It makes our job very hard as digital marketers. As much as we shout about the ‘brand building’ properties of buying space online, nothing really beats a solid, honest-to-goodness click-through to a client’s website. This is the Holy Grail of online advertising, and it’s worthwhile to examine the top 3 reasons why internet users avoid banners at all costs.

Reason 1: We’re living in the Attention Economy
You can read more here, but to summarise: a) we’ve exposed to too much information online, b) we’ve become better at filtering out unnecessary information, c) our attention is thus worth more than it was in the past.

Reason 2: We’ve had too many bad experiences
Trust me, you can click on 50 banner ads and the odds are that 49 of them will lead to poor experiences on the other side. This means either a) the page that you’re led to (the landing page) does not match the promise of the banner b) the execution on the page you come to is terrible.

Reason 3: Banners interrupt our browsing experience
Let’s face it. You’re not there to look at freaking banners. You came to a specific page for a specific reason. The banner is an interruption; an aberration in your online journey. Marketers who understand this know that the best way for a banner to work is to augment the content on the page. Relevant, functional banner content is the way forward. An example is throwing up relevant, up-to-date stock prices on a banner appearing on a financial site, or a finance calculator on a car site.

There are more reasons, sure, but these three highlight the main reasons why you’ll probably ignore 99 out of the next 100 banners you see. If we, as marketers, understand these reasons, it will set us on the right direction to creating banner adverts that convert.

In the meantime, check this out: “Probably the best banner advert in the world“

Mistake #1: Underestimate your audience

This is a biggie. Marketers have been doing this for a while. A classic case was South African ISP iBurst who were signing up 10’s of thousands of new subscribers a few years back and began to suffer major downtimes. Their response: Start a blog. The customer service guy, Ed, was vilified in public and was never heard from again. In remarkably similar circumstances, we’ve recently seen AT&T do the same thing with Seth the Blogger Guy, who was supposed to address customers complaining about dropped calls and poor service. The ‘community’ soon found out that Seth was actually an employee of AT&T’s PR company and took him to the cleaners.

Mistake #2: Neglect to plan (it’s a “conversation”, why should I plan?)

We see this often, and sometimes have fallen into this trap ourselves. An example is our own Heavy Chef Twitter account, which is lying painfully dormant* was set up without any clue as to who would run it and how we could optimise it. The problem is that it can backfire on you and represent you as unprofessional and inconsistent. The idea is to list your objectives, then select the Social Media channels that are most appropriate. Put deadlines and timelines to them, and keep measuring against your original benchmarks.

Mistake #3: Think people care (Why should I give away free stuff?)

“If you build it, they will come,” said Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams. Nope. They won’t. We’re too busy, and besides, “What’s in it for me?” Attention is valuable nowadays, so give me something in return. We now know that pure content is not enough, unless you’re giving something of real tangible value – it can be a way to make money, or an actual physical thing, or invitations to events. You’ll need to figure out what’s compelling about your Social Media offering to make people stick around.

Mistake #4: Not being authentic

The whole point of Social Media is that it’s, well, social. If you don’t want to be social, then don’t do it. The reason why links move so quickly around the social networks is because the medium magnifies normal conversations. Where you can 10 people sitting round a fire in reality, you can seat 10 million around the virtual version. Amazon’s Twitter account, for example, tweets automatically when the Amazon blog is updated – rather than a real person, or a team amalgamating into one Twitter account, conveying cool information, scoops, reviews and opinions. So, if you want to start a fire, make it authentic one (at least virtually).

Mistake #5: Ignore design and usability

After meeting leaders and CEO’s, marketing managers and brand custodians over the past year, it appears to me that the look n’ feel of Social Media channels often falls by the wayside. Set up a Facebook page? Sure! It’ll take 5 minutes. My company Twitter account? Heck, who cares if it has the default Twitter shade of turquoise? Companies often miss a trick here. As the adage goes, ‘you don’t judge a book by its cover, but you can tell a lot about whether you want to spend money buying it’. Usability testing, brand consistency, creative messaging, navigability, simplicity – all these things need to be carefully considered.

Marketers: here are some required reading links you’ll want to look at -

• Superlist of What NOT To Do In Social Media (UPDATED)
• 6 Stupid Mistakes Companies Make with Their Online Communities
• Twitter FAIL! The 8 worst brands on the world’s hottest microblog

* Our Twitter account DOES feature in our future strategy, just for the record : )

2. Corporate speak
Another pervasive mistake. Now you know, so don’t YOU do the same. The idea behind social media is that it’s social (*duh!). Corporate lingo – where your’re trying to sound smarter than you are – doesn’t work. Break down the barriers and talk in the same language as your customers. Unless, of course, your clients are grey-suited corporates. Then, maybe,  it’s ok.

3. Dishonesty
If you lie, you will get bust. ‘Nuff said.

4. Non-disclosure
Almost as bad as lying, non-disclosure is where, within your social media outlets, you pretend you’re not aware of problems that are occurring in your products or your organisation. This also applies to punting products or offerings without letting your readers know that they’re actually your products.

5. Cliches
Okay, we’re all guilty here. Words like twittersphere, synergy, energize, paradigm and low-hanging fruit… there are some words and phrases that are just so done.

6. Too personal
We DON’T want to know about your account manager and her son’s toilet training habits. Or if your community manager thinks that rash on his thigh is hindering his productivity. Not cool… and certainly not going to raise your online profile.

7. Not personal enough
This relates to point number 2, corporate speak. Blogs, Twitterstreams, social networks and Facebook pages work because they rely on interaction between people. It’s a personal thing. You need be engaging, compelling and relevant. Just don’t spill all the beans (point no. 6).

8. Lack of research
This is another trap we all fall into. It’s so easy to convey opinion as fact. Stats derived from conversation at the networking breakfast you went to last week do not count. You need to Google it, and cross-reference it. This is maybe very un-Heavy Chef like of me, since I often use opinion as fact, but that’s the way I write. But I do try avoid writing opinions, and then cover them up as facts.

9. Lack of authenticity
This means: if you’re not passionate and knowledgeable about the topic that you’re writing about, DON’T write about it. We see this all the time. Companies put their ‘corporate social media’ strategy in place, then task a junior in the marketing team to populate their various channels with content. This is more damaging than helpful.

10. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes
Okay, so we’ve listed 9 mistakes to avoid – the last point on this list is to NOT make mistakes. This is the beauty and the paradox of social media. Don’t let this list dishearten you – the point of social media is to get your message out there, and engage in conversation with your community. You can’t do this without trying something. A Facebook page, Twitter profile, wiki – anything! Do it. Go ahead and get your hands dirty!

For me, Facebook places more emphasis on personal aspects of life such as your relationship status and who your friends are. Twitter, on the other hand, has moved from telling people what you ate for breakfast and what you got for your birthday, to rather sharing links of interesting articles or videos you came across. As Caroline McCarthy explains, “depending on what you subscribe to, you can get ski reports, links to news headlines and blog feeds, mini-recipes, and celebrity-stalking intel.” These boundaries do overflow once and a while but let’s focus on the big picture here.

Friend vs. Follow

This is an easy way to distinguish between the two platforms. Facebook uses the word ‘Friends’ and Twitter says ‘Follow’. In his post on Why Facebook Isn’t Poised to Steal Twitter’s Thunder, Mark Hendrickson refers to Mike Butcher and his four particular ways in which he thinks Facebook “won’t kill Twitter”. He points out that Facebook has a different relationship model than Twitter: “On Facebook, you create a simple two-way friendship with someone. On Twitter, you can choose to follow someone and you can be followed, but the following relationship doesn’t have to be bidirectional.” This means that Twitter does not aim to create a personal relationship between its users. I follow Gareth Cliff and Ryan Seacrest on Twitter – that doesn’t mean I am friends with them or even know them personally. On Facebook you can join groups and fan pages on celebrities but your friends list consists mostly of people you know personally. Yes, once again, the exceptions are there.

What’s on your mind vs. What are you doing

Okay, the difference is slight and miniscule but people do answer these questions differently. Caroline agrees that they do bear quite a bit of a resemblance. On this point, Mark says that Facebook users answer the question more faithfully than Twitter users. “They actually provide information about what they’re currently doing, perhaps because they are prompted with a field that starts with something like ‘Mark is’. And the news feed lists their entries as action items (‘Mark is having a bike ride’ or at least ‘Mark likes biking outside’) under a tab called Status Updates.” Meanwhile, Twitter users in general use it, as Mark frames it, a public broadcasting system.

Mark says that Facebook fails to challenge Twitter with this new platform upgrade because the two companies in the end serve significantly different behavioural paradigms. This is the point I am trying to get across. Facebook and Twitter are so vastly different regarding their “behavioural paradigms” that it should not be compared or to a large extent affect each other.

There are other comparisons and examples of Facebook and Twitter’s difference but I think this gets the gist of it. I suggest that Facebook should stick to connecting people from a personal perspective because that for me is in the end what makes Facebook significant and that which makes it so different from Twitter.

Not sure whether it’s intentional, but I’d love to know the official stance from KFC. These pics are being sent via email, with the subject ‘When you’re feeling bored at KFC’ to just about everybody today, and it’s going round the world at a brisk pace.

kfc

kfc

kfc

kfc

kfc

Classic stuff.

Thanks to Tom from Boondoggle for the link.

We will post it on The Heavy Chef site because we’ve been trying to get Mike to post articles for the past 2 years without success.

In lieue of Mike sharing his wisdom about digital marketing, this will have to do…

Send your complaints to fred [at] worldwidecreative.co.za.

My apologies in advance.

blogging

As a blogger myself I know the importance of creating an online identity. I started snooping around to see what has been written on blogging and how much people really know about it. It is strange to me that people still define a blog as an online journal or diary, because this definition for me is a bit out dated.

Blogging has moved past only being a journal filled with a blogger’s personal thoughts and experiences. Another definition I found was by Cedar Pruitt who said it is an “ongoing documentation that can be viewed by anyone in the world with access to the internet”. This definition is probably more accurate but it still doesn’t dig into the essence of a blog.

After sending out a survey on blogging to TUKS journalism and communication students, I was shocked at how little they knew. All of those who replied said they do not have a blog but interestingly one student replied saying “Yes, if Facebook counts as a blog”. It was a great shock to me to realize that there are people that are clueless when it comes to the online world. Personally, when I studied journalism we didn’t even glance in the direction of online media and that’s tragic.

When asked whether blogging could become a form of journalism most students replied “no” and said that it does not require journalistic skill. What is ironic about this statement is how incorrect it really is in terms of how many great journalists there are in the world who do not have a journalistic degree or ‘skill’.

According to Cedar Pruitt blogging has already started to have a powerful effect on mainstream media. An important characteristic of a blog that makes it different from other forms of information media is the ability of its readers to give immediate feedback by publishing a comment on a story.

The blogging phenomenon is here and it’s real, but what people want to know is ‘why blog?’ and the answer is clearly not reaching everyone.

—————–
The great terror in the PC industry is that it’s created a $300 device so good, most people will simply no longer feel a need to shell out $1,000 for a portable computer. They pray that netbooks remain a “secondary buy” the little mobile thingy you get after you already own a normal-size laptop. But it’s also possible that the next time you’re replacing an aging laptop, you’ll walk into the store and wonder, “Why exactly am I paying so much for a machine that I use for nothing but email and the Web?” And Microsoft and Intel and Dell and HP and Lenovo will die a little bit inside that day.

The decision is probably out of American hands. Indeed, living in the US where netbooks are only just taking off it can be hard to grasp just how popular the devices have become in Europe and Asia and the degree to which they’re already altering the landscape. As Shih told me, “I was talking to the chair of one of the major Taiwanese notebook manufacturers, and he said, ‘This is where my next billion customers comes from.’ And he was not referring to the US.” He meant the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) where billions of very price-conscious customers have yet to buy their first computer. And the decisions they make Windows or Linux? Microsoft wares or free cloud apps? will have enormous influence on how computing evolves in the next few years.
—————–

As we witness the rise of the cheap netbook, shall we see the rise of operating systems like Ubuntu and Open Source software applications?

I feel a tingle coming on…

Thanks Travis for the [link]

pepsi

This is great from Cracked Magazine: 9 Corporate Attempts At “Edgy” That Failed Hilariously – it’s a list of advertising campaigns that try to pull off the slightly ‘left of centre’ communication that has worked every now and then. With all the hype around viral marketing these days, it’s probably not a bad idea to keep this list at the back of your mind when pitching new concepts to your clients.

Somehow you’ve got to wonder how some of these conversations went down. Picture the boardroom of Pepsi before the ’suicide’ campaign:

“Johnson! What concept have you come up with?”

“Sir, kids these days are sick of the wallpaper advertising we’re thowing at them. They’re not buying it. They’re just not that into it, sir.”

“What are they into?”

“It’s called ‘Emo’ sir.”

“What? Johnson?”

“Emo. It’s the new thing. Sir, kids don’t want friendly. They don’t want fun.”

“Well, what do they want Johnson?”

“They want to kill themselves, sir.”

Enter the Pepsi Max ‘Lonely Calorie’ campaign, picturing a cartoon character committing suicide in a variety of different ways. It’s awesome stuff. It’s not just a little out there – it pushes every boundary created in advertising.

I’m pretty sure Johnson is hitting the streets right now with a briefcase full of printed CV’s. You’ve got to hand it to him though – he must be a pretty persuasive guy to get it from idea to execution.

Check out the full list here.

[Thanks Shaun for the link]