Filed under: Events, Social Networking/ Word Of Mouth | Tags: adfluentials, advocates, brand relationship, consumer, conversation, Gok Wan, influentials, listen, review, Rich and Judy, WOM, WOMUK, word of mouth
Rich and Judy
This week, Neoco attended a WOMUK Expresso Briefing about why marketing should now be aimed at finding and engaging the “adfluentials”. The starting point of the discussion was a consideration of effective marketing in an environment where the brand-consumer relationship is increasingly complex. For one thing people are discerning between products and services with reference to new sources of authority. Online, peer reviews are becoming more important than any direct marketing. Even in traditional media people are listening to TV personalities for non-expert guidance. Publishers need to understand the Richard and Judy effect as much as fashion lines need to understand what Gok Wan will do to their industry. In terms of digital, however, these new sources of credibility are even more important for two reasons; firstly advocates and detractors a-like can get their voices heard easily, without regulation; and secondly they can be more easily engage with by brands, creating a real two way conversation.
To effectively get a message out there marketers need to identify and work with the people that have the greatest potential to influence others but who also are passionate about the brand or at least the sector.
These are the “adfluentials” and they already want to be found. Engaging with adfluentials in the first instance should ensure a more natural, relevant word of mouth reach. This allows brands to reach
their target audience in an organic way. From these ideas the issue that arises for me, someone starting out in marketing, is how active agencies need to be to achieve this. Surely working with influential brand advocates is about listen – taking a more passive role to empower consumers. And at the end of the day isn’t
this just a case of handing over more power to the consumers. Great if you have a cool brand, or a really solid product, but potentially a way to come across as pandering or directionless or even a way to open up
to more criticism. If this model becomes the predominant way of approaching marketing campaigns, agencies will have to consider brand strength and whether a product will genuinely stand up to scrutiny
before working with it.
Maybe we are generally moving towards a more honest approach to what the customer can add to the discussion. What is more, empowering people that want to have a dialogue with your brand doesn’t have to mean tipping the balance away from internally driven vision. Listening, after all, really means listening to the right people – finding ways to align brand vision and consumer needs. Involving highly targeted people
in the first stage of a campaign has certainly proved successful for Neoco’s clients, and even across brands that don’t have an immediate ‘coolness’ grab. It also seems that this approach is a great way to dissipate negative word of mouth.
Filed under: Brands & Marketing | Tags: bad website, Carl Sims, Centaur Media, crap design, Creative Review, Design Week, Design Week Award, they've always hated online people anyway, weak design, website
This design would never work in print - so why should it work online?
It’s an odd thing – that the venerable Design Week should display catastrophic design as exampled by its own web site.
Yes, I know we should be used to ‘odd’ things. Like believing the design industry would come together with one voice and say ‘no’ to free pitching and/or having done so actually enact it. Or, expecting to win a Design Week Award when you’re not one of the judges – but I digress.
Design Week has for years paraded itself as a venerable voice piece for the creative industries – graphic designers, interior designers, product designers and alike – clearly this has not extended to web designers. Simply put, the Design Week layout is a cacophony of rubbish. Please somebody tell me where to look first.
Many years ago, there was an expression which in deed was a belief; ‘no white space’. It was an archaic doctrine carved out of an ethos that space was money – so fill it up! Mainly demonstrated with ads and of course before colour magazines and newspapers. Subsequently, the battle for visual hierarchy was designed around type size and layout and in an odd way, whilst busy, was at least readable. However, ‘no white space’ on DW web site means a jumble of differing text, boxes of confused information, masses of jarring colour, various moving objects and neon-type flashes.
Maybe I’ve missed the point? Is it an attempt at the perfect example of extremely bad web design? Ah! I see. Forgive me for being misguided.
Don’t believe me? Click onto Design Week, whenever you like – go on. It makes no difference when. It’s rubbish now and most likely will be later.
Come on Design Week, lead the way – design well not design weak.
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Oops… no profile set up for Carl yet. So credit for this post goes here:
Thanks to Neoco’s Senior Brand Strategist Carl Sims (profile coming soon mate!)
Filed under: Brands & Marketing, Social Networking/ Word Of Mouth | Tags: 40 hour week, Bill Gates, community marketing, consumer community, digital marketing, Facebook, feed, friends, Gardening, global, groups, hotel review, I got thrown out of my community, interesting fact, neoco, online communities, social networking, Trip Advisor, UK, users, versus, Wikipedia
Proof that people involved in global online communities are much happier.
Online communities are not social networks. Social networks are not online communities. Bold statement. Let’s break it down a little further to explain. Everyone would accept Facebook as an example of a strong social network. Looking at Facebook, we can see it is all about ‘me’. Facebook for me is about my details, my friends, my activity (the feed), comments relating to me (the wall), my groups, events I’m attending… well, you get the idea. So where social networks are about ‘me’, online communities are about ‘us’. A good example of an online community is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is created and maintained by contributions from lots of people. Contributions that do not directly relate to themselves; unless I’m Bill Gates or similar, I’m not going to have a profile presence on Wikipedia. Even if I was Bill Gates, I would be using Wikipedia different to how I use Facebook. So two separate entities that use very similar tools (online user generated content) to create and communicate their content.
An analogy of the above is gardening… let’s imagine that a social network is the same as your own little garden. You are free to plant what flowers you want, put up a nice white picket fence, maybe one of those horrible water features. Whatever you do, the garden is yours and your friends can only come in to the garden and look at your work. An online community is like a communal garden. Using the same gardening tools, the community plant flowers, dig holes, put up fences, but no-one can claim ownership over the garden or any piece of it. The garden as a whole is the creation of the community.
Interesting fact:
If the UK population of adults all set about the task of rewriting everything on Wikipedia…
it would take less than five minutes
Another good example of an online community is Trip Advisor. Most people have used it at some point or another to help with their travel plans or check out a hotel review. Trip Advisor shows that for an online community to grow it cannot be owned by the brand. The brand must be part of the community. This is not to say Trip Advisor is at the whim of it’s own population but that the brand must respect the community and what they deliver. The brand must realise it is part of a larger whole. Recent stats show over 100 users spending over 40 hours a week updating Trip Advisor – more hours than most people work in a week! These are unpaid people who do this because they want to make Trip Advisor the number one travel website – the same goal as the brand itself. They do not do this because they want to generate Expedia more money! (Expedia own Trip Advisor). This shows how it is easier (and I use that term loosely) to engage online communities than social networks, as on social networks people are there for themselves. In the community, people want to contribute and basic community practice is to associate a ‘credit’ with their level of contributions to date.
Interesting fact:
25% of Expedia’s total turnover comes directly from Trip Advisor…
despite the fact it recommends many other travel service providers
Consumer communities are a form of marketing. It’s a different form of marketing with new rules and etiquette. It’s always best to consult marketers who have a wealth of knowledge regarding community marketing – conveniently Neoco can help. Neoco are an integrated digital marketing agency that have delivered a wealth of community and social marketing across digital channels. This article is one of the many insights we produce and deliver to our clients on a regular basis. Let us know if this was helpful or if you have any questions.
Filed under: Brands & Marketing, Social Networking/ Word Of Mouth | Tags: community, consumer, GSK, Madonna is still number one, mystarbucksidea, online branding, online communities, P&G, Party on Wayne, social environment, social media, social networking, social networks, Starbucks, tips, top 10, trends, Trip Advisor
Top 10s are important for people in Marketing
Part of the service we provide to our clients are opinion and thought leader articles. After a period of time we make these live for the public. Coming soon is an article about the difference between social networks and online communities – as people often confuse these very different models. In the meantime, enjoy the obligatory ‘Top 10 tips’ related to developing a successful online community:
- Make sure the community needs are inline with the brand needs – look at Trip Advisor above.
- Address the social challenges, not just the technological ones. Online communities and social networks are about people. Ignore the fact these people are online – do they still resonate with the audience social trends?
- The community owns the community. If a brand wants a community, it needs to be part of it – look at Trip Advisor example.
- Growth takes time and effort. Starbucks launched mystarbucksidea.com to build a community that looks to enhance the Starbucks experience. It’s taken a lot of financial resources and several months to get to the stage it is and currently requires 48 Starbucks staff to manage that community. Which leads on to…
- Communities need managing. They are about people and wherever you have a lot of people you need someone to manage and police activity – even if those people are like the 100 Trip Advisor contributors.
- Look at new ways to measure success. There are always the obvious benchmarks of page impressions and users but a community is not just a website. Set the targets outside of the obvious. Starbucks measure success on the goodwill they generate and new innovations from their community.
- Appreciate the many types of communities. Whilst there are similarities, a private community is very different to a public one. Restricting access, limiting numbers and increasing engagement creates an entirely different conversation with users. GSK and P&G are known to use closed/ private communities for huge amounts of R&D across their products.
- Consumer communities are a form of marketing. It’s a different form of marketing with new rules and etiquette. It’s always best to consult marketers who have a wealth of knowledge regarding community marketing (conveniently neoco can help). As a basic litmus test, put yourself in the shoes of the consumer. Would the activity work for you?
- These are social environments, so the general rules of social engagement apply. A good marketer would never crash a friends party and just start shouting about their brand all night – so why should that work online? Be respectful, honest and conversational – you will find it goes a long way.
- Make sure the community is connected internally (at your brand). Communities can be a goldmine for consumer insight and innovative ideas. Make sure these fulfill their potential by enabling conversations across your brand.
Filed under: Cool & Online | Tags: convert, filter, Flash, gif, jpeg, london, neoco, png, raster, svg, text art, textorizer
Neoco Sketch
I recently stumbed upon a site that does one simple job – it takes an image and then produces a representation of this image by simply writing words on a page. My explanation is clearly rubbish, so here’s what it does, straight from the horses mouth:
Textorizer takes a raster image in a format such as png, jpeg or gif, detects edges using a Sobel convolution filter and replaces them with supplied lines of text.
You can click here to see my “textorized” version of one of LB’s Neoco sketches.
The output of this process is an SVG XML file – where SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics (click here for more details from Wikipedia). In terms of the usefulness of this process, I will say what I said to eveyone in the office – usefulness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. I think it’s useful. Kind of!
Filed under: News | Tags: Arts Council, campaigns, Digital, Events, exhibition, I liked the Wizard of Oz show, installation, marketing, mobile, neoco, pitch, promotion, Purcell Room, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, strategy, The Hayward, Waterloo
southbank centre logo
Neoco have won a four-way pitch to deliver digital strategy, marketing campaigns and social networking presence for Southbank Centre. The project begins immediately and runs in to 2009, working alongside the existing Southbank Centre marketing team.
The work will see Neoco working on several projects every month for the world-renowned arts centre implementing new and innovative digital solutions as a way to communicate Southbank Centre’s vast programme of events amd exhibitions. In addition to the overall digital strategy, key events and exhibitions at Southbank Centre will benefit from unique campaigns to promote them. These ‘one-off’ campaigns will range from YouTube video challenges, interactive digital installations (to capitalise on the 21-acre site), social networking widgets, mobile applications and much more.
“Neoco have demonstrated an excellent understanding of our brand and of the key opportunities afforded by hosting some of the world’s greatest artistic events. They have the capability to deliver on both digital marketing strategy and execution – we are excited to be working with them,” said Rishi Coupland, Marketing Services Manager, Southbank Centre.
About Southbank Centre
Southbank Centre is the UK’s largest arts centre, occupying a 21-acre site that sits in the midst of London’s most vibrant cultural quarter on the South Bank of the Thames. The site has an extraordinary creative and architectural history stretching back to the 1951 Festival of Britain. Southbank Centre is home to the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room and The Hayward as well as The Saison Poetry Library and the Arts Council Collection. The Royal Festival Hall reopened in June 2007 following the major refurbishment of the Hall and redevelopment of the surrounding area and facilities.
