Similar to QR Codes is MVS. This is a technology that is currently being developed and stands for Mobile Visual Search. This also allows the user of a smart phone to download an app and take a picture of an article or newspaper (and apparently products) in which your phone will then take you to that page to read more.

What seems to be happening at the moment is that the makers of MVS are trying very hard to discredit the QR movement. This can be dangerous as the QR code lovers are obviously going to come out and have a stab back, then it becomes a pissing war and to be honest we have enough of these with our politicians year round. The unfortunate thing is that your competitor will dig long and hard to find faults and broadcast publicly. So in my reading I have come across a few things that are worth noting down.

The main issue I see with QR codes is not the technology but the use by marketers. Lazy ones will add the QR code to an ad campaign that will take the user to the company website … no wonder this is coping flack. It’s just plain stupid, boring and not using the technology for it’s intended purpose.  A good example however is a QR code on a bottle of wine – that takes me (at the indecisive point in my purchase decision) to a small video of the wine maker explaining the reason this wine works, the type of soil and temperature  for the year it was grown and other factors that make it a good wine. (See link below for more good examples – particularly the Hienz and Heineken ones )

The same can be said for MVS. Unfortunately I haven’t had the chance to use this technology apart from a test site (I live in a sleepy little regional area of Queensland that is not know for it’s IT savvy population), however it looks promising. Testing the Shortcut App by Kooaba, I can see that if I take a picture the app will take me to a pre determined web page in which I can read more or do something. Apparently they also state we will be able to take a photo of a product (such as the wine) and go to that information page.

As with any new technology – there are bugs and questions. For example, what happens if I scan a wine and it mistakes it for a competitors? Will it cost to add the images to a database? Who takes the image in the first place and loads it to be recognised – can a competitor take a picture of my product and tag it as theirs to re-route traffic? and so on.

So, hopefully what we see is less trashing of each other and more positive promotion around the technology so that it does end up main stream. If there are flaws then let the consumer be the one to voice it and allow the developers to engage and better their products.

Some good QR examples here – http://www.imediaconnection.com/article_full.aspx?id=31159

And as soon as I find some good ones of MVS (or if someone has any) they will get posted here

So ok – this is a fair enough strategy, however the energy it takes to continually generate new fans is exhausting for a small business as they don’t have the massive dollars the larger companies have. The other side to this is that recent studies have shown that only 1% of Facebook Fans actually engage (or communicate with) your brand. Great! – You’ve now used your marketing budget to attract as many fans as you can afford and only 1% will communicate! It just doesn’t feel like a solid strategy.

Taking a backward step here and looking at social media, we need to remember why it is so popular. This is a way for people to connect with each other. It’s massive because your voice as an individual can reach places you can’t in your smaller circle of friends. It also ads credibility, status (being the first to discover something cool), it’s  a way to stay in touch and retouch with old friends. See the pattern? – It’s all about ME ME ME and this is perfectly normal human behaviour.

If we wanted to take this into consideration and involve the ME’s in our strategy, it would make sense that we would be engaging with our fans. If your thinking “that’s just common sense”, then why do we still see so many companies with posts such as “come and stay with us” , “pay 5 stay 7 nights because we’re the best” or the one I hate the most, “like our facebook page”.

OK enough with the negative – you get the message. So what does work?

1. Create a persona – a personality for your business. Remember you’re trying to get other humans to connect with your and these humans are interested in your brand – be the personality you try and represent in your other media campaigns. If more than one person manages the accounts – then agree on a style and voice that best conveys who you are.  To demonstrate the difference in personality check out Globe Surf and Wall Street Journal – both have content and a voice that engages with their fan/follower. Globe at times will use slang and language based around it’s own sub culture where the wall street journal would never write things like this  – “Did my dog have asparagus for dinner, dude whizzed on my wetty, almost passed out in the surf…” This works for Globe – find what works for you.

2. Reply to your fans – If you successfully connect with your followers via a post – AND receive comments back – acknowledge that, as this is the perfect opportunity to converse.  A way one post by you does not constitute engagement. The other thing to realise here is that Facebook has an algorithm (Edgerank) that puts your post in place of your competitors as a result of the engagement. More people talking about a subject means it is more popular right! – makes sense.

3.  Frequency and Content – what you post and how often can have a big impact. Facebook offers insights which is one tool that can be helpful to determine what posts reach more people. In our experience we find 3 areas work the best. Videos, a photo and posts that talk about events, festivals and smaller intimate nights such as book launches or networking evenings. Mind you the content still has to be relevant.

As for how often – this will really be determined by your audience, however to get a good start on things – twice a day is safe. Experiment with times of post  – does the morning before work reach more people or is it later in the evening?Make sure you check out your analytics to see what’s working for you.

Just in case you’re wondering how you post twice a day at different times and measure the effectiveness – get onto Sprout Social and organise an account. It’s cheap and the tools you get around the ability to schedule your posts on any day and time are so worth while.

Note: The 1% of facebook fans article on Adage article points our that the engagement strategy is not the be all and end all. Of course the writer is referring the article to larger corporations and in any case – there should always be focus on engagement that advocates your brand via word of mouth. It has never been different, even before the social media days. Word of mouth is part of the reason you strive so hard with your customer service, after sales support, quality and image – engage away!

The one that really sticks out

for us here is that in 2014 the demographic change will be that 13 to 15 year old kids today will be our 18 – 20 year old market then.

So looking at that – I know my own kids have NEVER picked up a paper to look for toys, bands, movie times or anything else. In fact my 6 year old just spent an hour last night online going over all the toy sites such as Target.com.au to do his xmas list to santa. He did this all on his own and only request for help was ” Is Indiana Jones  with a space in it?” (must be some cool Indiana Jones lego stuff out there)

I don’t think this is a case of “when they get older they will discover the newspaper or print material”.

It is a complete shift away from the traditional print media or tangible media as Steve mentions to the online arena. Make of it what you will …. I know that if I wanted to ensure the effectiveness of my advertising dollar I would be working out now how I keep my 6, 9 and 14 year old happy  in 2014.

What we can say for sure is that online marketing trends keep changing a new technology develops and matures and rather than rehash some of the older methodologies used, we though we would explore some of the latest things we have been getting our hands dirty with.

You may or may not have heard about to the term “Buzz Measurement” or “Buzz Tracking”. In this post we would like to take a closer look at why it is important to know who is saying what about your brand on twitter, facey or any other social network.

So now that you’re finally using all of the social marketing tools to get your brand out there, how do you know that the message you’re sending or the message that is being perceived is actually being heard?

This social marketing thing we all do creates lots of chatter and in doing this opens up the doors for all past, present and future customers to comment (not to mention competitors). So with this in mind it may be a good idea to start looking at the measurement tools needed to track and monitor the masses as they rave about your company or beat you down.

Let me give you an example – we were looking into helping an airline carrier monitor some of the social aspects to a new service they were considering. In this evaluation we were able to track and monitor in real time posts and comments to outlets such as twitter re their services. One situation was when the air steward announced that there was no smoking in the terminal or on the tarmac and that it was a disgusting habit. Now I’m not a smoker, but you can bet the people on board that are smokers took offence at being labelled with the words “disgusting”.

So much so that one of these people actually blasted the airline on their twitter account the minute they had net access via their phone – this person had over 5,000 people following them and as a result this was re tweeted and so on ….

Obviously this was just the stewards opinion and not something the airline writes into it’s hand book – however when you upset a large demographic like this – all context can go out the window and damage is suffered.

Our advice to the airline when we saw this erupt live was a recommendation that there should be a memo that goes out immediately to all staff that they will need to be careful not to single out any one group providing this instance as a sample.

Now remember – it’s not all about looking at the negative.  It can also be useful when evaluating the marketplace for your existing or new competition, or even to capitlaise on positive posts. Try creating  your own blog page around these positive posts that will be picked up in the search engines easily or other social bookmarking utility.

So – what tools do we like to recommend …

http://tweetvolume.com/

http://hootsuite.com/

http://www.socialmention.com/

http://www.google.com/alerts

There are many  others out there on the market, some free, some not – and others that will need more time to learn the way they work – however if you are serious about promoting your brand (who isn’t) and can afford to spend a few extra hours a week to monitoring the chatter – then buzz monitoring is essential.

Remember that the Facebook page for your business is not the same as a group, or place page. You can create a stand alone business page on Facebook here – http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
Things to think about – You (the business owner) should be the owner of the email address used at the sign up process as the the original creator of the page may never be removed by other page admins. So don’t ask your P.A, marketing manager or receptionist to handle this task for you. Each page can have multiple administrators. Each page administrator will need their own business account or personal account. Admins can manage your page from their own Facebook account using the “Page Manager” application that will appear in the left hand column of the applications section once they become an admin for a page.
And last thing to remember, your Facebook page will be tied to your personal profile as the admin of your Facebook page; however, only you and Facebook know the connection exists

2. Why your business should have a business page.
This really is a classic example of answering a questions with a question. Our first response to our clients is typically, what is your online business strategy? Are you engaged in raising brand awareness, improving customer service, directing traffic back to your own website, building your email marketing list or to improve sales?
If you answered yes to all of these then to be honest – you will need several strategies and methods, however Facebook is an excellent tool for starters.

Other reasons you should have a Facebook page is that users don’t need to be logged into Facebook to find your business page. For example – http://www.facebook.com/thesilvershop
Facebook business pages are now listed in Googles search engine index, and a recent youtube video by Matt Cutts (Google SEO spoksperson) has confirmed that social media platforms and data are used in the complex algorithm that help to get your pages listed.

Here’s another good one – Your Facebook page can be suggested to friends. Seriously, word of mouth was very powerful, word of mouth via social media is more so due to the fact that you can “hear” what people are saying about you and engage or interact to amplify or placate.
The last point about listening or hearing your advocates is so important. There has never been a time where you could gain a better understanding of your customers. Forget focus groups, or strategic studies – the insights presented via many of the social media metric tools outstrip anything that has come before it at 1 /100th of the cost.

I’m sure we have mentioned it before – but don’t start without a strategy and invest in some good metric tools (Twitalyzer, Sprout Social, Radian 6 or Social Report)

In short what this means in the online advertising world is that it is OK to embark on a strategy that just looks at promoting your business brand. Actually, it’s more than ok, it is a must.

You see the habits of off-line purchase decision making and online purchase decision making are very similar in many ways. I think we need to get out of our heads that off-line and online advertising are at 2 different ends of the spectrum. We also need to stop thinking about online advertising as clicks on ads.

A recent study performed by ComScore (adage N.Y) studied 139 online ad campaigns by marrying data from its panel of U.S. internet users with shopper data, found online ads, even when they didn’t result in a click, increased a consumer’s likelihood of making a purchase at an advertiser’s retail store by 17% and increased visits to a marketer’s website by an average of 40%.

What they are saying here is that your awareness of brands you spot as you travel the web stay with you long after you leave the computer and go about your daily life. What you want is for your clients to have brand recall of your products and services over that of your competitors. They can’t do this if they are not seeing you online.

Yes this means get your site optimised and increase traffic to it – but it also means think laterally. Where can you brand appear online. This can be in the form of banners, rich media advertising, contributing to social sites or the standard Google Ads. What works for one company may not work for another.  Test analyse and re test – there is no secret here.

Just on a side note to those that say banner advertising is dead ….. yeah to a degree I think that the popup ads and misplaced “in your face” style has no place online. What I do love is a well thought out ad on a relevant site.

To give you an example – I drive a 1976 Kombi – I love this car and it is completely restored.

I visit the Kombi Forums often to chat and find new and better ways to keep her hummin along. It’s a very Niche site with a VERY niche market. On this site I found a well placed banner ad that wanted me to look at some amazing kombi parts on sale. …….. so I do  …….. and I find a small site that just does that, and very well I might add.

So I keep going back, and again to purchase online and have stuff sent to me within a day or 2. This business is now full-time for the guy that started and growing.

I get stopped everyday by other kombi drivers and just people wanting to buy one and everytime I tell them about the Bus Stop …… so whats my point!  – Advertise, get out there and test, analyse and build your business. No different to how it has always been.

Well it’s here again, but this time Papa’s got a brand new bag. It’s social marketing and media and there’s so much of the same that’s happening that you’re heads going to turn.

There is a term in marketing called social validation – explained by Wikipedia as “a phenomenon in which people are more willing to take a recommended step if they see evidence that many others, especially similar others, are taking it“. In other words, do what your competitors do or what the social cowboys tell you to do.

So lets firstly clarify one of the big reason to adopt a social marketing strategy

Why do you want to build a relationship with your customers?

Here’s my thoughts on it – The primary aim of social marketing is “social good”, while in commercial marketing the aim is mainly “financial”.

So if you’re thinking that you feel it’s important to build a relationship with potential customers in which you provide insights and offer your opinion without the expectation of getting something in return, then this is a great start. Naturally what happens here is, you build a better relationship with your potential customers and as a result, they are more likely to consider you if you provide a solution to their needs. While you’re building this relationship you’re also building your brand – in a positive way.

What should your goals be?
There are loads to consider, however for the purpose of simplicity lets outline 2

Goal a: Acquire new followers
Goal b: Increase Loyalty.

How do you do that?

a) Add some simple social media connections to your website and email.

The immediate:  For your website look at Add This.  It’s a very simple process for your web guy to handle.

When you’re ready to create your twitter, facebook, linked and any other social media account – finding the simple solution to adding these to your site in place of the simple addthis system is daunting. We found a few tools helped us.

• WordPress has some great social plugins – the one we use right now is Share & Follow
• DandyID – Simply put, DandyID allows you to store your various online social identities in one place. They have over 300 social networks you can add to your profile. Obviously this is an overkill, however what they want to do ids offer the right choice depending on your needs.
• For email signature we really like Wise Stamp. Using Thunderbird it was a snap to set up, and their tips and articles pages have loads of additional resources for setting up alternate options. Hotmail was not available at the time of writing this, however one of our clients has word from them that it is in the pipeline.

We will touch base and review more options here shortly (feel free to follow us on twitter and we will update when we post a new blog)

OK so to address Goal B – increase loyalty, I feel as though you have to give and help out others while using social media. So feel free to write about the things that you’re passionate about and things of interest to you as a business. This is basics 101. The second part to this is listen to what your followers and potential new customers are saying. To do this you can use a host of different platforms.

You can just log into Twitter itself or try using a platform such as the ones below. Some of the advantages of these platforms include the ability to manage both personal and business accounts as well as Linked In, Four Square

Tools For Managing & Listening

Hootsuite - huge interface with an iphone / ipad app as well as web and desktop versions. The ability to manage multiple accounts and a real nice statistic tool that brings in your Google Analytic account to help cross reference tweet traffic. Lots of power in this puppy and takes a bit of time behind the wheel to get the most from it, but well worth it.

Tweetdeck – very similar to Hootsuite, however it has some other subtle differences in usability. One of the tools I like here is the simple way you can view new followers to your twitter account and interact directly with them with a nice “howdy” back.

Sprout Social – my new favorite social tool. I love the simplicity of this one and also the power to mange my daily tweets. Like the first 2 you have the ability to schedule tweets and promotions, however the ease in which you can monitor competitors is very attractive. I also like the discovery tool which allows you to use a set of keywords to then be presented with tweets similar in nature – it’s a great way to research. They have mentioned to us that there is an app in the making for mobile devices as well – can’t wait to see that.

Don’t forget why you’re doing this while you emerge yourself in all of this technology – you’re here to give. One of the best ways to show your appreciation now you have a following is to reward the people that advocate your business and engage/applaud your followers. Offer solution and help, provide information to them that makes their life better, easier, faster, smarter. After all  – recognition is a great thing to be able to offer someone and something we all enjoy receiving.

To be honest with you this post has grown far larger than I indented and there are so many social tools I would like to discuss, so perhaps I will begin again with a who’s what of social media and marketing in the next article.

While this is compiled – if you find a great resource for social measurement, please feel free to leave a comment and I will check it out.

Was reading a lead from one of our Twitter Followers about the issues facing the US newspaper industry.

I won’t go into detail, however it is an interesting read that outlines the following (quoted from The Boston.com site).

“Newspapers have been hit hard by the loss of readers and advertisers to the Internet, while the national economic slowdown has intensified the advertising slump. In recent months, the Rocky Mountain News has closed, the Seattle Post Intelligencer has significantly reduced staffing and moved entirely onto the Web, and several major newspaper companies have filed for bankruptcy protection.

The New York Times Co. threatened earlier this month to shut down The Boston Globe unless its labor unions agree to $20 million in cost concessions, including pay and benefit cuts. The Globe is on track to lose $85 million this year, executives told labor representatives.”

Personally  I like to read a newspaper from time to time, however I can’t really get the global coverage in all the areas that interest me in one paper – I guess it’s for this reason that I love being able to read online news stories from tech to business in all parts of the world. Also in another article discussed earlier here – we spoke about the new emerging market … the kids of today. They just don’t read the paper at all – that blog post here

We decided to work with WordPress in this instance to help with the management of their portfolios. We find that we can re-code elements in a wordpress site to move around any flexibility issues and really display TV commercials, Print Advertising and Radio all in the one portfolio, even though the use of different platforms are needed to present the works.