ICH MARKE DU JANE

Although this is by definition no corporate marketing blog this one has to go out:

Big WHOOOOW! to the guys from Nitro who just recently joined the Sapient family. The Australians really did it: Grand Prix, PR Lion, Direct Lion, … you name it. Never saw such a bunch of lions on one spot. Nothing more to say but: Congrats, so happy to have you in the family.

And the show is not over yet: Both Sapient Nitro and Sapient Interactive are still in the race for other stuff. Watch this space!!

And this space:
http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/gaston-legorburu/creative-think-tank/our-man-cannes-ground-international-advertising-festival

When you work as a telecom and media industry consultant for a while, you learn how hard it is to strategise, research, brainstorm, or just try to magic the next this-will-make-me-my-family-and-oh-yeah-my-company-a-million-bucks application for the mobile phone. No matter what you do, the pesky, top-performing application remains the humble, old-fashioned, but incredibly efficient and relatively cheap (depends somewhat on location) SMS. With the arrival of the iPhone, and more importantly, the iTunes App store, I think things are changing…really fast. And I have no doubt that Android and Windows Mobile and company will catch up with time as well. But…these days I dream in bits and bites of iPhone applications and am buoyed up by the popularity but also the usefulness of some of the applications out there. For instance, I’ve recently liked having 9 Toolbox – a useful set of utilities like tip calculators and public holiday listings by country. Another good one out there for even the casual photo snapper is Photogene – a great mini photo editor that does a LOT within a tiny space. Beyond mere usefullness is inspiration and  Adidas’ new Urban Art app showcasing the street art in Berlin complete with GPS walking guides to which you can even add your photos showcases the originality and creativity of some of the apps. Finally, let’s not forget the addictive fun of simple games like Flood-It! (Yeah, I admit it – I am a little nerdy.)

My iPhone app dreams have been interrupted recently, though. At first it was mostly nuisance: “oh, someone else yapping about the wonders of Twitter. Ignore.” And then it became some sort of vague interest: “Really, you find it useful? hmmm, for information that I can’t get via Google Reader or otherwise?” And then progressed to alarming as I wondered if I was totally missing the boat: “Do I have to tweet too?” And really since then (sometime last summer), I have traveled up and down this rollercoaster trying to double guess if this Twitter brew-ha-ha is all just hype and marketing (sigh. yes, I am a marketer) and talk talk talk.

But.

Lately, I must admit, I am a little bit in love. Not with Twitter itself. But with what some companies and private individuals are doing with Twitter. Here are five of my favorite ideas of late and I think there is real brilliance to be further defined within the possibilities of this 140-character texting movement. (If you know me, you will understand why 4 out of 5 of them are food related):

BakerTweet: You are a baker? Ah ha. And your bread/cakes/cupscakes/pastries/addictive carbohydrates just came out of the oven? Ummmm, yes, I can smell them. You have some customers who would really prefer to get your goods as fresh and warm as possible? Well, easy. Tweet. Alert these people that it is time to stop by and get their hot cross buns.

Tastelive: Need some port to drink along with those biscuits you just bought? Not sure if you want the tawny? With tastelive, wine enthusiasts around the world get a chance to listen in on the rantings and ravings of the top wine personalities. Just follow binendswine and you can join wine tasting events as they take place – comment or ask questions of experts live.

Energize: (this is the non-food example) Here’s a clever way to search for new agency blood. Utrecht-based agency, Energize, is looking to hire an account manager and a strategic planner. They want to make sure that their people have some social media cred and experience and have therefore designed an application form that looks exactly like a page on Twitter, including an empty text field. Candidates enter a short message—describing why Energize should take a second glance at them for the position, plus their email address and Twitter username. Uploading a CV is optional.

Kogibbq: This one was launched last fall. Kogi Korean BBQ fuses the flavors of Korean barbeque with the ease-of-use (read: portability) of Mexican tacos and burritos and creates a whole new type of food addiction in the process. The food is sold primarily through two trucks that cruise around the Los Angeles area. You need a fix? Customers have to follow Kogi on Twitter to find out where the trucks are at any given moment. Apparently, more than 20,000 already do.

Maureen Evans: Perhaps my favorite of the bunch, but the least "useful." Maureen describes her services thus: “Tiny recipes condensed by @Maureen, Serves 3-4. Delicious ideas from all over the world.”  And I am really in awe. In 140 characters, Maureen tweets entire recipes for fairly complicated fare.

Check out her recipe for biscotti: "mix 1/3c sug/3T oil/egg/t anise flavr; +c flour/t bkgpwdr. Roll log to fit bkgpan; pat down. 30m@375/190C. Slice~14; brwn+6m/side."

She was recently reviewed by The New York Times, by writer Lawrence Downes, who also went to the trouble of testing out a good number of her recipes – without any help from anywhere else on the web.

Admittedly, this last listing is not about a new way to engage with customers, nor about more superior customer service, or even representative of a new genre of eCommerce. It’s just a fun and different way to share ideas, expertise and probably to make some new and interesting friends.

Which is what social media is all about.

The IAB just proposed a set of Metrics for measuring Social Media but this proposal still remains very conventional: Effectively measuring the success of social media marketing requires indicators that have been customized for particular categories in the social space and goals and have to go beyond reach and engagement. No other subject is receiving as much attention in digital marketing circles these days as marketing in social networks. This is no surprise given the ever-increasing number of active users on Facebook, LinkedIn and similar sites. Leading the way is Twitter, a micro-blogging service that has grown by an astounding 1,200 percent in the past year. Attempts to reach members of social networks using conventional forms of online advertising such as banners, however, have not been successful. When the German business networking site XING began embedding ads on the profile pages of its premium members, users were outraged. These communities simply will not tolerate intervention that impedes direct social interaction. One way around this difficulty is for companies to hire experts to enter into dialogue with users or to provide applications that offer users something more, like on Facebook. The main reason why many companies are still hesitating to try out these options is that they are uncertain how to gauge their effectiveness. As usual, marketing executives have to show exactly how much ROI their initiatives will bring. There is a widespread tendency to measure the effectiveness of social media marketing using conventional online-marketing KPIs, and the current IAB proposal is not going far beyond this. I tend to say that this the wrong way to go. Conventional online campaigns have a set length of time and are judged on things like Visits, page impressions, Duration of Stay or conversions. Social media initiatives, on the other hand, are usually designed for the medium to long term, plus they pursue different goals, like developing relationships with users and positioning influencers for the brand. Instead of subjecting social media goals and ROI to standard measures of campaign success, marketing professionals should apply metrics used in customer service and CRM. After all, customer satisfaction and customer retention are good signs of the success of social marketing campaigns too.

Defining goals and developing a systematic approach

Before a marketing department can measure the success of an initiative, it is essential for it to define the goals of the initiative and to know what the company wants to achieve with, say, an application. What is it that will determine success? Will it be a certain number of followers or influencers? Or will it depend on reach? In addition to precisely defined goals, it is important to establish and follow a systematic approach that will enable comparisons with other social media initiatives. A framework of this kind should at least include four components:

• Engagement: How will users engage and interact with content, apps and media in the social network?
• Impact: What effect will my content and topics have on users? Do they consume, interact or share?
• Stickiness: How long and how often are users interacting with the content or application?
• Quality of Reach: What is the quality of user profiles or user networks? Do they have large networks and can they or their networks be classified as influencers in the relevant area?

These items are important when defining metrics for different social media areas and tools, However, analysts and strategists will need to break down special indicators individually, depending on the goals of the company and the type of application.

Indicators for social media measurement

Social media – as a collective term – is not a single, neatly defined area. Each site has different goals and expectations, so different indicators are necessary to measure success. Just because you’re talking about Twitter or a Facebook application or even a banner on MySpace doesn’t necessarily mean you’re talking about the whole of social media. Standard KPIs like number of downloads are fine for a Facebook application, but very different indicators are needed for Twitter and online communities. A better approach for Twitter for instance would be to use listening tools and text-mining technologies to classify buzz. They give companies information about brand or product-related conversations, including how much is being said, how engaged the participants are and how serious the discussion is. More advanced tools like Twitalyzer can go far beyond that toward the quality of influencers and participant of the conversation. They do not ony reveal how frequently people send tweets on the subject to their friends, what keywords are being used, how often influencers contribute, e.g. by “re-tweeting” as well as the number of listeners and how they are being reached. Last but not least, they provide preliminary information about the tone of tweets. The posts of influential Twitterers can be monitored by a company and integrated in an internal workflow for further processing. Marketing professionals can measure the success of this strategy based on the quality and quantity of tweets posted on a certain topic and on the degree to which influencers “influence” their followers.

The most important thing, though, is that each platform needs its own individual set of metrics that take into account all four key components– Engagement, Impact, Stickiness and Quality of Reach. We still mainly see definitions of Reach and Engagement parts but this is not enough.

Next week a few of us will travel to Hamburg to attend this years next conference. This years topic is Share Economy – however I am not really sure how some of the scheduled sessions fit this topic. Building and maintaining customer relationships and brands seems to be the hot topic these days with lots of uncertainties resulting from the developments around social communities, twitter etc.

Here are my personal highlights from this years program:

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Auf dem diesjährigen eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit drehte sich wieder alles um das Thema Marketing Controlling und Web Analytics. Anwender, Systemanbieter und Consultants trafen sich zum alljährlichen 2tägigen Meinungs- und Erfahrungsaustausch.

Der "Godfather of Web Analytics" Jim Sterne schrieb in seiner Keynote der versammelten Analytics-Gemeinde ins Stammbuch: "Be an analyst, not a reporter" – und wies dabei auf ein Problem hin, das auch in den Teilnehmerdiskussionen immer wieder auftauchte: Unmengen an Daten, die auf Zuruf an Fachabteilungen unhinterfragt reportet werden und dadurch bisweilen zu Fehlinterpretationen führen oder in ungeeignete Aktionen münden (wenn sie überhaupt umgesetzt werden). Vielmehr muss jedem Report eine klare Zieldefinition vorausgehen: "To measure success you must define success". Nur so kann eine zielführende Analyse wertvolle Optimierungsmaßnahmen ableiten. more »

Auf manager-magazin.de erschien vor einigen Tagen ein recht interessanter Artikel zur aktuellen Einschätzung der Zukunft der Medien durch Mathias Döpfner, Vorstand des Axel Springer Verlags.

Mathias Döpfner wagte am Montagabend Woche in Hamburg einen Blick in die Zukunft der Medien. Einen besonders großen Umbruch sieht der Chef des Axel Spinger Verlags im Onlinejournalismus. Hier werde sich, so Döpfners Prognose, die Anzahl der Mitbewerber noch stärker verringern als im Print-Markt.

Hmmm, die Zahl der Wettbewerber im Onlinejournalismus wird sich verringern? Also dieser Prognose kann ich nicht ganz folgen, denn allein das Blogging ist sicherlich ein Trend der so schnell nicht wieder verschwinden wird. Vermutlich liegt der These eine recht scharfe Abgrenzung des Begriffes Onlinejournalismus zugrunde – und alles ohne Verlagshaus im Hintergrund wurde ausgeklammert.

Was im Umfeld des Onlinejournalismus aus meiner Sicht aktuell fehlt ist eine organisierte und einfache Zweitverwertung von Inhalten (bzw. Fremdbeschaffung von Inhalten für Blog- und Magazinbetreiber). In einem Beitrag vor einigen Wochen hatte ich ja bereits den Ansatz der britischen Zeitung Guardian vorgestellt, die eigene Inhalte über eine API zur Einbindung in fremde Seiten freigibt und als Gegenleistung, vereinfacht darstellt, Werbeplätze erhält. more »

I’ve been thinking a lot about the second last question in the video from Eric Schmidt’s speech at the annual convention of the Newspaper Association of America (webcast here). In my personal opinion, the questions sums up a lot of problems and disconnect between publishers and the web as well as its readers:

The querist asks Schmidt on his opinion on readers beingmore and more satisfied with the combination of a headline and an extract / summary instead of reading the full story. However, the way he phrases the question he very precisely and knowingly questions the rationality of his own audience (consumers). He describes Google as an aggregator driving this trend, a trend we are currently seeing in its purest form on Twitter.

To me personally the entire thought is just odd. How can you (a) question your audience how its uses your product and (b) have the arrogance to even question the people that pay your bills. more »

One of the topics I’ve been following over the recent weeks and months is the change and challenges google, twitter, blogs etc are creating for the traditional newspaper and journalism industry. Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, took a stand last week and gave a speech along with a brief Q&A session at the annual convention of the Newspaper Association of America (available as a webcast here). In his speech he gives an overview of his believes and predictions on how information sharing and the newspaper industry will evolve.

Schmidt sees a significant change to the existing concept of the newspaper of record, the traditional close connection of a paper to it’s constant (e.g. daily) readers. The concept of newspaper of record will have a hard time to withstand the innovation currently taking place as people are less tied to one source of information – instead looking for information valuable to them from trusted sources. more »

I gotta admit – I haven’t gone through the blogosphere to read what the world is saying about this whole „TWITTER FOUND A MONETIZATION MODEL“ hoopla. I read an article over on Adrants and then another one over on Techcrunch and chatted with a couple colleagues over here about it. ( I label it as „hoopla“ because it came up more than a handful of of times in my periferal vision headline reading in the last couple days.) I also just did a quick search on the words „Twitter Ad“ over at Twitter Search. That was the extent of my research on this one. So…what you won’t find in this nice little bit of navel gazing is a summarization of the opinions out there, but just some of my top-of-mind, gut-feel thoughts. (Yeah, the weather in Munich is getting to me, can you tell?) more »

Sportbegeisterte in den USA, und auch inzwischen weltweit, haben seit heute wieder eine Reihe von Basketball Games zu verfolgen: Das berühmte March Madness Turnier der NCAA für College-Basketball hat heute begonnen und wird bis zum 30. März (Final Eight) täglich von den Spielen berichten. Interessant ist hierbei der Live Web TV Service, der alle Spiele onDemand per stream (auch in HD) in einem Silverlight-Browser-Plugin abspielt, unterstützt von entsprechenden Sponsor-Logos. Nett – aber wo ist die Innovation, das Neue? Neben der echt guten Qualität hat man In-Player Funktionen zu anderen Informationen, Videos und Statistiken. Allerdings ist mir beim Live-Stream dann der "Share-Button" aufgefallen. Dort hat man neben den gewöhnlichen Share-Funktionen (Post in Facebook, iGoogle, digg etc.) eine weitere Option "Facebook Status Update", die meine Neugierde auf sich zog: more »