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Goodwill v Anxiety

I found this post by Seth Godin interesting as it reminded me of some of our thinking from a few years ago on Persuasion Pathways. We talked about the fact that people came to your web site with a certain amount of goodwill based on their relationship with your brand and that is reduced by the amount of anxiety they felt when interacting with your site. When anxiety had reduced the goodwill to nothing they would leave your site and shop somewhere else.

Seth is using some different terminology but essentially this is a similar concept model. He is focusing on the size of the red zone and highlighting the fact that it is a dangerous time in the process and that you need an incentive to get through it, the green dot is the incentive and the size of it is determined by how big your red zone is. Worth a read on his blog.

Twitter Users v Facebook Fans

According to the Emarketer web site Twitter is more likely to induce advocacy and future purchases from its users than Facebook. It says: "Marketers looking to push out the most effective messages to opt-in recipients must understand how audiences differ across channels and what causes them to connect with brands. Marketing venues that seem similar may differ strongly if their users have different needs and motivations."

According to the final edition of ExactTarget’s “Subscribers, Fans and Followers” report, the differences between email, Facebook and Twitter also include their influence on customer loyalty. Daily Twitter users who followed a brand were more than twice as likely as daily Facebook users who “liked” a brand to say they were more likely to purchase from the brand after becoming a social media follower. What’s more, Facebook fans were the most likely group to actively disagree with the question. Subscribers to opt-in marketing emails fell in the middle.

Innocent Kids

Digital creative agency Public has teamed up with Innocent to create a site aimed at kids who drink Innocent products. The site has games, competitions and lots of emotional engagement opportunities, as users get more involved with the brand they can get involved in sampling. This is a recognised strategy for brand recognition amongst the agency fraternity, it will be interesting to see how long they can justify it for with lots of pretty charts and reports.

Social beats Search

Gerd Leonhard is CEO of The Futures Agency, and has been described as "one of the leading media futurists in the world" he stated that social media beats search 10:1, but how does he explain it? 

"One emerging and very recent trend is that traditional search is losing out to what people are doing on social networks. Brands are getting more from social media. I believe in the long run, social media will be ten times more influential than search. 

This will change companies' attitude over time, and they will hire more people with experience of social, as social creates a kind of polling mechanism. The companies that have been used to controlling their environment will have to adapt to this. There has been a shift from this control to a situation where trust and engagement is more important for customers. The difference here is that trust and engagement are ‘soft factors’; ones that brands can have an influence on, but ultimately cannot control. 

Brands need a two-way model, and conversation is a big part of this mix. This in turn means that marketing changes; old style advertising is becoming useless, it’s no longer about simply pushing something at people; this is not what consumers want on the web."

Dyson does video...

Not only is James Dyson a god of industrial design and a hero to many, but he's also built a superb brand and continues to innovate and surprise. It's fantastic to see that he's also happy to let his team off the leash now and again and create something quirky and interesting which they can share with their fans. This youtube video profiles the new range of fans beautifully and deserves to be seen. You may scoff but Dyson is starting create a very "Apple" type approach to it's sector, hopefully we Brits will recognise the company and support it wholeheartedly.

Discover Easy Health - Guaranteed Results

(Nearly) a really nice viral, social campaign...

Firebox have been running a really nice campaign called "Firebox Inventor", in which they searched for the next 'must have' toy, gift or gadget for 2010. They had a huge response, with over 1200 entries ranging from genius to just plain weird. These were whittled down to a shortlist of 11 that were debated by their panel of expert judges.

The opportunity would have been to put this back to a public vote which could have bought lots of new people to their site with the shortlisted entrants sharing their entries on social networks. The winner was a twelve year old boy from Leicester called Tom Spring, his product idea which is currently being developed by Firebox Labs is Putty Monsters.

Onion Rings

Seth Godin recently published a post which included this diagram...

It was heartening as ever to see so much thinking summed in as simple way as possible which is of course the art of being an internationally famous marketing guru. However it also gave me a warm glow as we shared some thinking on the way web sites needed to work with Seth back in 2005. We arrogantly called it 3G web site theory as in third generation web sites (this was before the phrase web 2.0 was coined, we were always ahead of our time ;o) it was based on the idea that a web site had layers like onion rings which denoted how much access a user had a web site data and how that access could be controlled by user behaviour. As users downloaded assets, signed up for things, engaged in conversations so their access level increased until they'd reached the level of Superfan.

What goes around really does come around!

Barcode link to content

It's a rare product today that doesn't come with a barcode. Stickybits lets anyone scan any product barcode and append their own music, text, photos or video content.

Stickybits lets consumers add digital content to any barcode out there. Users need only download the free Stickybits app—it's available for both Android and iPhone—scan a barcode, and attach content. When the geo-tagged barcode is scanned again by someone else, they'll see whatever was attached to it along with who else has scanned it along the way. Users can even be notified when a barcode is scanned, gets new attachments or changes location. Also available from Stickybits, meanwhile, are barcode stickers that can be attached to anything, as well as downloadable, printable barcodes that can be glued, ironed, printed, tattooed or otherwise stuck onto anything in the real world. Stickers are priced starting at USD 9.95 for a pack of 20. Thanks to a partnership with Zazzle, Stickybits also offers birthday cards, business cards, mugs and shirts with unique, content-enabled barcodes printed on them.

Integrating Social Media and SEO

Search engines are starting to index the content users create on social media sites – and marketers have got to take advantage. Before engaging in any social marketing tactics, remember that SEO goals must take a back seat to your audience’s experience. Your primary concern when engaging with social media must be addressing customer needs, interacting with your audience and providing good content.

Within those parameters, however, there are many opportunities to use social media to distribute keyword rich content and attract links that can boost your natural search rankings. Here are seven tactics Marketing Sherpa recommend:

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