Archive for the 'Digital marketing' Category
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BR (Blog Relation), a new way of marketing communication
“To succeed in luxury car market, you should get rid of negative and cheap brand image before you launch your new sport car ‘KOUP’ next year.”
This was one of comments on Kia’s international business blog, Kia-Buzz (www.kia-buzz.com). Since it was opened in September 2007, bloggers from more than 155 countries have visited the blog and left comments on Kia’s new vehicles, motor shows, design issues and marketing strategies. The company staff listened carefully what people say and sometimes they ask questions to them. There have been lots of controversial topics and debates since they started the blog.
To manage its blog effectively, Kia carefully selected 11 blog writers within the company, from different departments and regions. Some of them are graduate trainees and some others are manager levels, and the company thought having writers with different backgrounds and age groups can help understanding customers with various occasions.
The blog has become one of the most cost-effective Internet marketing tools, due to companies’ growing need to interact with potential and existing customers. One of the earliest and the most influential company blogs was Fastlane (http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/), a company blog in General Motors (GM), managed by Bob Lutz, the vice president of the company. It was created in January 2005 to listen customers’ complains about one of GM’s car brands, Pontiac. When Fastlane was launched, many consumers were amazed because Bob Lutz and professional staff wrote posts, listened what they said, answered questions and reflected their opinions on real products!
Until a few years ago, having a home page was everything in Internet marketing, to deliver a company’s message to consumers and give them a nice company image. The growth of Internet has been encouraging consumers to be actively involved in companies’ marketing and production activities. They are not just sitting and waiting for the products and services anymore, but also they try to give their opinions on productions and companies’ activities directly.
These active customers, also called pro-sumers, demand high level of access and interaction in the company’s decision-making process, and blog was the best place for them to communicate directly to companies. This new trend on web is called ‘BR (Brand Relations)’ that covers the area that Public Relations could not reach-approaching each customer’s mind directly. According to this trend, a blog is one of the quickest, easiest, and most cost-effective ways to listen directly what customers want.
However, is it really useful? Should every company start a blog?
A blog is a completely open space, so if someone starts to talk about a specific topic, others can freely react with their comments. It is a place that totally relying on public opinion, so it is hard to predict what kind of reactions that public will make on a post. This means, sometimes it is much more difficult to manage a blog than a website’s contents management. Debates are often happened on company blogs between consumers, but also between a company and consumers, and how the company reacts can contribute or damage its brand image, because even though a blog is just a blog, people who write comments and join debates can be serious and they have a power to spread the story and comments.
Therefore a blog should be considered as a seed of conversation that can create either positive or negative buzz and it is treated as a part of Marketing and Branding tool. Then these points might need to be discussed fundamentally before launching a blog:
- Who is going to visit the blog? and who should be the writer of the company blog?
- How they should react when there is a negative comment?
- How a company should reflect and monitor people’s raw opinions on their strategies?
- What kind of topics need to be selected and discussed?
Yes, it may be just a blog that anyone write anything, but depending on how to manage it properly, it can be a key tool of integrated marketing communication, a really effective new media tool that helps developing communication plan in traditional media channels, or a good contribution in developing brand equity by focusing on consumer involvement and preference enhancement.
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Creative Commons License (CCL) in South Korea- a new way of respecting content owner’s rights
On 26 February, Naver (www.naver.com), the largest Internet search engine and a portal service provider in South Korea (5th in the world), announced that it officially introduce Creative Commons License(CCL) to its blogs and café services (web community service) and began a grand campaign for promoting CCL with cartoons, videos and so on. As for the largest portal service provider in user size at home, Naver has been struggling with copyright infringements, content and blog posting piracy activities of users. With this announcement, Naver becomes the third next to Daum (www.daum.net), which has already adopted CCL to its blog and café (community) services in 2005, and Paran (www.paran.com) in 2007. In addition, the largest social networking service provider, Cyworld (www.cyworld.com) also decided to adopt CCL as its official license and copywrite protecting method, starting in May 2008 (creativecommons.or.kr).
![[Naver’s CCL page including CCL introduction cartoon, movie, FAQ]](http://www.jayyoon.com/attach/1/1214319862.jpg)
[Naver’s CCL page including CCL introduction cartoon, movie, FAQ]
What is CCL?
Creative Commons is a Massachusetts-chartered 501(c) (3) tax-exempt charitable corporation. Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved. Their licenses help content owners keep their copyright while inviting certain uses of their work — a “some rights reserved” copyright (creativecommons.org).Using a Creative Commons License (CCL) means offering some of individual’s right to any member of the public but only on certain conditions.
[conditions that a content uploader need to select before post a content, source: creativecommons.org, 2008]Conditions are symbolised and easily attachable to contents. There are four conditions when a content creator can use on a post:
Attribution. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request.
Non-commercial. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for noncommercial purposes only
No Derivative Works. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.
Share Alike. You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.
‘Free Cultural approved for works’ seal. Creative Commons recently added the seal to Creative Commons Licenses that qualify as Free Culture Licenses according to the definition of Free Cultural Works — Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike. According to Wikipedia, Free Cultural Work is defined as works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and/or modified, by anyone, for any purpose. It also describes certain permissible restrictions that respect or protect these essential freedoms, but it distinguishes between free works, and free licenses which can be used to legally protect the status of a free work. The definition itself is not a license; it is a tool to determine whether a work or license should be considered “free.” When CCL is added on content, it means the owner of the content will get the appropriate license expressed in three ways such as: a. Commons Deed. A simple, plain-language summary of the license, complete
with the relevant icons.
For example,
means it allows others to download the content owner’s works and share them with others as long as they mention the content owner and link back to the original content page, but they cannot change the content in any way or use them commercially. shows the content is downloadable and redistributes the original content, and they also translate, make remixes and produce new stories based on the original work. However the content needs to be non-commercial in nature. means the content is allowed for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to the content owner.b. Legal Code. The fine print that you need to be sure the license will stand up in court (an example of the legal code is available to view at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/legalcode).c. Digital Code. A machine-readable translation of the license that helps search engines and other applications identify your work by its terms of use. (creativecommons.org)
How it works
Examples below show how CCL works in a South Korean community portal site Daum.
When someone writes a post, CCL information will be shown at the bottom of the content uploading tool, and the content uploader can select CCL conditions. When the post is uploaded, CCL is displayed at the right-bottom of the post, showing what the condition of this content is.
[The content upload is completed and CCL is displayed within the content]
It has been three years since the introduction of Creative Commons License in Korea. So far, Korea has emerged as the third or the fourth of CCL user country in the world except USA. Additionally, Naver’s CCL policies were expected more to invigorate CCL in the near future. On the other hand, Naver’s announcement about CCL has triggered enormous concerns in Korean blogosphere. Some of them were worried about possible side effects of unintended commercialisation of CCL, which could lead to emphasising the role of CCL as stirring up people’s sense of copyright orderliness rather than real Open Culture. But most bloggers were for it in view of CCL promotion in Korea and expected its impact on spreading CCL in Korea (creativecommons.or.kr).The United Kingdom and CCL
CCL has not been widely adopted or well-known among the UK Internet users yet. However the UK: England and Wales license has now been integrated into the Creative Commons Licensing process, so it is able to license one’s works under the jurisdiction’s law. Scotland has its one way of integrating Creative Commons License but it is provided by Creative Commons’ UK also under the Scotland’s jurisdiction’s law (www.creativecommons.org.uk).
Reference: www.creativecommons.org, www.naver.com, www.daum.net
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What’s your Google Sucks Index?
I just read an interesting article in Business week by Jeff Jarvis (the Dell hell blogger). You should read it, especially if you’re concerned about your brand and what people are saying about you online. Yes online (as I really have to point this out).
With the rise of the ’social web’ there are endless places where people are discussing anything and everything online, including your brand. These conversations can be both good and bad, hence responding, leveraging and monitoring (or whatever else you should do) are now a priority. In fact, this probably explains why we always have a waiting list for our digital marketing seminar (just helping our marketing team - this one is for you Fiona
So what are people saying about you online? Or to be blunt - how much does your brand suck? Obviously our digital marketing team are the best people to answer this question (sorry, yes, I will stop this self promotion now.
Adam winks at Dean and they high five each other). However if you’re on a shoestring budget, you can still measure some aspects of this by following Jeff’s simple advice in Business Week. The magazine should be at your local newsagent. (OK, it is official I’m now worse than a used car salesman - I’m even promoting Business week!).Anyway, if you really are on a shoestring budget (
you are screwed) or for any other reason can’t get a hold of the magazine. Here’s the advice in a nutshell:- go to Google
- enter your company’s brand followed by the word ’suck’
- the number of results is your Google Sucks Index (GSI)
- compare your index with your competitors’ (and laugh out loud)
The moment of truth - Do you suck?
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Problems with Google Analytics Stats?
I recently heard from Dean that some clients noticed that their statistics were lower using Google Analytics vs. their normal server-based analytics such as Webtrends and Nettracker. I asked several people who might be able to answer the reason but I could just hear “please let me know if you find the answer” or “that was what I was wondering about”….. Anyway, I found the answer and thought it might be useful for everyone especially for consultants. In fact, the answer was easily found on the Google website- Google Analytics Help Centre!
And today is the New Year’s Day in many Asian countries including China, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and many more. Wish you the happy new year of the rat, especially to someone who was born in the years of the rat, 1996, 1984, 1972, 1960….(I won’t say who they are..=p)
Ok, here is the answer;
Why does Google Analytics report values that are different from some other web analytics solutions? Different web analytics products may use a variety of methods to track visits to your website. Therefore, it is normal to see discrepancies between reports created by various products. However, we generally believe that the best way to think of metrics across different web analytics programmes is to think in terms of trends, as opposed to numbers by themselves. One example is to compare related metrics, such as page views (e.g. 15% of traffic went to page x). In addition, the comparison of data over time could be valuable; information such as “conversions increased by 20% over the past 3 months,” or “our site gained 10% more page views in the month of March.” In most cases, you will notice that different analytics solutions, though different in numbers, will generally depict the same trends.While we are not able to provide side-by-side comparisons of Google Analytics with other web tracking solutions, the following list points out some of the main reasons why your actual numbers may differ:
- Terminology: The terminology used in one programme may not mean the same thing or may not be measured in the same way as in another programme. Page views are generally similar between vendors; however, it is much more difficult to define a visit or a visitor. In Analytics, if a user comes to your site twice within thirty minutes without closing his/her browser, it will be registered as one visit. Other web analytics solutions may treat this behaviour as two visits, depending on their definitions.
- Tracking methods: There are two main methods of tracking activity: cookie-based and IP + User Agent.
- Cookie-based tracking relies on a browser setting the cookie. If cookies are disabled, cookie-based analytics programmes (such as Google Analytics) will not count the visit. This would exclude, for example, hits from a robot or spider.
- IP + User Agent tracking typically uses log file analysis for its data. This may report higher numbers than reported by cookie-based tracking because of dynamically assigned IP addresses and spider and robot visits.
- First-party vs. third-party cookies: Even among cookie-based tracking solutions, there is a difference between first-party and third-party cookies. Because third-party cookies are set by a source other than the website being visited, they are often blocked by browsers and security software. Google Analytics uses first-party cookies.
- Third-party images: Some browsers give users the option to disable images that are requested from domains other than the current page. Disabling such images will prevent data from being sent to Google Analytics.
- Filters/settings: Many web analytics solutions provide dat_ filters. Differences in the way that filters are applied, or creating different filtering altogether, can drastically affect the data in your reports
- Time zone differences: If your Web analytics solutions group data using different time zones, your daily or hourly data will be affected.
- Visitor browser preferences: Visitors must have JavaScript, images and cookies enabled in their browsers in order for Analytics to report their visit. Depending on their method of collecting data, other analytics solutions may still register these visitors.
- Caching: Google Analytics directly calls Google’s servers each time that a page is visited, even if the page has been cached. Other analytics solutions may not record an additional visit if the page is pulled from a user’s or server’s cache.
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Facebook’s new Ad program
Facebook, the second most popular site in the UK has been struggling to generate a proper revenue stream from its popular social networking site. Their answer - a social ad program. Are they modest about it? Not really…
“The next hundred years will be different for advertising, and it starts today. As marketers pushing our information out is no longer enough. We are announcing a new advertising system, not about broadcasting messages, about getting into the conversations between people. Three pieces: build pages for advertisers, a new kind of ad system to spread the messages virally, and gain insights.”
In essence, this program consists of three services:
1. social ads - ads targeted based on member profile data and spread virally
2. beacon - a way for facebook members to declare themselves fans of a brand on other sites and send those endorsements to their feeds
3. insight - an interface to gather insights into people’s activity on Facebook.
Social Ads is particularly interesting as it combines social actions from the user’s friends such as a purchase of a product or a review of a restaurant with an advertiser’s message. These ‘ads’ will either appear within the user’s news feed as sponsored content or as a banner on the page, kind of like Google mail’s (gmail) contextual advertising.
This Ad program may look like an attractive model to online advertisers, but it can also backfire. Or as Eric Schonfield of TechCrunch points out:
“If I start to think that my friends are advertising to me, I may no longer trust them (and, in fact, try to avoid them . .. by not logging into Facebook anymore). So the the trick is to make these appear to be genuine recommendations, and not ads. I am not sure how many people will be fooled by this, though. It risks turning something useful—the feed of my friends’ activities—into something spammy.”
Or as Seth Godin points out:
“When someone goes to Facebook, they’re not looking for stuff. They’re looking for people. But people don’t buy ads, stuff does. That’s a problem. Any platform that makes ads a distraction or a cost is always going to fail compared to a site where the ads are a welcome part of the deal.”
And this is the interesting bit. How are facebook’s users going to respond. will they embrace this advertising model or reject it? Only time can tell…
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Link Checking - Keeping it all together
The problems with an ever changing web site is that it allows errors to be introduced which can affect the user experience - the most common of which are broken links which may either mean that images don’t display or worst still that a page doesn’t display at all. Using a content management system helps significantly in this respect as this would typically look after all your internal links, but there is always the possiblity that some manually managed links e.g. to other websites can become broken and effectively give end users a negative impression of your site.
I use a wonderful little tool called Xenu Link Sleuth for checking links on sites - both as a quality check prior to deployment and as an occasional health check. You just tell it what the URL of your site is and off it goes and quickly (and I mean quickly) checks all the links on all the pages for dud links. You can then either view the results and filter them in tabular format, or create a report which will tell you which links are broken and importantly, which page has the link to that resource.
Visit the Xenu LinkSleuth page and download
Automated link checking is a great way of ensuring that your links are up to date. It is not a pure substitute for human checking though e.g. if you have a link on your site that says contact us but goes to your investor relations section, then it is unlikely that an automated link checker will flag this up as an issue. Beware also lapsed domain names when linking to external sites - if web site owners don’t keep up their domain name (this happens quite often with small sites) then they will typically lose control and the site either reverts to the domain registration company or be snapped up by a domain holding company. Under such circumstances an automated link checker probably wouldn’t notice the change as a page will still be served - only a manual check will be able to do this.
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Preparing PDF Documents for search
When deploying search technologies to client websites, I frequently get feedback from clients who aren’t entirely happy with the way their search results are returned or thier ranking. Nine times out of ten, this is due entirely to inappropriate document properties - in particular, the internal title of the document. Search technologies e.g. Google, Microsoft Index Server and Verity, usually give highest ranking to search terms found in the title of the document. They also typically use the value of this title when displaying search results. This is easy enough to set in HTML documents but what about Word an PDF documents?
This is a typical instance of the kind of problem I see all the time - the title actually shows the original filename of the Quark document which was used to create the PDF document and as you can see these are rarely indicative of what content will be found and these obscure titles would have not helped in establishing the relevance of these documents.
The problem however is that Acrobat does not allow us to set a new title here (Acrobat is essentially a file viewing tool not a file editing tool) and to do this you would typically use a PDF editing tool. As we are only interested in editing the title in this instance, there are fortunately a number of free utilities available in the public domain which will allow us to do this e.g. Bureausoft produce an utility called PDF Info which you can download to help in this task.
Treating your PDF documents in this way will make it easy for people to find the most relevant documents on your site from both your internal search engine and external search engines
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A blend of marketing activity
The festive period offered the chance to catch-up on a little not-for-work web stuff which for me started on Youtube. My intention was to investigate how to upload a video of the kids to the site and then embed the code for the page into our personal blog so that grandparents and the like could receive a more personal, and visual, happy new year message. However, with time on my hands I found myself quickly distracted by some of the bizarre offerings on the Youtube home page, one of which struck me as vaguely compelling.
The link was titled “Will it blend? - ipod”, and just a click later I found myself watching the introductory sequence of a presentation by Tom Dickson, a man in a white lab coat and safety goggles, who asks the question - “Will it blend?”.
Tom produces his old ipod, and while explaining that he had upgraded to a Nano, and with the warning “not to try this at home” displayed at the bottom of the screen, Tom rather casually chucked his ipod into the blender, closed the lid and hit the switch. Within what seemed like seconds Tom stopped the blender and emptied what looked like a collection of old metal dental fillings onto his workbench. Up until this point, and perhaps because I was on holiday, I had assumed this to be some kind of spoof, or a derivation of the old Joe Cartoon animation “Frog in a blender” (NOT FOR THE FAINT HEARTED).
It struck me that this would be a great way to market a blender, particularly since it combined two of the most pervasively popular forms of entertainment - music and home video, and their most commonly accessed means of delivery - the ipod and Youtube, with something as boring as a blender, and it made it fun. I started to think of what else you could do to build on this theme. How naive I was - Tom had it covered. Further investigation, since I was now in work-mode, revealed the following marketing mix.
Not only had Tom blended an ipod, he had also blended a golf club, light bulbs, oysters, a can of soup and any number of miscellaneous items and all his ‘work’ can be seen at his site http://www.willitblend.com/. At this site visitors can also purchase ‘Will it Blend?’ merchandise - t-shirts and caps. They can see examples of blending activity that you can try at home, visit the site of the company that Tom works for - Blendtec - and visit its site dedicated to industrial blenders. Furthermore, and adding into the contemporary mix of marketing, the inquisitive can also check out the “Will it Blog” section where (and this completed the circle for me) they can contribute to the debate regarding the final price of the blended ipod on Ebay where it was auctioned before Christmas. Now that is a well blended marketing mix.
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Elf yourself
Simon Trist just emailed me a great viral campaign called “Elfyourself“, which features David, our Design Director as the leading star. The idea is to paste your picture on the body of the elf and the elf will then dance around in a funny way (in a really funny way).
It’s a brilliant viral, because it actually gives the recipient something of value (a good laugh) and as we know - if the recipient enjoys the content of the email they will (probably) pass it on to their friends or colleagues (89 percent of US adult users share content with friends by email).
The psychology behind virals is, according to Andy Chen, a combination of belonging and sharing. The sharing process strengthens bonds and relationships, and virals becomes an excuse to engage with friends, family and colleagues to strengthen those bonds.
I enjoyed “Elfyourself” a lot, and I created my own version and passed it on to a couple of friends. Perhaps I unconsciously did it to strengthen my relationships, hope it worked!
Not all viral campaigns work. Elfyourself works, because it’s funny (humour is the most shared content via email), the branding is subtle - instead of smothering the recipient with an obvious commercial message it allows the recipient to engage with the brand which consequently gives the recipient an opportunity to become a media creator instead of a media consumer.
A viral doesn’t need to be like “elfyourself” to be successful -its more complicated than that. Advertising Age has a list of “The 10 viral videos you should have seen“. “Elfyourself” is not included but there are other campaigns from 2006 that could be worth looking at.
Happy holidays everyone!
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Spam can be art
I hate opening my inbox, only to find out that someone called seexxx@bestdeal.com and 123_youwin@pills.com wants to sell or give me something. Who are these people, and why do they think I need this stuff? – I don’t.
So who are they? The spam in your inbox is most likely from one of the 200 small hardcore groups of professional spam gangs that stand for 80 percent of all generated spam. And these guys are probably really rich, since spam cost U.S organisations more than $10 billion per year, and because of the fact that 11 percent of US Internet users actually buy stuff from spam
The Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) keeps track on the top spammers and you can read and see their images on the ROKSO’s website. These people are doing a great job!
I think it’s the fact that you can’t really get back at these guys that makes the whole thing so annoying. Although it is quite satisfying to see their mugshots (I truly hope people recognise them on the street).
If that’s not enough and you’re still feeling depressed over your inbox, then visit spamrecycling.com. It is a data visualisation engine (built with AJAX technology) that creates beautiful pictures from your messed up inbox. You can email your spam to spam@recycling.com and they’ll email you a link which allows you to watch as your spam mail is being recycled. This is definitely a therapeutic process and you’ll also get a beautiful artwork to impress your co-workers with.
Interesting stuff on spam, (also to impress your co-workers).
The term spam is derived from the Monty Python SPAM sketch, set in a cafe where nearly every item on the menu includes spam luncheon meat. The excessive amount of SPAM mentioned in the sketch is a reference to British rationing during World War II. SPAM was one of the few foods that was widely available.
Spammers can spell, but they misspell intentionally to avoid commonly-filtered words e.g. Viagra becomes V1agra
2006 - (June) 55 billion spam per day
The most common items advertised in spam messages are: Pornography site subscriptions, prescription drugs, purported sexual enhancement products and printer ink cartridges
