Archive for December, 2009

Fluffy Links – Monday December 14th 2009

Monday, December 14th, 2009

Happy Birthday Stephen P.

Life is nearer to completion with a painting from Eolai.

O’Leary Analytics show the effect of bad news on Tiger Wood’s sponsors. When your client gets more attention and it’s negative, how good is your association then?

Clever competition from Komplett.ie. They built a 500 euro PC and the comp is that you build a better one using their catalog for the same price. Check out some of the builds. Well worth a bookmark.

Very important blog post here. User comments and a defence if you get legal hounds after you.

Twitter look fashion shoot.

Innovation Corner:
Rolf on Innovation.

Johnnie Moore on how rewarding some forms of innovation/creativity can misfire.

The five secrets of innovation are…

Modest Mouse – King Rat
So many people this could be dedicated to.

Ireland’s sweet tooth

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

Some facts from the Business Post today:

  • Ireland’s chocolate market is the 12th biggest in Europe and is Britain’s biggest confectionery export market.
  • Cadbury’s Dairy Milk has been Ireland’s favourite chocolate for more than 75 years, bought by more than 60% of the population and is Ireland’s number one confectionery brand.
  • The Mars Bar is the number one filled bar.
  • Maltesers is the number one cinema brand.
  • Tayto holds a 28.4 per cent share of the crisps market.
  • King Crisps holds an 11.6 per cent share of the crisps market and is the number one crisp by pack sales in the capital.
  • Hunky Dorys is the number one crinkle cut crisp, with a 13.4 per cent share of the market.
  • Harvest Fare is Ireland’s leading nut range.
  • Doritos and Sensations are number one and number two sharing bags in Ireland.
  • The gum and mints market is worth €53.4 million annually, with Wrigley holding a 76.5 per cent value share.
  • Nestlé Rowntree is the number one brand in impulse sugar confectionery.

I love the terminology used.

Peppermint Everything Cupcake
Photo owned by norwichnuts (cc)

Horse Feathers – Live in Academy2

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

About this time last year I saw Parenthetical Girls live in Whelan’s and said it was my gig of the year and now I think Horse Feathers in Academy 2 on Friday night was my gig of 2009. And I went to some fantastic gigs this year I must say. I’ve been a huge fan of them ever since hearing Finch On Saturday played on Pearl’s show on Phantom a few years back. Beautiful music and when live it’s even better. Good banter between the band and the very small but enthusiastic crowd.

Photo:
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Video:

Rivers of yellow flow through the streets

Saturday, December 12th, 2009

We’ve probably all seen the glut of taxis at nighttime in Ireland of late. I did this video last night (it’s very shaky to start) walking along Stephen’s Green and looking down Dawson Street. Taxis on either side of the road and some double upped while more taxis drive past. Every yellow light is someone looking for business.

and another walking towards Merrion Row

Every new Taxi plate gives a little more buffer for the Taxi Regulator. Nice offices that they have. In the end the consumer pays for this and is the one having to listen to all the moaning from the drivers about it. What is it with regulators who are the last people to give a shit about quality or service but all about ensuring revenues for themselves at least?

Update: Numerous racist comments have been moderated after I got linked to by the IrishTaxi.org forum. The commentators directly came from this page. How shameful.

The Paul Gogarty “Fuck You” video

Friday, December 11th, 2009

After uploading to YouTube I see there are other copies there already. Ah well. I’m actually slightly shocked at the ferocity of the sentiment. It’s vicious. And I’d know…

The bell sounding really makes you think “Rounnnnnnd 2”. Commentary and whatnot on IrishElection.com

Update: Some people on Facebook are reporting that the Green Party have reported this video inside in Facebook as abuse.

Joyless Irish Greens have reported the amazing Gogarty-goes-postal video to Facebook as ‘abusive’. Do yourself a favour and search for “Green TD turns Dail air blue” on YouTube. It is absolutely hilarious.

In case you missed it, you can now search what people are saying (even those not connected to you) in their status updates.

Update: An email from YouTube:

Dear damienmulley,

Your video Paul Gogarty TD says “Fuck You” to Emmet Stagg has become popular on YouTube, and you’re eligible to apply for the YouTube Partnership Program, which allows you to make money from playbacks of your video.

Once you’re approved, making money from your video is easy. Here’s how it works: First sign into your YouTube account. Then, complete the steps outlined here: http://////. Once you’re finished, we’ll start placing ads next to your video and pay you a share of the revenue as long as you meet the program requirements.

We look forward to adding your video to the YouTube Partnership Program. Thanks and good luck!

All thrown into one messy post…

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Hello from London, here for another few hours then back to Dublin, then over to Galway, back to Dublin and then Cork for a little bit of work and a long bit of rest. 2009 has been a cracker and a killer of a year. More on that in later posts.

So anyways, London. I was here for another MeasurementCamp which is an event with some of the brightest minds coming together and sharing information and insights around social media. Real social media done by real genuine people. We should have one of those in Ireland … oh wait.

There were three speakers this time and all three made me consider how people do social media but two in particular fueled an epiphany (or two) for me. Two Johns, John Griffith and John Willshire talked about social media but from different angles yet both were honing in on the idea that it’s not just ROI and it’s not just about quick hits and moving on. John Willshire talked about social media being a bonfire when advertising is fireworks. It’s not about hashtags in Twitter so you can spam your client’s name to as wide an audience as possible and who’ll forget you a few day later. It’s hard to boil down John Griffith’s talk. It covered a lot in a short time but the way he views social media is how I’d love to see it in the future. We are not clones of each other and when a company realises this, everything can improve. He talked about delivering a marketing message to your granny and how what you tell her is not important but what she says to her friend in her version of the story is the important bit. Social media almost becoming spiritual.

Saw Stephen Malkmus in Camden on Wednesday night. Great gig. Photo:
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Was in the Tate Modern on Thursday. Saw the Big Black Box installation. Great idea, giant art is always fun.

There was also this exhibition called: No Ghost, just a Shell, the blurb of which is:

No Ghost Just a Shell project, which was initiated when French artists and frequent collaborators Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno purchased the copyright for Annlee, an animated figure originally designed a Manga agency in Tokyo. No Ghost Just a Shell proposes scenarios in which Annlee is liberated from ownership and allowed the chance to resolve the ambiguities of her fate.

Photo of one of the works:
photo

Bought Charles Saatchi’s book on himself. I am Charles Saatchi and … which is excellent. Well worth a quick read. Used this quote before but if only every company had this printed out:

By and large, talent is in such short supply that mediocrity can be taken for brilliance rather more than genius can go undiscovered

Oh yes, got some media calls about the new Facebook Privacy settings. On Facebook and miffed? Get over it, public or not, you already upload all your personal data to the computers of a foreign company.

Oh yes and lastly, I normally use the Apple Store in Regent Street to check emails with my phone and upload pics to Flickr etc. And this time I logged into Foursquare and mapped my travels too. But St Pancras Station now has free WiFi and it’s worth a visit too after getting a beautiful makeover. Pic:

photo

The Art Fair 10th-13th Dec – Some nice affordable art

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

Got this via email:
The Art Fair is on soon in the Nora Dunne Gallery. 52 different artists displaying, price range to suit all pockets, I’m told.

5000 complimentary tickets are all sent out…more are on the way. Each ticket once filled out will enter the customer into the draw for paintings by John Morris, David Nolan and Judy Glynn, Handmade silver jewellery, A TV DVD player, 200 euro voucher for the no-reserve Auction coming up on the 29th December and whatever else turns up on the day.

Big fan of art especially if at a good affordable price. Have a looksee.

Frightened Rabbit

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

The support for Modest Mouse tonight.

Google Realtime search – powered by Twitter

Monday, December 7th, 2009

Imagine they had something better than Twitter at one point and killed it? Here’s Google Realtime Search, powered by Twitter. Remember the days when Yahoo! search was powered by Google? I’m sure Twitter realises that Google will do their best to build something so they don’t have to use Twitter one day…

Making (Real) Money With Social Media Marketing – The Komplett Experience

Monday, December 7th, 2009

This is a guest post from Aaron McKenna who is the Country Manager for Komplett.ie, the Norwegian electronics etailer. Komplett launched a social media marketing campaign in May 2009. In this guest post, Aaron will discuss some of the elements relating to their experiences and lessons learned since then. This is a blueprint on how to do business online using social media. Download, print, send on and share with as many people as you can.

Komplett will make a high six figure sum out of social media marketing in Ireland in 2010, having made a modest six figure sum in 2009. By 2011 it will be seven. I don’t joke. I was reading an article in the latest BusinessWeek talking about social media consultants being the equivalent of snake oil salesmen in some senses: Extolling the mantra of social media as gospel, adhering to strict doctrines about ‘the conversation’ and selling many companies just that; expensive snake oil.

Personally, I’ve decided to class myself as a ‘sceptical convert’ to the idea of Social Media Marketing.

I’m a convert because we’re actually making money out of it. It’s driving revenue. There are results beyond how many followers we get, and impressions to our blog. These are nice things to have, and the brand value of our exercise is quite important… But at the end of the day, there has to be a bottom line result; and the word ‘results’ is something I find a lot of marketing agencies and consultants tend to shy away from when you quantify those results on the bottom line.

Yes the money is, in the grand scheme of things, not a massive amount of our total turnover… But another good piece of advice on business is, it’s a game of inches; and social media marketing for us has been quite cheap all things considered. And the potential I see for it is much broader than what it stands at today.

I’m a sceptic because I inherently mistrust anything that every business consultant looking for my cash is extolling the virtues of. The first thing I look at in any business/marketing consultant is how many successful businesses/marketing campaigns they’ve run, barring their consultancy. It’s low, for many of them, and I mistrust mostly their lack of understanding of the day-to-day fundamentals that business leaders have to deal with.

I remain committed to growing our social media efforts whilst in the back of my head wondering how much of this is a fad or a bubble. Surely some of it must be, I think…

But the trick to succeeding in the long run will come in being strong in the areas that will stand the test of time and still be around in five years. Not just platforms, but modus. I truly believe that you have to add value to reap success in this medium – Setting up a Twitter account, getting 10,000 followers and spamming them with ‘deals’ all day long; or talking about the weather outside your office, these things do not add value.

Adding value is writing ‘How-To’ articles for the DIY products you sell (in our case, computer components) and being around to answer questions for people on the fly. It’s hotels giving me a great guide for the locality so as I know where to go and what to do within easy striking distance of the lobby when I arrive for an overnight business trip. It’s being able to tweet the reception to say what time I’ll arrive because of a flight delay, and getting asked how it went in the end when I finally arrive.

The second lesson I have after adding value concerns the bottom line: It’s something that is often left out of discussions regarding social media marketing, whereas in my view and, I think, in yours too it is a central concern. How much money can I make out of social media, when and how?

While our circumstances and experience sure as heck won’t be yours, I find value in reading the stories of other businesses and applying my own lens to it.

The Beginning

We kicked off in social media marketing for four main reasons:

  • 1. We’re a web company, and web based marketing reaps direct results in a playing field we’re suited to
  • 2. Social media has been on the rise for some time now, and all that noise warranted some exploration
  • 3. Yours truly originally comes with a background in online media, and so you could say I have a bias towards this field (and knowledge of how to make it work) that aided our decision to explore it
  • 4. It’s cheap. Let’s face it, we’re all looking for the cheapo marketing option, and till now our social marketing campaign has cost us, per month, less than the cost of an advertisement, just one ad, in many magazines and newspapers

We tested the waters a little with some not very convincing and sporadic content for a few weeks, kicking the tyres, picking platforms and seeing how they work – A blog, Twitter and Facebook were chosen as our three main avenues of attack.

Bebo is popular in Ireland, but not amongst our audience – though not to say we’ll never go there. LinkedIn and other services like that have value, but focusing on them takes more resources and doesn’t provide enough value, so I made the decision that we should focus our efforts on these three platforms.

This, I suppose, could be a lesson pulled out for you right here: No matter what the mediums you choose, and the way you choose to approach them, you need to be able to focus daily attention to them. Spreading yourself too thin reaps poor rewards in all channels.

Finding A Strategy

After a while, having spent no money and a little time on the effort, I figured there was something in it and we’d need a strategy. Obviously it needed a strong ‘social’ element, with us becoming more active on Twitter and Facebook and growing our audience there… But I still needed to find the ‘Something’ that would add value and give people a reason to participate with us beyond our charm and good looks.

At the time we were running a fairly popular campaign, doing free ‘Build Your Own PC’ classes in our office on a Saturday morning. (A campaign that will see light again in 2010, incidentally. We’re working on ways to bring it to a wider audience.) A clear value add: We teach you how to build your own PC and you’re more likely to do it, and shop with Komplett because you know us – we’re the guys who taught you how to do it!

It doesn’t take a genius (which is fortunate, considering I was the guy doing the figuring) to figure out that we could make a jump into offering how-to content online via the blog. A phone call later and Marc McEntegart, a henchman from my days in media, was sat in my office and we discussed ways to shape it. The idea of how-to and technical content was my idea, as was the evolution from this into writing up product spots and doing deals. Marc came up with the idea of filling in the middle with tech news and general articles, growing our traction with a reader base whom we could later convert into customers.

He – and here’s another lesson – is also a sociable fellow. Take a look at us on Twitter, on boards.ie, and the general tone of many of our blog articles. You ideally need a good communicator to front your social efforts. An introvert won’t cut it. Sounds silly, but there you go. Someone with tact is a bonus, too.

Our content heavy model won’t suit every business, but we spotted a gap (localised Irish how-to and technical content), and invested a near FTE into the effort… A big toe dipped in.

The flipside from the content on the blog – which we see as the anchor to our social media operation – is the communication channels, Twitter and Facebook. Here we’ve developed an offering tailored to the medium, becoming extremely chatty and friendly with people on Twitter, where constant conversation is the norm; and less sporadic updates to Facebook of the most interesting blog content.

So the ‘workflow’ of our social media campaign involves Twitter and Facebook conversations ultimately driving traffic to our blog, where the greatest value-add resides in terms of content; and from the blog we eventually convert customers with quality, useful content, like how-to’s and product spots highlighting what we think is interesting and why.

Not That We Forgot About The Conversation…

The blog is the anchor of our social media campaign, and it eats up the most time and resources. Our main focus is to drive people to the blog where we hook them with really useful and honest content.

That’s not to say that we think Twitter and Facebook are a means to an end. These, particularly Twitter, are places where we see a huge level of engagement with people on a daily basis; from answering questions about products to more social banter.

This engagement in conversation, be it with or without a blog, is extremely useful: For starters, we’ve got some of our best feedback from customers through this avenue. It’s a live finger on the pulse, and it’s proved useful to us on many practical levels… Including feedback from folks telling us that something in the webshop is broken and needs to be fixed, long before we would have ever noticed it.

How Do I Gain Traction?

No matter your strategy, be you tweeting alone or creating compelling content every day, you need to gain traction with your audience. Once you’ve hooked a customer into your social web – be they conversing with you on twitter or following your content via RSS or whatever – you can pretty much count on their loyalty, so long as the content remains good.

Komplett launched its non-traditional social media marketing campaign with a fairly traditional trick: we ran a competition for people following us on Twitter and Facebook, giving away a bunch of free games. Now, there is a discussion here about quantity versus quality in terms of your following: It’s relatively easy to get a thousand eyeballs on the internet. But quality eyeballs?

To my view, quality is all that matters – the customers we attract (for Komplett) have to be Irish (we’re an Irish webshop); they have to be web shoppers or people open to the idea of shopping online (believe you me, they’re not a wide grouping in Ireland per capita today); and buying the kind of stuff we sell: Computer components and consumer electronics. Whatever your audience profile, you need to target this group.

So, on the face of it is a competition going to generate quality followers for us? Depends on the competition. Our video game one was a bit of a wide net to cast, but we went about promoting it in targeted haunts – Damien here gave it a plug for us, and his audience would be right up our alley. We pushed it on boards.ie where we have a long-standing customer interaction forum (their biggest… I say to social media heads sometimes that we’re probably the oldest Irish company with a social presence on the web); and so the potential net was wide, but the delivery method was not.

You do need something to get you some buzz to get some traction – be it a targeted competition (the easiest route) or something more elaborate – and after that, the audience will grow itself slowly but steadily. Always focus on that: Slow but steady. Quality. Once you get in a few dozen eyeballs, they’ll begin to spread your stuff around and you’ll grow steadily.

The Salacious Relationship: Social Media And Money

As I mentioned above, many marketing agencies and consultants don’t like to talk money. (Not in terms of results, at least.) Particularly in the context of social media. It’s sometimes difficult to reconcile yourself against being social and honest and opening people’s wallets. Brand awareness, brand value, buzz, goodwill, word of mouth… All great words and phrases, but the majority of you out there (I’ll bet) are just like me: fighting for your lunches. Fighting for customers, conversions, sales and, ultimately, to keep a chair under your arses.

In the daily reality, you need a dual-band approach: All the buzzwords do translate into real value for your company. All that goodwill generated from all those people you’re tweeting with or from that funny video you threw up on YouTube is worth something to you: Branding, customer loyalty, whatever. But this isn’t always a result directly seen on the bottom line today, unless you’ve got an eye towards driving sales as well.

Focus too much on one aspect and you won’t go very far, at least not very fast – schill too much for sales and you’ll alienate people. Make them feel good about themselves, great, but where’s the call to action to make a sale?

Short term revenues matter. So does long term customer relationships. But you need to eat your lunch this afternoon. Social media, to my mind, should be about getting you a sandwich today and building the kind of relationship that delivers a big turkey every Christmas.

How do you achieve this? Every industry and business will have a different answer. (It’s my hope that in reading this, of course, you see my logic and twist it to your circumstance.) For Komplett the answer comes through our business model obviously, we’re an online retailer, so we give you content about our products; making the most of them and what have you; and people buy stuff.

The relationship we forge brings them back: That relationship of trust between you and Komplett, that says we’re a human company that wants to do good by you. If we simply generated that goodwill we’d get sales, eventually… But there needs to be the call to action today.

If you’re a hotel and tweeting me on my journey, you’ll likely get the goodwill to bring me back next time. But how did you ensnare me the first time? Good content? A pre-sales conversation about the area the hotel is in, and what I can do around it?

What can you offer your customers, and where’s the call to action?

And what kind of results can you expect? For me, a quarter million added to the bottom line is alright, I suppose, a few percentage points, not worth a bankers bonus for sure. I won’t turn my nose at it. But I could make a half million in once off sales to a particular group of people if I invested time into it… So where’s the long term payoff in social media?

Well, that quarter million represents customers who are most certainly satisfied and will likely be loyal to Komplett; they may even tell all their friends about us. I need the quarter million today, the couple of million tomorrow, to justify the investment in time and effort in social media… But the long term takeaway, the thing that the social media consultants like to extol the virtues of, is still there; and that will build your business for the long term.

Depending on your business the fundamental numbers will be different. Five thousand or fifty thousand or fifty million, it doesn’t matter, it’s marketing 101 as to defining success: If you’re a hotel (sorry, I’ve got hotels on the brain today) and you follow my advice and offer content, how many hits do you get on that content a month? What’s the click through rate to your online booking form? What’s the conversion? The average order value? Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.

The long term virtue of the relationship with that customer is obvious. But the key is you just made some cash out of them today. That’s critical. And yes, tomorrow or the next day you might get the other people who took a peek and decided not to buy… But I’ll bet your boss (or bank manager) looks at the figures for customers who pulled the trigger, not the ones who played with the pistol and might come back tomorrow.

Dip your toes in. Define your strategy, and your criteria for success. Invest in it, you’ll spend money before you make it. If you’re not being successful, tweak it. Eventually you’ll get there. My recommendation is to drag in guys like Damien once you’ve figured out your criteria for success at different investment levels. Give the consultants a clear framework and they’ll bring excellent value to your efforts, defining routes to achieving the success you’ve defined, not some vague definition of it taken from the social media bible.

Social media marketing is new, it’s going to evolve tremendously in the years to come in terms of platforms, methods and tools (I already see people creating tools to track down potential sales leads on the social networks); but like any other investment you make in time or money, it needs to deliver money today as well as the long term promised value of customer loyalty and brand awareness.

On Twitter: Aaron McKenna