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.

The Merchant

I have the great privilege to work with one of the worlds leading boutique hotels; The Merchant Hotel in Belfast.  When creating their new online marketing strategy we discussed the power of using stories to help in stimulating interest and how a story spreads much better than a low room rate or an interesting menu.

When the highly ornate and modernised Victorian building opened, it could have been marketed for its high impact visual features and quirky historic artifices but that wasn’t how the marketing/conversations started.  It started around it serving the worlds most expensive cocktail.

This is marketing genius at work.  The story of opulence or history is harder to pass on and not quite as interesting.  The worlds most expensive cocktail however lets us know exactly what sort of hotel you’re talking about and of course, we’re likely to tell someone else about it.

When doing any form of consulting, the first question I ask is “What’s your online marketing strategy?”   Other than the odd email campaign and perhaps some Pay Per Click advertising there is typically no plan.

Having a written plan is essential to measure success, if objectives for your website are being met and if you are getting a good return on investment.  The choices for your marketing time and budget are enormous, with options ranging from viral marketing, social media, online display or affiliate advertising to targeted permission email marketing.  The secret is not which tool you choose but which objectives the tool helps to fulfil.

By creating a 5-page web strategy and sharing it among your team, it is my experience that you are substantially more likely to get the results you need.  The 5 pages could look like this:

1. Marketing Objectives (Build brand, increase opt-in consent, create sales, get people to attend events etc)
2. Publishing Schedule illustrating actions such as publishing dates, responsibilities and deadlines.
3. Engagement Policy – when a customer engages, who answers?  What are they allowed to say?  What types of comments require authorisation for a response?  What types of engagement do you ignore?
4. Results Matrix is used to measure your efforts net affect.  For example, how many doors you opened, the number of new opt-in email addresses you received or the amount of people signing up for your event.
5. Review Outcomes page is reserved to record the thoughts and changes in direction of the campaign as greater insight and experience is gained over time.   Comparing the actual outcomes with the published objectives often leads to a shift in objective and greater opportunities emerge.  There is no harm in this as long as the objectives are not being changed to match the results matrix.

The greatest advantage of an online marketing strategy compared with offline activity is that your plan can change much more quickly as your experiences change.  This is because you haven’t had to commit to heavy production costs.  So review your activities in accordance with your plan regularly and don’t be afraid to change it for the better.

In a movie called Field of Dreams an Iowa corn farmer, hearing voices, interprets them as a command to build a baseball diamond in his fields; he does, and the Chicago Black Sox came. 

Kevin Costner was lucky in the movie.  He didn’t do any marketing and yet the objective of filling a stadium full of people worked.   The unfortunate thing about a website is that unlike the Farmer’s baseball diamond, it is lost in obscurity and unable to fulfil its objective unless you market the fact that it exists.  

How we find websites is rarely due to off-line marketing efforts.  It is usually arrived at by way of links we find while researching, search results, forwarded recommendations and social media or as a call-to-action in our online marketing.

So when creating a website be aware “build it and they will come” – to quote the movie, only works for people with voices in their head. You need to build an online community.  That takes strategy.  Get the strategy right however and Chicago Black Sox will appear.

The way it was:
During boom times, marketing was often delivered with the emphasis on letting the world know we are GREAT!  Noisy ads were placed for all to see and little thought was given to how the customer could engage with the campaign. Back of bus campaigns promoting websites failed, billboard advertising promoting online failed and text message advertising on subways failed, for obvious reasons.

The way it is:
Traditional media and advertising is in massive decline.  The general consensus is that recession is to blame; however, statistics show that marketing budgets are simply moving to more effective channels.  Recession busting companies are taking this on board and moving to the Internet.

As a nation, we are now becoming experts at ignoring other people’s vanity and are tuned in to any attempts to push their brand or products and services under our noses. 

As Google connects the searcher with the sought, it skips out the middleman.  The big question is, where does this leave ad agencies and business’ built on old school advertising and the channels to market they use? The answer is that they need to change.

The way it shall be:
Marketing is becoming more practical.  It is no longer about big brands dominating the skyline and customers believing in their promotions. It is about creating connections and conversations, engaging your audience and creating a buzz using innovation. 

I’m not saying that old advertising methods no longer work, what I’m saying is that the new economy just has a different way of making judgments.  Those that innovate in terms of being different, market in a way that encourages customer engagement and create debate and buzz will lead us into a new era.

When bad weather hits, we are always looking for someone to blame for the impassable roads – the local council doesn’t have enough salt or the central government has acted with inadequate fervour to overcome our frosty difficulties.
The same happens in a downturn when our businesses don’t live up to our expectations.  Is it not time to change our solution to match the market and cease blaming the greater-unchangeable?
 
Should recruitment agencies not move to become business efficiency agencies? Should estate agents not start a local email magazine interviewing 5 interesting people a day and challenging staff to get 20 new opt-in readers per day?  Should small building manufacturers not start blogging on how new school playgrounds could be built, only to be thought leaders when times get better? Perhaps they should or shouldn’t.  One thing is clear, as the market changes, the businesses that move to match change will survive.  Those that shake their fist angrily at government will freeze.
 
Online marketing is the new business efficiency agency, the new estate agent, the new manufacturer.  Those that get with the programme early will survive. Those that fail to understand the power of community and local leadership will struggle.