Digital advertising & social media marketing, Sydney, Australia
As today was designated Recycle a Blog Post Day, I decided to go back to my very first post, which was written to explain web 2.0 as a digital trend to a traditional advertising agency I was working for at the time. The only thing I’ve changed is the title and added and substituted “social media for web 2.0 in the post
One of the first questions people ask me about digital trends is “What’s so great about social media?” The easiest way to describe it is to use the 30 second elevator speech.
Last week Nielsen released the 2009 Global Online Consumer Survey of over 25,000 Internet consumers from 50 countries. The survey covers degrees of trust consumers have for advertisers/brands. The top 3 are worth highlighting:
* 90% of consumers surveyed trusted recommendations from people they knew personally
* 70% trusted opinions from other consumers posted online
* 70% trusted brand websites
The key takeaway for me is that “strangers” opinions posted online offer as much trust to the consumer as the company website. That can be a glass half full or half empty depending which side of the social fence you sit on.
With the definition of customer experience lifecycles, marketers can calculate the most strategic influence points on the path to purchase. What interests me is the multiple touchpoints in a customer’s lifecycle where brands who use social media marketing can make a difference to a customer’s experience. I found inspiration in this post on How to define social media strategies by using the customer experience lifecycle
A standard customer experience lifecycle includes the following stages:
At the Social Media Club Sydney June event panel discussion Do you need an agency to run effective social media campaigns? Karla Courtney – Online Editor Qantas Travel Insider, and @qftravelinsider – represented the client perspective. Karla works client-side and has built a community around the @qftravelinsider Twitter account by engaging in conversations around travel. Watch the video excerpt from the evening.
Habitat is a trendy furniture store, set up by Terence Conran in the 1970s, for those who’ve never been to the UK its like a slightly more upmarket version of Ikea. @HabitatUK turned up on Twitter a couple of days ago, and decided to use trending topic #hashtags at the start of their tweets to get noticed. They used ones that had absolutely nothing to do with furniture, decorating, or shopping, but obviously the top hashtags for Thursday evening AEST such as #iPhone #mms #Apple and even Australia’s Masterchef contestant who got voted off #Poh. I found these on Twitter Search:
The microsite is dying, only most clients and (traditional above-the-line) agencies have not woken up to this yet. Adam Ostrow asks Is Social Media making corporate websites irrelevant? I agree with him and with We Are Social and say microsites are being killed off by social media (and search). Even David Armano just killed his website. Microsites are usually part of the silo’d channel marketing that clients (and some agencies) seem to love. So to have a brand campaign, you put out a TVC, some print ads, outdoor and then online is just the tacked on afterthought – and its usually the “matching baggage” banner advertising, and the microsite. Microsites exist because of a need for a campaign extension: a place to enter a competition, a place to go to when you’ve clicked on a banner to “find out more”, sometimes it’s a story that continues on from a television commercial. Except in most cases there’s not enough story to keep people hanging around to engage at all.
