The death of cookies or just some overdure regulation

We’ve been using behav­ioural tar­get­ing for a num­ber of years. It opti­mises media spend and ampli­fies cam­paigns to the peo­ple who count. And, if done well, your prospects won’t realise it’s hap­pen­ing. But the EU believes con­sumers need to be pro­tected and made aware of the meth­ods used to tar­get them. That’s why there’s new leg­is­la­tion com­ing into effect on 25th May.

So, what to do? Well, the gen­eral con­sen­sus out there is the fol­low­ing: If you’re adver­tis­ing through pub­lish­ers and affil­i­ate net­works you need to make users aware that you’re track­ing their behav­iour to serve tai­lored adver­tis­ing. But what’s the best solu­tion? It could get messy with mul­ti­ple alerts, pop-ups and overlays.

Well, there’s an indus­try ini­tia­tive led by the IAB seek­ing to pro­vide an ele­ment of self-regulation, with a sym­bol like this appear­ing on behav­iourally tar­geted ads.



When clicked the user will be advised on the data being cap­tured, how it is used to serve adver­tis­ing and asked for their explicit con­sent. They’re hop­ing to have this in place by the end of 2011. It seems like a sim­ple solu­tion that could work for the whole industry.

Mat­ters get a bit more com­pli­cated when you’re using cook­ies on sites that you own and admin­is­ter. The direc­tive seems to imply that you still need to makes users aware of what you’re doing. But there’s a view out there that if you’re using cook­ies to improve the user’s expe­ri­ence e.g. shop­ping cart, remem­ber­ing log-ins, pre­ferred con­tent, etc, then you don’t need to get explicit consent.

So, with the end of May loom­ing, here are a few things to start planning:

• When adver­tis­ing after May, con­sider using the enhanced notice (icon) to gather con­sent or opt-out.
• Appor­tion respon­si­bil­ity for data pri­vacy within the con­text of behav­ioural adver­tis­ing with pub­lish­ers and ad networks.
• Ensure your pri­vacy pol­icy on your web­site suf­fi­ciently dis­closes the use of cook­ies and how they will be used.
• Pro­vide a sim­ple means for users to pro­vide explicit con­sent or opt-out.
• Con­sider mak­ing “do not track” func­tion­al­ity com­pat­i­ble with the lat­est incar­na­tions of browsers from Microsoft, Google and Mozilla.

Whilst it’s highly unlikely that the leg­is­la­tion is going to be enforced any­time soon, as respon­si­ble mar­keters, we all need to have a posi­tion on the direc­tive and a plan to ensure we don’t fall foul of the law. So, if you need a bit of advice, get in touch and we’ll point you in the right direction.

The death of creativity

I came across this quote from George Lois and it got me think­ing…”Cre­ativ­ity can solve almost any prob­lem. The cre­ative act, the defeat of habit by orig­i­nal­ity, over­comes every­thing.”

I’ve got a nag­ging feel­ing that mar­ket­ing automa­tion is giv­ing today’s mar­keters a num­ber of bad habits. Don’t get me wrong, I’m truly bought into the tan­gi­ble ben­e­fits of auto­mated plat­forms — com­mu­ni­cat­ing at the right time based on expressed and behav­ioural data, iden­ti­fy­ing qual­ity leads and rout­ing them appro­pri­ately to sales. And once the mar­keters have got to grips with the plat­form, they deliver greater effi­cien­cies, speed­ier exe­cu­tion, more con­trol and in-depth measurement.

But, at what cost?

When talk­ing to mar­keters, their approach to cre­at­ing a new cam­paign is often to repli­cate a pro­gram, swap out the header graph­ics and change the calls to action.  Really, is that what’s going to engage their tar­get audi­ence? Surely one lead gen­er­a­tion pro­gram can’t sim­ply be re-purposed. What about audi­ence insight and under­stand­ing? Who are they, where are they in the buy­ing cycle, what are their needs from your con­tent and what’s your unique propo­si­tion that’s going to excite them?

We need to get back to the fun­da­men­tals of defin­ing the cre­ative and busi­ness require­ments of a cam­paign. Only then do we develop cre­ative con­cepts that will sup­port these require­ments and deliver the best piece of mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion pos­si­ble, whilst at the same time defin­ing the opti­mal con­tact strat­egy for imple­men­ta­tion through mar­ket­ing automa­tion. It’s my belief that effec­tive cam­paign exe­cu­tion can only be realised through a com­bi­na­tion of left– and right-brain thinking.

So, if you find your auto­mated cam­paigns are deliv­er­ing less value for you over time, maybe it’s time to take a step back and breath some cre­ativ­ity back into your cam­paigns. You never know, it might just work…

Guaranteed leads. Publishers should try harder...

So here’s me think­ing that pub­lish­ers have really missed an oppor­tu­nity when it comes to pro­vid­ing guar­an­teed leads from their web properties.

Admit­tedly, whitepa­per pro­grammes work well when you’re try­ing to gen­er­ate a list of names. But, some­times that’s all they are – a list of names who are often unre­cep­tive when followed-up by tele­mar­ket­ing. Surely all of these “names” are active on the publisher’s web­site – they’ve been vis­it­ing, review­ing con­tent, con­tribut­ing in forums, etc. But all of this infor­ma­tion isn’t cap­tured when they fill-in a form and the data is passed on to the client.

Surely pub­lish­ers should be able to pro­vide some­thing that looks more like a lead than a name. Yes, they’ve reg­is­tered for a piece of high value con­tent, but there’s also so much more infor­ma­tion that can be appended to their pro­file e.g. how many times they’ve been on the web­site, areas of inter­est, lev­els of inter­ac­tion and con­tri­bu­tion, etc.

So, give me a score for each per­son that shows a com­bi­na­tion of “Pro­file Fit” and “Interest/Activity Fit”. And, as time is of the essence when hand­ing over leads (think of it as an atomic half-life of oppor­tu­nity), don’t give me a list of names once a week. Find out how to auto­mat­i­cally pass leads to our CRM sys­tem in near real-time. That’s why open APIs were invented.

In my hum­ble opin­ion, if pub­lish­ers can’t pro­vide this speed of ser­vice and level of infor­ma­tion, then guar­an­teed lead pro­grammes will become obsolete.

Social Media - Fire, Aim, Ready

Dur­ing a meal with a client the other day, she men­tioned that a divi­sion in her com­pany was deploy­ing a task force to develop a social media strat­egy. Whilst I under­stood the sen­ti­ment, I explained that this seemed like the wrong thing to do. I was obvi­ously accused of heresy and ignor­ing the most impor­tant trans­for­ma­tion in mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions since Johannes Guten­burg devel­oped the print­ing press in 15th Cen­tury. After all, which self-respecting com­pany doesn’t have a fully defined social media strategy?

Let me explain. Back in the bub­bly days at the end of the last mil­len­nium, every­body was talk­ing about how to define and adopt a new media strat­egy. These days, nobody would con­sider a new media strat­egy, but instead how dig­i­tal should be used as part of a broader mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions plan. It’s the same with social media.

Don’t think about engag­ing with your cus­tomers in social silos or hav­ing a knee jerk reac­tion to your CMO say­ing “we need a Face­book fan page”. Look at first under­stand­ing your tar­get audi­ence and what you want to achieve through your com­mu­ni­ca­tions. This should then help you to define your com­mu­ni­ca­tions strat­egy. It’s only at this point that you’ll be able to define which mar­ket­ing chan­nels to use and whether social plat­forms are even rel­e­vant within this plan.

Reas­sur­ingly, a work­shop at our recent Social Media Hud­dle made me realise that we’re now at a point where many of our tech­nol­ogy clients are truly start­ing to inte­grate social media into their mar­ket­ing plans. By doing this, they’re now able to add higher lev­els of engage­ment, col­lab­o­ra­tion and cre­ate dia­logue with their prospects, cus­tomers and chan­nel through social plat­forms. With­out los­ing sight of the fact that these activ­i­ties are part of a broader mar­ket­ing mix, involv­ing paid media, search and more tra­di­tional com­mu­ni­ca­tion vehicles.

How Salesforce.com do social

The final pre­sen­ta­tion at last week’s Social Media Hud­dle was from Xabier Ormaz­a­bal. He’s Senior Man­ager, Prod­uct Mar­ket­ing over at Salesforce.com. His 25 minute slot was filled with a huge amount of insight and action­able advice. Here’s a quick sum­mary of the points I took from it.

Salesforce.com build their social media strat­egy around three pil­lars of online com­mu­nity. Seems like a pretty straight for­ward model:

• First ensure that your cor­po­rate site and other owned web prop­er­ties are work­ing hard for you. Focus on build­ing engage­ment through knowl­edge shar­ing, user groups, blogs and ideas sharing.

• Sec­ondly, cre­ate your own branded chan­nels on exist­ing social plat­forms. Use lis­ten­ing tools like Radian6 to under­stand what peo­ple are say­ing and where they’re say­ing it. Engage with peo­ple where they spend their time and dis­trib­ute your con­tent across YouTube, Twit­ter, Flickr and Slideshare.

• Finally, cre­ate con­ver­sa­tions across the web on sites where you don’t have branded chan­nels e.g. Twit­ter, third party blogs, forums and part­ners sites. And, make sure your social media guide­lines are up to date and dis­sem­i­nate the poli­cies to your con­tent creators.

A good sug­ges­tion that came out of this last pil­lar was how to cal­cu­late a rough ROI for your social activ­i­ties. For exam­ple, first cal­cu­late how much a video costs to cre­ate and to upload to YouTube. Then, ascer­tain the £/$ value of a video view (that’s the tricky bit, but any media buyer should be able to give you a fig­ure). Mul­ti­ply this value by the num­ber of views and divide by the cost. Easy!

There was also a debate about whether peo­ple should have mul­ti­ple accounts on Twit­ter e.g. their “work” pro­file and their “per­sonal” pro­file. The audi­ence seemed split on this topic. I per­son­ally pre­fer a sin­gle account @Wrigsy where I Tweet about a broad range of top­ics (from climb­ing moun­tains to our lat­est new busi­ness wins). But, I sup­pose I’m lucky that I can also Tweet through our Ban­ner account @BannerCorp when the topic is purely focused on work.

If you’re a salesforce.com user, start using Chat­ter. It’s their most suc­cess­ful prod­uct launch to date and gives users the sort of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion they expect from plat­forms like Facebook.

POWNAR - the power of news and recommendation

CNN have cer­tainly pushed the bound­aries when it comes to explor­ing the power of rec­om­men­da­tion and the value of shared con­tent. Their global research ini­tia­tive Pow­nar, illus­trates why peo­ple share con­tent, how they share it and the type of con­tent they pre­fer to share. In the US and Europe, peo­ple tend to share con­tent for altru­is­tic rea­sons, whereas in Asia, shar­ing con­tent is more about broad­cast­ing your sta­tus. As you might sus­pect, arti­cles with embed­ded video and images are most likely to be shared. And, Face­book is the pri­mary plat­form used for sharing.

Most inter­est­ing from the research is the effect that shar­ing has on the per­son who is shar­ing the con­tent and those receiv­ing it. Peo­ple are 3.7 times more engaged with con­tent that has been rec­om­mended. And, those who share the con­tent are 2 times more engaged.

There’s also an inter­est­ing uplift in brand met­rics. Shared con­tent increases brand con­sid­er­a­tion by 12%, brand rec­om­men­da­tion by 19% and brand favoura­bil­ity by an astound­ing 19%.

The key actions to take from this research are to assess your con­tent to ensure it’s opti­mised for rec­om­men­da­tion and make it share­able. And, find a lady in Paris to be your indi­vid­ual broadcaster…

Take a look at the attached press release to under­stand how semi­otics, con­tent arche­types and bio­met­rics can be used to under­stand the effect that shared con­tent can have on your brand.

CNNI POWNAR — the power of news and recommendation

Getting the most out of LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an unde­ni­able force when it comes to B2B social net­works. Henry Clifford-Jones showed us some fas­ci­nat­ing sta­tis­tics – over 80 mil­lion pro­fes­sion­als view­ing 1.5billion pages per month across 600,000 pro­fes­sional groups.

When you want to build a group on LinkedIn, it’s only going to be a suc­cess if you build it around a com­mon inter­est and pur­pose. An empty LinkedIn group can be a very lonely place…

So, the more focused and well-defined the group is, the higher the level of par­tic­i­pa­tion and engage­ment. Also, don’t get too dis­ap­pointed if most peo­ple aren’t con­tribut­ing. LinkedIn reckon that for every per­son that con­tributes on the site, nine will com­ment and inter­act, whilst 90 will just sit back and con­sume the content.

The new inPages Platform

 

We were also lucky to take a sneak peak at the brand new inPages Plat­form. Our Hud­dle saw it just ahead of its global launch in New York. So, a bit of a scoop for our company.

So, what does inPages enable mar­keters to do?

Well, it does seem that LinkedIn has picked up on a well known fact – rec­om­men­da­tions from per­sonal acquain­tances are the most trusted form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion – and intro­duced a new tab on the com­pany pro­file page called Prod­ucts & Ser­vices. This areas of the site enables com­pa­nies to fea­ture infor­ma­tion about their prod­ucts, with onward links to their cor­po­rate sites.

LinkedIn Com­pany Prod­ucts and Ser­vices Page

But the clever bit here is that the new plat­form enables mem­bers to fea­ture in their pro­files the prod­ucts and ser­vices they use and to rec­om­mend them. This gives rec­om­men­da­tions a new level of cred­i­bil­ity – because they’re directly linked to a person’s pro­file. Thereby over­com­ing the con­cerns that many com­pa­nies actively “mas­sage” prod­uct rat­ings and rec­om­men­da­tions on other third party sites. I sus­pect that many tech mar­keters are already in a mad rush to get their prod­ucts and ser­vices listed.

How­ever, on reflec­tion, this new plat­form does raise a num­ber of inter­est­ing questions:

• Will com­pa­nies need to update their social guide­lines to encom­pass their employ­ees rec­om­mend­ing their own prod­ucts or those from other companies?
• If your pro­file fea­tures a large num­ber of prod­ucts and ser­vices, does this just open you up as a tar­get for sales guys? You’re clearly a per­son who influ­ences the pur­chase and based on the num­ber of prod­ucts, you’ve clearly got the budget…
• Look­ing at the demo of the plat­form, there doesn’t seem to be the func­tion­al­ity to pro­vide neg­a­tive feed­back. Surely these are often more impor­tant than pos­i­tive recommendations?

I’d be inter­ested to hear your thoughts on this topic.