BE BACK SHORTLEY

BE BACK SHORTLY ~ JUST DOING SOME REPAIRS

KIND REGARDS ~ DR. ASHE MEDFORTH

Mobile set to be fastest growing marketing medium

NEW RESEARCH conducted by the Internet Advertising Bureau research has found that 73 per cent of marketers think mobile will be the fastest growing medium for the next 5 years.

The study also showed that 95 per cent of digital budgets now include mobile allocations and only 5% of UK marketers not yet investing in the medium. Awareness and understanding of areas such as MMS, voice and video shortcodes has grown, with just 20 per cent of marketers having no experience in this area in 2009 compared to 66 per cent in 2008.

Knowledge of mobile search is also on the rise, with the amount of marketers with no experience of the discipline declining from 57 per cent to 29 per cent over the last 12 months. The research also found that compared to 2008, the majority of employees responsible for planning a mobile campaign within the agencies surveyed are mobile specialists, with the number of dedicated mobile experts increasing year-on-year. In 2008, around 37 per cent of those responsible for planning mobile campaigns within agencies were dedicated specialists with this figure rising to just over half (52 per cent) in 2009.

Agencies that took part in the survey were also asked what percentage of their digital spend is for mobile, and the results reveal that some 95 per cent of respondents included mobile in their overall digital budget. Within this, 30 per cent spent between 0 and 1 per cent, 46 per cent spent between 1 and 5 per cent, 13 per cent spent between 6 and 10 per cent with a further 6 per cent spending more than 11 per cent.

Looking to the future, some 40 per cent of agency respondents predicted they would be spending between 1 and 5 per cent of their digital budgets on mobile in 2011. A further 29 per cent believed they would be spending between 6 – 10 per cent and 13 per cent stated they would be spending between 11 and 20 per cent and just 1 per cent of agencies stated that they will not be allocating any budget to mobile in the next 2 years.

73 per cent of those surveyed agreed that mobile will be the fastest growing media for the next 5 years, with a further 73 per cent also believing that most media agencies will have a mobile specialist by 2010. In terms of using the medium to communicate with specific audiences, some 55 per cent of respondents agreed that in the future mobile will be the primary medium for communicating with 12 – 24 age group.  Regards….. Ashe, IT Bloke – London.

Twitter Ads Are Evil: Here’s Why

Advertisers are frustrated. You’re all having direct conversations with friends on Twitter, Facebook, blogs and the rest while totally bypassing the mass mediums they understand. Rather than consuming content all day on TV, in newspapers and on the radio, you’re engaging, one-to-one, with individuals you trust. They can’t get in the middle of that. They hate it.

So it’s perhaps predictable that we’re experiencing the rise of in-stream Twitter advertising. How do you get inside those conversations? “You pay to do it!”, they exclaim. Ah yes, so suddenly we have Sponsored Tweets, ad.ly and others offering to pay users to Tweet out their ad messages. Problem solved! Except it’s not. That’s the exact same outdated model of interruption-based advertising that we’ve been trying to block out with a TiVo or an internet ad blocker. Be aware would social media advertisers, we have become a lot more refined and selective, if We don’t want it now. We’ll simply ignore it.

---

Paid Recommendations Destroy Trust:

---

Some envision an in-between route in which we get paid for our recommendations. So if I buy a new phone and love it, I can pass on that recommendation and also get paid. Likes.com, which is yet to launch, aims to profit from this model. Sounds smart, huh? Except that my relationship with you is based on trust: if I’m suddenly getting paid to make recommendations to you rather than doing it in kind, do you put as much trust in me and my recommendations? Of course you don’t.

This week I posted on Facebook about my Excellent new  Topfield DVR Player. I’m very pleased with it. Today a friend posted that he’s ordered the exact same product based on my purchase. Do I expect Topfield to pay me? no way: my payment is knowing that people trust my recommendations. That builds more trust.

---

The Web Economy = Trust + Attention:

---

The problem: people assume that money is the web’s primary currency. But the web trades in other currencies: trust and attention.

Trust is the confidence we place in individuals and brands. I’d suggest it’s the highest form of currency in human societies: extremely hard to build and remarkably easy to lose (see Chris Brogan’s Trust Agents).

Attention, meanwhile, is the currency of abundance. In a post-scarcity world where billions of web pages cry out for my attention every second of the day, paying attention to you is a gesture that says “you matter to me” (see Jeff Jarvis’ What Would Google Do, among others).

Twitter ads steal attention and destroy trust. That’s the exact opposite of what we need.

---

Advertisers: Add Value, Don’t Interrupt!

---

How do brands get their messages across if not by interrupting us? They need to become agents of trust, too.

Dell is making millions by posting special offers to its Twitter followers. Blendtec increased blender sales 5x by turning its ads into entertainment. Comcast joins the conversation simply by asking “how can I help?”. Those are just three examples from the hundreds we’ve posted recently.

Brands need to learn the they now have to make efforts to befriend us, build relationships, and offer so much value that we broadcast our positive experiences out to our own networks of trust. They might entertain us. They might help us. They might become enablers of our own personal goals. And when they do, we’ll return the favor. “Spend your attention, time and marketing budgets on this”, IT Bloke is telling you, “it’s important!”, and with good reason, why not give us a call and let us tell you more reason why???,

I have to admit that for once, that I cannot take full credit for this article, as I have to admit, I was actually a dear friend of IT Bloke, Alex Hamiliton, who gave me some of the concepts to research, during supper last Friday, so hey thanks Alex, thanks, I hope you like what IT Bloke  has done with your thoughts.  Regards….. Ashe, IT Bloke – London.

Micro-blogging emerges as driver of Mobile Internet usage:

NOVARRA, the Internet Mobility company, has today revealed that micro-blogging  sites such as Twitter are introducing new consumers to internet via mobile and driving significant usage, with page views of bit.ly and tinyurl.com having grown by 1068 per cent to date in 2009.

The growth supports the findings of Novarra’s latest Mobile Internet Experience Update (October 2009) which noted that page views of Twitter grew 3500 per cent in the first half of 2009. Tiny URLs and bit.ly links - shortened URL services regularly used in tweets - are often used to share online content via Twitter and other micro-blogging services because the shortened web links fit easily into 140 character SMS messages. The surge in their use shows that links shared in micro-blogs are becoming an increasingly important driver of internet use via mobile and a catalyst for bringing new mobile users online.

Novarra’s data indicates that neither bit.ly or tinyurl.com were in the top 1000 sites accessed on the mobile at the start of 2009, but the tenfold growth this year has seen them skyrocket in the rankings. UK mobile users lead the way, with tinyurl.com now ranking in the top 200 sites accessed last month.

Randy Cavaiani, vice president of marketing at Novarra commented on the findings: “The growth in mobile traffic to sites that shorten URLs demonstrates that Twitter is a great viral tool for exposing consumers to new and interesting content. Much of the content shared this way is from ‘long tail’ sites that are personally relevant and important to consumers and their circle of friends.” Regards….. Toby, IT Bloke – London.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon, sets Social Media ablaze.

It might not really be an IT Bloke kind of movie, however, Shhh, can you hear that? What were hearing is the collective shrieks from Twihards everywhere as The Twilight Saga: New Moon is upon us. For those of you asking yourself, what is a Twihard? I’ve included the definition below.

twi-hard noun
A serious/obsessive reader of the Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer, one leap above Twilighters.

Currently the Twilight Saga is all the rage, and seems to have taken over almost every aspect of social media. If you venture over to MySpace.com you’ll see that the homepage has been New Moonified. It should be noted that New Moon & MySpace seem to share the same demographic, Tweens... so it only makes sense to try and grab those pageviews.

MySpace has been all about some New Moon here lately, as they just hosted an exclusive stream of the red carpet during the films premiere, which pulled in 3 million viewers.

Over on Twitter, Twilight holds 3 of the top 10 trending topics including the highly coveted top spot.

If you search for "New Moon" on Twitter it seems like you need to constantly refresh so you can see the hundreds of new Tweets. Below is an interesting graph, which shows the buzz over New Moon, comparing blogs to Twitter. You can obviously see the drastic climb just from last month, as the hype around the movie grew with each day.

YouTube is even trying to cash-in on the New Moon craze by adding a “Twihard” box atop their site that states the following, "The world is gripped by Twilight mania these days and on YouTube that translates into videos that celebrate, discuss and even mock the cultural phenomenon."

Like I said before, New Moon hits theatres today and is expected to make somewhere between 85 million – 100 million dollars this weekend, and could possibly break some box office records when it’s all said and done. It’s already broken the advance ticket sales record, previously held by Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.

It'll be interesting to compare New Moon's "social media status" against the next film in the saga when it hits the cinema around this same time next year, to see if it still has the same amount of hype around it.

What this really shows us, is that this is really going to be the year when  Social Media Marketing Explodes into the mainstream and Companies really start to realise that they have to jump on the bandwagon or simply get left by the wayside, a message IT Bloke has been trying to promote for year, perhaps our time is here at long last, just did not expect a film like moonlight and the like of Hannah Montana aka Mylie Cyrus, to be heralding the way forward, Regards….. Ashe, IT Bloke – London.

Corporate Weblogs: No Guts, No Glory

Corporate Weblogs have been published for years, but too many are sorry efforts with the life sucked out of them by overly cautious PR flacks and scared-rabbit marketers. Corporations that want to create great Weblogs need guts to break free of traditional thinking. Here are a few tips:

Don't focus on republishing press releases;
Few mistakes of corporate Weblogging are worse than using Weblogs as merely another repository for press releases. But it's not necessary to completely eliminate press releases. There are two "tricks," though.

The first trick is to publish only part of the release, and link the other section on your site with the complete document. The second, more important trick, is to add value by highlighting why the release is important and including relevant information that isn't in it.

Personalize and emotionalize;
One of the major values of corporate Weblogs is showcasing the "human" aspects of companies. Use the Weblog to show your company has intelligent, caring people. Don't be afraid to include personal aspects, but make sure they are relevant. Discuss how you, co-workers, family, and friends use and like or dislike products and services.

Say you're driving to an industry conference and speak in the car to someone who says something interesting, blog it, as soon as you can. Help the reader "experience" the conversation by adding personal observations.

Employ macro and micro thinking;
Brilliant people think on multiple levels, from the micro (their own business) to the macro (business worldwide). Examine big ideas touching on all aspects of your industry, not just your company.

Discuss competitors;
Many corporate advertising and marketing professionals, as well as C-level executives, cringe at the idea of writing about competitors, except, perhaps, negatively. Great Weblogs discuss great ideas, and those ideas come from more than just your enterprise.

If you want your corporation to be considered a thought leader, write about other movers and shakers in your business. I don't agree with the idea of never saying anything bad about other companies. I believe in being intelligent and thoughtful when discussing competitors. If you dislike a product, at least consider writing about it and, not coincidentally, discussing why you think your product is better (assuming it is!).

Admit mistakes;
Many corporate executives loathe the idea of writing about their mistakes. But a well-reasoned post that details mistakes and explains what your company is doing to fix them can be tremendously valuable for customers. Unlike an "official" announcement, a blog post can hit on an emotional level.

Employ multimedia;
Include lots of appropriate photos, charts, podcasts, and videos, including interviews with corporate executives, thought leaders, and customers. Solicit ideas via social networking; I used Twitter (thanks @irabrodsky and @sohear) before writing this post.

Understand editing and formatting;
Find someone who knows how to write well, and get him/her to write the blog or, at least, read it before items are posted. Avoid a typographical "circus" where sentences are crammed with italics, boldface, upper case, trademark and registration marks, ellipses, and hyphens. It's very hard to read.

Also, a pet peeve: Avoid using the "cool" diction that infects too many tech blogs. I'm talking about "peeps," "perps," "props," and other bird-like illiteracies.

Certainly there are risks to corporate blogging, but the numerous advantages outweigh the disadvantages. I'm sometimes more "liberal" about pushing the limits, but check out some of the better enterprise services blogs from Amazon Web Services, Dell, English Cut, GM, Marriott,Quicken Loans, Seagate, Sun Microsystems (including the president/CEO), 37signals, and Zillow.

After all these suggestions, don't blog unless your corporate "DNA" is conducive to it. If your culture is too secretive, forget it.  However if you need hand with setting up your corporate weblog, writing blogs or with tailored content provison contact us and we will be glad to lend you some assistance, after all we have been doing this for a very long time now, Regards….. Ashe, IT Bloke – London.

Hollywood is Cracking down on Celebrity Tweeting:

In the US, From college stadiums to newsrooms to the NFL, the establishment continues to assess how to best deal with social media.

Now, Hollywood execs are moving in on Hollywood talent, imposing restrictions designed to prevent news from leaking out of celebrity Twitter and Facebook accounts.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, studios like Disney and DreamWorks are adding clauses to contracts that forbid talent from sharing confidential information or pre-empting a studio press release via social media sites.

The heart of the issue, reports THR: “Until relatively recently, getting an ill-advised word out to the wider public required a TV camera or a gossip columnist; social media eliminates the middleman and enables an actor, musician or sports personality, to broadcast to millions in an instant.”

Mind you, such confidentiality is already implied in many contracts, but apparently with news being leaked via social media accounts, execs feel that many new specific clauses are now required. But are they? Assuming they’ll be able to quiet people whose job it is to make headlines seems naive, especially when in most cases, the talent has all the leverage.  However it may be a case of tough love for many celebrities, as they may not have that leverage any more, if they have there career effectively destroyed by the  ever more interlinked mass of Social Networking sites.

And even if Paula Abdul declaring she’s leaving American Idol or Chad Ochocinco telling fans about his team reaching a deal with their first round pick doesn’t allow their respective organizations to put the PR spin they’d like on stories, is it such a big deal? Such events give fans a sense of connection, which makes them more likely to watch TV shows or buy football tickets. After all, we tune in for the talent, not for the executives, and is that not just effectively good Word of Mouth Marketing.

In my mind it is only the more negative sides of Social Media that celebrities have to worry about, ie far less privacy, and having to think even more about the long term effects of virtually all of there actions on a daily basis.  Here in the UK, we are already experiencing the era of the celebrity Faux Pas and I predict that this is going to grow even further, perhaps it is now time that Celebs of all brands, started leaving, social media marketing upto those who know what they are doing, Their PR Agents. Regards….. Toby, IT Bloke – London.