Media Week

Brand Republic's DB just popped into my inbox and the headline - Firms to spend more on social media - caught my eye.

A report by E-Consultancy and cScape on customer engagement has established that because of the economic downturn:

51% of business want to engage with customers more

But 45% have NO defined strategy

41% are thinking of using user ratings & feedback

37% are toying with user-generated content

36% might start blogging

And 7% say they have found some success with Twitter

Incredibly: "Sensitivity to price, focus on quality and desire for simplicity are the types of customer behaviour which responding organisations believe will be most significant to them during 2009."

What on earth is going on?

Why does it take a financial crisis, the like of which we've probably never seen before, to wake business owners up to the fact that listening to and talking to customers is first rung on the ladder to success?

As a consumer, when did you last desire or go for the most expensive, shoddily made and complicated to operate product or service?

Why has the need to tighten budgets and be more fiscally responsible suddenly given rise the genius strategy of making it easier for customers to communicate more easily with the companies they're thinking of buying from?

Does it really take the threat of cash-strapped consumers using their back buttons for marketing departments to decide on a dialogue to entice them back into the mall?

Come and see me present next Tuesday at The Online Information Show at Olympia on Helping Advertisers Help Themselves Through Blogs & Social Media!

I'll give you some ideas on your approach and show how we've been in a successful dialogue with customers through www.adCenterCommunity.com for years!

I'm so flabbergasted I'm going to have to sign off now and go and lie down!

Tesco with your Tosca, Kenco with your Kanye West or Germoline with your Genesis?

I’ve just signed up to Peter Gabriel’s music download project We7.com and am listening to all sorts of stuff for free, streaming it across the web to my laptop as I write.

The idea is to provide much of the content for free if users listen to an ad at the start of each track.

In an interview with The Guardian Gabriel says that adding an advertising model is "....a big hurdle. Twenty years ago, the thought of encouraging advertising with music would be like offering your daughter to the devil, but I think the reality is that people have got used to free music, and this is one of the few ways that musicians can still earn in a free music environment."

They’re offering targeted ads based on “information volunteered by users, with an average of two minutes of ads per hour of music.”

Now as hard as I tried I couldn’t find an ad to listen to, although I did find a karaoke version of Sledgehammer, so I couldn’t assess how irritating they are.

But what do you think? Could you endure 2 mins of messages for all those free vibes?

Is this the new stuff or is Gabriel just shaking the tree?

Planes are great places to learn something, and I’ve been on enough of them in recent weeks to have fathered an encyclopaedia of facts, figures and inane trivia.

BA’s Business Life mag is a great source of news, views and interesting articles about entrepreneurs and how to get that extra edge in the board room.

November’s edition (can’t find it online!) had a great snippet of insight into “persuasion.”

Picture the scene, you’re about to go onstage at a conference in front of hundreds or you’re within yards of the biggest pitch of your life.

What tactics can you employ to propel yourself into the consciousness of your audience so they listen with an more keener ear than normal?

Well according to some research conducted at Stanford Business school, a simple introduction would be good for starters!

Apparently bigging up yourself and your credentials in your opening gambit is an instant turn-off and likely to set you back in the persuasion process.

What you need is someone else to kick off proceedings and give your audience some insight into you as a person and indicate some of your business successes.

It helps if the introducer is an expert of reputable standing but, interestingly, it doesn’t really matter whether this person knows or is in any way connected to you!

It’s not even a problem if they obviously stand to gain something from the deal. As long as it’s a simple and credible passing of the baton, the uplift in the likelihood of a successful outcome is increased.

So the next time you’re about to conjure up some prospects, make sure you have a glamorous assistant waiting in the wings ready to sprinkle some magic dust on you before you go on!

PS – I am available for a small donation but not tickets to Twickenham at this time!

I’m sitting in a hotel room on the 26th floor of the W in downtown Seattle slowly recovering from an action packed week at PubCon in Las Vegas.

PubCon is the annual conference set up by the folks at WebmasterWorld.com and attracts thousands of web marketers from all over the world to learn from the very best and then to have the very best time!

This year was my third outing and, although it seemed a little quieter, the content really was king.

My main take away from the event was the deluge of advice and emphasis around social media. There were six tracks to the conference and social media marketing occupied a whole one by itself!

One of the sessions I attended had a raft of experts keen to let folks know how to use the channel to its most effective.

Warren Whitlock, who wrote a book on the Twitter Revolution said there are three main phases people go through when thinking about getting set up on Twitter.

First there’s "denial" – you simply can’t understand why you’d want to read about someone standing in a queue at the bus stop or wondering what they’re going to eat for dinner.

Then there’s “reluctant acceptance” – this is the bit where you shrug your shoulders and take the plunge because everyone else seems to be raving about it. You still haven’t quite grasped it yet but will give it a stab.

The holy grail of “meaningful connections” hits shortly after that when you realise you can make real friends, barriers can be eased and you can learn a lot about other people, yourself and your industry from just 140 characters!

Warren’s big tip - be authentic and be yourself!

Brian Carter – a very funny and engaging presenter – said set goals, measure and let the results guide you. KPIs are important but there’s no doubt that if your blog establishes your authority then a bookmark is your social proof. Use Twitter to gain attention.

Kent Schoen from Facebook also waded in with some tips on how to maximise reach through social media.

He said to try and generate reach and engagement between evangelist and engagers as that’s where the organic effect increases buzz as people talk about your products or services. Measuring the buzz is crucial to understanding passive and active engagement – “there’s a difference between insight and metrics!”

There’s tonnes more content from the show out there! Rumours abounded that because so many of the delegates were using Twitter to communicate we caused it so have outages not seen from the platform in a while.

What is for certain is the platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc have started to change the way we communicate and influence purchase decisions and be influenced.

Even though we’re in an economic slump, now’s the perfect time to be experimenting and getting into these channels because when the dark clouds disappear and the sun comes out, one if its permanent rays will be social media.

It’s a channel you have to take advantage of!

Tess Alps’ column in the latest edition of Media Week was spot on.

In it she mentioned Thinkbox’s new blog – Televisionaries – but unfortunately didn’t actually give us the URL which may have been an editorial gaff but does add much weight to her premise that what you do offline drives online discussion in the blogosphere.

She’s so right about needing stamina to keep writing too. I remember nearly eighteen months ago, when Steve Barrett asked me to contribute, it took quite a few weeks to get into the groove of subject discovery, and then a fair while honing the discipline of writing it down in an accessible and engaging way.

When it comes to reputation management you can choose your battles. Of course there’s loads written about a lot of generic subjects, but there are tools and services out there which can monitor what’s being said about your particular brand or trigger-word. Responding on blogs where other people criticise you is not for the faint hearted. You have to have a clear strategy and tone that says you’re not there to fight but to present a different perspective. The fact that most blogging platforms let you supply your website credentials alongside a comment means you’re likely to be marketing yourself at the same time, growing your angles awareness within the community that’s built up around your speciality.

If you do measure the buzz around your brand, there may be a negative vocal minority which can be de-prioritised for a while, but once they reach a critical mass I believe it’s crucial to address their issues or needs. There is something about the internet that has fuelled consumer vociferousness. Maybe it’s the relatively anonymous nature of the web, or the fact that our customers have never before had such access to information and the ability to express themselves.

What is certain is that people-power is here to stay thanks to the proliferation of social media.

Because the large majority of blog and forum readers are lurkers and are not actively writing down their sentiment, means they’re sure as hell voting with their virtual feet and not engaging with products and services they take issue with.

It’s the silent majority we need to address both online and off it.

As the dark nights get longer and colder, I’m not sure whether I’ve been struck down by SAD – Seasonal Affective Disorder – or I just need to get real and chug a few mulled wines a couple of weeks early as.......to tell you the truth......I’m a bit depressed!

Last week I spent four days with a BBC film crew traversing the East Sussex countryside in search of an Escape in the Country. When the director and producer tried to get to know me and my girlfriend Ashley (she works at Microsoft Advertising too) they were fascinated to know about internet marketing for precisely ten minutes before I called time on the conversation because their eyes had started to glaze over. Was it because their jobs seemed far more tangible and, dare I say, interesting than ours, or are we so used to talking in CPMs, CPCs, SEOs and ROIs that we sometimes forget it took us a while to grasp the theory and shouldn’t expect everyone to be over-enthused on first exposure just because we live and breathe it?!

I can’t tell you the amount of times I have just had to swallow my pride, nodding in agreement when I get introduced as someone that works in IT or computers! If I correct the introducer saying I work in advertising, the two simply don’t connect in most people’s minds so we all end up looking a bit silly.

So am I over-reacting? Do we digital folk live in a bit of a bubble? Are we facilitating billions of pounds worth of clicks and impressions for advertisers to connect with users who don’t care how it works, but just want to experience it?

Should we just be quietly proud because we’re at the cutting edge of marketing advertising and it’s taking a while for the mainstream to catch up?

As he opens his presents on Xmas Day, will my nephew announce that he wants to do a degree in Search Engine Optimisation when he goes to university?

Will my father want to discuss the Google/Yahoo deal or the impact of social networking on the youth of today when we go to watch Plymouth Argyle on Boxing Day?

Probably not................maybe next year?

Been a bit quiet recently as I was filming Escape To The Country last week. It was a fascinating experience which took a lot longer than you'd think for a one hour show, but was nevertheless a hoot and a considerable break from the norm.

So having got back to several hundred emails, I'm already off out tomorrow to attend Search Marketing Expo - Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman's Search Engine Land conference - to hear some of the best speakers in the industry impart valuable advice on SEO, PPC, link building and keyword research.

I'll be speaking at 9am (!) on Wednesday 5th on Brand Reputation Management Strategies and again at the Paid Search Check Up at 3pm.

I really do recommend coming along if you can make it. The agenda really is first class!

Check out the adCenter Blog for details on who you can get a cheeky 15% off the registration fee!