Friday, April 28, 2006

How to refuse profitable business, part X: Truly bad telecoms marketing

I wrote a column in the 3GPortal about an extremely bad marketing example from the UK, with one of my mobile phone accounts with one of the UK mobile operators. I didn’t mention the operator, that would be unfair, as these kinds of mistakes are commonplace all throughout the mobile operator community. But the story is illustrative of how bad telecoms marketing is still today in 2006 in even such a modern and competitive market as the UK.

Without getting to the specifics of the telecoms profits, customer care info, etc details that are in the column (which is written obviously for telecoms professionals), let me keep it on a more general level here to summarize the story.

"How to refuse profitable business, part X: Truly bad telecoms marketing" continued...

Blog about what you talk about

Bill Gates may be the most obvious public face of Microsoft, but Robert Scoble is giving him a run for his money. Scoble is a tech evangelist at Microsoft who has played a big part in helping the company win at ‘the new PR’ of the blogosphere. And here he is, giving some free advice to Southwest Airlines on the content with which they should be filling their blog:

Some other things I’d love to know? Is there free WiFi near their counters anywhere? What’s the best restaurant in each airport? Who makes the most reliable luggage? Some craft definitely have funnier crews than others. Any way to know whether you’ll be on one of those flights? ...What are their favorite online travel resources? (Flight trackers, etc). Where do they go when they want to have fun on a layover?

When I talk to groups or individuals about blogging, I often hear the same statement from at least a few people: “I don’t know what our company could actually say on a blog that would get us millions of hits.”

Scoble poses only a few questions here, but they shine a light on the kind of value that a company’s employees can give through blogging. He has had quite a lot of practice doing just that for Microsoft. But if you start by asking yourself what people tend to ask you when they find out who you work for/what your company does/what your role entails, the ideas for what you could possibly say on a blog start to roll thick and fast.

As for the ‘millions of hits’...Well, do you really want to appeal to as many people as possible, or just the people who are most likely to be your customers, potential customers, and industry peers? Most smart businesses have a niche (or a few) that they attempt to cultivate offline; online is no different. Social media just allows for much more rich and far-reaching cultivation and conversation. More on that in future posts.

Studios' order for a clue makes some progress

Has Hollywood discovered the long tail by accident? If they are indeed improving box office takings by selling less of more, like Amazon and Netflix do - that is, fewer tickets per film, but lots more films showing - then perhaps this is what will finally kill the unsustainable, economically bankrupt, overblown budget model. We can only hope.

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Retailer vs. publisher approach to customer engagement

An interesting article in MediaPost on what publishers can learn from online retailers about customer engagement. It differentiates between online retailers and publishers, useful for those who don’t really think of such difference… whether I am ‘shopping’ for stuff or information, it’s my objective and state of mind that matters, not their business models. Which is precisely what the article points out:

Online retailers want consumers’ money. They create their sites’ experience around customer needs almost exclusively. [ed. note: not very well, as we point out on this blog] Publishers, on the other hand, want advertisers’ money. This sets up a different dynamic than in online retail. Ask anyone at an online retailer who is king, and they’ll reply loudly, “the customer.” Ask the same question of a publisher, and you’ll get a split of responses between “the advertiser” and “the audience.”

There are two more reasons I am flagging this article up here. One is the following paragraph:

A year and a half ago, pop-ups were panned by the industry and the IAB as short-sighted money-catchers that would inevitably erode publishers’ appeal to their audience. Now, with more content choices than ever, and a growing consumer-narcissistic-centric orientation about media and advertising, it’s only a matter of time before a similar revolt is staged against page takeovers, expanding banners, ads with audio, video pre-roll, and every other interruptive format that advertisers “find effective” now, or hope to use to replace a flagging format in the future.

Does it mean that the message that interruptive advertising or ‘messaging’ is unacceptable to users is getting through? I wish!

The second point worth nothing is the mention of measurement. A long standing gripe of mine against the marketing types who cannot see the forrest for the trees, i.e. people for the user-metrics.

Meaningful engagement is not measured by duration of visit, or pages viewed. Retailers see high metrics here and fear their customers couldn’t find what they wanted, then begin immediately scouring their sites for more e-barriers to raze. Publishers, in contrast, exalt: more page views, more inventory, more advertiser revenue next month. But with this many people visiting via search, and many more who visit directly but still in “search mode,” publishers can safely assume that much of their audience is mission-driven. If their mission is not accomplished, and accomplished quickly, consumers will seek an alternative, and these metrics may turn out to be a red herring.

And finally something that is music to my ears:

However “engagement” will ultimately be defined, it will surely connote a consumer willingness to continue interaction, not a grudging reluctance. Think of all the habits we, as consumers, have altered because an outdated model has been exploded by changes to technology and media: we don’t sit in front of a travel agent’s desk while she types commands into a computer we can’t see; we don’t haggle impotently with car dealers; we don’t trudge from store to store looking for a replacement cooking grate for our barbeque grill; we don’t clip coupons; we don’t tally gains and losses in our portfolio using the morning paper and a calculator; we don’t hurry home to catch our favorite show; we don’t watch the commercials. Media models--particularly those in online media--that fail to regard the customer experience (and by that I mean customer expectations in an absolute sense, not relative to what the experience on a particular site used to be) as paramount will suffer. 

Who's online? Not just 'geeks'

Adriana Cronin-Lukas, who is a member of the Engagement Alliance advisory board, uses the social bookmarking tool Furl to flag up this Center for Media Research item on internet radio listeners:

A new study by Arbitron and Edison Media Research finds that the weekly Internet radio audience increased by fifty percent from 2005,(satellite radio awareness tops sixty percent of the U.S. population, while the AM/FM radio audience remains strong. The report chronicles this expansion of the radio market and its implications for advertisers and media planners.

The monthly audience of Internet radio tops an estimated 52 million; an increase from 37 million people in 2005. The weekly Internet radio audience also increased 50 percent over the past year, with 30 million listeners last year.

Adriana comments:

So much for those who say that internet is for geeks and not their main customer base. Also, it is worth noting that “Online radio listeners are 36 percent more likely than the average consumer to live in a household with an annual income of more than $100,000.” Now tell me that it’s not worth making full use of the internet communication potential!