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?

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?

Words Work

A while ago, I was reading Management Today and was struck by their article ‘Crash Course in Communicating in Clear English’. Somehow something than enjoins you to ‘have a look at all your written communications’ seems a bit quaint in these days of digital communication and blogging your heart out.

Like most things MT, the tips stand up to scrutiny. One thing is missing however. In order to communicate something clearly you actually have to have something to say. Perhaps it’s worth remembering Jeremy Bullmore’s great adage 'The only time it’s worth advertising is when you’ve done something worth advertising’.

Far too many of us spend a lot of time rearranging words without thinking of what it is we are actually trying to communicate. Advertising was actually really good at this. You had to get your message out extremely succinctly. Since more and more forms of communication (PR, online) now allow you more and more space we’ve stopped valuing the finely honed word which actually carries a message.

Maybe we’re in good company though. Even TS Eliot had problems making words work. See Burnt Norton Verse V.

What Works for the Workers...

We had a discussion in the office around internal communications and the role digital can play in helping build staff awareness, engagement, enthusiasm and loyalty.

A handful of key (and very useful) ideas came of it but perhaps the most interesting identified the challenge of internal communications in the need to become a habit without becoming stale. Inconsistent messaging is almost as damaging as no messaging at all and battling the two-headed monster of Shrinking-Time-and-Attention-Span doesn’t help.

Internal comms teams, then, must create relevant, succinct and engaging communications for staff that are often so busy working hard they forget to eat lunch. So how do you get their attention and how do you keep it?

A few interesting case studies across a spectrum of approaches arose in our discussion. From Deloitte’s engaging Film Fest competition to a College's mandatory internal landing page and all the intranets software and web apps in-between (Chatter, LinkedIn groups, MOSS, etc...). Some shared experiences with internal comms that didn’t work as result of information overload, irrelevance, disinterest and/or miscommunuciation (the most recent and public being Vodafone).

Social Media Japanese Style

There's an interesting piece in ClickZ on Social Media Marketing the Japanese Way.

The piece references Mixi, one of the most popular SNS sites in Japan, which launched in 2000, years before MySpace and Facebook. There's also GREE, another well known social media site that started in Japan. AS businesses are starting to adopt Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools for their social media marketing efforts, they point out that Japanese businesses have been monitoring and responding to these threads related to their business or products for more than 10 years. For example, 2channel holds the distinction of being the world's biggest BBS site with over 12 million users.

They list the various social media groups - see recap of their list below.

For PC and Mobile: Mixi and GREE, which provides display ads, text ads, and PPC and advertising opportunities.

Video and Photo Sharing Sites: According to comScore, the Japanese spend 187 minutes on average on YouTube. Nico Nico Douga is another popular video sharing site, with 17 million users, including over 770,000 premium account users.

Social Bookmarking Sites: Hatena and Livedoor are popular in Japan and are still growing their user base. Hatena bookmarks can also be shared via Twitter.

Blog Network Sites: Did you know that there are more blog posts in the Japanese language than any other language in the world. Popular blog network and service sites include Ameba and the Livedoor blog.

Mini-Blogging Sites: Twitter is growing in popularity and use. According to Nielsen's Report, Twitter Japan has a higher reach (16.3 percent) than Twitter U.S. (9.8 percent).

Micro SNS Sites: While micro SNS sites are not that popular in Japan yet, there are some steady services that let you create your own SNS site, some for free.