Online Marketing Trends Presentation – ’Being Heard Through the Noise’
I was kindly invited to present at the Evolve Programme event today at Blick Studios in Belfast. I promised to share my notes here afterwards, for further detail.
Below is the script I wrote. I could provide simple notes but at least with a script you have the full details, should you wish to bore your children to sleep with them. Links are included in the text.
There’s actually extra content below, as I cut some out to save time (lucky you!).
Campaign Methods III: A Strategic Template for Building a Website
As with any marcomms activity, building a website requires context, reasoning and planning to be done effectively and efficiently. I’ve knocked together a template form for gathering all the initial, high-level information the designers and developers might want to form a basis for the site strategy.
I invite anyone involved in website creation to amend, append and critique the template until we get it into really solid shape. By all means take it and use on your own business or clients. UxDs, developers, strategists, marketers, managers, take a critical look…
Click the image to visit the public document. You can edit the document by creating a Google Docs copy, or downloading it to a useful format. And any comments below would be most welcome.
How to Release a Successful Social Game: Lessons from Rovio and those Angry Birds
I am getting uncomfortably attached to Wired (UK), it’s becoming my gospel. The magazine’s recent piece on the success of the mobile game Angry Birds coincided with some work I’ve been doing on games dev strategies. I’ve pulled together a list of lessons from Rovio, the game’s developers, taken straight from that article, that one might consider when launching a mobile game…
- Answer every email, tweet, etc.
- Respond to fan feedback with updates.
- Design a game for everyone, young and old.
- Make something with international appeal, and get big in countries with smaller app markets (not US, UK, etc.) first before hitting the big ones.
- Appeal to different levels of gamers by having an easy version of the game (eg. pass the level) and concurrent harder versions (eg. pass the level with maximum points).
Campaign Methods II: S.O.M.A. – A Structured Approach to Situation Analysis
Effective tactics are built on meaningful strategy, that sits on top of solid research, floating on a crystal clear understanding of what you actually have and want. Herewith a (very) simple formula for creating that understanding.
I must be turning into a proper marketing wanker, as I experienced a brief smugness last week after inventing a new acronym. I sat back, sipped my americano and thought, “great, I should blog this!”
I should probably kill myself now.
Nevertheless, there was a mote of sanity in my coffee table scribblings so I share them with you now.
The acronym is S.O.M.A. – Story / Objective / Market / Audience. It’s a quick reference list of the main attributes to cover when analysing an organisation or project for a new strategy. I’m not trying to coin some groundbreaking feat of business theory, I’m not hoping to hear other people using the term at the next TED conference. It’s a throw-away mnemonic to serve as a kind of checklist of what needs to be covered in order to understand where the client / project is at, and where it should be going.
Facebook Announces Sponsored Stories – A New Stab at Unannoying Ads
This morning’s headline social media news is Facebook’s announcement of the roll-out of a new ad platform: Sponsored Stories. In short, user actions at specific locations – digital or real – such as landing on a Facebook Page or checking-in to a venue, may be converted into an ad published beside that user’s News Feed, if the action has been sponsored by a paying advertiser.
When a digital property achieves a very large, or very niche, user base the opportunity arises for subtle, useful and highly targeted advertising. Facebook’s existing targeted ad system is a good example of this. Sponsored Stories sounds like it’s been approached in the right manner, softly dropped into the streams of relevant online action announcements. It’s a far better approach than the disastrous sledgehammer of Beacon.
But it also looks like a rather prehistoric way of monetising a potentially potent service. So my friend checks-in to Starbucks via Foursquare and, since Starbucks is a paying story sponsor, an ad appears on my friend’s Facebook, or on his friends’ Facebooks, saying “hey look, we’re Starbucks and your friend loves us!” It’s not very exciting, is it? It doesn’t smack of fairness or organic growth; it doesn’t sound very useful. Nevertheless, Facebook is right to seek ways for advertisers to pay small sums for individual recommendations on Facebook, and I can’t think of a better way to do it right now…
A Few Favourite TED Videos
My good friend asked me to curate a shortlist of my favourite TED videos for his rumination. I thought I’d share them round.
While we’re here, I must take a moment to say that TED is simply one of the most enlightening things I’ve encountered online. It is perfectly pitched to teach, inspire or entertain within a digestible time limit. I typically watch TED talks while cooking my dinner so it doesn’t feel like I’m losing valuable media-consumption time while bound to the mundanity of prepping vegetables. Yeh, learn while you chop.
This is just an eclectic taster, you know like a seafood platter. I’ll probably post some more soon.
- Pure inspiration, delivered perfectly – Sir Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity …and his beautiful follow-up about Changing Educational Paradigms.
- Convincing evidence that mushrooms will change the world, especially the mighty Mycilium – Paul Stamets on 6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World.
- Gripping insight into insight itself. How it feels to open up the creative right brain hemisphere – Jill Bolte-Taylor’s Powerful Stroke of Insight.
- Introducing the designer’s designer, Ross Lovegrove Shares Organic Designs.
- A quick show of just how complex and beautiful marine life can be – David Gallow Shows Underwater Astonishments.
- Practical approaches to design in a disadvantaged part of the US – Emily Pilloton Teaches Design for Change.
Sex, Drugs and Electronica – the Real Life Interactions that Fuel Online Networks
A quick look at the importance of the offline world in making members of online communities more numerate, productive and intimate.
Helping companies use social media effectively is challenging for lots of obvious reasons, not least of all because a lot of the people using social media don’t want to hear from them. But it’s hard enough building communities around completely non-commercial themes. The internet is littered with well-meant forum threads and blog posts that will forever stay unanswered and unread. It’s obvious that traffic and engagement can be boosted by real world activity. But the exploding list of (lists of lists of lists of) successful social media marketing case studies rarely gets to the heart of how face-to-face interaction supports the online communities.
Strategy Process: Introducing the “Collaborator Review”
Competitor reviews are standard practice in industrial research but collaboration is often ignored or slipped into the footnotes. Why not formalise a process for the Collaborator Review as a stage of your research of at least equal importance to competitors?
Writing a research plan for a strategic tender last week, I was struck with a familiar pang of awkwardness when I added a competitor review to the process. Competition is an ugly word but it has real-world, often productive, manifestations. It is essential to good strategy in products, marketing, business planning, etc. Next time, however, I want to include a collaborator review to complete the circle. Below is a sketch of how such analysis might be conducted.
What’s the Biggest Issue on the Internet Now?
I don’t know and neither do you. If anyone says they know what the Next Big Thing is, assume the position of one eyebrow cocked, head askew, and feet twisted slightly away to allow for a swift escape. Nevertheless…
…here’s a few things it might be:
- A set of viable models for profiting from digital IP, as people get increasingly exposed to, and comfortable with, taking other people’s creations for free.
- Protecting the world and its children from hackers, frausters and moral perversion, without spoiling the socialist ethos on which the web was built and still operates.
- Mobile solutions with which we are so comfortable that they become ubiquitous and our daily activities become substantially more “connected”.
- Hardware that facilitates more fulfilling digital experiences, such as “electronic paper” readers.
- Location-based services that make geographical proximity important again, in the context of our digital lives.
- Services launched via gaming models, thus making the boring but important stuff fun.
…and here’s one thing it could well be:
The term digital curation has been bouncing out from the hard techie core of the web into more mainstream publications since March 2007, which unsurprisingly coincides with that year’s SXSW Interactive. Technologists and sociologists have been talking about the Semantic Web for longer. Some commentators like to refer to the next life stage of the internet as Web 3.0, and usually reference the semantic web in the same breath.
The broad principles behind curation and semantics, insofar as the evolution of the internet is concerned, come down to one core problem: information overload. The idea is that we already have masses of data and we’re only going to get more. We can’t handle it all in a way that brings the most useful or entertaining stuff to the fore. So we are looking for solutions that manage and filter, ie. curate, that data in ways that are meaningful, ie. semantic, to our real lives. Just as Google revolutionised search by using algorithms that attempt to mimic human decision making and pattern recognition, the next big web technologies are likely to do the hard work of presenting existing information to us in human ways.
And if you can find 15 minutes in your frantically tuned-in life, Kate Ray does a much better job of explaning the above idea in her documentary.
If the Love Affair with Facebook is Dying, Where are We All to Go?
After screwing-up over our privacy settings again, the angry mob of public opinion has been banging its pitchforks on Facebook’s door in swelling numbers in recent weeks. Their horns sounded over the digital landscape, calling all to an exodus from the network. The 30,000-odd claimed participants of Quit Facebook Day (31 May) represent something like 1/15,000th of the population. That’s equivalent to a soul resident of a medium-sized town trundling off into the sunset, taking with him little but the rapidly fading memories of drunken photos and half-known friends, calling back over his shoulder, “No-one coming with me then? No? Right-oh, guess I’m on my own then.” Like the punters in the only established pub in town, no considerable volume of users will leave if they have nowhere else to drink with each other. What, then, would an alternative network look like, and how would it win a stronghold in the domain of the largest web property in history?
Most of us remember the last great migration, from the MySpaces and Orkuts of the world to the shiny new Facebook. We didn’t leave the other networks because we had come to hate them, we did so because the alternative was fundamentally better. From the stroboscopic assault of MySpace pages, Facebook looked more like an orderly collection of personal profiles, with more features and room to store all the media that makes us who we are online.