PiKE's Thinking ... » Marketing

Node XL Maps for #standardbank and #FNB on twitter during the ASA firestorm

Walter Pike — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 06:49:33 +0000

These network diagrams have been uploaded to illustrate my interview on SAFM on the media show at 9:20am Sunday March 4, 2012. Live streaming here (obviously this link will be no use unless you are listening live)

The first map describes the conversation for #FNB.

To help you understand it the size of the pictures is in proportion to followers, The green line are “followers” and the blue lines “retweets

#FNB 16/2/ to 24/2/2012

This is the same methodology but a picture of the #standardbank over the same period.

#standardbank 16/2 -24/2/2012

I work with Marc Smith who does these maps and we can do them for you – you need merely to contact me by clicking on this link and filling in the contact form

The ORM riddle: When is an Apple not an apple?

Walter Pike — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 06:50:14 +0000

Tim Shier announcing the new Brandseye

When I started the Digital Academy a few years back it was because I realised that technology does not always save on labour. In fact effectively marketing on the internet will probably require even more people. You will require crowds to analyse and interpret the wealth of data that is available.

One of the huge issues with online reputation management (ORM) is how to judge sentiment because it requires an intelligent response. What does the description “sick” mean as in “wow that’s really sick” are we talking about amazing or putrid. In the same way is an apple a fruit or a tech company. This confusion in interpretation, which is often regional, makes for incredible complexity in judging the sentiment of comments made online.

Local business Brandseye have come up with an elegant solution; they have crowdsourced it.

Crowdsourcing is a simply asking the crowd (anyone in the world), usually in an open call to solve a problem. The crowd is massively scalable and can be accessed regionally.

In this case in addition to the algorithm built into Brandseye, the system allocates members of the Brandseye crowd real-time mentions, the rater gauges if each mention is relevant and judges the sentiment, the location of the person that made the mention and the media type. Local context and local language subtleties are critical – along with the intuitive sense humans have for what other humans are trying to say. Computers are not great at picking up irony, sarcasm, humour… or rage. People are. Based on their peer-reviewed accuracy, the BrandsEye Crowd are paid for their effort.

The benefits for Brandseye and Brandseye clients is greater accuracy, for the raters a source of income in the form of micro employment which they can access anywhere where they have an internet enable device and an internet connection.

I think that this is a really clever and an elegant solution and although I have not experienced it in real life I can’t see any reason why this won’t work. Well done Tim Shier and the Brandseye team.

Declaration: Tim is a member of a think tank I have organised called ideaorgy, a place where ideas come to meet and mate. But we have never discussed any of this I regret to say.

Come on – That’s not Social Media

Walter Pike — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 12:52:58 +0000

A profound lack of understanding of social media is being used to support the reluctance of agencies and marketing companies to fully embrace it.

I was passed along a link to a post on the brandgym blog titled “Social media yet to show me the money” and I felt the need to comment.

The argument calls social media a fad which is sexy but yet to deliver. The argument is based around the following 5 points.

Engagement is not new.
Engagement is a means to and end not an end in itself.
That the thought that interruption marketing is dead is an oversimplification.
That it is penetration not loyalty that drives growth.
The point the writer regards is a killer is that people have no appetite for participation.

Without addressing each one of the points I must point out that the argument is a straw man, although probably an unwitting one. It confuses social media with using social media platforms as a media channel to carry advertising messages.

To briefly clarify then, we need to understand that all marketing is about spreading ideas. My brand is an idea and that choosing my brand is a better choice than choosing your brand is also an idea. Brands and ideas only exist in the minds of people.

Interruption marketing is the process of interrupting people doing stuff with a message which if repeated often enough is expected to change attitudes. The people interrupted could be people driving down a road interrupted with a billboard, people catching up on the racing results on the newspaper interrupted by an ad or people watching football being interrupted by a banner or a branding message.

This works when people are prepared to be interrupted, when they trust the source of the message and when the message is unchallenged as the only real source of information on that particular idea (product, service, brand, category etc). None of these conditions hold true any longer.

The emphasis in social is connections. Its how ideas spread through massive networks of connections that needs to be understood.

When you run an ad on facebook you are doing interruption marketing, tightly targeted mind you, but interruption none the less, Google Adwords are also interruption but they make up by being incredibly relevant based on keywords. If you run a “viral” youtube ad once again you are attempting to interrupt. The Old Spice man is an example of using digital media to extend an interruption marketing campaign.

When you are operating in the social realm you are doing something completely different, you are engaging in the conversation between people who are talking about your stuff or things like your stuff. You are providing them with the tools to help them talk about it and you are facilitating that conversation.

Your objective is to engineer some kind of new discourse around the idea, not to get gather meaningless hoards of facebook fans or “loyalty,” as the point is correctly in the blog post, loyalty is more a personality characteristic than a brand one.

Interruption marketing is certainly not dead and will continue to play a role in social campaigns, the growth in social is slow to begin with and can be helped with traditional announcement awareness provided by broadcast communications. But interruption is extremely expensive and pretty ineffective for the reasons mentioned above, we can compensate but make it even more expensive by buying bigger and bigger audiences so that the we can successfully interrupt more albeit at still a low percentage.

Contrary to the view stated by the brandgym blog, social is not a “nice to have” add on to the media plan – its the core element for the simple reason that people trust people they “trust” and act on the recommendations and the opinion of their peers and less on the self interst of brand messages. In this world the media plan now becomes the “add on” to support the launch and facilitation of that conversation. Its likely to stay a huge budget item not because of its effectiveness but the opposite.

It’s kind of obvious that the bulk of people in any social network will not generate content. People fulfill differing roles in society, some are discussion starters, some are question people, some are answer people some are bridges or connections but most are followers, but that does not minimise the impact of the people they are following, they form tribes around ideas and the conversation is between people as it moves between online to face to face and back again.

The final reposte to the claim that social media has yet to show the writer the money is to suggest that he ask ex Egyptian President Mubarak what he thinks. Time magazine names the protester its person of the year 2011. The movements it referred to, the Arab spring, the Occupy movement, the Russian unrest, slutwalk and many others beside are all social media enabled movements. None would have happened in 2011 without social media and some like the Occupy movement which spread around the world in a few weeks would never have happened at all.

Advertising agencies and marketers need to start facing the overwhelming evidence, instead of doing the ostrich thing. To remain relevant they need to start trying to understand how ideas spread in a world where media is no longer only a source of information but a site of coordination.

Picture by Roads Less Travelled Photography

How Woolies Lost its Mojo

Walter Pike — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 08:00:54 +0000

There was a time, those of us of a certain age will remember, when Woolworths was held up in marketing classes as a brand that had been built entirely on word of mouth.

But, on Wednesday, 1 February 2012, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) upheld a complaint by Frankie’s regarding Woolworths plagiarism of its slogan and Woolworths, feeling that consumer sentiment was against it, announced that it would remove the product from its shelves.

The word of mouth has changed.

The way you build a word-of-mouth brand is to deliver a remarkable customer experience and hope that people would tell their friends and, if they had a similar experience, they would tell their friends in turn and so on until the market all agreed.

Used to take a lot of time

In those days, this took a lot of time because people could only maintain a relatively small network of connections and would only tell two or three or five or a dozen friends. Now, when the marginal cost of publishing is zero, in an instant the average connected consumer can publish to thousands of readers and reach millions in a few seconds. The word soon spreads

I was the client service and strategy director for Woolworths’ early advertising agency when it crossed to “the dark side” and became an advertiser.

It did so because of the market’s perception that quality, certainly in its clothing section, had declined. This was also the time when the Woolworths’ food stores were still being set up. Advertising was the price Woolworths was paying for the reduction in standards and quality and the strap line “adding quality to life” was designed to turn that perception around.

Revealing

When the Frankie’s story broke on Talk Radio 702 end of last year and spread like wildfire through the social networks, I could not help thinking how far from the word-of-mouth brand Woolworths had moved. Apart from the absolutely appalling manner in which it handled the social media firestorm, it was revealing in how it was defended by some.

In essence, the argument ran that, because all the big retailers behave this way, it should be expected. But in a connected world, a social world, you don’t want to be like everyone else; you want to be remarkable, you want to be spoken about, you want people to share their experience with their friends. It’s about the buzz you generate by the special experiences you deliver that grows your brand.

In the absence of any research to prove it, I suggest that the reaction on the internet and then in the market was so vocal, not only because this was the powerful corporate bully riding roughshod over an entrepreneur, but because Woolworths has taken a position of quality, integrity and doing good and its customers and fans felt cheated and let down when suddenly they could see a new truth.

Trust has already gone

Woolworths can paper this over and things will go on as they were but, as with the wife who was cheated upon and forgave, the trust has already gone and when something like this happens again, all hell will break loose.

A more savvy Woolworths would not have waited for days before even responding to the accusations and then would not have done so in the defensive manner it did and, what is worse, would never have waited for the ASA ruling to force its hand before it would announce that it would remove the product from its shelves and do the right thing by Frankies.

I think that many people would have wanted to believe Woolworths and it would have been easy to see Frankies as an opportunistic startup with nothing to lose. Not now, though.

Ironic

The irony is that Woolworths were once one of the best in the world at generating the buzz it needed to be a standout brand. What happened with Frankies and how it handled the incident demonstrates something completely different. It demonstrates that it has lost the set of skills and attitudes it needs to be amazing and get buzz. It has joined the pack with the rest of the retailers.

If the price of a poor product and a poor customer experience is advertising, this is really good news for broadcast media owners – you should be getting a boost to your turnover.

Woolworths, you seriously need to look at how you curate your brand in the future; all the clues are in how you used to do it. The lesson is that you are no longer in control – your customers are.

Comment; This article was first appeared on Bizcommunity

Takumi Sushi – I am sorry but you lose.

Walter Pike — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 15:10:07 +0000

People do such ridiculous things when they find their brand under attack and here is a good example.

This is what happened;

A twitter user buys R399 take away sushi from a place called Takumi Sushi, When she opens up the container she finds a dead bug, she thinks it’s a cockroach – so she does like every normal twitter person would – she posts a tweet with a pic referring to how she had found something extra in her starter.

When she goes back she shows the management and apparently the chef responds in anger by throwing the container at her general direction.

Only after this started spreading through twitter did the establishment respond followed up by a threat of legal action obviously intended to intimidate the customer. Read the whole story here

Eventually a voucher was offered to the young ladies, which they turned down (kind of obviously) and now Takumi Sushi has offered to give the R1000 voucher to the person who makes the best response on the story.

The fact that the bug wasn’t a cockroach at all but a beetle is not the issue, its not even an issue that the clumsy bug could have flown into the sauce at the customer’s dining room. Nobody will really know.

The issue is that this business instead of apologising and fixing the problem acted with violence and then decided to intimidate its dissatisfied customers in the public domain and then to make the folly worse is now using the R1000 of vouchers to induce people to say nice things about them.

In this new world customer service is the new marketing – you have to give people a great experience – and if you do they will tell their friends. You behave badly they will do so as well.

If the management at Takumi Sushi had accepted responsibility the incident would have died away in seconds – instead its been floating through the interwebs and here I am sitting a good 12 hour drive from wherever in Cape Town this place is and writing about it, and some people will even read this – maybe even a lot.

I can’t possibly judge what is the the real truth but like any normal person I did a few searches on twitter and using Google and on the whole the Desmarais sisters come across a reasonable – Takumi on the other hand come across as defensive and their behaviour as aggressive and completely unacceptable.

Sorry Takumi that not the way to do it. You lose.

Posted via email from Organic Marketing…

Marketing sucks say Thought Leader commentators

Walter Pike — Wed, 11 May 2011 08:47:54 +0000

Sarah Britten, who is @anatinus on twitter wrote on the Thought Leader blog about her mothers day experience at boutique hotel Marion on Nicol in summary she felt ripped off because in spite of paying a top price for high tea the venue didn’t deliver what was promised. So she told her closest friends on a very well read blog and her friends told their friends like I am doing here.

Everyone should do this.

For me the really interesting bits are the comments left by the readers - read the article here

The comments give a very jaundiced view of marketing, advertising and delivering value. In effect saying that she should have expected to be ripped off. Some even saying that the complaint should have been more appropriately dealt with by a quiet word with management.

What a lot of total horse.

Maybe those marketers still stuck in a time warp think that they can do this stuff without considering the power of word of mouth in an always on always connected world.

Marketing is about delivery, about the delivery of value to customers and then the word spreading. What has changed is that the idea, which used to be spread by advertising is now being spread by people telling each other.

Because they can and now instead of telling their 10 closest friends they are telling 10 000.

Posted via email from Organic Marketing…

Imagine the ASA getting hold of this – Blackberry insults iPad

Walter Pike — Fri, 06 May 2011 10:13:35 +0000

Handbags at 20 paces probably describes the Vodacom complaint against CellC. This is a bit more spicy. Blackberry has decided to insult all of the millions of iPad fans.

I suppose that the intention was to get people to talk about the advertising which is fine because the PlayBook itself is not much to talk about.

Video

Oh by the way this post was made on my iPad.

Posted via email from Organic Marketing…

Vodacom: This is what your brand is.

Walter Pike — Tue, 03 May 2011 09:08:37 +0000

In an earlier rant I spoke about the Vodacom rebrand. In summary I said that brands are built by the customer experience and that because of the high involvement of customers in the Vodacom brand and how simple it would be to tell them about the logo change that the bulk of the money spent on the rebrand was wasted and would be far better used to improve service levels after all the offer inherent in the rebrand is better service.

Over the weekend I went to get a microsim for the iPad I had passed on to my daughter, I went to Fourways to get one but there were no micro sims available in Fourways, according to the guy at the Vodashop at any store.
On Monday I drove to another shopping centre around a 20 minute drive, they had one but in order to get it activated the clerk needed to call Vodacom, after 10 or so minutes I decided to video him holding on.The video is below:

IMG_1650.MOV Watch on Posterous

This poor man has obviously to put up with this day after day, and the queue of customers in this store laid out as friendly as the post office would agree with me. Hopefully Vodacom will realise that this attitude is a reflection of Vodacom not this otherwise helpful chap.

Vodacom you can paint building tops red, make blue rugby teams play in red jersey’s you can even give away red cell phones or spend millions of rands in media. This is what your customers and staff experience day after day.

This is the Vodacom positioning and anything you say on TV, Radio and Billboards doesn’t matter, because in a real time always connected world.

Your Brand is what we (Your customers) say it is.

Posted via email from Organic Marketing…

Cell C and Noahgate. Some lessons.

Walter Pike — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 11:31:09 +0000

As I drove back from my interview with Ashraf Garda on the radio show Media@SAFM on Sunday I thought about the conversation that I have got involved in regarding the new Cell C campaign.

The whole thing started with a video posted on YouTube on Wednesday 28^th July. The video was supposed to be a segment of comedian Trevor Noah’s comedy show in which he ripped into all the South African cell phone networks.

The fairy tale was that the Cell C CEO was so concerned on seeing the video that he placed a full page ad of apology to Trevor Noah and all of South Africa, promising better service and within a few hours offered Trevor Noah the job as the CEO (Customer Experience Officer) a kind of independent referee on Cell C customer service called telltrevor . In these few hours they also set up a rather large website development.

For good measure Cell C also changed their logo and announced how they were going to change the standard of cell phone connections with a new network.

The only thing is that it’s all a fantasy.

I had been pulled into the controversy firstly by commenting favourably on the Cell C apology, naively as it turns out. You see I had never expected a major marketing company to pull a stunt you would really only expect from “Honest Joe’s Used Cars.”

I was full of praise that at last a South African corporate had understood a little of Social Media strategy – listening and then responding, swiftly and with gravitas to a complaint. Why Cell C’s Full Page apology was a Marketing Masterstroke.

I was really disappointed when I found out from blogger Marc Forrest, Cell C the Joke is on you that it had all been a stunt. I felt it important to respond and did so here Cell C is Astroturfing, What a Joke

This was picked up by Radio Highveld news and Media@SAFM. And Mandy de Waal wrote a really good article with comments on Daily Maverick

This is a pulling together of my thoughts.

The media landscape has changed. Customers are connected and vocal. Dan Gilmour calls them the ‘Former Audience” because they have the power to generate as well as consume content. They are active participants in the branding process.
The first step in new marketing is listening. Listening to what the customers are saying and responding with solutions adding to their experience as well as with honesty and so building relationships based on trust.
The second is building an experience for your customer, an experience that they will value and tell their friends about, in other words build brand fans.
The principle underlying marketing in an always on and always connected world is that the customers have control. This could be described as a democratisation of marketing because in this world your communication is a discussion not a lecture. Brands can no longer tell customers what they should believe and with enough media spend, shout at them until they believe.
1. New marketing is really about preparing the environment for the idea (which is what a brand is) to spread. It’s like as a farmer prepares the field creating the right environment for the crops to grow, the marketer must nurture the brand in a partnership with its fans.

So what has Cell C done wrong?

Strategically:

If you are going to poke the sleeping bear with a pointed stick you had better have a well thought out plan, because it may wake up. The core of this is the customer’s experience.
1. Does Cell C have a demonstrably better network than either Vodacom or MTN?
2. Does Cell C have demonstrably better customer service?
3. If not then they have set themselves up for a very bloody nose.
4. If you want to have a relationship with your customers, the foundation of that relationship is trust.
  1. So is it a good idea to try pulling a stunt and spinning a yarn?
  2. Is it a good idea to pretend that a new independent customer service system had been set up?
  3. Why would I want to tell Trevor instead of Cell C?

Executionally

You don’t try to hoodwink your customer, even if you think its funny. Don’t make a fool of him, especially if your intention is to make him a hero.
Once you start a relationship with subterfuge it taints the rest of the relationship.
Customer service is a company culture thing. Pretending to outsource customer service to a comedian with no record as a consumer champion is bizarre.
Is appointing a comedian as your customer experience officer a message to tell everyone that your customer service is a joke.
Cell C has launched a new logo – but their TV ads still carry the old logo, that is just sloppy, and a message in itself.

What I would suggest:

Cell C get your network working, your outlets working and make sure that your customers are getting a superior experience.
Your customers don’t care how good you say you are, they care about their cell phone service
Then develope the tools to let your customers tell the rest of us about it. Because they are going to do it anyway.
Then go on and invite the rest of us in to join the conversation, using all media.

I am reminded of an article I read in the Huffington Post yesterday, called The dark side of vitaminwater it reveals that Coke’s legal team, who are defending a consumer protection lawsuit claiming that Coke has misled its customers into believing that vitaminwater is healthy, with the argument that “no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking vitamin water was a healthy beverage.” What twisted logic. Is Cell C under the illusion that they can treat their customers the same way, follow the same kind of strategy and same kind of defence if they get called out.

The fairy tale is just a fairy tale and we now know that. What we also now know for certain, because Trevor told us, is that the Cell C network is terrible.

Internet causing newspaper blindness!

Walter Pike — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:09:16 +0000

Glasses

The newspaper industry is in denial. It is myopic.

When I read the comments of newspaper man Rupert Murdoch and read the reports on the recent keynote speech by Mark Cuban in which he called Google a vampire that must be vanquished I cant help be reminded by the management thinker Theodore Levitt and his great HBR article Marketing Myopia which although written in the sixties has perfect applicability here. The death of newspapers is not the death of news, its just the death of news on paper.

Levitt was one of the founders of marketing as a concept and the key thesis of this article is that businesses and industries fail not because of a failure of the market but because of the failure of management. Management typically puts its own needs ahead of the needs of its customers, who because their needs are not being met move on and before long the industry is in decline, being replaced by another.

The classic is the story the demise of buggy whip manufacturers, who knows what would have happened if they had seen themselves in the transportation business.

Newspapers are dying not because people don’t want to read, because they don’t want news. Newspapers and book publishing are dying because there are better and lower cost ways of reading than ink on dead trees. In fact people are reading more and more, the massive growth of the Internet has actually translated into the fact that people are writing and reading more than they ever have – and its now much easier and cheaper to get the stuff to read.

If newspapers rethought their business and realised that they are not in the news on paper business but are in the news analysis business, or the news spreading business, or the entertainment business or the information business, they would see opportunity not problems.

The appropriate action is not to try to defend, because the forces are too big and inevitably the garrison will be overrun – the choice is to understand exactly what value you are bringing to customers and focus on that.

To borrow a thought from Seth Godin the art is not in the artifact, music is not vinyl or plastic so too is journalism and news not paper. The demise of newspapers will not bring an end to journalist – with more people reading I suspect the opposite.

NO we are not looking at the end of news, we are looking at less control in the news, cheaper news, more and wider analysis of the news, more people getting the news – we are looking at the golden era of news, of journalism, of writing and of publishing.

. . . and of forests.

Photo Credit Greything