Hill+Knowlton Strategies

You know it’s the beginning of the year when you’re hit with an overwhelm of opinions and insights on future trends and innovation on social media, digital PR and online marketing. I still have to catch up with what happened in 2008!  January is the month whereby we’re going to look closely at what really worked and what didn’t in 2008, for both the agency and the industry at large. Then, taking a deep breath, roll out 2009. 

However, in light of the title of this blog post, I felt the urge to keep up with the current conversation and at least reflect on Econsultancy’s outlook on 2009. I attended their Online PR roundtable in December 2008, amongst a variety of people in the industry including clients / brands, PR agencies and specialists. Not many answers but at least the understanding that we are all in the same boat when it comes to a) who owns the space – social media / online PR (if anyone, as it seems all sectors within marketing are fighting for it; b) most importantly, measurement, which still stands as a combination of sentiment, level of influence, share of voice and advocacy. The findings of the report are here if you are interested in further reading – Online PR Industry Benchmarking Report.

Back to the exciting bit – challenges for 2009. As PR agencies,  we do not necessarily own the social media space, however we must define clearly what we offer in order to deliver both client and audience impact. What’s more important and raising our game is the ability by which we can measure ROI. Notwithstanding the significance behind the correct level of skilled resources. To be honest, that sums up my goals for 2009. Producing results that are consistent with clients’ objectives. In terms of technology, that’s a completely separate discussion which I need a few pages for!

Take a look at Econsultancy blog post on Social media marketing and Online PR challenges for 2009.

And another one – Peter Kim Assembles a Band for 2009 Social media predictions (with some high flyers’ predictions)

We’ve been talking for some time now (since perhaps the internet emerged) how technology is changing and perhaps even evolving how we as human beings communicate and will do so in the future.

I came across this video recently, Did you know? created by Shift Happens in 2007 (you may have seen it already) which really puts this conversation about web 2.0, the change of marketing with the rise of technological innovation in a completely broader perspective. I’m tired of doing the same social media workshop, trying to explain how this affects everyone, and in fact will use this video from now on to make the point should there be a few who still argue.  The perspective, is an enlightening one, the ‘human’ perspective. Although some detail is outdated i.e. the $100 laptop for Africans fell through, the message is clear to all of us, parents, children, educators, employees and enterprises.

My only challenge to this video is that the over-arching sentiment doesn’t entirely reflect the developing world, mainly Africa. A South African myself, only 20% of the South African population use the internet. However there is a vast comparison to mobile, where about 99% of South Africans own a mobile.  Banking facilities are available in Africa, amongst other broader marketing opportunities, which make us, the 1st world look archaic in comparison. Mostly due to leapfrog technologies, developing worlds have a greater opportunity, although seemingly unequipped!

I could go on…questioning the human race and what role we play! But for now, I’ll limit myself to the marketing and communications point of view…are we truly taking advantage of this new form of communications that truly inspires and engages with people than ever before? And if you don’t think it’s relevant to you, I would highly recommend you think again. So sit back, relax and enjoy…click here. 

I’m finding it increasingly interesting how more and more people within PR are starting to look at the future of digital. What’s interesting is that we are looking at what is the best way to structure digital practice within a digital agency, how to increase digital knowledge amongst all PR professionals.  The same question was posed on LinkedIn, and now I’ve picked up a few blog posts.

One that is worth a read, is Sally Falkow’s blog post titled, UK PR companies missing out on digital opportunities…”According to a survey of Britain’s 100 leading press and public relations
agencies, 79% of the industry’s major players have yet to develop a set
of online and social media services. Perhaps not surprisingly, over
half of the agencies that do offer online PR are based in London”.

The difficulty we’re finding is that not all PR professionals see the true value of digital for clients and the impact it has on deliverable results. Additionally, the client does not always understand or have the backup to support these initiatives.  I think the days of PR vs Marketing or PR vs Advertising are coming to a head as we cannot keep talking about digital PR vs online marketing…they are synonymous and should be looked at with an integrated view point by all parties.

Any suggestions or insights would be much appreciated, from both evangelists and cynics! 

Just how do you follow Burger King’s legendary viral ‘Subservient Chicken’? Well, the wags at Crispin Porter + Bogusky keep trying with various degrees of success.

The latest chicken-themed campaign is Huckin Chicken, involving a man on a motorcycle in a chicken suit performing a series of increasingly dangerous stunts. The viral is a clever extension of the related Burger King ads using behind the scenes footage. As the number of visitors grows, they show additional clips, leading to a ‘world record’ chicken jump after 1m visitors.

At the time of writing, I’m not aware of whether the Guinness Book of Records has added the record to their books. Perhaps they are waiting for other flying chickens to come forward first?

Given its relation to the ads, it is heavier branded than previous virals, with brand mentions in the ad, on the back of the bike and the final ads themselves on display.

It’s well executed and another creative piece of work, but maybe it’s time to move on now, guys. We’ve all seen enough viral chickens for one lifetime.

P.S. One disturbing note was a throwaway comment saying that the pit was specially dug to film the footage as ‘originally this was all giant redwoods’. I sincerely hope not, as I know which I’d prefer to see.

The old joke goes, how many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one, but the lightbulb has to want to change.

I’m left with a similar feeling after viewing Gap’s new viral, Watch Me Change, although the general reaction in this corner of the office is Make Me Stop.

You can’t fault the execution. It is slickly produced with some excellent work in Shockwave, including some impressive dance moves if you can make it to the end. The concept is that you recreate you own likeness by creating a virtual you, even down to your age, eye width and muscular definition. You then dress yourself and you are ready to go.

You then have the bizarre experience of watching the new virtual you perform a strip-tease to music, although fortunately you keep your underpants on to spare yourself total embarrassment. Then the advertiser is revealed as the Gap telling you that ‘Change. It feels good.’

Perhaps it was thought that the appeal to the more voyeuristic elements of the internet would make the viral more, er, viral. Certainly the concept of inviting you to select a new look for yourself from the Gap catalogue is fine, it’s just what you do with yourself that bothers me. It suggests the design agency wanting to strut their virtual stuff with their impressive dance moves. I know dance is a common theme in Gap’s stylish advertising and that this is about shaking off the old you, but I’d rather watch Madonna strut her funky stuff anyday.

With so many brands experimenting with viral marketing, it requires a combination of great idea and execution to stand out from the crowd. Saab have done this with the surprisingly detailed and addictive Race Against Time.

Race Against Time has been created to promote the Saab 9-3 SportWagon and involves good use of data capture and high standards of creative. The game itself is an absorbing journey in which by answering a series of questions you create your own narrative to find your way to Hazart Point in the fastest time possible. This involves a dangerous hitchhiker on the loose, police stops, even hidden games, all narrated through streaming video filmed from the driver’s view.

You have to admire their ambition as well as their budget. Sometimes the simplest virals can be among the best, like the addictive BBC paper throwing game, but this is a serious undertaking and the majority of the players will never get to see the full range of content that is contained within the game. It also carefully communicates key messages about the models available, driving pleasure and a spirit of adventure.

It will be interesting to see how many players and leads this generates for Saab. Will the office community be patient enough to follow it through when an amusing picture often provides the kind of coffee break moment they are looking for? Provided word of mouth and existing databases can drive enough players to the game, Saab have created one of the virals of the year.

This blogger is a fan of Burger King’s viral marketing. It has proved itself consistently innovative and generally effective both in raw traffic and in changing perceptions of the brand among the yoof (and not so yoof) demographic.

As with all successful ventures you then face the difficult task of trying to surpass your previous efforts. Burger King’s viral marketing shot to fame with the Subservient Chicken, where visitors could type in commands to see him do just about anything from dancing to commenting on a competitors offering.

This was followed by the less successful Harry Enfield-endorsed Angus Diet and the weird and wonderful Sith Sense.

Burger King have now returned to their first love, chickens on the net, with a spoof rock band website, Coq Rock. As you’d expect, the site is awash with chicken puns and some suprisingly well produced rock tracks in praise of chicken fries. While the site lacks the addictive qualities of the Subservient Chicken and the Sith Sense, it shows Burger King further experimenting with the medium through the use of ringtones, merchandise and a messageboard (unavailable at the time of going to press, hmm).

Footnote: Burger King clearly knows the literacy levels of its core audience, buying both the ’subservient’ and ’subserviant’ versions of the domain name (note to self: spell check this article, ahem).

Not sure if this is a marketing stunt, but MindComet has today launched BloginSpace.com, “a free service for bloggers allowing them to submit their blog feeds for transmission into deep space” (isn’t that where most of them end up anyway?)

Their terms of use include this stellar (sorry!) gem:

“While Blog In Space supports Intergalactic Free Speech, Bloggers who use this site are urged to keep their blogs devoid of any overt language, comments or content designed to offend, taunt or provoke alien life forms in any way. Aliens may find your lifestyle, grammar or the picture of your girlfriend offensive, we just don’t know. Blog In Space does not warrant that any content transmitted into space will not be objectionable to alien life forms and will not be responsible for alien abductions, close encounters or intergalactic war.”

I have a better idea. How about BloggerinSpace.com, a service that allows you to submit the blogger you dislike most for transmission into deep space.

Who’d be first on your list?

Great example of collaborative marketing from Penguin (courtesy of Gary Stein) in the form of Penguin Remixed:

We’ve gathered together thirty of the best spoken word samples from some of the greatest books of all time and the finest actors around.

Now they’re yours to play with.

Download the samples, use them in your music, submit your tracks and you could win a great prize, including your tune published in a Penguin Digital Audiobook.

The top ten tracks at the end of July will be turned into an audiobook, and sold via Audible.co.uk and iTunes UK. They’ve already had 84 submissions since 7 June.

I love what Penguin have done here.

They are a great brand with a unique visual identity (essentially unchanged since the overhaul by famous typographer Jan Tschichold – pronounced chick-old – in the 1940s). The combination of classical literature, audiobooks and remixing is an inspired one, and will allow them to reach an audience that probably doesn’t see any book publisher as particularly ‘cool’. Finally, the Penguin with headphones logo is one of the best examples of graphic wit I have seen for a long time.

But most important of all, when it comes to the concept of collaborative marketing they clearly ‘get it’.

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

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.