wayfindings

Qik offers a way to stream your cell-phone videos directly to the web. Suddenly, we’re not just citizen journalists, but citizen video journalists. Marc Andreeson, who basically invented the web as we know it, thinks its a good enough idea to buy in. We should all pay attention.
The impact of qik (and its inevitable spin-offs) on social media is huge, so be prepared.

I predict that a new class of brand advocates will emerge. Here’s an example of someone reviewing a music festival. He’s clearly comfortable with his cell-phone/video camera, and his subjects are too. But the crude production values give it credibility and immediacy. Imagine if you had a team of 5-10 qiksters subtly promoting your product or service.

Branded Response generally relies on content over technique, but, at least until the novelty wears off, qik looks like a way to break through the clutter.

Advertising on mobile devices offers unparalleled opportunity. It is the media of choice among hard-to-reach young consumers. It is immediate. It is highly targeted.

But it can be misused. Witness the experience of the agency curmudgeon, Jim Chazer.

“DON’T ANNOY ME!!!!

If you annoy me, you not only won’t get a (good) response, that brand you’re spending beaucoup bucks on building is, in my mind, a pain in the you-know-where. My professional advice to you…DON’T ANNOY YOUR CUSTOMERS!

Here’s a great example of WHAT NOT TO DO.

last week and I got a chance to watch my kids play in a neighborhood event called “Friday Night Basketball”. It’s sponsored by the homeowners association and gets kids up to the park to play. It’s actually pretty cool. Boys and girls. Older teens and tweeners. Skilled players and beginners. Somehow it works and everybody comes away smiling.

Anyway, I’m watching, but I’m keeping my distance…hanging out by the car so I don’t embarrass my kids (which, apparently, I have a tendency to do). Suddenly, I get an urgent text message. I could tell that it was urgent because the subject line said “URGENT”. I didn’t recognize the number, but I’m thinking that it might be an urgent matter since somebody else thought it was urgent enough to put “URGENT” in the subject line. Could it be that maybe I really am as indispensable as I think I am? Unlikely, but if there’s a chance that my guys need me, I’m checking the message so I can help.

SIGH!

Apparently, the urgent matter was that I had a chance to download a ringtone from some stupid hip-hop artist (is there any other kind?). How annoying is that? And mind you, they’ve sent me crap like this before, but I didn’t care because they didn’t mark it “URGENT”.

Now, guess what happened while I was checking AT&T’s @#%&*-ing URGENT message:

A) I missed my 12 year old daughter poaching a pass and going coast to coast for a layup

OR

B) I fell in love with that ring tone, bought the album and plan my vacations around the artist’s tours.

Also, guess what happened shortly thereafter:

A) I opted out of AT&T’s stupid marketing messages and looked into switching over to Verizon

OR

B) I URGENTLY opted out of AT&T’s stupid marketing messages and IMMEDIATELY switched over to both comcast and verizon

Treating your customers with a little respect goes a long way toward building your brand.

PS: Note to AT&T’s marketing department. You’re lucky that I was able to vent with this blog. My first reaction was to come down and teach you some manners.

Jim Chazer, Wayfinder Response Curmudgeon”

Thanks Jim. Two lessons for brand-conscious response marketers:

1. Don’t cry wolf. What’s urgent to you is probably pretty low in your prospects’ world view. If the kidney he/she is waiting for has arrived, OK. If they are facing late fees or overdraft fees if they don’t act right away, OK. Otherwise, you’re not that important to their lives. Respect that.
2. Be careful to match offers to targets. Jim has a family plan so it might be tough to match specific phone numbers to owners, but it’s worth the effort. That hip-hop ring tone might have been perfect for a 12 year old girl. For a fan of The Who? Not so much.

Everyone talks about lead-gen.  But, what about protecting what you’ve got?

I’m convinced that a lot of marketers are, as they say, “going out for hamburger when they’ve got steak at home.”

Why does this strategy get so little attention? There are the obvious reasons; it’s a long-term strategy, it’s tough to track, it requires coordination between service and marketing staffs.

But, I also get the sense that customer retention lacks sex appeal.  Telling the CEO (or a recruiter) that you grew the customer base 20% comes off a lot cooler than reporting that you cut customer defection by 20%.

It’s time to get serious about retention and its close cousin win-back marketing. The following numbers from a PricewaterhouseCoopers study make a compelling case:

• most companies lose 10 – 40% of their customers every year
• it costs 5 to 10 times more to get a customer than keep one
• reducing attrition by 2% has the same impact on profits as cutting costs by 10%.

Bottom line, the PWC study states that reducing customer defection by 5% increases profits by 25% to 85%.

How can cutting attrition have such a big impact on profits? The obvious benefit from keeping customers is incremental sales.  But hidden benefits are just as important:

• loyal customers increase referrals that bring in new business – for free
• loyal customers don’t need promotional pricing used to attract prospects
• loyal customers provide information (quantitative and qualitative) that helps the business acquire new customers more efficiently.

In a tough economy, every customer counts. Now is the time to pay more attention to those you have.

Social Media is the darling of internet’s talking (and blogging) class these days, but is it a killer app or a waste of resources?

Aberdeen Research Group has recently released a survey of “challenges, tactics and strategies companies face when implementing customer-facing Web 2.0 applications”.

Despite other recent reports to the contrary, results from best-in-class companies report that social media strategies generate positive customer satisfaction, plus great insights that have lead to product innovations and better marketing decisions.

Successful social media is definitely a Branded Response approach. It necessarily leverages those aspect of the brand that generate response. Technorati Tags: web 2.0, social media, branded response, aberdeen research, best practices

Two seemingly contradictory articles caught my eye over the last few weeks. But taken together, they turn out to be two sides of the same coin.

One was by Doug Garrett, the president of a DRTV agency. It appeared in the June 2, 2008 issue of DM News, a direct marketing industry weekly publication. Consider the title, “Focus DRTV on Building Brands.” The article mentions Sharper Image and George Foreman Grill, two companies that were successful selling product via DRTV only to eventually fail. Why? Because both focused on short-term sales. For all the millions spent on TV (a fantastic branding medium) neither was willing to allocate any of their precious airtime to communicate a brand to the customer. This limited them to a product to product sales mentality. No franchise building, no customer loyalty.

Not long after that article, appearing in the July 14, 2008 issue of Adweek, was an article by Ron Bliwas, CEO of O & M’s A. Eichoff and Company entitled, “You’ve Lost That Selling Spirit: Why television spots fail to make the sale and what brands and agencies can do about it.” His challenge to marketers was to start adding immediate incentives and calls to action in all TV advertising, i.e. a stronger reason for consumers to buy right now, or, if they’re not ready to buy, at least call or click for more information.

Two articles, from two very different points of view, converging at the essence of Branded Response. Committing to your brand, in addition to what you sell are keys to short- and long-term success.

The Break Up - You’ve heard all the whitepapers, now see this important message dramatized.

Here at Wayfinder, we anticipate that Branded Response efforts will increasingly rely on web-based conversations. If you’re going to participate in web 2.0 for consumers, it’s helpful to keep up with content leaders.

Here’s a fun, interactive map from Vanity Fair where N, S, E, and W are replaced by News, Earnest, Opinion and Scurrilous. Checking out all the sites is a great way to kill a weekend.

According to a recent Brandweek article, Fortune 500 companies are just now incorporating social media into their marketing mix.

The first step many of them are taking is to hire social media consultants to teach them about creating and fostering conversations with customers, prospects and influencers.

Many see social media as an internal as well as external tool. Social media may be the solution to the age-old problem of turning productivity-robbing organizational “silos” from concrete into something more transparent.

But is marketing the best department to make social media work? Effective social media is all about honesty, substance and trust - attributes not often associated with marketing. Putting product development specialists, senior execs and R&D into the social media mix might be a better approach, warts and all.

Technorati Tags: social media, web 2.0, fortune 500

This July 19 article on times.com shows that even as major retailers experience jaw-dropping year-over-year declines in same store sales, their online sites are picking up at least some of the slack. Take The Gap for example, according to the time.com article, its same store sales were down 11% during Q1 2008, but online business grew 21% for the same period.

Consumers are calculating the cost to schlep to the malls and the online experience is suddenly looking even better. Smart retailers are responding with free shipping offers that are apparently being gobbled up.

This new reality isn’t a passing fad. Any business that isn’t virtualizing its selling process, either with robust online offerings or web-based selling techniques like webinars and virtual sales calls, will find itself at a severe disadvantage.

It’s no secret that most people who visit a company’s web site, don’t provide their contact information. And the ones who do may strictly be looking for freebies. Turning these registrants over to salespeople can be frustrating. In an ideal world, marketing and sales would work to qualify every visitor, whether they register or not.

LEADSExplorer (www.leadsexplorer.com) takes a step in that direction. It tracks visitor activity to help sales people know which prospects to target, and based on what pages visitors track, what content to talk about during cold calls.

This is an interesting idea, if a little creepy. There are existing ways to approximate what they claim to achieve. Trolling through web traffic reports can provide some of this type of information, as can mining your google adwords reports.

On the other hand, a more Branded Response-appropriate approach is to use the knowledge about where visitors come from, what they look at, and where they leave to improve the content your web site provides. Making free and gated content more compelling through white papers and webinars may be a better way to invite prospects into the conversation.