FRANKthoughts

There’s nothing better than to start the new year with some fresh ideas. The Customer Learning Curve is showing that your target audience is made of different people in different stages of their relationship with your brand. Check it out and let me know what you think:

Back in June we first spoke about Guvera . Well  it’s finally launching in a few weeks…15 December we’re told. The Guvera model is based on engagement in favour of the classic advertising-interruption model. From their eDM “Instead of advertising being perceived as disruptive or annoying, Guvera allows the advertiser to align their brand with their customers passions, allowing the brand to become the hero that provides new ways to find and get music, for free.”

If you think about your own experiences in meeting people you’re more likely to end up talking with someone who is approachable and listens rather than someone who just wants to talk about themselves.

 The Guvera approach allows brands to be able to fast-track engagement via an understanding of consumer preferences across a range of crieteria. Registering with Guvera is like speed dating for brands. To register you’ll be asked about your prefences on holidays, sport, music, gadgets & things, web activities, countries, books, films, food and charities. Just the kind of topics any one might ask in getting to know you.

I’m currently reading Mike Walsh’s excellent book, Futuretainment. In this he says “The challenge/opportunity for brands to benefit from an engagement-approach is to shift their brand strategy focus and to start behaving like media companies. Great brands engage consumers through telling stories. By learning more about the stories that surround a brand we can form our own impressions of their products/services and what they mean to our own lives and experiences. As audiences fragment one of the few ways for brands to achieve mass awareness is for their message to be compelling enough for consumers to do the distribution for you.”

It’ll be interesting to see how brands manage this opportunity with Guvera. In this emerging era of brand engagement it is clear that some brands (just like some people) are socially inept and there are likely to be degrees of sensitivity between the one-night stand approach and building longer term relationships.

As Mike says “the future of entertainment is not advertising- the future of advertising is entertainment.”

This post is not about “social media”. It’s about media that is social. What’s the difference?

“Social Media” (Or earned media) is the collective term used for everything involving twitter/facebook/blog/youtube/flickr etc. It’s usually about listening, engaging and growing a community.

Media that is social is the sort of media that supports an idea by providing a community participatory solution. Here’s an example: Pavegen is the first commercial pavement that creates energy from people’s footsteps. The electricity produced is used to power signs, lights and information kiosks. The pavegens can be branded and will actually work nicely with a promotion leading people (literally) to a specific store.

It seems everyone is a winner: The brand gains publicity for the unique approach and saves on electricity bills. The consumer gets a better “experience” and the environment gets some help.

Here’s another example showing how The city of Denver is using parking meters to help raise money for homeless people in Denver.

It’s simple, Every time you put money in the meter you support food, shelter and care for the homeless people in your area. How many people will avoid paying for the meters now? How many people will feel better paying for their parking space? How good will the council look? Here’s from the Mayor: “This grassroots campaign is projected to raise roughly $100,000 per year giving the general public a constructive way to help Denver’s homeless. “The donation meter demonstrates yet another innovative way in which this community is responding to Denver’s Road Home and our commitment to ending homelessness” – Mayor Hickenlooper.

The real social media isn’t about twitter or youtube. It’s about people doing something together, a bigger idea and making things better.

Would love to hear about more examples of real social media. Got some?

We asked “In the face of dynamic pull-social media platforms is there a long term future for data bases and pushing information via data bases?”

I’ve been wrestling with this issue for the last few weeks and i’m not sure i’ve resolved my head. The shift in emphasis for me is feeding value-information to an opt-in data base versus having a dialogue. The theory of opt-in data bases is fine but rarely do they deliver on the promise. I don’t know what the norm and i accept that opening rates will vary but an opening rate of 10% or less for most eDM’s might not be far off….even a bit generous. By comparison a healthy dialogue with a brand takes us to a multi-segmented, bespoke relationship.

My view, and i’d love someone to challenge me, is that databases will be dead in 3-5 years as social media chatter eclipses their relevance. Here’s some other opinions.

Tim Pethick, entrepreneur at large, brand guru and founder of Nudie, said

“I don’t believe so. We all find our way onto databases at specific moments of time in relation to a particularly relevant context in that moment of time. Change the context and the time frame and a push to the database just becomes more spam. Consumers want to be in charge and that will mitigate in favour of ‘pull’ based solutions.”

Ben Freund, CEO of goswitch, said

“I believe that data base marketing will always have a place as it gives consumers a chance to register for offers that of interest, and it gives marketers the ability to target their offers for specific market segments.”

Josephine Evans, Marketing Director of Tireworld, said

“When considering our specific industry, we do believe there is a long term future for databases and pushing information via databases.  For most part, the products and services we provide are a need and not a want and as such, databases enable us to cost effectively communicate with our customers with timely and unobtrusive messages.   The ongoing challenge for us is to better educate our employees on the importance of capturing the “right” data so that what we communicate is always meaningful and relevant to our customers.”

Adam Garone, co-founder of Movember, said

“It’s depends how the data base is sourced. If you are purchasing a database from a third party and sending them an e-mail or direct mail then, in my view there has never been any value or long term future in that.  If however your data base has been sourced through building your own community, then there is absolutely a future in continuing to provide valuable and timely information to the data base. The key being valuable and timely information.”

 ”The dynamic pull of social media has added a new dimension to how brands can communicate which presents a huge opportunity.  In this environment the tone of the communication needs to change as you are participating in a two way conversation.  That demands that you are transparent, real, don’t attempt to control the conversation and provide value to the conversation and the community.”

So opinion is fairly evenly split…i still think that databases will die a slow death. Thoughts anyone?

As part of FRANkVizeum’s social strategy for Melbourne’s GPO we’ve just launched our second promotion with the help of our friends from nuffnang and off course GPO’s lovely community manager Sarah Willcocks. As part of the spring racing carnival, Melbourne’s GPO is giving away 3×2 hour personal styling sessions with three of Melbourne’s top fashion bloggers: Fashion Hayley, Lady Melbourne and Sea of Ghosts. The lucky winners will also get their professional shots taken at the GPO and $500 towards their spring racing apparel. For more info visit Melbournesgpo.com, twitter and facebook. Good Luck!

Yesterday i made it to Marketing Now @ the Sofitel in Melbourne. The flavour of the event was “How to use Social Media and Online Marketing to reach customers directly, and keep them.” Here’s Dave and myself courtesy of David Armano, as are all these shots gratefully borrowed from his twitpic

Some spectacularly credible speakers sharing their wisdom yesterday were Gavin servant of chaos Heaton, Laurel silkcharm Papworth and Darren problogger Rowse.

As someone who is hungry for social business learnings i found Laurel and Darren (unfortunately i missed Gavin) both generous and inspiring. I came away enriched and wondered why every seat wasn’t filled. The entry price was a $100 donation, $50 of which went towards thankyou water so it was all very affordable and worthy. One of the concepts Laurel touched on was COI, the Cost of Inaction…worth bearing in mind.

I would say that the majority of marketing directors out there are tussling with the concept of infusing social media into their businesses and brands. With a few exceptions the results so far are indifferent and yet if they’d broken away from the slavery of emails and meetings their understanding could have been mightily accelerated. I wonder if in 12 months the same speakers are assembled there will be a queque to attend?

Moving on…i took the opportunity to promote Nuffnang by stickering the venue at strategic points as in the photo…nicely spotted by Mr A.

For those who missed the event here’s Darren talking about how to promote a blog. This is from his blog not yesterday’s session, but similar content. Laurel’s presentation is available here. Many of her slides are minimalist and need Laurel to do them justice but my favourite slides are 18-24 inc. Judging by the comments flying in on twitter David Armano’s session is along these lines.

The social business challenge as we see it here at FRANkVizeum is to take social to market pitched at a level that integrates a brand’s current investment in paid for media activity and does not leave marketers thinking “What are you talking about?” and “How is this possibly relevant to my brand(s)?”  We have our social media infusion process, some case histories and we run our free FRANkademy session each month to introduce social thinking within a traditional media context. It’s working for us and our clients and i would encourage any brand with just their toes in the water to dive in and splash about.

Anybody who went to MarketingNow (or didn’t) want to add their thoughts?

A year ago, I hadn’t heard of Nuffnang and yet next month I am very honored to be on the judging panel of the inaugural Nuffnang Asia Pacific Blog Awards.

All thanks for our partnership with Nuffnang must go to David Lee, my fellow Director in Nuffnang Australia. Dave approached Ming and Tim, Nuffnang’s co-founders, about our potential involvement, about 11 months ago and since November 2008 we have been building Nuffnang’s blog advertising community in Australia. Today we have over 1,000 bloggers who have signed up to our network with ads seen by 90,000 people daily.

However our numbers are dwarfed by the collective might of Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines who have over 100,000 blogs with ads seen by 3 million people daily.

The awards have created a frenzy with over 400 bloggers, plus partners, being flown to Singapore for a grand Gala Dinner and accommodation at Nuffnang’s expense. The sponsors are Pringles and The Singapore Tourism Board.

There are 12 blog awards in total Best Blog Shop, Best Food Blog, Best Fashion Blog, Best Parenting Blog, Best Travel Blog, Best Geek Blog, Best Celebrity Blog, Best Entertainment Blog, Best Original Blog Design, Most Influential Blog, Best Hidden Gem and the top award of Region’s Best Blog.

Nominations have closed so now it’s down to the serious job of judging.

As the need for sound social business strategy becomes more apparant in Australia its fascinating to observe how brands are trying to engage with bloggers. Australia is at a relatively early stage of development in terms of engaging the blogosphere and it’s good to be at the forefront of the understanding process. The key consideration in social media is to originate and sustain a healthy dialogue with the view of building a long term relationship.

The challenge for many brands is to recognise this and not to approach the blogosphere with the intent of ‘taking’ or ‘using.’ The opportunity is to give and share, as with any healthy relationship.

The inaugural blog awards is part of Nuffnang’s commitment to our blogger community and i can’t wait until i visit Singapore for the first time in October to witness first hand the raw energy of our Nuffies.

As Friday afternoons go in the FRANkVizeum Melbourne office, this was just like any other. We were sitting around discussing the week in retrospect……helped with a few beers and debating whether Collingwood could beat Adelaide on the weekend. Deep stuff!

When the question was posed – Has anyone heard of the lying down game? While most shook their heads, those that were familiar with it took us through the concept.

The game itself originated in the UK by two guys from Somerset and has caught on around the world amongst the online social community thanks to a dedicated Facebook page & official website.

The concept is designed for all those who enjoy the sport of lying down in random public places to confuse people.

There are two aims:

1) The more public the better
2) The more people involved the better

Please be aware that the palms of your hands must be flat against your side and the tips of your toes pointing at the ground. Just as if you were standing, but vertically challenged.

This of course sparked one of those ‘FRANKVizeum’ moments, and so began the challenge. Lying face down outside our office and without getting cleaned up by passing traffic; we successfully created the company initials ‘FV’ using eight human bodies (Exhibit A pictured above).

With the photo uploaded here, we were now part of this growing craze, why not try it yourself!