Eggblogg

Make love, not war

A few headlines pulled randomly from this week's marketing press:

"NI poised to parachute in chief marketing officer"

'"Lucozade Sport to target gyms"

"Sky uses viral ad to push golf and cricket"

Is it me, or is use of warlike language in marketing becoming increasingly dated? Parachuting, ambushing, targeting, pushing, campaigning, attacking and dominating. Clearly marketing is as stuck in the adversarial model as ever. It's all about us and them - we push, they resist, we find new ways to push, until they give in and buy.

According to Simon Sylvester in How to Think Digital, since 2003 consumers have been spending more on devices and services to avoid watching advertising than the entire advertising industry has been spending on media to reach them.

Marketing is going through a crisis – if it's not about targeting, what on earth is it about? In the Web 2.0 model it's about conversations – realising that the distance between businesses and their customers has shrunk – the relationship has changed. We need a ceasefire, a way of friendly co-existence. Consumers are our neighbours, not our enemy.

It's not just that anyone can now put up a website, say what they think on a blog, post a video and avoid watching advertising. There are still plenty of people who have no intention of ever seizing the means of media production. But the mindset, the culture has changed. Who will be the companies to succeed and prosper during peacetime?

*The peace symbol is 50 years old this year. The version pictured here is by Aurora Fox.

The UK political parties and social media

The US Democratic nomination race showed just how much more developed the US political parties are at harnessing the web and social media in particular. Barack Obama may have gone a bit quiet now on Twitter, but at least his office recognised the need for a presence there, as did the Clinton camp. Although unlike her rival, Hillary doesn't follow anyone back!

A quick look at our main UK political party websites and I see that Labour has an email newsletter sign up, videos of speeches and four blogs, although none are by named people. Gordon Brown is keeping a mysteriously low profile. Over at The Conservatives, things are more impressive. 'Show your support on these social networks' declares the front page, with logos and links to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. Video is used well and the homepage also features an 'Ask David Your Question' box, an exhortation to subscribe to webcasts and and a link to 'Webcameron'.

Onward to the Liberal Democrats, and I was half hoping to see something akin to the Tory site, but instead the visitor is presented something rather lumpen. Pride of place is a news feed featuring what appear to be latest speeches by LibDem ministers accompanied by a less-than-enticing RSS button. The other main area on the page is taken up with a list of topical issues and a link to a film about climate change. OK so it's policy-led, but a bit unengaging, and not a personality in sight.

For news of Twittering UK politicians (the medium is made for them!) see http://shorttermmemoryloss.com/twitterpolitics/

How businesses use technology to lose customers and waste money

This morning on Radio 4 I caught the end of a discussion about whether we have become a nation of grumpy old men and women, quick to complain and blame others, less willing to accept that sometimes our woes are simply down to fate and bad luck. One commentator suggested what people are fed up with is not so much the inability to accept when things go wrong, but rather the problem of no-one being prepared to listen when there's a genuine complaint. Call centres, automated phone and email systems, the apparent intractability of customer service in the face of what 'the computer says'... it all adds up to techno-rage on a grand scale.

Surely we command the technology, not the other way around. Humans are infinitely more complex and capable of intelligent action than are computers, yet in the race to automate customer service (ie reduce costs) we de-humanise both the service agents and recipients in the process. We also lose business.

I can think of two recent episodes which made me realise how effortless it is for a business to lose customers this way.

Our household was a loyal customer of Pipex broadband for 6 years until one day when I tried to connect to the internet all I got was a message to call their 0870 number to find out why my connection was down. Apparently I hadn't given them my new credit card details, so when they were unable to take a payment they had closed the account. If I wanted it re-instated I would have to apply as a new customer, pay a connection fee and wait up to 10 days to be back on line. Fine - I switched providers.

Then three months later Pipex sent an expensive piece of direct mail offering to 'buy me back'. It doesn't take a degree in psychology to know it wasn't going to work. Never mind that they made zero effort to keep me as a customer when they had the chance, but then they sent me a desperately-trying-to-be-cute mailing which actually managed to offend.

Even small firms appear to have problems. I had a call recently from a local telesales company asking if I had heard of them, as a precursor to a sales pitch. Less than six months previously I had hired this firm to train up an employee in telesales skills, so yes, I had heard of them. This was a small business, not a multinational - yet they literally did not know who their customers were, and this is B2B we're talking about.

So what's the answer? Could marketing and customer services work together more? Will utilities firms start making their support and customer service phone lines 0800 numbers rather than 0870? (Funny how their sales lines are always 0800)  Will we be able to get a response to a complaint without having to threaten legal action first? Will customer service representatives be given the authority to listen and make real, human decisions? As Lisa Hoffmann points out, angry customers just want to be heard.

What sort of a complainer are you? Take the complaint test and find out...

Key themes from Social Media Influence conference

I had a great day at Social Media Influence 08 in London yesterday. As always happens when I'm out of the office for a day, there's now a mountain of client work to do, so I wanted to take a few minutes to blog about the key things I picked up.

There were so many great ideas and insights I think I have enough material to talk about in several blog posts, however some themes stood out:

• The need to look beyond traditional ways of marketing and its reliance (for example) on demographics and instead to think about embedding ourselves into niche communities
• The need to listen, participate, be human and authentic
• The need for innovation, which means setting aside time to think and play

My overall impression also was that no-one has yet 'written the manual' on social media, and despite the overarching themes there were many different points of view, loads of interesting examples and plenty of debate, which made for a stimulating day. The standard of presentations was very good; speakers who stood out for me were Antony Mayfield, Michael Steckler, Neville Hobson, Alex Burmaster and Joanne Jacobs.

The reason I went was because I suspected there were no easy answers and I wanted to hear what the brightest minds were thinking and doing about it. I wasn't disappointed.

What's the definition of 'spam'?

Wow, things got heated today at Chris Brogan's website. Earlier in the day he had sent out an email to his LinkedIn connections, inviting them to subscribe to his email newsletter. I was one of the recipients, and I was struck by how reasonable the email was (I'm usually quick to cry 'spam!')

I thought no more about it, but after receiving a few odd complaints Chris opened it up for discussion. By throwing in my 2-pennyworth I managed to get hit in the crossfire myself!

As I always tell the students in my email marketing workshops, 'the definition of spam lies with the recipient'. And you can be sure there'll always be at least one recipient who thinks it's 'spam'!