Not another social network

Virgin Atlantic have announced a Travel social network as part of their 25^th Birthday, aimed at the ‘inspirational' travel market. Much like the BA Metrotwin, which was specifically created for the to London-New York traveller, the vtraveller is aimed at frequent flyers. Now I am not about to go about disputing the power of social media or the idea of having a branded social network. What does concern me is what brand owners think can be achieved through branded social networks and how long they think users will stick around for if they aren't properly supported, particularly if the branded social network's unique selling point (in this case sharing pictures and travel experiences) is not really unique at all!

A social network is a great way of getting your users together, but getting them there is only half of the battle - you have got to get them to stay as well. How? Social networks should address an unmet need, not replicate what works for others. A great way of driving engagement with your brand is by ensuring you provide feeds to share content with other social networks - it's not always necessary to reinvent the wheel, just hitch a ride with a passing juggernaut, in this case Facebook and Twitter!

When brands decide to create social networks they should try and keep the branding as subtle as possible and have something unique to offer, like HMV's Get Closer (full disclosure: Get Closer was LBi's work, not that I am biased!) or Disney's Disney Xtreme Digital. Get Closer offers music fans a unique sharing experience and exclusive music treats whilst the U.S aimed Disney My Page is aimed at providing a safe social environment for a pre-teen audience - a demographic many other social networks avoid due to the legal issues surrounding under 14s.

To get the most out of social media it is vital that you don't push your brand onto users but instead aim to pull in users voluntarily, giving them a unique (softly) branded experience in a comfortable social environment.  If you want an example of how things can go wrong when brands go against this advice just look at Habitat - you couldn't have missed the furore over their recent Twitter spamming, where an over-zealous intern used non-brand related hash tags that were trending in order to drive views of their tweets. Note: If I'm looking for Tweets about the Iranian opposition leader, I really do not want to know about your latest offer on garden furniture! 

Of course when managed well branded Twitter accounts can be a great example of how to use social media. Twitter enables you to follow users mentioning your brand and provides a great tool for monitoring your brand perception in a real world example. Where Twitter works best is when the brand has a legitimate reason to use it - on the DR end Dell have famously made millions from tweeting specific short-term offers whereas Innocent Drinks and ASOS have manage to drive terrific brand engagement simply by being themselves and talking to their users like real people.

It is more important than ever for brands to be considering how they position themselves within the social media sphere. Ultimately it's all about being believable - if you have no legitimate reason to exist within a social space then think carefully before you move. With so many social networks around branded networks have to ensure that they have a real reason to exist in the space before they invest, otherwise there is a risk all that investment will end up going into a network that users use twice and ultimately can't remember their password for.

Three golden rules to achieve integration between your campaigns and your website

As this is a media blog, I have written a lot about different media types - search, affiliate, display, etc... all trying to win the attention of customers and entice them towards their website.

But is the message that leads the user to a website the same message they receive when they land? A good customer experience should take the visitor from their off-site touch-point straight to a page that will meet their expectations. Unfortunately we often see clients who come to us with campaigns where there is little relationship between the two, leaving the visitor to work harder to find what they are looking for.  That's if they don't just leave the site out of frustration.

Why does this happen? From what I have seen, it comes down to a division between the "website team" and "marketing team" in many organisations, especially those where the website is not seen as core to the business. Ultimately, both teams may want to drive success on the website, whether it is sales, enquiry or interaction with some fancy new widget, but these teams have their own performance goals to work towards. Marketing want to see that their campaigns generate site visits and have onsite acquisitions attributed to their own campaign. Meanwhile the website teams are moving around content and considering the online experience in order to maximise conversions, not just those from a particular media campaign but from the many, often simultaneous, traffic sources for the site.  Both causes are noble, but shouldn't everyone be pulling in the same direction?

So, what options are there to align the online and marketing experiences? Essentially, the landing page (and subsequent navigation through the site) needs to meet visitor expectation. It is no use landing on a site homepage with zero identifiable relevance to the media campaign when they could have landed deeper in the site or be a creative landing page that matches the campaign message.

I've blogged previously about the benefits of diversity and full service offering in a digital agency - being part of a full service agency we know that the first step to bridge the media/online divide is ultimately to get the teams talking!

So here are my three golden rules:

1) Talking - share plans, strategy and results between the online team and the marketing team. Replace the silos with an end-to-end view of the customer experience.

2) Testing - perform landing page AB or multi-variant testing to gather insight into what onsite content works best for different campaign plans. When everyone if fighting for a piece of webpage real estate ensure you base decisions on data instead of who has the loudest voice.

3) Targeting - it isn't possible to cater to everyone all the time, so target landing page content to the specific visitor. One option is to create a campaign specific landing page or microsite. Another is to serve targeted content. There are many tools that will segment site visitors and allow you to serve relevant content to them. For example, display relevant content to someone arriving by paid search, as opposed to a particular email campaign or those have arrived on the site organically. Just as I have blogged about customer targeting from a media point of view it can also be powerful to target a visitor onsite.

Five reasons why Bing has a long way to go

If you work in digital media you'd have to have been living under a rock for the past few weeks to not have heard about Microsoft's re-branded search offering, Bing.  So called because Microsoft believes it represents "the sound of found" (yes, quite), it seems everyone loves to talk about a potential Google killer and so it's no surprise to see that the PR machine has gone into over-drive once again with numerous features appearing in both the mainstream and specialist press.

Worst coverage of all came in the form of NMA's story last week, quoting research carried out by supposed news portal One News Page that stated that 55% of consumers plan to replace Google with Bing as their main search tool and (be warned, this one takes the biscuit) 90% would use the term "to bing it" as a term for searching the web.  Shame on NMA on two counts.  Firstly for printing such clearly ludicrous statistics without any kind of critique - seriously, 90% of people will say they are going to "bing it"?  Even though that is 35% more than the number of people that plan to use it?  Even worse is the fact that they have taken statistics from a site that is little more than a holding page - they claim to be a news aggregator but the fact they don't show up in comScore suggests they don't see significant enough traffic volumes to carry out the kind of survey needed to make these statements.

Before I start with the vitriol then there are a few things to note.  Bing isn't all bad - it's certainly a step in the right direction and they represent more of a threat to Google than anyone else at present.  However if they are to challenge their dominance in any way they have to address the following obstacles:

1. It's ugly. Don't get me wrong, Google is hardly an oil painting but that logo is horrendous. The images on the homepage are a good idea - the kind of thing that will have casual users setting it as their homepage just to see something new each day - but the execution is all wrong due to the central placement of the homepage. When a user actually searches for something the tabs and navigation all suddenly become left-aligned - it's a minor thing but it's jarring. The dead space around the images just seems like a wasted opportunity too. Why not expand the images so they fill the whole page, giving a much richer, colourful experience? Instead they have a homepage that feels dated already.

2. The timing of the launch was fumbled. I've already mentioned that there's been loads of press coverage but, for reasons best known to Microsoft, the full product won't be rolled out across Europe for six months yet, giving us a skinny version instead whilst the local teams catch-up. The result is that everyone goes to visit the site before the full functionality of the US version is here and write it off as nothing but a name change. The advertising dollars will now have to work twice as hard when Bing comes out of Beta in the UK and the competition will have had six months to catch up - if someone in Redmond is reading, feel free to give us a call if you need help with this!

3. Google are rapidly surpassing Microsoft even in their intended areas of strength. With Google Options and Squared announced literally weeks before Bing any thought leadership Microsoft would have had has already been diminished.

4. Bing isn't social. With access to Passport login data Microsoft have a clear advantage over Google in the social space - they know much better who you are and who your friends are. Why not use that information? Show me the restaurants my friends are more likely to click on. Let me ‘Bing' sites I like so my friends can see them.

5. They just don't get the audience. Microsoft claim to be targeting power searchers with Bing and it is understandable why - it's an audience containing 30% of searchers that are responsible for more than 50% of searches - but they just don't understand the audience. The images on the homepage are great for a casual audience but power users are likely to use a browser based search box. Microsoft's answer to this is to develop additional functionality in IE8 but who exactly are they kidding? We all know that they need to be targeting Firefox to win this audience.

So what do people think - does anyone have any thoughts on why Bing represents a serious challenger to Google's dominance?

Different strokes for different folks

Afternoon all, do you ever have days when you buzz off what you do ? I am having one !

We lost a pitch, so why am I happy you ask .... to be honest I don't think we'd want to work with the client.  The team did a fantastic job however the client didn't buy our approach to digital, they bought a 2% commission, we should do it cos we do the telly, approach. Now, its not an invalid argument however when the review is called because they were not getting a strategic perspective or quality of service and in his words had a "bunch of 21 year olds with calculators" on the account it doesn't make a lot of sense to re purchase the same thing ( it stayed with the incumbent ) at an even lower price point invalidating the agencies' ability to do a better job as the margin is squeezed further. I actually feel a bit sorry for them !

I am proud of the fact that we delivered a comprehensive, intelligent approach to digital - Each client values different things from an agency and there is no one size fits all solution so today I am happy because we stood tall behind our beliefs and I am glad we have a point of differentiation that polarises clients.

Wouldn't life be very dull if we were all the same ?