Best resources in Social Media? A personal plotted history...

Television and newspaper reports make ‘Social Media‘ and ‘Social Networking‘ buzz words sound like something that’s arrived on the scene in the past couple of years – but at least the basics pre-date the existence of the internet itself. Early BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) existed before anyone had even heard the term ‘internet’, and in concept will probably exist when its moved on from its current form.

My first experiences of the Internet involved struggling to make an Acorn RISC PC (post-Archimedes era RISCOS system) connect to Demon Internet – something I very shortly lost interest with and then attempted again a year or two later using Compuserve as an ISP. At the time this involved a sign-up fee, monthly subscription costs and national rate BT call charges. Compuserve had a built in message board structure as well as IRC (Internet Relay Chat), then later First Class (combining the two, plus rich media) which was adopted by the Open University quite early on – something I got involved in quite heavily as a means of exploring the diverse social aspect of the net. But all of this was heavily limited by both the inherent costs of being online for any significant period of time and the critically slow connection speed of a 56.6kbps modem.

If you’ve been using the internet since as early as 1996 (or even earlier) then your experiences of connecting to other users for social reasons may be very similar, and like me, you’re probably keen to embrace new forms of social networking, especially if they can offer something new.

Instant messenger clients like MSN, AIM and ICQ proceeded Internet Relay Chat use and existed way before any of the current social networking sites came into play. They’re still very popular, although the media still seem to be stuck in the mindset that IM’s are still ‘chat rooms‘ and lead to children being duped into strangers’ cars.

MySpace seemed to be the first Social Networking site to get mainstream news coverage and therefore mass popularisation, but its novelty seemed to be centred around having the highest friend count out there. It suffered from grotesquely heavy amounts of spam, and now seems to be almost entirely left for dead by its user base. Has anyone asked you “are you on MySpace?” in the last year and a half? Despite its flaws however, MySpace does seem to still be the default option for Bands on a self-promotion tip. To an extent it’s probably still one of the best options as the site is still very well trusted, and it’s big advantage is how heavily it can be customised – ideal for bands and labels who want their artwork to be fully integrated online. Somehow it does seem ironic though that the default MySpace music player re-encodes mp3’s to a noticeably poor bitrate. I’d say MySpace’s days are probably numbered and without re-inventing themselves or taking better advantage of their music profiling niche, then at some point in the next 5 years it may well find itself at the online graveyard with Geocities....

[Full article available at 1985... Click to read]

The Pin Point Accuracy Of Mobile Marketing

Mobile gives us a great chance to think again about content delivery and usability. Try using something like the Rightmove iPHone app and compare that to trying to use a web browser on any mobile device. There's no comparison. The app is in a different league in terms of usability. This is what mobile internet is all about. It's so simple your dear old Gran could use it - and that's the holly grail of usability.

Last night I was sat in bed fiddling about with the new Amazon iPhone app. Just because I had a couple of minutes to spare before I nodded off. The iPhone was already serving as a clock radio and was playing an internet radio station to help me nod off.

Just think of the opportunities for targeting that that one scenario alone contains.

The device ‘knew':

• where I was geographically (due to the GPS)

• what time of day it was

• what I was doing - shopping online and listening to some relaxing tunes

• what kind of mood I was in (based on music selection and browsing habits??)

That's a pretty solid basis for delivering some really well targeted marketing messages - either by embedding advertising in digital radio, sponsoring content, creating comparable apps - or just by having your content available in a format that lends itself to this kind of easy, quick access via mobile devices.

How receptive would I potentially have been to messages about similar artists to the one I was listening to? Possibly a new, comfier mattress??

As it happens I ended up spending a few minutes updating my Amazon wish list, which I hadn't looked at for some time - deleting a few items and buying several more that I'd forgotten about - adding up to reasonably serious and completely impromptu shopping trip!

And that's the power of mobile marketing - giving true 24/7 access to your products and services - combined with the ability to deliver compelling, effective marketing messages with absolutely pin point accuracy.




 

Writing an effective client brief

Writing an effective client brief

The brief forms the all important foundation in the relationship between and agency and its client – and it’s a chance for the agency to really shine and demonstrate its strengths.

At least that’s how things are supposed to work in theory. In practice, client briefs often fall short of the mark. Briefs to digital agencies should be all-encompassing, as things can get a bit sticky if the agencies are forced to fill in the gaps themselves. Good briefs should account for all possibilities and should always include several key points.

The first question an agency should ask, and therefore the very first point a brief should address, is ‘Why are you doing this? What do you want to achieve?’ It’s not enough for the brief to say that the brand needs a better website or a stronger presence in social media.  The brief really needs to focus on clear business objectives and the concrete reasons behind why the client is exploring a digital campaign in the first place.

The brief should also make clear what the success criteria are. Is the client looking to increase sales/conversations by a given percentage? Or are they looking to raise brand awareness – and if so, what are the metrics by which this will be measured? The best thing to do here is often to clearly state the business objective and then let the agency decide the best course of action.

Having defined the objectives, the next essential step is to outline the challenges and constraints. Client briefs will frequently focus on the end goal, while ignoring the journey to get there.  In order to successfully meet the objectives of the brief, agencies need to know about any potential hurdles: are there timing issues (‘it needs to be ready in a month’) or any technical constraints?

Not to mention, any budgetary constraints.  In an ideal world, agencies would have access to unlimited funds, allowing them to do anything and everything possible. But, let’s face it, that almost never happens.  As such, it’s essential that the brief make absolutely clear what the financial specifics are from the very start. The worst thing a brief can do is ask the agency to suggest budgets and not provide a ball park figure.  

It’s also important to let the agency know what other marketing activities you’re undertaking. Too often, digital briefs sit in isolation.  It can be tricky for an agency to provide the right response if it has no idea what your brand’s all about and what your plans are for DM, advertising and/or PR.  Including relevant details about your offline marketing strategy provides the online team with an important context.

In the end, remember that the brief is often the only information your digital agency will have to go on. The better the brief, unsurprisingly, the better the end results produced by the agencies.

Rebranding Mauritius: what’s gone wrong?

By Sean Carey and Laura North

At the World Travel Awards last week in London, Mauritius lost out to the Maldives in most major categories. The Maldives received Indian Ocean's Leading Destination, Leading Hotel, Leading Resort, Leading Travel Agency and a host of others. Mauritius had to make do with winning Leading Airline for Air Mauritius.

What is Mauritius doing wrong? It’s a question that the Mauritius Tourism Promotion Authority must have been asking.

It has tried to solve the problem by employing London-based agency Acanchi to create a new identity for Mauritius, and the result was unveiled last month.

With such a beautiful island paradise to promote, you might wonder why it’s taken 18 months and 31 million Mauritian rupees (£617,998) to come up with the new slogan: “Mauritius – It's a pleasure” or, the official version in French, “Mauritius – C’est un plaisir”.

Will the slogan help them beat the Maldives at the World Travel Awards 2010?

Unfortunately not. The slogan will do little to help as it fails in key areas.
 
You can ask three questions when evaluating the effectiveness of a slogan. Is it specific and not generic? Is it simple or short and easy to remember? Does it create a positive impression?

So how does “It’s a pleasure” do on the first question? This is its biggest failure: the phrase is too generic and could apply to almost any country in the world with a well-developed tourist sector and a reasonably friendly local population.

The country does better on the second question, is it simple and memorable? Al Ries, of American marketing company Ries and Ries, has pointed out that the most successful brands are ones which tend to have simple and short names attached to them. Think of Apple, Google and Nike, names that stand for instantly recognised products and services. The same is true of taglines.

The new Mauritian tagline is undoubtedly short and simple, but like the slogan that it replaces – “Mauritius – unforgettable experience” – it is a forgettable phrase. It doesn't have anything like the same impact as the taglines “Brasil – sensational!” and “Incredible India”.

And how about the third factor, creating a positive impression? “It’s a pleasure” gives an indication of the hospitality of the island, whether as a place to do business or as a place to relax. It certainly sounds like a nice place to go to.

But, according to Sen Ramsamy, a former member of the Board of Directors of the Mauritius Tourism Promotion Authority, writing in Le Mauricien, the phrase might be creating the wrong kind of positive impression. He says that “It’s a pleasure” could imply sexual tourism and “any remote suggestion to this type of tourism will prove simply disastrous."

Overall, ‘C’est un plaisir’ is much too open-ended and ambiguous for it to be effective in word-of-mouth communications.

When all three factors are present – non-generic, simple and positive – word-of-mouth communication happens more easily. And this type of marketing is very important in the promotion of a country's tourist industry.

Have other countries fared better when creating new identities for themselves? The answer is yes in the case of New Zealand. It topped a recent survey published by United Nations World Tourism Organisation and European Travel Commission where strengths of destination brands were rated by 165 National Tourism Organisations. Its branding was judged to be instantly recognisable, consistent and credible.

The tagline "100% Pure New Zealand" works well: it’s specific, simple and positive. Although the word "pure" is generic, it relates to individual perceived New Zealand attributes, acting as an umbrella for its agricultural produce, its values and natural environment. It’s easy to remember and it integrates the country's name into the sentence, creating an even stronger association.

Another good way to test an advertising slogan is to reverse it and then apply the new tagline to the brand’s competitors in order to tease out the relative strengths and weaknesses of the various positions.

New Zealand also does well in this test, especially when you compare it to densely populated urban areas. You can confidently state, for example, that the UK is not 100% pure, with its polluted cities. For urban dwellers, stuck in offices and breathing lungful’s of exhaust fumes, the purity of clean air and mountains evokes a pastoral idyll.

Mauritius fares less well. If you reverse the tagline for the Seychelles and the Maldives, for example, then it would suggest that these other Indian Ocean paradise islands were not a pleasure to visit, which clearly isn’t true.

The Mauritius Tourism Promotion Authority should look for a clear concept that puts Mauritius on the global tourist map. As Navin Ramgoolam, the Prime Minister of Mauritius, says, the country needs “a strong image that makes the difference”.

The island has to prove that it is better than its competitors, especially when the economic climate means that potential tourists are more likely to stay at home. Then Mauritius will be able to give the Maldives some competition in next year’s World Travel Awards.

Dr Sean Carey is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism (CRONEM) at Roehampton University. Laura North is a freelance travel writer.

Online engagement for charities

We are all too aware that the recession has hit brands hard, but for one sector, the repercussions have been astounding. With cash donations falling by a massive £367 million between 2007 and 2008 (NCVO research), charities are understandably struggling to keep donors engaged. Whereas brands can persuade consumers to spend by offering good value for money, charities have a tougher job in persuading consumers to part with their money for no direct gain in the form of a product or service.  As the marketing sphere continues to diversify, the job of engaging consumers has become even harder. Charity begins at home and never has this saying rung more truely than during a recession.

Once driven largely by advertising innovation, the digital marketing climate is now changing and as such, digital consumers are starting to ‘reject' standard advertising formats and are instead beginning to favour content (whether branded or User Generated Content) over other digital media. More often than not, consumers will now just click away from pop ups and entirely ignore banner ads as their viewing habits become more selective. But with the hard sell approach no longer working in the digital space, how do charities still attract donors with online content?

The answer is with customer publishers. Hard-hit by the recession, charities need to safeguard the relationships they hold with regular and valued donors, so any communication with them must be successful. With the ability to transfer their skills across various media channels, customer publishers are experts at leading their clients into successful digital content strategies. No longer just accounting for the magazine market, customer publishers excel at producing targeted editorialisation for brands across a variation of channels. Selecting the correct channels and the correct content for the correct audience, they produce online content that moves away from heavy sales techniques and accurately encapsulates a brand and its values.

A recent YouGov study commissioned by the APA in fact showed that consumers are far more likely to make a purchase if a website makes the effort to engage and entertain them through interesting and relevant content. So, as a responsive and flexible method of opening up an effective and sensitive dialogue with potential and current donors, customer publishing is the perfect way for charities to fully engage their donors and make a demonstrable difference in terms of money in the bank.

NSPCC is a great example of a charity that has used customer publishers to break into the digital space. Following the success of the charity's offline publication, Your Family, the organisation decided to launch a dedicated website offering interactive parenting tools. Created by customer publishers, Your Family works in a much more sophisticated manner than simply conveying NSPCC appeal information on ending child cruelty. Instead, it provides readers with parenting articles through which they gain a closer relationship with the charity, reinforcing the organisation's positive messaging in support of family life.

The British Heart Foundation has also been involved in the online customer publishing medium with its ongoing Food 4 Thought campaign. Through a specially produced pack for schools, the campaign aims to raise children's awareness of the importance of a healthy diet, and has been extended online with the creation of www.junkmonkeys.tv. The website has achieved over 700,000 visits, and a huge response from school children. Half of the children who have seen the campaign say they're eating less junk food, with 65 per cent saying they eat more fruit and 83 per cent claim to be taking more responsibility for their health, which shows the power of communicating through editorial..

An incredibly effective communication channel for charities, customer publishing has proven the power of branded content in a huge range of channels. Designed specifically to engage an organisation's customers, as opposed to explicitly selling a product, the medium is far more engaging than any other media platform. And offering a much greater ROI, customer publishing is a perfect choice for charities.

Snapping at the ankle of the elephant

In the small market town of Newcastle Emlyn in West Wales, a war is currently raging. News that a prime site on its tiny, character-full high street is being offered to one of the big supermarket chains has not gone down well with local retailers, who are now fighting back with feisty campaigns and a flurry of press coverage. Similar battles take place in towns across the UK every year. Yet, far from being exhausted by their uphill struggle against the might of the multiples, independent retailers are drawing deep and giving the fight everything they’ve got. Often, they have public sympathy on their side, thanks to fears of additional traffic congestion and the perceived risk to the town’s ‘soul’. But the one weapon they have lacked until now (other than the quite obscene financial resources available to the big multiples) is strategic information – information that would enable them to make better choices and capture customers’ loyalty to protect their businesses against rival attacks on their market share.

Trend data

Levelling the battleground

Comparing sales

Purchasing optimisation = 12-15% sales uplift

Sharing costs nothing

http://www.salesout.co.uk

One-to-One Marketing goes 3D

Lord Leverhulme famously said that “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the problem is I do not know which half”.  In a downturn it is vital that none of the marketing pound is wasted and as planning director at Leeds-based direct response agency PCD, I can reveal how to be smarter with your marketing spend.

Whether you call it direct marketing or one-to-one marketing, the all important goal is to promote your message to your customers in a more targeted way. Achieving this goal becomes ever more vital as company boardrooms insist marketing teams justify their budgets and as such decisions, strategies and plans will become more customer data insight driven.

Digital opportunities and channels provide marketers with never before seen levels of interactions with customers and prospects. Integrating in a single process, for example via direct mail, sms, web or email, with levels of personalisation that are no longer restricted to simple variables but include imagery, product messages and copy to fit an individual customer’s particular purchasing habit and lifestyle, help to engage with target audiences.

Yes, this comes at a higher cost, however experience has shown that cost per pack whilst increasing is countered by an overall increase in conversion, lowering overall acquisition costs.”

To reflect this explosion in alternative on and offline media platforms, we at PCD have refocused the business and developed a 3D approach – data, digital and direct.

• Data means knowledge and provides insight, information and understanding which results in targeted planning, segmentation and a well defined strategy.
• Digital means one-to-one dialogue, delivering relevant and personalised comms. This means that the right message is being delivered the right way at the right time, both on and offline.
• Direct means accountable and results in brand building, generating response, measuring, learning and improving.

I believe that we needed to develop this unique 3D approach in order to provide clients with targeted methods to reach their consumers and increase customer value.

What’s different about our 3D approach is that you will realise it’s not just about sending complex mailing packs, building the biggest websites, sending the most emails or developing ‘flashy’ online campaigns. It’s about taking data and using it to understand your customers. It’s about understanding a customer’s journey with your brand, the touchpoints and conversations you’ll have and those you should have. It’s about segmenting data to target creative more effectively and then delivering campaigns that embrace and engage the customers.

This is all before a creative concept is hatched and means that clients fully understand their customers, allowing them to embrace and engage with them in a way they have not been able to do before.

I believe that our approach begins by understanding our clients data, the segments they form, the impact these segments can have on your business and then the creative message we can deliver, ultimately ensuring the right customer receives the right message by the right channel.

 For more information visit www.pcdagency.com or telephone 01943 872505

Nine Top Digital Trends for 2010

1: Facebook replaces personal email Question: Google has it, Hoover has it (in the UK anyway), TiVo had it, lost it and has somewhat got it back. Xerox had it, but nobody really cares anymore. So what is it? It’s when a brand name becomes the verb associated with its use. So rather than searching, you Google, or TiVo when digital recording a television show.

Arguably an even more powerful synonym is when a brand becomes a noun, such as Polaroid, for instant developed photograph, although that didn’t end so well. The newest one would seem to Facebook, although it has too meanings. ‘I Facebooked you’ could mean that you the person has added you as a Facebook friend or they sent you a private message though Facebook. The latter would seem to be of more interest as no-one has really owned this type of communication before. No brand ever became synonymous with email. To Hotmail or Gmail someone just never happened.

So the interesting and overlooked disruption of Facebook is its displacement of personal email as a communication tool. Completely permission based, no SPAM (yet), and no address book required - your friends are already on Facebook.

2: Open source software starts making proper money, thanks to the cloud There’s something starting to happen within the open source software world. Projects that were typically for the purview of programmers, or at least technophiles, are now available to the masses. An example is Beanstalk www.beanstalkapp.com a fully hosted, version controlled code repository that uses the Subversion open source project. The big deal is that to set up and maintain a Subversion repository can be a pain - plus you need a server if you want to give access to anyone. Beanstalk has created a subscription based service that, for a small fee, removes the hassle.

Services like this can only really exist with cloud computing infrastructure - so companies such as Beanstalk don’t have the huge upfront capital outlay for servers, they only pay for what their customers use. With the right skills any open source project can be commercialized in this manner.

3: Mobile Commerce - the promise that has never delivered, yet. As annoyingly tantalizing yet esoteric as the word ‘convergence’ has been over the last 10 years, mobile commerce has promised much but never delivered.

Mobile phones have delivered real benefits to societies world wide and in developing nations are used commonplace as devices for the transfer of money. However, until only very recently in the nations that invented and first adopted mobile technologies, has use of your most precious device been extended to payment for goods and services.

With the advanced browsers of iPhone and the Android platforms one could pay for goods through full e-commerce sites, but who really wants to fiddle around with a phone in one hand and a credit card in another? The game changer is the iPhone / iTunes platform. In-app purchases on the iPhone can tempt users to buy small items, upgrades, updates, etc, while iTunes holds their precious credit card information.

All, of course, is done in seamless fashion, enough to promote impulse purchases. Would seem like an easy task for this to be extended to other platforms with PayPal or Google Checkout. But we have been here before haven’t we?

4: Fewer registrations - one sign-in fits all I use a great application on the Mac platform that securely holds my login details for upwards of 50 different sites. It means that I don’t have to use the same password for each site and that I don’t have to search around for post-it notes (my 1998 method) to log into the site I joined a week ago. However, I’m starting to resent having to register for anything ever again. I don’t see why, to leave a particularly pithy comment on a blog or news site, I have to register all over again. I’m sure I’m not the only one and that’s why services like Facebook Connect and OpenID are particularly useful and will continue to be adopted at great speed through 2010.

Who knows where these might go? Perhaps next year I’ll be able to pay for something using my Facebook login.

5: Disruption vs. Continuity - Alternatives to the “Big Idea” As the significance of social networks continues to grow, businesses are investing more in community building as a marketing driver. According to the recent Tribalization of Business study released by Deloitte, 94% of businesses will continue or increase their investment in online communities and social media and, for the majority of these companies, their marketing function will drive this investment.

At the same time, as evidenced by Google’s recent release of “free floating” social tools, such as Google Waves and Sidewiki, there is an increasing shift towards online identity and social activity being an integrated part of the network as a whole, rather than concentrated within discrete platforms such as Facebook.

With the increasing emphasis on marketing and advertising through social networks and the increasing pervasiveness of social tools, marketing objectives come into conflict with advertising techniques.

While advertising has often sought to distinguish itself and stop the consumer in their tracks with a disruptive “big idea,” the emphasis is shifting toward persuasion through fitting organically into the consumer’s social sphere. It will always be the objective of marketing to provide creativity and novelty, but the way in will increasingly be one of persistence and continuity.

6: Self-Sufficiency – The Continuing Evolution of Web-Driven,Open Source DIY Culture Much has been said about the power and potential of collective intelligence. From solving complex problems through crowd-sourcing, to reconfiguring industries to be leaner and more innovative by harnessing the expertise of a network of independent suppliers, many of the breakthrough solutions of tomorrow appear to lie in more effectively pooling the resources and intelligence of our increasingly networked world.

On the other side of the equation, the power of pooled intelligence and networked resources have empowered individuals to take on more and more complex undertakings themselves. From drawing on the collective intelligence of blogs and university open courseware to educate themselves, to services like ponoko, spoonflower and cafe press that facilitate small-scale production, to offline resource pooling like pop-up retail and collective office spaces, individuals are discovering that it has never been easier to try doing it themselves.

While we find new ways to thrive in a still struggling economy, expect to see lasting changes coming from empowering individuals to work together to become more ever more self-sufficient.

7: Info-Art Where we once had pop-psychologists and pop-philosophers, we now appear to have pop-statisticians and pop-economists. The growing wealth of data and the access to rich and diverse data sources that are significant byproducts of information networks have made the art of data analysis a defining skill of our time. By the same token, the skill of elegantly visualizing that data has become a defining art of our time. The art of the infographic is becoming increasingly pervasive as people look more and more to the growing amount of data at our disposal for insight, and more refined as the interactions of that data becomes more complex.

With an ever increasing need for real-time analysis of a growing torrent of raw data, expect to see greater innovation spurred by more elegant ways of capturing and visualizing information by a growing number of info-artists.

8: Crowd Sourcing Across many industries and organizations, crowd sourcing will become a growing tool as part of elance outsourcing strategies. Organizations will mobilize the passionate special interest groups to not only carry a message but, even more importantly perhaps, to lead and take part in activities on their behalf.

Predictions for 2010 are not as rosy as we all hoped and budgets for just about everything continue to be cut, encouraging ‘creative’ thinking regarding getting things done and done well. From political canvassing to software development, from people journalism to environmental activism, we will see huge growth in crowd sourcing models provoked and led, largely, by digital social media strategies.

9: More Flash, Not Less Outside of the obvious brand sites, micro-sites and media sites (video, games, etc.) Flash has often been looked down upon if not completely discounted by techies and search engine optimizers alike. It seemed to face an uncertain future as a viable tool for serious websites and applications such as eCommerce tools and corporate websites.

As it is, Adobe’s rich media tool has enjoyed the grit and determination of its advocates and external development community. Several tricks, authoring tools and server side scripting workarounds have meant that Flash built websites no longer serve up a single, impenetrable page. They offer deep, searchable, indexable sites that will allow acute, detailed traffic and behavioral analytics and search engine optimization. As websites continue to increase in their importance as a company’s storefront, the demand for rich, brand-extending experiences will also increase. Further proliferation of (lightning speed) broadband will reduce download issues while the adoption of Flash on mobile devices will dramatically increase and fuel reach and the desire/need for highly usable, brand transporting, conversion oriented experiences

Dispelling the myths of online video.

Online video is one of the fastest growing areas in advertising. And with that growth come a host of opportunities for savvy marketers. However, despite the many advantages of online video, many advertisers remain wary due to various myths surrounding the medium.

It’ll end in tears if you’re just going to Tweet around.

I’ve just been through a whirlwind of social media lately. Conferences, projects, discussions, it’s left me feeling quite anti-social about the whole thing. But stay your burning pitchforks. Do not assault my door as you Tweet that you’ve found a non-believer.  

So social media? Yes please, but only if it fits with my commercial objectives and I can afford – both in time and money - to integrate it as part of my plan.

www.theagencyonline.co.uk

Don’t let DM go on strike

Get out your violins: I’m about to complain about the trials of being a direct marketer. Boo hoo. The postal strike is making our jobs difficult. Pass the tissues – I know you feel my pain.

But the truth is that the strikes are causing problems – for clients, for agencies, and for the postal service itself. Because despite all the special vitriol postmen reserve for the so called ‘junk mail’ that makes their bags so heavy, clients sending marketing letters with Royal Mail is what makes the business run.

We’ve all heard Royal Mail’s long-standing gripe that “Royal Mail does the work. TNT takes the profit”. Yes, other providers take profitable downstream access work while the Queen’s posties still deliver the final mile. It must be hard to see that happening, but it’s a fact of deregulation and it is not going to go away. Striking, however, is building up a raft of problems for the future.

Not all business users have switched to other providers. Some like the quality assurance of having a Royal Mail postmark – it shows a company is supportive of the service and that it wants to align itself with the well-loved Royal Mail brand.

Or, I should say, the ‘once well-loved Royal Mail brand’. The sad fact is that more big spenders are considering leaving every day the strikes go on.

The industrial action is giving businesses an excuse to swap providers, even though, in the event of a strike, the mail taken out of the system downstream generally ends up in the same sorting office while posties warm their hands on a brazier outside.  

It’s not news to say that the strikes are damaging the Royal Mail brand. But it is perhaps pertinent to put a real value on it in this way.

The longer the strikes go on, the less Royal Mail will be viewed as an old, friendly and dependable brand – and the more lucrative contracts will switch elsewhere. This will leave  postmen with even more to carry on that last mile, and even less sympathy from the bosses as their diminished pot of funds shrinks even further.

No client wants to have to make these decisions. But many feel – rightly or wrongly – that they have no option in dissociating themselves as far as possible from a brand they can no longer rely on.

 David Rolfe is client services director at customer management agency Snowball

Facebook encourage its members to reconnect with the deceased

Facebook has hit the headlines again for introducing a new service helping its members reconnect with old friends. However within moments of the service going live facebook was inundated with furious emails as members were being encouraged to reconnect with deceased friends!

 

The new ‘reconnecting’ service Facebook introduced turned into a PR nightmare for them. The repercussions on brand damage were huge, news stories started appearing online and national newspapers also carried the story of the insensitive reconnecting messages.

 

Facebook’s head of security quickly responded with a solution, by requesting proof of death such as an obituary or news article! Anyone who is responsible for managing consumer databases knows the importance of screening for deceased individuals on a regular basis and applying industry best practice. Not only does this help to avoid the negative headlines and reduce brand damage but also lessens the risk of upsetting and alienating existing and potential customers.

 

However with vast amounts of personal data stored and published online, fraudsters are continually lurking in cyberspace.  Unscrupulous individuals make a hobby and even a career out of identifying deceased members of the public and using online ‘skimming’ techniques to collect relevant information to steal people’s identity.

 

According to CIFAS, the UK’s fraud prevention service, during the first quarter of 2009 there has been a massive 74 per cent increase in deceased identity fraud compared to the same period in 2008.  Without wanting to be sensationalist or taking the moral high ground, companies who store and use personal data must understand the importance of putting strict procedures into place which help to identify deceased individuals. With over 600,000 people sadly passing away each year regular database management is imperative.

 

Until recently the deceased suppression market was often thought to be a confusing market place with a number of deceased suppression files available. However last month Mortascreen signed an exclusive partnership agreement with deceased data provider Lifecycle Marketing, which will provide Mortascreen with deceased data from over 90 per cent of UK register offices. 

 

I am pleased that Facebook have now introduced the option for family and friends to ‘memorialise’ profiles of members who have died and remove sensitive information such as status updates and contacts. But as identity fraudsters continue to find security loopholes using clever and complex techniques to steal identities, I am sure they could quickly forge obituaries or edit news articles as proof to steal the identity of dormant members.