What Works for the Worker, Works for the Customer

Yesterday, I wrote about our roundtable discussion on internal communications. I mentioned staff communications and it's effect on customer/client needs.

This was the golden nugget we uncovered during our chat - at the end of the day, proper internal comms drive more value from your customer and client relationships. And not just monetary value: loyalty, recognition, association, recommendations, on and on and on. An excited, informed staff member is better equipped to provide a greater service experience to your audience (Zappos being the most obvious of examples…)

Internal communication, then, cannot be an afterthought. Communication affects service. Communication is service; A service to your employees which improves service for your customer.

It’s not a new concept but it is one that, in our world of increasing content and decreasing time for it all, can be easily forgotten on the back burner.

We've started a few growing group discussions on LinkedIn around these ideas - would be great to hear your thoughts either here on the blog or over in the discussion groups.

LinkedIn Discussions:

Is it useful to think of Communications as a Service?

What's working internal comms among PR and Communications professionals and within corporate social media?

Communication is a Service, Not a Cost

Looking through the Marketing Society’s 50th Anniversary book ‘The Future of Marketing’, sponsored by Accenture. These words stood out particularly, from Ian Livingstone, CEO of BT: ‘From a customer point of view, irrelevant advertising is an imposition. Truly relevant advertising is a service.’ Too true Ian.

But I’d go one stage further than that. I’d actually say: Truly Relevant Service is Advertising, or at least ‘publicité’ as the French would have it. Businesses have always understood that the experience of the brand is as much to do with the people and the service as it is to do with the promotion. More so in many cases as B2B marketing budgets have always been smaller than desirable.

So, I’d like to see the Future of Marketing in B2B as one in which marketers get involved in service delivery, not just comms delivery. Oh, and I’d also like to see a major B2B brand talking about business audiences in the next edition of the Marketing Society book. But suspect I’ll have to wait 50 years for that.

Have You Seen the Muffin Man?

Earlier this year, I attended a CBI Council meeting.  As always, it’s fascinating to listen to how a wide variety of companies are dealing with the world as we know it.  Service businesses in the main come out well – perhaps because they are more agile and able to adapt their services to what’s needed in the current marketplace.  So law and accountancy firms are seeing a reduction in contract briefs but an increase in resolution or winding up orders.  All sounds a bit ‘ambulance-chasing’ but it means that they’re still in business, still employing people and still keeping the economy turning.

What was agreed overall is that companies have reacted differently to this recession.  Rather than laying people off they’ve changed their working conditions (a la Honda).  Rather than closing, they’ve sought to diversify.

Which brings me to the Muffin Man. Recently, I bought some muffins off a stall in Cambridge market.   They were about 4 times as expensive as the ones you can buy in Sainsbury’s.  But they were handmade by the stall holder, who was charming and we had a long discussion about how hungry kids are when they come out of school and how muffins were just right.  Trouble is, the children hated his muffins.  But, I reflected, as I threw them in the bin, at least I’m keeping the economy going by buying them in the first place.  Although perhaps I should suggest he diversifies  – into aggregates.

Time to Start Thinking Differently About Digital Marketing

The obsessive focus by marketers on acquisition makes less sense in the current climate.

Marketers have transitioned their activities from offline advertising to online advertising,seeking ways in which to use social media to, well, advertise – despite the fact that that’s not how the medium seems to work.

For a start, markets are retracting, making the retention of customers an essential exercise. Secondly, customers are more likely to be influenced by what peers say about product or service on a social networking site than by an ad, and never more so than in B2B decision making where advertising has always hovered around a mere 15% of marketing spend.

I'd love to hear your thoughts - has your business grabbed digital marketing by the horns?

What are you doing that's engaging?

Stickybits: The Newest Addition to the Business Social Media Toolkit?

This year’s SXSWi-ers were the first user group to be introduced to the world of Stickybits, a new user-gen content-and-location app. It’s been making pretty big waves across social and news media so we decided it was time to have a go with it in the office.

Essentially, it is a barcode to which you can upload content with your smartphone and stick to real-life objects. You can attach any sort of content to it (pictures, images, copy, audio, etc...) including the location, if you want. Other people can then discover and scan the barcode to see what you’ve uploaded (the content that ‘owns’ the bar code) and can add content to it (a bit like commenting on a blog - so everyone who scans/views the code after you will be able to view the content you've added).

Try scanning the barcode above (you will have to download the app, but it's free) to see how it works.

Official barcodes can be bought or downloaded from the Stickybits site but, in an interesting twist, you can apparently also ‘tag’ (add) your content to existing barcodes as well (yep, even the one on that can of cola on your desk).

I’m not entirely convinced it’s eternally practical, especially in a broad scope of accessibility as it's a smartphone app and not a web based app. Part of the appeal of Twitter, Facebook, et al. is that they are web-based with mobile capacity, meaning they are more accessible to more people, in more ways, in wider demos. Stickybits is for smartphone users only (and not even all smartphone users - though Adam, our resident Googlevangelist, is happy they’ve included Android).

I also imagine there’s a huge amount of trust needed to make this work in a family-friendly, legit way for any sort of long term stability. I don’t think anyone wants to see streets lined with Stickybits or stumble across disturbing content (though apparently there is a ToS to abide by) while they're innocently scanning away.

Still, it’s intriguing. It opens up the door for brands (and not just the consumer ones, either!) to add another layer of interactive messaging to a physical product; a new layer of contact for building relationships.

It's a great step in the direction of on and offline integration and there’s huge potential to get really creative with it. Brands can incorporate reviews, best practice guides, user manuals, product notes,  inventory, tracking, feedback forms, viral contesting , maps, business information, networking details… the barcode is your oyster.

So now I put it to you – have you tried it out? Come up with some good ideas? Have any thoughts on its practicality, longevity or even relevancy?

Who's In Your Audience?

Earlier this year, I attended a seminar in Branding & Communications Today. 

It was a morning of examining brand strategies and key demographics. The phrase of the day was definitely 'Gen Y', after a presentation focused purely on exploring the behaviours (on and offline) of the social media generation (those born '81 to '01) who were also affectionately referred to as Young Fogey's, for their tendancies to behave older than their years, despite their depictions in the media).

At the end of the morning, we broke into groups and discussed the morning's presentations. When the topic of Gen Y inevitably came up, one of the members in our group posed an interesting question:

Do you consider your audience based on age/gender/routine or do you consider your audience in terms of their lifestyle and behaviour?

An example he gave of this was a 40 year old divorcee regressing into juvenile behaviour compared against an 'Young Fogey' behaving wise beyond his (or her) year's.

While the process of considering demographics is clearly not as clean cut as A or B, it's still an interesting thought, don't you think?

More Than an MP3......

A bit of horn-tooting for one of Omobono's (former) own, Andy, who has used his digital mastery for an exciting new project of his own, called 3DiCD.

It is a digital experience for online music, providing interactive packaging along with the music files. As they have said: “With a 3DiCD, listeners get the whole packaging experience; engagement and immersion all within the online environment.

Last week, Andy and the 3DiCD team launched with a digital version of Imogen Heap’s Grammy award winning album, Ellipse. You can check it out here.

We wish Andy and the team the best of luck.

Does Marketing Need to be 'Official'?

So it’s official.  Relationship building websites work. At least that is the finding of a study on P&G’s customer experience website in Greece (the equivalent of www.supersavvyme.com).

This was one of the papers presented at the Academy of Marketing Conference, a convention of academics who study and research what we practitioners do for a living.   The paper showed that broadening the customer-company relationship via the website increased positive word of mouth towards the website, and intentions to increase purchase of the company’s products.

So far, so good.  Except they haven’t compared it to other relationship building websites.  Or outside Greece.  And the statistical differences are so miniscule you’d need a microscope to see them.

A second paper looked at whether loyalty cards increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.  Answer?  Not really.  The reason being that all stores have loyalty cards so it’s a must, not a differentiator.

What was interesting about both these papers is that the research process (which is incredibly robust, uses lots of very complex terminology and some graphs that make you glad you’re no longer at school) revealed what I would argue most marketers know by gut – that making an effort to broaden your customer’s interaction with your brand or company (as long as it’s relevant and useful) is going to make them more likely to want to do business with you.  And that marketing’s job is to keep ahead of the game constantly.  Once you have a good idea (like storecards) your competitors will catch up – meaning you have to move ahead of the pack again.  That’s what makes our jobs so stimulating.

However, wile the academic community is pontificating about whether 0.03 is a meaningful statistical difference we are judged by whether it actually made any difference to the success of our client’s companies.  So it’s left me wondering why we marketers are so desperate to have our ‘gut instincts’ validated by research?

Would welcome anyone’s views.

Room for Foursquares?

A few weeks ago, Shane Richmond published a post on The Telegraph's blog questioning the point of Foursquare. Having previously been searching for similar answers, I had suggested to him a presentation by US agency JESS3, on where location-based tools might change for the better. Shane very kindly credited us with the suggestion in his post as he searched for his answers (thanks, Shane!).

I have been playing around with location-based networks to further understand them and their relevance in business (if you stop by Omobono HQ, check in on both Foursquare and Gowalla!). There is a clear application for consumer facing brands but is it the same for business-to-business?

So, I  put this question to you: what is the point of Foursquare, etc. and is there space for location-based networks in B2B's growing portfolio of digital tools?

Radio Silence: To 'Err' or Not to 'Err'...

The thing about talking on radio, and if you’ve ever done it you know, is that you spend the next 24 hours thinking about what you might have said.

For example, I was recently on BBC Radio 4's 'You and Yours' discussing the use of World Cup association with seemingly irrelevant marketing campaigns (you can read the whole story here). This is how it went, and how it should have played out.

Julian Worricker (presenter) – “You’ve said marketers are ‘a carbuncle on the sidecar of reality’, is that what you really think?”

Fran Brosan (yours truly) – “Err”

Fran Brosan (should have said) – “I don’t believe that specious connections to the World Cup help our industry build a professional image.”  Or even ‘Yes, that was a bit poetic wasn’t it.” Anything but “Err”.

Julian Worricker (paraphrase) – “Do you think it’s a good thing to be doing Press Releases about the World Cup if you’re not associated with it?”

Fran Brosan – “It depends on what you’re trying to achieve – waffle, waffle – so it depends on what they are trying to achieve.”

Fran Brosan (should have delivered on brand message to emphasise Omobono’s expertise) –“Identifying what you are trying to achieve is really important.  All good communications start with good planning which is a really important part of what we do for our clients at Omobono.”

Also completely forgot to tell them we were Marketing Agency of the Year (although they probably wouldn’t have said it).

At least I managed to get out a reasonable definition of marketing when he asked (phew).

Then just as you are beginning to get into your stride the interview ends.

So if you agree (or don’t) - especially with the carbuncle bit -  let me have your comments.  "Err" is fine.