“They should just put them all in a field and let them duke it out” was often an English man’s solution to the political problems in Northern Ireland in the ‘90s. “Just kick the Brits out” would have been the rhetoric from a New Yorker when sharing a drink in a Manhattan bar.

The problem was much more complex.  To understand Northern Ireland, you just had to live here and as a native, you knew that the outsiders just didn’t understand the culture and complexity of the solution needed.

There is a sculpture  in Northern Ireland’s second city, Derry.  It is called ‘Hands Across The Divide’ and it illustrates the change in Northern Ireland’s culture.  It symbolises how politics has moved from a shouting monologue to an engaging dialogue.  The sculpture shows the need to reach out and understand the differences in culture.

Deploying an online marketing strategy for an organisation is a lot like ‘The Divide’.  There is a temptation to use monologue techniques and try and advertise your thoughts, opinions and prices. This technique fails as it did in the old politics in Northern Ireland.   There is a temptation to think your message is all that counts and that everyone should listen.  There is a temptation to use traditional marketing speak and convince others that your products or services are worth their attention.  This is not the culture of new marketing.

New marketing, like the statue depicts is about understanding, listening and engaging.  It is about talking to your followers in their language and convincing them that you are worth engaging with, by respecting the culture of online marketing and showing some understanding. This cultural understanding can’t be taught.  To  truly understand the online conversation you need to get immersed in it and live it!

Hands Across the Divide in Derry.

No love needed

A cactus requires little love, occasional attention and not much work for the prickly companion to grow.  The fact that the cactus grows at all with such little resource and maintenance is a wonder and because we don’t invest that much time in nurturing it, we don’t expect the cactus to bring us joy and wonderment.

A puppy requires tons of attention.  We can’t give it a bowl of water once a week and hope that it survives.  It needs more than just sustenance.  The little dog needs care, lots of your time and love.  In return, when the puppy grows, we are rewarded with face licking affection, loyalty and obedience.

time invested rewarded with loyalty.

Online marketing can be split into either cactus or puppy activities.  SEO, PPC, online display ads and website design require little attention once established and will allow your business to grow slowly.

Blogging, email marketing, online PR, social media and web content are all puppy activities, requiring lots of attention.  Once you start a puppy activity, you need to commit time, emotion and passion to ensure the activities’ survival.  It takes time for your puppy to grow but given time and the right nurturing, your puppy activities will repay you with more loyalty and love than any cactus could bring.

Coke v Pepsi and the sip test problem

In 1972 Coke had 18% of the soft drinks market while Pepsi had a mere 4%.  By the early 80s, Cokes’ share of the market had fallen to 12% while Pepsi had grown to 11%, despite Coke spending more than $100m per year on advertising and having superior vending machine and retail reach.

Around the same time, Pepsi started promoting the Pepsi Challenge.  Consumers were asked to take a sip of Coke and Pepsi in glasses marked Q and M and choose their favourite.  57% picked Pepsi and 43% picked Coke.  Coke disputed the findings at first but eventually ran its own tests and found the feedback to be accurate.  Pepsi won in an A/B sip test.

Coke set about improving their formula to fight back against the slide of market share to Pepsi.   They worked restlessly to get a modified flavour and in September 1984, Coke ran sip tests with hundreds of thousands of Americans and came out between 6% and 8% ahead of Pepsi.  New Coke was born.

On the day of its launch Cokes’ CEO Roberto Goizueta announced, “This is the surest move the company has ever made” and there was little reason to doubt what he said.  The research was in, the stats showed New Coke would win the taste fight.

Within months of the launch, New Coke failed.  Coke drinkers rose up and Coke were forced to bring back Classic Coke. But oddly enough Pepsi never managed to capitalise on the rebellion of Coke drinkers and to this day still lags behind Coke in terms of popularity.

So how did Coke get it so wrong?  They had all of the statistics that any manager would need to make an informed decision.  The problem came about because Coke took the wrong data.  In a sip test, you only take a mouth full of Coke and a mouth full of Pepsi.  Pepsi is sweeter and when taking a sip will win the preference of most tasters. But we don’t just sip a Coke or Pepsi, we drink a can, bottle or glass of the stuff.  So when the new, sweeter flavour came into being, it was rejected, as the overall experience wasn’t as pleasurable as the original Coke.

The same thing happens when we review our online marketing stats.  Page impressions, unique viewers and open rates blind us. Finding followers and even goal pages seem to be a sensible measure of our success.  I argue however, that this is just another sip test.  It gives us a sense of how we are performing but it doesn’t give us the whole picture.

So what should we measure?  When creating an online marketing review I believe that the new metrics and the measurement of success or failure should be based upon the quality (not quantity) of your audience, their level of engagement, their loyalty, your influence over the audience and whether or not they are spreading your good word.

By combining your metrics to give a holistic overview of your audience and your influence then you are drinking the full can of Coke.  Looking at click-to-sell ratios is just sip tasting.

“We use Twitter, Blogging, Facebook and Email Marketing”, said Andrew the Managing Director of an online travel firm. But under scrutiny Andrew didn’t know what to expect from using these tools. He just knew he wanted more orders. His strategy for getting more orders was to shout loudly until someone listened.

On closer inspection the Twitter account was following 1986 people and had 33 followers. Out of the 33 followers, 7 were spam, the rest contra-following from organisations that were sympathetic to the travel company but never likely to purchase anything from them. The travel company insisted on tweeting a new offer every day. They treated their Twitter channel as an advertising channel.

The Facebook fan page has employees and family as readers and again contained a sequence of ads for holidays and short breaks. The email list had nearly 100,000 email addresses but rarely achieved open rates in excess of 3% with purchases often equating to zero.

Andrew wanted to grow his Twitter following, Facebook fan base and rent new email marketing lists believing that his sales funnel would grow. Needless to say that this growth tactic would just annoy more people and not increase orders. The problem wasn’t the size of his audience; it was how Andrew’s company engaged with them.

Having a hammer doesn’t make you a carpenter nor does having a paintbrush make you an artist. The problem in Andrew’s case is not the tool set he uses nor is it the force he is applying. The problem stems from a lack of understanding the art and craft of how to use the tools. From experience I find that most organisations start with the tools before they ever ask the question if anyone is skilled enough to use them. Sometimes the tools fall into naturally skilled individuals’ hands, most times they don’t.

Give me tools...more tools!

Phil Lynott - A good pose in it's day I'm sure

When Thin Lizzy released their magical album Jailbreak in 1976, the title track of the same name contained amusing lyrics;  “Tonight there’s going to be a jailbreak somewhere in this town”.  The precise location of the jailbreak is obvious – the Prison.  We forgive the band because of their creative license and ability to move us in other ways.

Gucci for years have shouted at us installing the virtues of their brand with a relentless onslaught of glossy ads containing gorgeous people.  They have created design masterpieces but have had their share of catwalk boo-boos. We have let them away with their errors due to creative license and their ability to move us in other ways.

Gucci’s recent attempts at using online social marketing site Twitter however are criminal. The error goes beyond creative license and the marketing team should be jailed for their efforts, or lack of.  They have adopted their above-the-line marketing strategy and used it on the web, giving us a spectacularly good example of how not to engage with customers using social media.

In Gucci’s twitter feed they have tweeted 16 times.  11 have been ads for their site and four times requesting that advocates help them move from having 3800 followers on Twitter to 100,000 followers! – Why on earth would I help? Are we supposed to feel sympathy? You haven’t earned my trust or respect yet.  You haven’t given me a reason to help you!

A clear case of “Searchlight on my trail, Tonight’s the night all systems fail” – Thin Lizzy, Jailbreak.

(twitter @GuccibyGucci)

Gucci twitter feed

Guest Blogger: Gareth Dunlop, MD of Tibus

Imagine you are a small business owner with 10 to 50 employees.  Your business has been growing well for nearly ten years now and is really starting to perform for you.  You were just planning a new phase of growth in the early part of 2008 when deep recession hit.  Your margins are squeezed, your people are stressed, and not only are there no bonuses this year, there are no pay-rises for any of your staff.  You are concerned that you will need to lay people off.

You check the local business press for inspiration and guidance.

What do you read?

“Keep your foot on the advertising pedal”
“Marketing through a recession”
“Investing in building your brand”

The titles have been altered to ensure that this doesn’t become personal, but the message in each is the same – that businesses should maintain or increase their marketing spend in a recession.

Really?

So given the choice of laying someone off, or reducing marketing, you should lay someone off?
Or given the choice of a direct foreign territories sales visit to close a hot lead, or continuing to market, you should market?
Or given the choice of finalising a product innovation, or continuing marketing investment, you should continue marketing?

The communications industry needs to wise up and grow up.  I have yet to read a single article by an author making these recommendations who has put a penny of their own money into implementing these recommendations for their own business.

Clearly there are many businesses who should definitely reduce communications spend.  And more importantly, there are yet more businesses who radically need to alter how their communications budget is spent, by realising that the day of the interruption marketer is gone forever, and has been replaced by the age of the permission based marketer.

And that permission based marketing happens online, in a measurable and accountable manner.

Fiona, the Marketing Manager of a major hotel group often phones the IT department to complain when her mouse is faulty, her PC is running slow or the printer runs out of toner.  At the same time the IT department are bedding down extremely complex routing traffic shaping protocols to ensure that voice data gets higher priority over email across their wide area network and that the company infrastructure is free from Trojans, a threat that could collapse the entire group infrastructure within moments.

Fiona has no idea of the level of complexity and commitment the IT team has to put into keeping the business running.  She never calls to congratulate them on keeping the key company infrastructure running for 365 days without fail.  The IT team is as important to a business as oil is to an engine.

Stuart works in the IT department.  Often distracted by being called away from his complex world to perform tasks for the Marketing department.  He views their efforts as little more than spending big budgets on pretty pictures. “Anyone could do that job!” claims Stuart.

Stuart doesn’t see the effort that goes into creating the stories around the pictures, the long hours spent on exhibition stands, the detailed review of website content and customer journey planning needed to turn a prospect into a customer.  Marketing is the water needed to make the business live, grow and prosper.

Internet Marketing requires both oil and water.  It’s an odd combination, as they don’t readily mix. Often we make the mistake of outsourcing Online Marketing decisions to IT experts and frequently make the mistake of having traditional Marketing experts telling us what is technically achievable.  To create a successful online marketing strategy, add three-quarters water to one-quarter oil.

YES: If you can passionately articulate something that both you and your customers care about.  If your passion is about politics, sailing boats or saving small puppies and it corresponds with your line of business, then blogging and engaging with those like minded will enhance the likelihood of you being talked about, your influence becoming policy or donations coming in to help save more puppies.

NO: If the only thing you can blog about is what you had for breakfast or the new wallpaper in your office.  Because you want to talk doesn’t mean others want to listen.  In my experience blogging is often added to an online marketing strategy for the wrong reasons, such as to try and enhance search engine position or to fulfill the desires of the CEO.  Unless the blog integrates with the other elements of your digital marketing strategy, feeds your email marketing, your tweets and enhances the readers understanding of your topic of expertise, then it is likely  your blog will have no following.