bridge across to Desire provided that the story is the kind which the potential customer can project themselves into.

In general terms this is where the discipline of Netcoms meets the discipline of Branding – adding value to superior products. However, in the case of the websites that we reviewed there’s actually some kudos to be gained from appearing local and relatively under-polished, though there’s a fine line between being charmingly unprofessional and being uncharmingly so!  (Some of these organisations blatantly describe themselves as “not for profit” when they are, well, not.)

Greed and Avarice are members of the same crowd as Desire and deserve some attention. Prices like information tend to converge in this particular sector, but some of its members are at least attempting a variable pricing model with discounts for extended stays or even incentive schemes during the stay.

Returning once again to Reassurance, it’s clear that the key component of the Action stage of the sale will be the responsiveness of the team that uses the website to generate AID. If emails are left unanswered, or if deposits are demanded before queries are answered there is a chance that the online part of the communication will be exposed as an empty facade. I’d also be prepared to wager that few of the websites we came across have anything worthy of the name of a sales database.

A few of them must stare at the prettiness of their pages and wonder what’s going wrong, unaware that it’s the second (and subsequent) online contacts where their opportunities are being squandered.

So, a few general conclusions from our weekend excursion into this comparatively online-dependent market:

• Promotions of any kind, including online, are no replacement for getting the basics right
• Delighting your customers with an excellent service and unexpected extras may not get them to come back but it may help you leverage them as referrers. The Web can clearly be used to support this referral strategy.
• Any unexpected and hard-to-duplicate extras at the website stage of the sale will be even more advantageous for all aspects of AIDA
• Consider what other psychological drivers that have led this prospect to consider this purchase and attempt to appeal to them in your narrative. They may also allow you to leverage an unlikely partnership with a business in another sector and to literally hyperlink a pair of related propositions
• Some of the best marketing ideas depend more on brainpower than budgets. The Web will not only be a cost-effective platform for the main offer,  it’s also often the best way of communicating and supporting other low-budget high-IQ creative marketing ideas.

No, not another co-branded iPod (now there’s an idea), but instead Google is pushing its search appliance for small and medium-sized businesses, Google Mini. This combined hardware and software product has been reduced to £1,995 (I note that in the US it’s a cheaper $2,995) and can index up to 100k documents.

No doubt Google thinks that there are still enough businesses out there with less than 100k documents (higher capacity and priced options are available, if not) – although I presume they are not planning on searching employees’ iTunes collections… Either way Google Mini is another indicator of the search giant’s moves into the lucrative SME marketplace, as seen with Adwords and local business search.

In the age of information overload, the importance of search within corporate networks is paramount. And you can be just as sure that Microsoft and its competitors will not allow Google to have it all its own way.

The BBC is pushing RSS big time. Dave Winer picks up on a nice little analogy in one of their announcements:

Like sushi restaurant conveyor belts, RSS delivers content to people so they can easily pick what they want to read.

The only difference is that everyone can read the same article via RSS – unlike the sushi restaurant where once something’s been grabbed, you need to wait for another to come round.

(via Scripting News)

Nora Denzel, HP’s Senior Vice President, Adaptive Enterprise, has started an audio blog/podcast over on the hp.com blogging community. She joins the stable of executives and technicians that have been blogging for HP since the end of last year. I really like the rationale she offers behind her decision to go down the audio route:

But it isn’t really important to me that I keep up with the latest trend or try to be as cool as everyone else in the industry. I just wanted a fun, informal, low maintenance way to communicate. Because if it isn’t fun, I’m not going to do it.

Well put.

I’m also quite interested in HP’s approach to their blogging community. Unlike others in their industry, it seems to be invitation-only rather than free-for-all. In the past I have been a strong proponent of the latter, leaving it to readers to decide which blogs are worthwhile. However, I am being swayed on the quality vs quantity argument. I can certainly see why some companies would prefer to be selective, particularly at the outset, and if this means they will experiment with the medium rather than avoid it completely, that has to be a good thing.

(via Micro Persuasion)

NB. Whilst HP is a Hill & Knowlton client, like all posts on this blog the opinions are those of the author and are not endorsed by either company.

There’s a debate rumbling in the blogosphere right now about whether advertising in RSS feeds is a good or bad thing. At the end of the day, users will decide because they can unsubscribe to feeds they think are abusing their loyalty. Dave Winer (50) summarises my advice to businesses very well:

Having a blog is a smart move for a consultancy like Jupiter [Research]. The blog itself is an ad that says “Here we are, we are Jupiter, and this is how we think.” Implicit but not explicit is “Maybe you’d like to buy our services?”

Notice any parallels with the holy grail that many corporate communications executives and agencies call Thought Leadership? It’s about creating a leading position in the marketplace based on your thinking and expertise that will help you sell more of whatever it is you sell.

It’s also why many companies would benefit from business blogging communities.

The paid search phenomenon has fuelled a significant part of
the Internet’s revival, with its simple pay-if-they-click,
don’t-if-they-don’t model.

With the search engines now turning their eyes to local search,
paid search network Espotting is targeting local advertisers wanting yet more
accountability and those with no websites at all. The principle follows the
performance-based model of pay-per-click. If they call a trackable
freephone number, then you pay, if they don’t, you don’t.

For a local advertiser, being able to easily account for
your advertising expenditure should be an appealing proposition. For the
publisher, they are able to tap into a new potential audience of local
advertisers.

So, why do I have my doubts about the idea?

• Financial viability: In my experience, advertisers love the
  cost per action model, publishers don’t. Will it make enough money for
  the publishers that carry the likes of
  Espotting’s ads? How many Internet users are going to call and what
  about those dial-up users that can’t make calls and surf the Internet
  at the same time?

• Pricing point: will the cost appear prohibitive for
  advertisers? What’s the cost for all those free calls?

• Trust: how comfortable will web users be without being
  able to kick the virtual tyres of a small business? However, this goes both
  ways, with a clear phone number and fixed address adding to the trust factor
  in e-commerce.

For all the potential of pay-per-call, the paid search world
won’t want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs and pay-per-click will
be the defining model for a good while yet.