STEP 1: Find Persuasive Momentum

To answer the question posed above, I always refer back to the concept of Persuasive Momentum. By aligning your company’s goals to that of your customers’ expectations when formulating a marketing message, Persuasive Momentum is achieved by strengthening the coherence of both your message and your brand, and ultimately increase the likelihood of increasing conversion rates.

STEP 2: Understand the Tools & Environment

A starting point to understand your customers’ expectations is to look and know what tools they have at their disposal to engage with you – and when it comes to mobile marketing, the challenges here are vast. As pointed out by Tim Bishop during our last Heavy Chef session in Johannesburg, there are approximately 6,000 different type of mobile handsets in the world, each with their own unique features and specifications to consider when crafting a mobile marketing strategy. Yes, it is a daunting task – but not impossible.

So, let’s assume you now have put the building blocks of persuasive momentum together – in other words, your strategy aligns with your customers’ expectations – we can now think creatively in increasing the conversion rates of your mobile marketing campaign.

STEP 3: Creative idea generation

In my experience, it is easy to get caught up in the excitement of new technologies and fact is we can be very fancy with our creative marketing ideas, but when reviewing the majority of campaigns in the mobile (and overall marketing space for that matter!), the biggest barrier to conversion in my opinion is the lack of clarity of what companies want people to do.

Being obvious should be the foundation of your communication. It is frightening how many marketing messages are put out there without being clear of what the sender is expecting from you, the recipient. Ambiguity leads to passivity.

Creativity isn’t only about design and art-work, but rather a conscious process of looking for novel ways of approaching a situation. Thus, within the mobile space, you have 2 options to go with:

1.     Stick to the tried-and-tested

The absolute vast majority of mobile handsets are setup to receive text messages (SMS), multimedia messages (MMS) as well as basic access to the mobile web (WAP). With this in mind, you can understand the best practices and come-up with some creative ideas to utilise these tools.

For example, Dunkin’ Donuts used an SMS short-code which customers could text and then receive a $0.99 coupon to use in-store. Full case study here.

2.     Embrace the trends

Targeting the smart phone user, the opportunity to create an innovative mobile application/game or utilize innovative and trendy services such as location-based social networking comes into play. Here your aim is to create rich, interactive experiences, create excitement and even use your campaign’s focus on using bleeding-edge technologies as a mechanism to generate PR.

For example, The History Channel used location-based social networking application, Foursquare, to reward people visiting and “checking-in” (a Foursquare term for updating) to historical locations around the world. Full case study here.

STEP 4: Get cracking!

Get your team together, possibly ask some creative-heads in the digital space to join-in, and start throwing around some ideas to creatively engage with your customers. And regardless of which route you choose to go, the point of conversion is where your goals intersects with that of your customers’ – thus creating persuasive momentum and ultimately a profitable relationship.

There is little doubt though, that the early adopters of technology fall within the domain of the youth and geeks. This has been the case since the advent of most things electronic. But, in assuming that when a technology matures, it’s usage demographics stay the same would be a gross generalisation on your part.

Whether your customer-base is made-up of 10 year old kids, baby boomers, those living in rural areas or even the blind – in planning your foray into the mobile web, there are a few universal truths to consider:

1. There are more than 5 billion mobile phone connections worldwide
2. Google is everywhere and everyone uses Google – on various devices. It would be wise to invest in your business’ search engine rankings.
3. In leveraging existing social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Mxit, the mobile web becomes a powerful tool in building and tapping into your community.
4. Your mobile handset has and will still become increasingly functional – this includes it’s evolution towards a ‘digital wallet’. How can you add value to your customer’s lives?
5. Marketing hasn’t changed all that much – you have a message that you want to convey, a value exchange to offer and require the right tools (such as mobile) to reach your market.

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

- William Strunk, Jr. (1869–1946)

Professor William Strunk Jr, author of the first editions of The Elements of Style* (1918), was one of the first to publish a writing guide to English usage. His objective was to focus on a few essentials relating to the rules of usage and principles of composition. His statement “vigorous writing is concise” rings as true today, whether in writing a novel or getting your message across in 140 characters**.

<end of excerpt>

Thus, here are 10 lessons in writing for Twitter – inspired by an academic from the nineteen hundreds:

1. Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, non-committal tweets.
2. Omit needless words (same goes for use of excessive punctuation marks!!!!!!!).
3. Drop the adjectives.
4. If you are indecisive or unsure of what to tweet, rather say nothing.
5. Use complete words, find shorter synonyms or at the very least recognisable abbreviations. DO NOT use text message lingo when tweeting. EVER.
6. Do not break your tweet in 2.
7. When asking a question, choose either rhetoric or open-ended questions as they are more conducive for generating feedback tweets.
8. Have purpose when tweeting. Know to whom your tweet is meant for and what you are expecting in response to that tweet (if at all). If you want someone to click on a link, tell them so accordingly
9. When referencing a link in your tweet, make use of url shorteners to help you make the most of 140 characters.
10. Lastly, a point I never get tired of hearing – to borrow from The Cluetrain Manifesto’s 95 Theses: “Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.” Read your tweets out loud before posting. Do they sound uncontrived?

So, now over to you – what do you find works well when composing a tweet?

• You can read the complete version of Strunk Jr’s The Elements of Style (1918) here.
• Have you ever asked yourself the question: Why 140 Characters? Check it out: http://www.140characters.com/2008/11/13/hello-world/

A few weeks back, the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) expressed concern about fake Julius Malema accounts on Twitter tweeting misleading messages. The ANCYL’s militant tone of voice in conveying this concern however made for some nice headline-grabbing soundbites. Soundbites that lead to a barrage of responses from journalists, commentators and the Twitter community alike.

But, taking a step back for a second and cutting through the ANCYL’s talent for their creative choice of words, their concern is valid. And one that many a person or organisation has flagged before. This the very same reason why Twitter introduced Account Verification in 2009: a lawsuit was filed against Twitter by the manager of a well-know baseball team in the US back then (details of the case can be found here).

In fact there are a number of cases where Twitter was asked (read: threatened) to shut down fake Twitter accounts:

• Kanye West posted a rant on his blog saying: “Hey Twitter, take the so called Kanye West Twitter down now.”
• Ewan McGregor was considering legal action to remove a fake Twitter account that had attracted 20,000 followers
• Actor/musician Vincent Gallo ordered Twitter to find and shut down fake accounts
• BP asked Twitter to enforce a disclaimer on fake BP Twitter account @BPGlobalPR

The list goes on.

However, as the ANCYL has learned (or not), there are correct ways of dealing with impersonators and then there are the No-No’s that can potentially even exacerbate the problem.

Here are 5 Twitter No-No’s when faced with a fake Twitter account:

TIP #1: Be confrontational, aggressive, threatening in trying to resolve the problem

TIP #2: Stand on a soapbox and rant to the whole world

TIP #3: Failure to acknowledge your ignorance of the nature of the technology and community

TIP #4: Stereotype and paint all Twitter users with the same brush

TIP #5: Failure to setup your own Twitter profile (even if it is only a placeholder profile)

To the last point, by saying that you should create your own official profile, I’m not saying you should now start using Twitter. Take Tiger Woods for example: he (or more likely, his communications team) setup a Tiger Woods Twitter profile back in mid-2009 which, barring 3 tweets promoting his website, stayed dormant for a year and a half. And until recently served its purpose as a placeholder for Tiger on Twitter. Nothing more, nothing less.

Bottomline, if fake accounts are your concern it would be worth your while to at the very least have your own profile to inform the general public of, as well as point Twitter to when flagging your concerns with the company. It just makes for good practical sense.

The distinction between community management and content syndication seems obvious, I know, but in my experience it is a case of it becoming habit: Content. Check. Publish. Check. Share. Check. Smile and wave. Check.

Still, not to dispel the value of content syndication, it has an extremely vital role to play in the broader community management process. Case in point it is the very first pillar of The Heavy Chef Project’s Community Management Grid (pictured below):

There is value in creating channels dedicated to content syndication though.

Take for instance The Wall Street Journal’s Breaking News Twitter profile (@wsjbreakingnews). It’s sole purpose to feed through breaking news headlines from around the world. No “engagement”. No “listening”. A straight-forward news feed. It’s fine. It works, because the 20,338 people following @wsjbreakingnews know what they are in for. It has clarity in it’s purpose.

Indeed, it is only one cog in the WSJ’s broader online community.

To what extent are you spreading your content? Is it perhaps over-shadowing your community management activities? Or is it adding value in the purpose it should have?

This months’ focus on Community Management at The Heavy Chef Project has proved to highlight some really exciting opportunities for businesses in terms of building profitable relationships with their customers and stakeholders.

However, it has also opened-up a lot of questions – particularly around the question: “Ok, that’s nice, so what now?”

A good starting point is to realise that there are in fact 3 Type of Communities you can “build” online:

1. BUILD: This is where you create your own network/platform for people to join, for example Reebok’s GoRunEasy [Key differentiator: You built it. You set the rules. You control it.]
2. RENT: This is where you create your own presence on an established network/platform, for example Lady Gaga’s Facebook Page [Key differentiator: You attract community. You set some rules, but you do not control it. The network does.]
3. JOIN: This is where you identify an established community and then be part of that network, for example Star Wars: The Expanded Universe Forum [Key differentiatior: You are part of the community. You follow the rules. You have zero control.]

So, if you decide to go the actual BUILD route, here are the 7 STEPS IN BUILDING AN ONLINE COMMUNITY:

STEP #1: Define your objectives and be very clear in what your expectations are from this endeavour.

STEP #2: Decide on what profile of people you are attracting to your community and then spend a great deal of time to find out their motivations for potentially joining and interacting within your community

STEP #3: Think about the potential barriers of your typical community member. How tech savvy are they? What devices are they using to connect online? What is the level of internet connectivity they have?

STEP #4: Have clarity in your call to action. Plan your community function, layout and creative so that it aligns your objectives with the motivations of your community members.

STEP #5: Focus on balancing technical soundness with creative execution.

STEP #6: Realise that if you build it, they will not come. How will you attract members to your newly built online community?

STEP #7: Be part of your own community. Interact relentlessly.

Note that to address the question “How do I build an online community?” – we did not start with the platform (e.g. Wordpress, Sharepoint, Joomla etc); we started with your message and your community member personas. Only in clarifying that, should you think about what is the best technology for my community.

For the last few months The Heavy Chef Project team has been hard at work demystifying online reputation management (ORM) to marketers – and with great success I might add judging by interest from our readers.

And with our Heavy Chef Events on this particular topic around the corner, we’ve been noticing increased queries around the role of PR agencies in assisting with the management of brands in the online space? A relevant question indeed.

UNDERSTANDING PR AGENCIES EXPERTISE

At it’s core Public Relations (PR) agencies focus on building relationships; now if that is true, one has to admit in a world where relationships and networks are increasingly empowered through the power of the web, there has to be a very prominent role for PR Agencies to play in particularly managing brand relations with their customers online.

Furthermore, PR agencies skills can be found in:

• Clear understanding of clients business (incl. tone and style of a message)
• Ability to craft and spread a message through a mix of media
• Extended media networks to leverage
• Management of crises
• A profession ethos of acting quick and nimbly

More skills can be added to this list for sure; clearly a nice alignment with ORM is evident.

THE BAD NEWS

Unfortunately, the above-mentioned skill-set does seem to be true mainly in theory. The general sentiment that I’ve picked up is that PR agencies are stuck in the old mindset of sending out press releases to mainstream media based on a rationale of stats and demographics – and particularly applying these same methods of communicating to the online space. Essentially, as Valeria Maltoni puts it “PR is having a hard time letting go of the pitch“.

Other criticism leveled at PR Agencies aptitude to add value to the social web include:

• Lack of understanding of the social media environment
• Balancing social media strategy with appropriate tools
• Overall technology savvy of the average PR practicitioner
• Inability to measure return on investment of engagement
• Lack of clear processes and systems in dealing with conversations online

Needless to say, a lot of these items aren’t unique to PR agencies – however are still key in evaluating there ability in dealing with brands reputations online.

CONCLUSION

ORM’s success lies partly in choosing the right monitoring technologies to pick-up mentions and conversations around your brand. However, the biggest distinguishing factor in optimising ORM for your brand lies in what you do with those mentions and conversations.

With that in mind, I believe PR agencies can have a huge role to play in looking after your ORM – but only if they a) invest in understanding the tools and measurement metrics around ORM; and (most importantly) b) stay true to their belief in the process, management and, ultimately, the value of relationship building online.

Business is about relationships. Relationships is about people.

People talk. Thus, businesses (need/want to) listen.

The proposition is easy to get: the ability to “listen-in” on consumers in their unique spaces has huge amount of value for business – whether in sales, customer service, product development or strategy.

The problem is this though, with the plethora of options available for people to converse in the online environment – whether through a comment on an article, writing a blog post, updating your Facebook status, taking part in an online forum or enthusiastically tweeting your 140 characters – the sheer volume of content generated makes it extremely difficult to find those mentions relevant to your business, brand, product or industry.

Enter the online reputation and social media monitoring and management (ORM) service providers, who addresses this dilemma head-on through some very smart technologies – problem is there’s also a lot of skinny chef’s out there…

ONLINE REPUTATION (ORM) SOFTWARE, TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGIES: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

1. The Good:

Like I said, there are some very smart ORM technologies out there. Some of those that the World Wide Creative team have tested and/or used ourselves include:

• Radian6
• Brandseye
• Saidwot
• Trackur
• BuzzLogic
• Social Mention (free)
• Advanced Twitter search (free)
• TweetDeck search filter (free)

In fact, there are many more tools to choose from (here’s a wiki of available social media monitoring solutions), however to put a stake in the ground I would recommend you look no further than the one’s I listed above. They really are well developed tools.

From our experience with these tools they do very well in:

• Scanning and finding mentions (real-time)
• Filtering of queries
• Gage and track sentiment
• Organise and forwarding queries
• Affordability

Each tool has its advantages and features they are strong in compared to their competitor products.

However those providers that stand out, often excel in:

• Their own reputations online
• Tasting their own “food” (in fact, I know Radian6 responds to almost every blog post which mentions their name with a comment of some kind, for example here and here)
• Realizing that they alone cannot be the custodian of a company or brand’s reputation, and that inevitably they need to provide support to their clients in using their tools optimally
• Constantly researching and improving their products
• Involvement in educating and adding to the body of knowledge around standards/methodologies for ORM
• Easily making client references available for which to contact to find out about the clients experience of the particular tool

2. The Bad:

“It’s no longer a matter of whether or not you should be listening, but what you do with all of the information you collect to build your business” (Amber Naslund, Radian6)

Even considering the ‘Good’, ORM is still a young field within the digital space, which means there really are a lot of areas that can still be improved on including:

• Generating faster response times in bringing through mentions; with all the tools we’ve used thus far – some mentions still pop-up a few hours later in our streams. An aspect I know most of he service providers are constantly improving on
• It’s imperative to try and attach context in which a mention is used in.
• The biggest area of growth in my mind is going to be in standards and technologies that integrate that data with other business functions (best case study I know about is the system behind Comcast’s ORM efforts – very impressive)
• The identification of “themes” within the conversations that are picked up, to trace general conversation trends and group them with each other
• Comparisons with competitive information to measure certain criteria against each other
• The identification and targeting of influencers and profiling those influencer’s online profiles
• The ability to monitor and ascertain the threshold within conversations i.e. when is it required to action a specific mention?
• The overall profiling of your customers online – where they are, how often are they online, how active are they, what networks are they on, how big are their spheres of influence etc.

However, a great deal of the improvements do not only come in the monitoring of mentions, but also in the management of the customer, which means – where tools can improve include: managing, forwarding, organizing, ranking, integrating, actioning, tracking, follow-ups, historical data, team responsibilities – essentially a holistic customer management plan for finding, evaluating, dealing and following-up with relevant mentions online.

A lot to take in, I know, but in my experience to decide on which tool is best for your business – test a couple of them to see what results they bring back. Fact is the efficiency of ORM tools differs from business to business, particularly when it comes to the geographical region where your customers are situated, as some tools often pick things up better within a specific region than in others.

3. The Ugly:

Often the ‘Ugly, really pops it’s head out when a business is already utilising an ORM tool. A couple of things I’ve picked up:

• Try this: tweet the words “affiliate marketing” and see the plethora of followers coming your way, with random @-replies and zero regard in which the context you used the words. Spamming is becoming more “sophisticated” through abuse of these tools.
• With the volume of mentions that might come your way, losing sight of the individual might become increasingly likely. When ORM becomes an automated find-and-respond, too many business have fallen into that trap and have lost a great deal of trust.
• As much as this post is about the tools, one cannot focus purely on the technology to do the job for you. The power of the human voice and initiative of the human mind is essential in structuring your ORM efforts successfully.
• Social media, like any other channel, has its rules – authenticity is rewarded, privacy must be guarded, sharing is encouraged etc – not understanding these “rules”, lead to problems. How often have companies jumped into the space with a typical ‘corporate messaging’ and got burned.
• “With great power, comes great responsibility” – if your tools are in place, the mentions are coming in, you are managing them nicely, you have set an expectation. It is a huge risk if that expectation is put out there and the point comes where you cannot deal with every individual mention. Ensure that systems to allow for scalability is put in place.

I’ve been impressed by the smarts of some the ORM tools out there. Some of which are really impressive and I’m sure will continue to improve, as well as open the door for new players in this space.

However, a respected digital analyst once said to me:

“Humans will always trump algorithms”

Even in going through the process of selecting the appropriate tools, you and your team’s application and management of these tools can be the difference between good, bad or ugly.

Some recommendations for further reading on ORM tools:

http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog/2008/03/03/34-online-reputation-management-tools/

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_manage_your_online_reputation.php

http://www.futurelab.net/blogs/marketing-strategy-innovation/2009/03/8_tools_for_online_reputation.html

http://outspokenmedia.com/guides/orm-guide/

http://www.heavychef.com/how-to-manage-orm-simply/

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/whats_next_in_social_media_monitoring.php

http://mashable.com/2008/12/29/brand-reputation-monitoring-tools/

http://mashable.com/2008/12/24/free-brand-monitoring-tools/

You are a student. You are studying for Physics final exams.

You decided to switch on your PC/laptop and stand in front of your webcam.

You hold-up a piece of paper (provided to you by the teacher/downloaded and printed from the web) to the webcam and what you see in front of you is an interactive, 3-dimensional representation of a rollercoaster – explaining to you the laws of Newton…

I introduce to you LearnAR, a tearning tool for the future.

LearnAR combines the real world with online-multimedia-content, through using a web cam and a bit of software. At it’s core using the technology behind Augmented Reality.

Check out a demo of this tool:

LearnAR’s educational resource pack contains a set of interactive learning assignments across languages, math, physical education, biology and more.

(no doubt this was something I could’ve used back in the day!)

A huge opportunity for brands to latch on to an educational drive, get in front of the elusive, attention-starving and influential youth market, whilst providing real value in a wow-factor kinda way.

Alternatively, a tool like this can be something to invest in for internal staff learning, right?

Can you see the opportunities? Massive.

Takes online learning to a new level, doesn’t it!

The study used the following age brackets as a base: 

• Kids: 2-11 years old
• Teens: 12-17 years old
• Young adults: 18-24 years old
• Adults1: 25-34 years old
• Adults2: 35-49 years old
• Mature adults: 50-64 years old
• Seniors: 65+ years old

The results are as follow (diagrams below):

1. FACEBOOK

2. TWITTER

3. LINKEDIN

Although it is no surprise that the ‘adult’ segments form the nucleus of most of the network’s member bases, what interests me is the prominence of the 50-64 (and 65+) year olds – the ‘Silver Surfer*’ demographic as it often referred to.

With Silver surfers becoming the fastest growing Internet demographic group in South Africa (source: Online Publishers Association), it is indeed a relevant demographic and has become quite a hot topic of discussion in recent times.

Overall though, I think we can all agree that within the South African context Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – though, especially Facebook and to a lesser extent, Twitter – are dominant forces within our online and mobile web space.

It would thus make sense to do your due diligence and understand the digital habits of your customers online.

(via BNET)

*An adult, generally 50 years of age or older, who frequently surfs the web and spends time online (”silver” refers to the colour of their hair)