I started out the weekend getting my solo gliding certificate, and flying my first four flights with no-one else in the plane. Here’s a picture of the KA13 I was flying (it’s the red one at the bottom).
We then spent most of the rest of the weekend finalising our move into new offices while we wait for the brand new and very cool offices to be fitted out. How come? Well, we’ve just completed a deal to become part of Hasgrove-owned Amaze plc, the UK’s largest non-London digital agency. They’ve got 180 people in Manchester, Chester, Brussels - and pretty soon it’ll be 50 in London too. We’ve made Head of Client Services Emma Nicol and Planning Director Pete Anderson shareholders in recognition of the work they’ve done over the past couple of years while we’ve built up to this point, and it’s well-deserved.
We’ll continue to operate under the Underwired brand, and of course we own the eCRM.co.uk website and trade mark, so the pointy-head stuff we do, along with the lovely design work Jason’s team produces, will continue but with a bit more, well, momentum behind it.
So, a momentous time. And we’re extremely happy. You could say I'm flying.
Tuesday, 20 October 2009
Here lay the Wave
So, I’ve spent a week or two experimenting with Google Wave. I’ve had some correspondence with some journalists I know, a Vistage colleague in the US, other people who run digital agencies. And it’s been a frustrating experience.
I think partly the way they’ve done the beta release is to blame. It seems that very few large communities of people that already correspond have been given a pool of invitations. So conversation has been very fragmented. The beauty of Wave, which is a kind of rolling discussion incorporating instant messaging, social media, productive wiki and email, can’t show itself clearly when there are six of you but not all on the same wavelength at the same time.
One of the features I found quite interesting is that you can incorporate a Wave into a webpage. In my case I hosted a Wave in my blog for a week, and people who were logged in to Wave could view the embedded Wave and people in the conversation could interact with it. My coding’s not up to much, so it didn’t look particularly elegant, but it’s a far cry from the basic comment field.
So I think that one day Wave could be awesome. While some of my colleagues didn’t see the attraction, I think it might become quite a revolutionary step. For example, imagine constructing a collaboratively-generated screenplay or feature article, where several people can be involved in different time zones, editing previous contributions and suggesting new, constantly honing and refining, fact-checking, editing and clarifying as you go along, until the final polished artefact is ready. On the other hand, I can see all sorts of mischief, and the experience of wiki, where attribution and defacement become important, may have to be reworked.
It’s not in itself particularly original - it is after all an agglomeration and blurring of the borders between a whole host of technologies that have been around for between 15 and 30 years - but it may take discussion itself to a whole new level.
I think partly the way they’ve done the beta release is to blame. It seems that very few large communities of people that already correspond have been given a pool of invitations. So conversation has been very fragmented. The beauty of Wave, which is a kind of rolling discussion incorporating instant messaging, social media, productive wiki and email, can’t show itself clearly when there are six of you but not all on the same wavelength at the same time.
One of the features I found quite interesting is that you can incorporate a Wave into a webpage. In my case I hosted a Wave in my blog for a week, and people who were logged in to Wave could view the embedded Wave and people in the conversation could interact with it. My coding’s not up to much, so it didn’t look particularly elegant, but it’s a far cry from the basic comment field.
So I think that one day Wave could be awesome. While some of my colleagues didn’t see the attraction, I think it might become quite a revolutionary step. For example, imagine constructing a collaboratively-generated screenplay or feature article, where several people can be involved in different time zones, editing previous contributions and suggesting new, constantly honing and refining, fact-checking, editing and clarifying as you go along, until the final polished artefact is ready. On the other hand, I can see all sorts of mischief, and the experience of wiki, where attribution and defacement become important, may have to be reworked.
It’s not in itself particularly original - it is after all an agglomeration and blurring of the borders between a whole host of technologies that have been around for between 15 and 30 years - but it may take discussion itself to a whole new level.
Tuesday, 6 October 2009
They is no longer The Man, They is Us
Once upon a time I taught myself how to write HTML so that my client’s logo repeated in the background. The site was a single page, talking about an awards scheme for budding playwrights. The site had been commissioned by Allied Domecq via a visionary PR agency, Scope. It was my first commercial website. It was early in 1995, and my digital agency had been going a year - it all feels a very long time ago.
And yet not a huge amount has changed, but there’s been a subtle shift. Online communities still grow, morph, die. People choose which stuff to consume and which stuff not to consume. They choose how and when to interact. They write, take part in places of play, and navigate their social networks.
They. Not you, Mr, Mrs, Miss and Ms Brand Marketer. The individual consumer. They control what they do, say, think, recommend. They control your reputation. They is no longer The Man, They is Us. So now the consumer is doing the building, and the static HTML or even the documentary email is old hat. These days people use XML-based channels, YouTube, Twitter and Digg, and so on - through the browser, IM app and phones. Forrester’s (then employee) Charlene Li set it out beautifully simply in the book (book!) Groundswell, which described a new generation of segments based on how integrated consumers are with social media content production, consumption, recommendation and storage. Li told of a revolution that has taken place under our noses but behind most marketers’ backs.
The future is, as it were, here. Which means that brands too have to start getting their hands dirty. Brands have to join in the social fun, make social gaffes, fix lapses in tact and establish a reputation. Today is when you have to start if you haven’t started already. Gone are the days when background repetition created any capital for brands - we’re in a future where immersion is the new rule.
And yet not a huge amount has changed, but there’s been a subtle shift. Online communities still grow, morph, die. People choose which stuff to consume and which stuff not to consume. They choose how and when to interact. They write, take part in places of play, and navigate their social networks.
They. Not you, Mr, Mrs, Miss and Ms Brand Marketer. The individual consumer. They control what they do, say, think, recommend. They control your reputation. They is no longer The Man, They is Us. So now the consumer is doing the building, and the static HTML or even the documentary email is old hat. These days people use XML-based channels, YouTube, Twitter and Digg, and so on - through the browser, IM app and phones. Forrester’s (then employee) Charlene Li set it out beautifully simply in the book (book!) Groundswell, which described a new generation of segments based on how integrated consumers are with social media content production, consumption, recommendation and storage. Li told of a revolution that has taken place under our noses but behind most marketers’ backs.
The future is, as it were, here. Which means that brands too have to start getting their hands dirty. Brands have to join in the social fun, make social gaffes, fix lapses in tact and establish a reputation. Today is when you have to start if you haven’t started already. Gone are the days when background repetition created any capital for brands - we’re in a future where immersion is the new rule.
Saturday, 3 October 2009
ECRM and the Art of Customer Retention
Time was that marketers simply marketed. They told a story that engaged potential customers in their brands. They talked at people, hoping to attract, seduce and exploit. Retention was simply about delivering what was expected - not disappointing - and being consistent. When I became aware of interactive marketing in the early 1990s it was because of a CD-Rom called Xpand Expo, a virtual exhibition hall that you could click around, read text files placed on virtual stands, and that was about it. They’d spent a lot of time rendering an exhibition hall-like suspended ceiling, and done a good job of selling virtual stands to the likes of HP. What occurred to me at the time was that here was a golden opportunity to give some power to the consumer, by removing the sales person - but it needed structure and marketing thinking to make it engaging and work. I started my first digital agency to do just that.
Interactive multimedia truly gave the power of self-selection to the consumer. It meant if we gave a consumer five choices, they’d (almost certainly) choose the option that appealed to their needs most. Slightly problematic in that getting CDs to enough potential customers was expensive and the media was fixed. No-one in marketing took it very seriously. Then the following year along came the world wide web, and the world changed in twelve months.
Marketers cottoned onto the opportunity - eventually - to engage customers in a dialogue driven by the customer herself. Websites became big business for forward-thinking clients and agencies like ours; getting people to the websites became the next challenge but again, tapping into elective channels made sense and worked in practice. In fact, the agency I run now started as a search engine optimisation (SEO) agency in 1996 as an offshoot to our web agency. And actually that leads me towards the problem marketers face at the moment, which in my view is crippling the advance of interactive, elective experiences that customers can enjoy and companies can make millions from. And they can, because some have seen how to solve the problem.
The issue is that in the years following the early pioneering experimentation, digital marketing has become siloed. When I last looked there were 3,500 companies claiming to build websites. SEO has become an industry in its own right - in fact, two industries: organic (natural) search optimisation and paid-for search, (PPC – pay-per-click). Web has become websites plus tactical microsites, often by different agencies. The DM agency probably has a microsite supporting a print campaign. The PR agency is looking after “reputation management”, though it might be subcontracting the Facebook page to a social media agency. Oh, and the online ad campaigns are being specified by the media buying company.
I’m sure it all made perfect sense at the time.
So here’s the situation most clients (except the really canny ones staffed by strategic thinkers) find themselves in today. A dozen agencies, some nested or subcontracted. Each of them doing what they’ve been told. And if they’re good, each one is trying extremely hard to improve on what they did last quarter, incrementally increasing click-throughs or eyeballs or impressions or recall by 3%.
Many of the really good ones will be coming to you with really great ideas for attracting new customers. Fantastic viral ideas coming from the ad agency. A really good creative hook with legs from the online agency that will reach new audiences and probably drive some extra traffic to the website too. And what with the e-commerce company annually improving the sales funnel, well, it’s an ever-improving world out there. But while all these bits and pieces are individually doing better than whatever they were doing before, they are also gradually losing touch with each other. It used to be that marketing marched to a single coherent beat, where the TV ad established the awareness and each other medium elaborated on the brand message. Yet that’s fragmented badly, and what we’re left with is a mess of tactical, competing, agency-income-motivated digital campaigns that have no backbone or strategy, and which often do more to confuse the customer than empower them.
It’s a situation we see all the time. And there is a simple way of getting out of it, though it takes will, vision and patience.
We need to go right back to the customer. The data is the key here. All of the various marketing activities I’ve described deliver data in fairly large quantities - data about who your customers are, how they behave, what they like, how many times they buy, how much they spend, how long they last, how quickly they churn and so on. Again, it’s probably in a variety of different places, but that doesn’t really matter. The first step is to find it all.
So, step one, find the data. Any eCRM agency worth its salt will be able to manage the aggregation of this data, manage its analysis, and come up with insights about your customers. These insights inform segmentation - behavioural, demographic, technographic; value (by whatever measures)-led, loyalty-led, influence. And segmentation tells you what you need to say to each of them at what time to increase their engagement and to increase sales... when McCain Foods did this, engagement rates with brand resistors went from 14% to 63% in just ten months.
So now we have a map of what needs to be said to whom and when. In its most basic form eCRM can easily be delivered by email. This might be augmented by microsites speaking and exchanging information with each segment. Supporting this you might want to extend forums or social media that allow customers to interact further with you, or each other. If you observe these closely enough you’ll find out what’s bothering customers - in fact they might show you how to segment them even further or what’s going to interest them in the future.
And suddenly (well, to be fair it might be three to twelve months) you have the kernel of a digital strategy. Followed through, the segmentation which came from all that disparate data can start delivering genuinely useful information that essentially becomes the foundation of a marketing strategy. Simply observing the success or failure of each strand of communication with a segment by watching the behaviour of the recipient, gives you the power to change the options you make available to her over time. It’s enormously powerful, and because all that is being done is observing response and making changes based on what is seen, the power really is back in the hands of the marketer, even if it appears that the whole machine is being driven by the customer.
And from this observation of what works and what doesn’t, what motivates or engages and what demotivates or disengages, comes the magic: very quickly we start to see which segments we want more of. And that means we know what to tell our agencies to do. They are suddenly working to your plan, not theirs, and your plan is driven by an eCRM strategy not an agency account handler’s desire to make themselves famous with an award-winning viral or a 0.002% increase in banner clicks. Time was that clients drove strategy, rather than herding agencies, and eCRM brings that time back, at long last.
Interactive multimedia truly gave the power of self-selection to the consumer. It meant if we gave a consumer five choices, they’d (almost certainly) choose the option that appealed to their needs most. Slightly problematic in that getting CDs to enough potential customers was expensive and the media was fixed. No-one in marketing took it very seriously. Then the following year along came the world wide web, and the world changed in twelve months.
Marketers cottoned onto the opportunity - eventually - to engage customers in a dialogue driven by the customer herself. Websites became big business for forward-thinking clients and agencies like ours; getting people to the websites became the next challenge but again, tapping into elective channels made sense and worked in practice. In fact, the agency I run now started as a search engine optimisation (SEO) agency in 1996 as an offshoot to our web agency. And actually that leads me towards the problem marketers face at the moment, which in my view is crippling the advance of interactive, elective experiences that customers can enjoy and companies can make millions from. And they can, because some have seen how to solve the problem.
The issue is that in the years following the early pioneering experimentation, digital marketing has become siloed. When I last looked there were 3,500 companies claiming to build websites. SEO has become an industry in its own right - in fact, two industries: organic (natural) search optimisation and paid-for search, (PPC – pay-per-click). Web has become websites plus tactical microsites, often by different agencies. The DM agency probably has a microsite supporting a print campaign. The PR agency is looking after “reputation management”, though it might be subcontracting the Facebook page to a social media agency. Oh, and the online ad campaigns are being specified by the media buying company.
I’m sure it all made perfect sense at the time.
So here’s the situation most clients (except the really canny ones staffed by strategic thinkers) find themselves in today. A dozen agencies, some nested or subcontracted. Each of them doing what they’ve been told. And if they’re good, each one is trying extremely hard to improve on what they did last quarter, incrementally increasing click-throughs or eyeballs or impressions or recall by 3%.
Many of the really good ones will be coming to you with really great ideas for attracting new customers. Fantastic viral ideas coming from the ad agency. A really good creative hook with legs from the online agency that will reach new audiences and probably drive some extra traffic to the website too. And what with the e-commerce company annually improving the sales funnel, well, it’s an ever-improving world out there. But while all these bits and pieces are individually doing better than whatever they were doing before, they are also gradually losing touch with each other. It used to be that marketing marched to a single coherent beat, where the TV ad established the awareness and each other medium elaborated on the brand message. Yet that’s fragmented badly, and what we’re left with is a mess of tactical, competing, agency-income-motivated digital campaigns that have no backbone or strategy, and which often do more to confuse the customer than empower them.
It’s a situation we see all the time. And there is a simple way of getting out of it, though it takes will, vision and patience.
We need to go right back to the customer. The data is the key here. All of the various marketing activities I’ve described deliver data in fairly large quantities - data about who your customers are, how they behave, what they like, how many times they buy, how much they spend, how long they last, how quickly they churn and so on. Again, it’s probably in a variety of different places, but that doesn’t really matter. The first step is to find it all.
So, step one, find the data. Any eCRM agency worth its salt will be able to manage the aggregation of this data, manage its analysis, and come up with insights about your customers. These insights inform segmentation - behavioural, demographic, technographic; value (by whatever measures)-led, loyalty-led, influence. And segmentation tells you what you need to say to each of them at what time to increase their engagement and to increase sales... when McCain Foods did this, engagement rates with brand resistors went from 14% to 63% in just ten months.
So now we have a map of what needs to be said to whom and when. In its most basic form eCRM can easily be delivered by email. This might be augmented by microsites speaking and exchanging information with each segment. Supporting this you might want to extend forums or social media that allow customers to interact further with you, or each other. If you observe these closely enough you’ll find out what’s bothering customers - in fact they might show you how to segment them even further or what’s going to interest them in the future.
And suddenly (well, to be fair it might be three to twelve months) you have the kernel of a digital strategy. Followed through, the segmentation which came from all that disparate data can start delivering genuinely useful information that essentially becomes the foundation of a marketing strategy. Simply observing the success or failure of each strand of communication with a segment by watching the behaviour of the recipient, gives you the power to change the options you make available to her over time. It’s enormously powerful, and because all that is being done is observing response and making changes based on what is seen, the power really is back in the hands of the marketer, even if it appears that the whole machine is being driven by the customer.
And from this observation of what works and what doesn’t, what motivates or engages and what demotivates or disengages, comes the magic: very quickly we start to see which segments we want more of. And that means we know what to tell our agencies to do. They are suddenly working to your plan, not theirs, and your plan is driven by an eCRM strategy not an agency account handler’s desire to make themselves famous with an award-winning viral or a 0.002% increase in banner clicks. Time was that clients drove strategy, rather than herding agencies, and eCRM brings that time back, at long last.
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