And you thought YOU didn't have enough data?

So you need data to make decisions, right? But how much data do you need?

 

Seems we marketers are not the only ones who have to produce dramatic, powerful results from the slenderest of raw data. I was drawn to this story in my hometown newspaper online.

It turns out some researchers in Nantes have found a couple of lines of a music manuscript by Wolfgang Amadeus - a matter of moments worth of actual music - and from this they are planning to reconstruct enough to be able to present a concert highlight.

Talk about the art of extrapolation! I wish them the very best of luck. At least in digital marketing we can afford to make a couple of assumptions, test and refine as we see real results.

Of course, this all seemed completely feasible to me. Until I read the last line: "Many notes are obliterated and you have to guess at them". 

Oh.

Nokia plants a time bomb

The Sandlines mind has more than one obsession: as well as being far too interested in engagement marketing to be really healthy (and all that Web 2.0/Web 3.0 stuff that goes with it), I'm also a compulsive consumer of music, old and new. 

So when I saw that Nokia's "Comes With Music" service is launching here first, it sparked in both chambers. This is a canny piece of work: you take the bit of the mobile industry that is pretty transactional for the hardware manufacturer (i.e. Pay As You Go) and turn it in to an annually renewable event. The deal is this, as I understand it:

• you buy your pre-pay Nokia music mobile
• you get unlimited music downloads, complete with DRM that keeps it safely on the mobile without any of that nasty file-sharing
• 12 months later, ka-boom. The DRM locks
• you buy another pre-pay Nokia music mobile.

Let's do the time warp again

I feel like I’m in a time warp – all summer the news has been full of talk of inflation: prices going up, cost of living on the rise, tube strikes...

Inflation is even encroaching on my working life. I’m seeing people talking about Web 3.0 more and more. 

What does all this mean? What on earth is Web 3.0? How is different to Web 2.0? How many people haven't got their head around THAT yet?

OK - so let’s leave the numbers to one side for a moment (inflation, after all, is just adding hot air). Instead, let’s think about the way marketing has been – and is going to be – changed.

When I started my career back in the ‘80s, marketing was typified by a lot of shouting by marketers and not much obvious feedback. You either shouted louder, smarter or funnier to try and get heard:

 

“(insert name of soap powder) will get your whites whiter than white”...

You wouldn’t know what good all that advertising had done until the year-end figures came in showing market share. It was a (slow) one-way street. And even then you could tell which bit was responsible for the change.

Here we are in summer (?) 2008 and that picture couldn’t be more different: the consumer has found his/her voice and (s)he’s not afraid to use it. The blogosphere, dedicated review sites, communities and social networking sites (you know the names) have created a world where what your customer thinks of you is at least as visible as the picture you’d like to paint with your marketing activity. Your audience has found a voice - and is not afraid to use it.

So what do you do?

For a start, no-one’s really figured out how to make all those social networking sites sell soap powder. Doesn’t look much like old-style ads are going to cut it – though I’ll watch with interest how Facebook’s latest attempt works out.

A key term for me is engagement. Engagement can be well thought out marketing communication via email, sms, rss etc. It can be personalisation of content within those community channels – think ‘Amazon Recommends’. It’s the growing importance of (and return on investment from) customer reviews:  whether allowing  customer to post reviews directly on your website (the good, the bad and the ugly) or independent review sites.

This completely changes the tone, language and content of marketing communications.  Take the story last week about how EA Games responded to the YouTube community taking the mickey out of the reported ‘glitch’ in their new golf game:

Or check out this from Samsung’s new ‘iPhone killer' (sic)

We’re writing the rules again from scratch.

And maybe this time we won’t have to create mock scientific ingredients.