However, this one pretty much says it all when trying to explain to someone the difference between an online ad campaign, and online PR viagra online. The key words: Time intensive, listening before engaging cialis online. online pharmacy viagra. generic cialis.Perfect for illustrating why an earned media approach isn't a quick fix and takes a while to work.
For obvious reasons, this is a subject matter that’s impossible for me to ignore!
When we originally up the agency, Cow’s co-founder Siân ordered a book called ‘Contented Cows give better milk’, which I am guessing was all about employee engagement in a company. I say guessing as on my part its one of those many books that lay on the shelf gathering dust.
However it turns out that this is really true – contented cows (I am not sure about ‘Cows’) really do give better milk. Scientists at Newcastle University in the North of England, carried out a study that showed giving a cow a name and treating it as an ‘individual’ increases its milk yield by almost 500 pints.
According to Dr Catherine Douglas of Newcastle University’s School of Agriculture: "Just as people respond better to the personal touch, cows also feel happier and more relaxed if they are given a bit more one-to-one attention generic viagra."
So how does all this tie back to the world at large ? Marketing blogger Zack Brandit talks about a number of lessons that our English dairy herds have for the rest of us.
Firstly there is the point of branding starting within a company, so you’ll have a greater chance of making a success of things if the people you work with are happy. Then there’s the fact that personalising a consumer’s experience and starting a dialogue with him / her increases brand loyalty.
However, the most interesting point is it reminds us how moods can spread through the herd.
Sentiments and emotions can be broadcast among clusters of people and so “the market” should never be perceived as one big uniform herd, “but rather, a collection of individuals with names and personalities.”
Love these ads created by Saatchi & Saatchi Milan for the Sci-Fi channel. The posters turn the tables on the classic 50s and 60s alien invasion flicks.
The first one is a spoof of film posters for the 1954 movie, Creature from the Black Lagoon.
A study published in the Journal ‘Science’ confirms the fact that colours affect your mood and shows that whether you use red or blue in an ad makes a difference to what your audience thinks.
Juliet Zhu of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver carried out the study on 600 undergraduate students and as well as testing them for memory recall when using different colours, asked them to create new products or imagine new uses for everyday ones.
Red was the better colour associated with memory and concentration, while blue helped with - and I really hate this phrase! - quite literally blue sky thinking.
That might seem obvious but in fact, Dr Zhu’s study found that it’s not something we are aware of on a day to day basis, with over two thirds of students predicting that blue would help with both the creativity and memory task.
"They always think blue will help them do better regardless of the task. The reality is, it only helps when the task is creative in nature. When you have cause for attention to detail you should go with red", said Dr Zhu.
Several of the tests specifically looked at colours and advertising campaigns. Red was better if you wanted people to focus on the technical details of a camera, while blue was better if you wanted to highlight all the possibilities the camera could be used for.
At the same time, when taking a fake brand of toothpaste, red worked better when getting through the message ‘cavity prevention.’ But blue was better for the most positive message ‘tooth whitening.’
Reporting on Dr Zhu’s study, The Toronto Globe and Mail cites another colour researcher, Markus Maier of Stony Brook University in New York, who says he has found that red can also have an inhibitive and disorientating effect. One of his recent studies involved bombarding an exam test subject with a flash of red light. Markus Maier found that this ‘flash of danger’ then ended up taking up valuable brain space was needed to sit the exam.
Wikipedia is obviously edited by a vast community of volunteers. By and large they are public spirited and committed to being objective. But sometimes articles are changed back and forth between people with opposing points of view and biases, and you the reader won’t be any the wiser.
Wikidashboard sits on top of Wikipedia. By showing you the history of edits, it allows you to make up your own mind about the veracity of each article and also gives a little guide as to how contentious it is. It also tells you who has been editing a particular piece.
Useful especially when you look at political entries, or indeed ones about brands.
The other day in an article that’s gained a lot of attention, Guardian tech journalist Bobbie Johnson proclaimed that he’s done with social media. If you haven’t done so it’s definitely worth a read. In summary Bobbie says:
“I've had it with social media. Not social networking per se, but the incessant chatter about how "social media" is changing the world. How it's going mainstream. How it's the biggest change we've ever seen.”
So we have the incessant squawking of “experts”, and the talking up of the same people again and again and again as the ones everyone should ‘follow’ - something Kevin Palmer discusses in a great post entitled ‘The social media echo chamber makes me not want to listen.’
The core problem is that social media is being looked at in isolation as something only to be touched by a select group of gurus. Instead, to my mind it should be an intrinsic part of every marcoms campaign – you have an idea of how you are going to target print, broadcast and also online.
It's a component of the core campaign, and an important one. But it doesn't sit on its own.
So while I completely get why organisations have individuals like the excellent Shannon Paul (Detroit RedWings), Kelly Feller (Intel) and Scott Monty (Ford) on-board to operate in this space, it seems to make less sense for actual agencies to set up specialist divisions – and every week I still read about someone here in the UK doing just that. For the reasons mentioned above, we took the opposite approach.
We once had a division (Herd was originally the name of it, I simply kept the URL for the blog). But we stopped that last year, thinking that it would be better to skill up all the core account handlers in online media knowledge. And while one or two of the Cows like myself definitely have more of an interest in this area, I’d never bill myself as an ‘expert.’
So the backlash is in full swing, as demonstrated by those two videos below. Maybe no bad thing. Bobbie says at the end of his piece, “I'm sick of "social media sensations". And I'm sick of social media. Social media is people. People talk about stuff. The end.”
Or, maybe more accurately, as Chris Lake says on econsultancy, “'Social media', I fear, has been overused to the point of losing all meaning.”
For the first video (source), watch the first 40 seconds....it’s scarily close to the truth! The second (via Kelly Tall) is maybe a bit cruel, but pokes fun at the whole phenomenon.
Ben based this calculation on Facebook’s expected ad revenue, the number of US users, and the average amount of time they spend on the social network.
That’s no accident, as we’ve posted before (for example, here, here and here) a lot of Facebook brand activity has a low value for the simple reason that you are reaching an audience that’s not in the mood to be bombarded with these kind of messages.
For a good overview of some of the things you can do, see Advergirl’s tips on setting up Facebook pages for your brand.
Ikea (whose catalogue is apparently the 3rd most published work after the Bible and Harry Potter) has been doing a great piece of activity in German speaking Europe.
Originally rolled out in 2007, Ikea has again been giving shoppers the chance to star in their own personalised ‘3D catalogue’, featuring themselves. The video explains it all.
Update: Kate Richardson pointed me towards this post by McCann Sydney strategy director Mark Pollard on 'How Ikea Games You.' It has some good insights about Ikea sucks you in through disorientation, such as the use of the "great hall of panic."
I try and keep the Cow news and case studies to a minimum on this blog, but this is something I wanted to shout about as it's a milestone for us.
Our colleagues in Cape Town have produced Cow's very first TV ad, for South African mobile phone network Vodacom - turning the 10 second spot around in 24 hours so it could feature on the premiere of season five of 'Idols' on TV channel MNet.
The spot promotes Gridstar, where South African cellphone users film and upload themselves showcasing their talents, for the chance to win prizes.
Leo Burnett Frankfurt’s excellent blog points us to an example of what it calls a “human brand act” from clothing retailer Lands End.
We all lose gloves and mittens all the time, with young kids in particular chucking them away at random intervals so they won’t have to wear them. As a result (assuming you live in the US), Lands End has come up with a solution to the one mitten problem, they will sell you a single one at half the price of a set with free shipping.
Surprisingly, Lands End has not really shouted about a service that could earn it a lot of consumer goodwill. Even to the extent of not having a way you can order a replacement mitten online (you need to phone).
A fascinating study has appeared on Marketing Charts about “vanity” freephone numbers having a higher recall rate of websites. Now, it is worth saying that this study was commissioned by 800response so there is an element of ‘well they would say that’ about it. But it’s interesting reading nonetheless as it flies in the face of what’s received wisdom.
US consumers were played an ad for a make-believe company “Bayside Auto Sales.” One featured 1-800-New-Auto (good luck in getting hold of that one) and another featured www.baysideautosales.com (ie the direct URL of the company).
The phone number turned out to have a 52% better recall rate than the website. It doesn’t say what the time lag was, but it does reinforce the point that you’d do well to expect your consumers to remember a website once they got home. And though they could look it up there and then on their mobile phones, it has to be pretty special for them to make the effort.
Moreover once they do go on your website, 40% will go and check out the competition straight after wards.
“The results suggest that advertisers who use their websites as the exclusive consumer response tool risk losing potential customers,” said Laura Noonan, VP of Marketing at 800response, commenting on her survey.
Yes, but in addition to including a good old fashioned phone number in your communication, it shows that even online companies can’t rely on their websites as the only way of interacting with customers. Time to take your content out elsewhere instead of waiting for them to come to you.
Mr Tweet, the Twitter friend recommendation service, has released a study about why Twitter is going mainstream.
According to its survey, 69% of respondents think the micro-blogging platform will shed its early adopter service. Now that’s 69% of respondents who are Twitter users, and so would have more of an incentive to talk it up.
What's more interesting are Mr Tweet’s seven reasons why this prediction will come to pass. I’m not so sure about three, but the other four seem to make sense:
The volume of news coverage about it. Twitter has had a huge amount of publicity, but this is no guarantee of success. According to a report we did for a client which was looking into it, from Jan – June 2007 the virtual world Second Life had 500+ media mentions in the UK alone. And currently it has a little over 500,000 regular users worldwide ...
Brands are engaged. Again as they were in Second Life, only to leave again in a hurry when their investment didn’t pay off. Fortunately for Twitter there is no real investment needed save someone’s time.
But I do agree with:
“One simple tool, infinite uses.” There are countless ways you can use Twitter to connect and share information, it’s an enormously useful service
Facebook status updates on steroids. Twitter takes one of the core features of Facebook (the ability to tell the world what you are doing), and magnifies them through the use of countless applications that have been developed by third parties.
A passionate, intelligent user base that spreads the word.
The need to feel connected in a way that other networks can’t deliver. Facebook is still a way to connect with friends. Twitter is a way to make “friends” (and the “" is deliberate) - services like Mr Tweet actively encourage you to follow people you might not necessarily know.
As I’ve said before, I'd never expect Twitter to become the new Facebook. Just from my own personal observations, from all the people I know who have started accounts but never used them, you need to be fairly committed. But then again, raw numbers aren't everything.
Instead it’s the type of user that makes Twitter attractive, and not the numbers. In traditional media, plenty of outlets thrive based on the perceived quality rather than quantity of their viewers, and so it may well be here.
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